Halifax's memoirs

Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881-1959)

Halifax ‘Fulness of Days’

These memoirs lived down to my expectations. Halifax came from that class of born administrators who never reveal what they really feel. He records events and describes people but one is none the wiser as to what he really felt about the people around them. Alll we get is anodyne account after anodyne account of what he saw and heard.

The tone of his commitment to politics can be gathered from this remark shortly after the start of the First World War:

‘As a private member … I was not unduly tied, and both before and after the war used to imitate my brother-in-law, George Lane-Fox, in trying to order my life as to reconcile the claims of the House of Commons with as much hunting as we could put in.’ (p. 89)

Halifax gives us the occasional anecdote. A few of the most interesting are given below.

Speaking in public

Churchill’s gave Halifax advice on speaking in public. Churchill favoured always using speaking from notes and said 'But never try to pretend to your audience that you’re not using them. If you do that, you get them into a sort of competitive game of hide-and-seek, in which you are bound to lose. But if you are perfectly open about it, you  can keep them waiting at long as you like while you  find your place in your notes …’ (p. 96)

Also of interest is Churchill’s advice to Halifax as we was about to depart on a mission to the West Indies. The topic was parades: ‘There’s only one thing that is important to remember. Look every man in the eye as you pass him. The sergeant-major has had them on parade all standing under a hot sun in time for at least two regimental officers to see them before you come on the scene, and if you go by talking to whoever is with you and looking the other way, it’s pretty flat for the men.’ (p. 96)

As an East Riding man myself, I was fascinated by this anecdote concerning Mark Sykes.[i] (Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes.) He was a keen supporter of the Territorial Army while also being very familiar with the farmers of East Yorkshire where, in those days, horses were the main means of traction. He set up a Territorial Reserve in 1912  to provide army transport, calling it the Waggoners’ Reserve which was mobilised early in the First World War.[1]

Halifax provides an excellent diary extract November 1937 when he was entertained at Göring’s house, located in a heavily forested area where Göring was engaged in massive forestry operations. At lunch they were served by ‘parlour maids in country-peasant costumes’ liveried footmen in ‘green and white plush, breeches, [and] gaiter-spats’. But, for Hastings, none of this concealed the fact that Göring was ‘a composite … of film star, gangster,[and]  great landowner’.(p. 191)

As for Mussolini, Halifax said that he gave the ‘impression of a large stage and of a play being acted with every histrionic aid before an easy-going, rather indifferent, but on the whole not disapproving, public’. (pp. 200-1)

During one of his many encounters with King George VI the King revealed to him his determination to defend his country. He told Halifax ‘that he intended always to carry a rifle in his car, and he proposed himself to do rifle practice in the gardens of Buckingham Palace’. (p. 216)

Churchill had the same idea, telling Halifax in May 1940 ‘that every man ought to fight to the death’ and that ‘if they come to London, I shall take a rifle (I’m not a bad shot with a rifle) and put myself in a pillbox at the bottom of Downing Street and I’ll shoot until I have no more ammunition.’ (p. 221)

[1] See https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/29236 for more detail.

[i] p. 104.