Harold Macmillan

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1957-1963)

• Born: February 10, 1894
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 29, 1986
• Place of death: Birch Grove, Sussex, England

As British prime minister, Macmillan witnessed a period of unprecedented affluence combined with a diminished role in world affairs for Great Britain. Committed to improving the lot of the average Englishman, to granting independence to the British possessions, and to strong economic policies, he ended his career as prime minister in the wake of ill health, divisions within his party, and scandal.

Early Life

Harold Macmillan was the son of Maurice Macmillan and his American-born wife, Helen Bolles. His education followed the pattern in the Macmillan family, which was noted for its scholarship as well as its business acumen; Harold’s grandfather had founded in 1844 the publishing house bearing the family name. At the age of nine, the boy was sent to an exclusive boarding school, Summer Fields at Oxford; from there he went to Eton, leaving an undistinguished record. In 1912, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, and it was as an undergraduate there that he initially became involved in politics. He became a member of that training ground for future politicians, the Oxford Union. His speeches before the Union were indicative of the politician of later years, showing careful preparation and love of epigram. His allegiances at this time wavered between Liberal and Labour, but more important, his education and Union membership provided young Macmillan with a well-trained mind, one able to penetrate and resolve difficult problems.

Macmillan joined the army at the outbreak of World War I, initially serving in the King’s Royal Rifles and then joining a guards regiment, the Grenadier Guards. Although not decorated for his military service, he gained a reputation as one of the bravest officers in any of the five Guards Regiments. He was wounded three times, the last being a severe pelvic wound received during the Battle of the Somme (1916), which incapacitated him for the remainder of the war. His wound did not finally heal until 1920, and it left him in pain and with a shuffling walk for the remainder of his life. It was a result of his wartime experiences that Macmillan sought to compensate for his academic background by assuming an exaggerated military manner, symbolized by his mustache, which, along with his drooping eyebrows, gave him a rather odd appearance, in keeping with high Tory manners. More significant, these wartime experiences changed his outlook on life. He emerged more pessimistic, more practical, and more confident of his own capabilities: He had experienced the horrors of mass warfare and was imbued with a real concern for the quality of life of ordinary Englishmen.

At the end of the war, Macmillan chose not to return to the family publishing house and accepted an appointment as aide to the duke of Devonshire, governor-general of Canada. This appointment was Macmillan’s first close association with the English aristocracy and encouraged that quality in the young man. This relationship was important also in that he met the duke’s daughter, Lady Dorothy, to whom he was married in April, 1920, at Saint Margaret’s, Westminster. This marriage into the established, eccentric, and wealthy Cavendish family undoubtedly spurred Macmillan’s political ambitions, and when he finally entered the House of Commons he found himself, as a result of this match, related to sixteen members of the lower chamber.

Macmillan was working in the family firm in 1923, when he decided to run for Parliament. He approached the Conservative Party Central Office and was assigned to Stockton-on-Tees, a community he had never seen before. At this time, Stockton was experiencing the full impact of the industrial slump characteristic of the old English industries, and Macmillan’s discovery of the misery of the city’s populace renewed his wartime concern over the average Englishman’s lot and provided a focus for his vague radicalism. Although he lost his first attempt for a parliamentary career, the Labour government fell the next year (1924) and in the subsequent general election Macmillan (now aged thirty) entered the Commons.

Life’s Work

When he entered the House of Commons for the first time in October, 1924, Macmillan quickly linked himself with a number of young Tories with similar experiences, service in the trenches during the war, which left them all with a sense of mission to remedy evils in England, all representing industrial towns, and shocked by the quality of life among the electorate. Macmillan and his fellow Conservatives became convinced that the economic structure of the land must be changed to avert revolution. Yet although he had had his radical moments in the past, he was never tempted to become a socialist and cross the aisle to join the Labour Party. With the exception of the Labour years of 1929 to 1931, he was to represent Stockton until 1945. Although Macmillan soon was regarded as one of the more promising younger Conservative members of the Commons, ministerial appointment eluded him (Anthony Eden, three years his junior, was made an undersecretary at the Foreign Office in 1931). Thus, during the 1930’s, Macmillan settled into a routine, combining politics with the family publishing business. In Parliament, he gained the reputation of being a clever, if impractical, idealist, a rather dull and nervous speaker with too much of the “Oxford manner” about him. With the passing of time, he became somewhat disillusioned with Parliament and traditional conservatism, which he believed was adhering too strictly to laissez-faire attitudes and deviating from its tradition of nineteenth century paternalism for the lower classes.

The main concern of the Tory member of Parliament during the years from 1924 to the outbreak of World War II was domestic affairs: the quality of life, economic and industrial policy, unemployment. Macmillan was probably more influential outside Parliament than he was within, which may partially explain his disillusionment. As early as 1927 he and three other members of the Commons Oliver Stanley, Bob Boothby, and John Loder had published a book, Industry and the State. The four authors condemned socialism for its denial of individual freedom but were equally harsh in their judgment of laissez-faire capitalism, and they advocated increased governmental intervention to encourage business mergers, and guidance for industry and finance. The work also promoted an extension of property ownership, employee shareholding in business, and worker partnership in public industries. In 1933, Macmillan published his first book under his own name, Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Policy , advocating the same policies and procedures set forward earlier. Five years later, he published The Middle Way (1938), his prewar political testament, a study once again of the problem of social and economic development within a free and democratic system. Although a restatement of earlier ideas, The Middle Way was a prophetic statement of policies to be implemented a quarter of a century later when he became prime minister: nationalization of coal and other essential industries, as well as of the Bank of England; the formation of a national board to oversee the distribution of food throughout the land; and other forms of governmental intervention.

As Europe moved closer to war, Macmillan was one of those who increasingly lost confidence in Stanley Baldwin’s and Neville Chamberlain’s leadership of the nation and the Conservative Party; his disenchantment with this leadership increased after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. He was one of a group voting against Chamberlain’s leadership in the debate of May 7-8, 1940, and when Winston Churchill was made prime minister, Macmillan received his first ministerial appointment, the modest post of parliamentary secretary to the ministry of supply, where he was able to put into operation some of his ideas on planning. In June, 1942, he was moved to the Colonial Office as undersecretary.

The real turning point in Macmillan’s career, however, came in November, 1942, when he was sent to Algiers as British Resident Minister following the Allied invasion of North Africa. The next year, he was appointed Resident Minister for the Central Mediterranean, with the task of handling Italian affairs for the Churchill government. In both of these tasks, Macmillan gained his initial experience with diplomacy and discovered that he enjoyed its challenge and had a certain flair for it. He established a comfortable relationship with General Charles de Gaulle, whom he considered a friend, and the Allied overall commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Macmillan always believed that as a result of these experiences he and the British had a “special relationship” with the future American president and the American people. These wartime experiences were also instrumental in altering Macmillan. Before the war, he had been essentially an intellectual, theorizing, pleading, and waiting for his time to come. Now he found himself in a succession of situations in which his actions and decisions could affect people: His theories were converted into reality, and he had become a man of action.

In the national election of July 5, 1945, Macmillan was the first cabinet minister to be a casualty of Labour’s victory; subsequently, a safe Conservative seat was found for him at Bromley, Kent, which he represented for the remainder of his time in the Commons (to 1964). From 1945 to 1951, Macmillan was a member of the Shadow Cabinet as spokesperson for the Tories on such matters as industrial policy, fuel and power, and European unity. In the Conservative victory of 1951, Churchill was returned as prime minister, and Macmillan accepted a post in the ministry of housing. Superficially, his attainments were outstanding. Two million people were waiting for houses, and in 1952 a pledge was made to construct 300,000 units a year, a goal that was attained during the next twelve months and was considered a great success for the party and for the minister personally. In October, 1954, he moved to the ministry of defence, and in the Eden cabinet of 1955 he was foreign secretary and later Chancellor of the Exchequer; in none of these posts did he have the success that had come his way in the ministry of housing.

The opportunity for which he had been waiting a lifetime finally came his way in 1957. Although Macmillan had initially urged intervention in Egypt to block that nation’s seizure of the Suez Canal, he shifted course quickly when it became obvious that the international community was opposed to the joint Anglo-French intervention there (which contributed to Eden’s resignation of the premiership in January). Macmillan was asked to assume the office of prime minister; the Conservative Party was in disarray, and Great Britain’s credibility was low. Macmillan was expected to be only a stopgap prime minister, but to everyone’s surprise he remained in office for seven years. Perhaps the chaotic conditions worked to his advantage; things could only get better. From the beginning, Macmillan gave every indication that he enjoyed the ultimate power in the land he seemed to be ten years younger: The atmosphere of crisis seemed to suit his temperament and style.

As prime minister, Macmillan’s achievements may be summarily listed. His major interest had become by this time international relations, and he saw himself as a twentieth century “honest broker,” playing the role of an elder statesman, a mediator between the Soviet and the American superpowers, keeping the lines of communication open when these two states seemed on the brink of nuclear conflict. His personal friendship with President Eisenhower eased Anglo-American tensions following the Suez debacle. He worked hard for a big power summit to be held in Paris in 1960, but this came to nought as a result of the U-2 incident. The lessened position of Great Britain was clearly indicated by both Macmillan and his countrymen being mere spectators at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

More positive was Macmillan’s role in the process of decolonization that swept through the developing world after 1945. Despite reservations within his own party, from 1957 Macmillan actively advocated granting independence to British colonies, a policy he believed preferable to rebellion and violence. It was his hope that by granting independence, strong economic ties would be maintained between Great Britain and the former possessions. These ideas were contained in a speech he made to the South African parliament in 1960, urging them to heed the “wind of change” sweeping across Africa, a wind that could not be resisted. South Africa rejected Macmillan’s advice, proclaiming itself to be an independent republic and withdrawing from the Commonwealth.

Economically, Macmillan now had the opportunity to put into practice his dreams from the 1920’s and 1930’s. The National Economic Development Council (nicknamed Neddy) established an advisory body of appropriate economic ministers and representatives from the trade unions and Confederation of British Industries to undertake the sort of planning that had been so successful on the Continent.

By 1963, however, conditions had begun to change. The Conservative political position had started to deteriorate, unemployment was on the rise, that winter was a severe one, and the sex scandal involving Secretary of State John Profumo was taking its toll on the Macmillan government. Although Macmillan was not personally involved in the scandal, he was blamed for not keeping a closer watch on his associates. Additionally, his health was deteriorating, and he resigned in October, 1962. He rejected the almost conventional offer of an earldom and the Order of the Garter, saying that nothing could match his term as prime minister. He returned to the Macmillan publishing house and relaxed his normal fifteen-hour-a-day work schedule. He did find time, however, to write the six volumes of his memoirs, books that remain a basic source of information about the man.

He finally accepted the peerage on his ninetieth birthday in 1984, taking the title earl of Stockton, in honor of his first parliamentary constituency. After his retirement from the Commons, he filled the largely honorary position of chancellor of Oxford University. Macmillan died at his home, in Birch Grove, Sussex, on December 29, 1986, after a brief illness.

Significance

Macmillan’s life of ninety-two years spanned an era of fundamental change in Great Britain’s world position, and these changes prompted his flexible and adaptive nature. As a young man he enjoyed the experiences of the pampered upper classes, but during World War I witnessed the destruction of the old European order and the beginning of a steady decline in Great Britain’s position in the world. Still, his premiership from 1957 to 1963 witnessed the height of British affluence after the devastation wreaked by World War II. By the 1950’s, although poverty still existed, the mass of the population was better fed, better housed, better amused than ever before, and there was talk of a new Elizabethan Age (inaugurated by the coronation in June, 1953, of Queen Elizabeth II). This spirit was echoed in the cartoonist’s image of Macmillan as “Supermac” and the election boast of 1959 that “most of our people have never had it so good.” This positive image is in sharp contrast to the lessened status of the land internationally, perhaps best illustrated by Macmillan’s recognition that Great Britain could not survive alone in the modern nuclear world, the 1960 cancellation of their “Bluestreak” missile program, and the acceptance of American Polaris missiles to arm British submarines. Great Britain had become virtually dependent on the United States.

Bibliography

Aldous, Richard. Macmillan, Eisenhower, and the Cold War. Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press, 2005. Recounts Macmillan’s failed attempts to cement Anglo-American relations by forging a special relationship with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Ashton, Nigel J. Kennedy, Macmillan, and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Examines Anglo-American relations during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, describing Kennedy and Macmillan’s different perceptions about Cold War politics.

Macmillan, Harold. Winds of Change, 1914-1939. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Macmillan’s six-volume memoirs are basic to an understanding of Macmillan and his age. All volumes provide fascinating anecdotes for the reader, but should be carefully scrutinized in the light of subsequent material made public.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Blast of War, 1939-1945. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. The second volume in Macmillan’s story covers the years in Algiers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tides of Fortune, 1945-1955. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. The third volume of the memoirs covers his years in the Shadow Cabinet and Churchill’s return.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Riding the Storm, 1956-1959. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. The fourth volume of the memoirs covers his becoming prime minister.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pointing the Way, 1959-1961. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. The fifth volume of the memoirs covers his speech to the South African parliament.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. At the End of the Day, 1961-1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. The final volume of the memoirs takes Macmillan’s life through the end of his prime ministership.

Pollard, Sidney. The Development of the British Economy, 1914-1967. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969. The final chapter treats postwar Great Britain, covering industry, foreign trade, banking, economic policy, and wealth and poverty; generally notes an upward leveling and greater consumption throughout the entire population but against a background of positive decline in the old industries or relative decline against foreign competition in new industries.

Sampson, Anthony. Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. Seeks to relate the stresses within Macmillan’s character to the various strands of his experience as publisher, radical intellectual, guards officer, and duke’s son-in-law. Published four years after his resignation as prime minister and still the only general study of Macmillan.

Shields, David Brandon. Kennedy and Macmillan: Cold War Politics. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006. Examines the friendship of Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy and how their relationship affected Anglo-American relations.