Portraits and Miniatures Read Free

Harrow and then Master of Trinity (in both of which institutions he ironicallysucceeded in flattening the intellectual enthusiasm of Rab’s hero Stanley Baldwin) from 1859 to 1918. Rab’s mother was a Miss Smith of Edinburgh, whose father had been editor of the Calcutta
Statesman
and one of whose brothers was Principal of Aberdeen University as well as a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, while another had been private secretary to the Viceroy. There was a hint of eighteenth-century Cornish parliamentary gentry in his father’s family, but the aristocratic influence was minimal, although the top of the upper-middle-class status was assured and constant. Rab’s father and three of his brothers became knights, although only the least academically regarded one made any money. Wealth was indeed a somewhat alien concept, and Sir Montagu Butler was distinctly shocked by the amount of money that Sam Courtauld settled on Rab. Although this separated him from the lifestyle of his parents and other forebears, making him at once broad-acred and more metropolitan, as well as less at home in the comfortable villas of the Cambridge academic clans, he remained a dutiful and affectionate son. I would guess he remained closer to similar parents than Maynard Keynes had done twenty years earlier.
    As a young Member of Parliament Butler pursued a course of great party rectitude. Almost his first action to attract any public notice was a May 1930 anti-Harold Macmillan letter to
The Times,
of which he was the author, but for which he organized three other MP signatories as well as himself. Oswald Mosley had just resigned from the Labour Government and issued a manifesto of economic and constitutional innovation against the hidebound complacency which seemed to be the approach of both the main parties to unemployment and other evils. It was the beginning of the road that was to lead Mosley to the British Union of Fascists, but this was at first by no means the obvious direction, and many respectable people, from Harold Nicolson to Aneurin Bevan, were attracted by his ideas. So was Macmillan, who had written to
The Times
supporting Mosley’s call for a change in the rules of politics. ‘… if these [existing] rules are to be permanently enforced, perhaps a good many of us will feel it is hardly worth bothering to play at all’, Macmillan rather rashlywrote. The Butler-drafted reply was intended both as a put-down and as a warning off the grass, and from the point of view of party orthodoxy was neatly done: ‘When a player starts complaining “that it is hardly worth bothering to play” the game at all it is usually the player, and not the game, who is at fault. It is then usually advisable for the player to seek a new field for his recreation and a pastime more suited to his talents.’ Macmillan stood rebuked by the prefects, who no doubt hoped the headmaster would be pleased, for lack of proper school spirit.
    This was odd, for Butler had incomparably less of ‘school spirit’ about him than did Macmillan. He was too irreverent for that. He was no good at games (although quite a good shot) because of an arm permanently damaged in a childhood Indian riding accident, and he did not much like Marlborough, where he was sent after failing to get an Eton scholarship. He was born two years too late for the World War I army. He showed no particular affection for either of the two middle-grade Cambridge colleges (Pembroke and Corpus) of which he was a member, and although he warmed much more to Trinity in later life this was on the basis of a worldly old Master enjoying a success in a new field rather than of an enthusiastic college loyalist.
    Macmillan, on the other hand, was full of
schwärmerei
for the institutions with which he was associated. He loved Summer Fields, Eton, Balliol and the Grenadier Guards. So this early Butler-Macmillan dispute was fought with each occupying paradoxical terrain.