Asquith (47 page)

(11 January 1913) I dined last night at Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck’s & played Bridge with Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Keppel: quite a worldly evening. I sat at dinner next Lady Ponsonby (Mrs. Fritz) who snubbed me most persistently: all out of temper, because her husband hadn’t been made Govr. of Bombay. Aren’t women wonderful?

(20 December 1913) I went to a large dull would-be fashionable dinner at Lady Paget’s on Thursday night—Grand Duke Boris, Countess Torby, & the like. I didn’t enjoy it, and can’t conceive why I went. Yesterday by way of contrast Puffin and I spent the evening together
a deux
at the
Great Adventure.

(27 February 1914) The Crewes’ dinner last night was a big affair, and there were some beautiful ladies there, such as Lady Curzon. I did not fare badly in my partner as I took in Lady Pembroke, whom I had not met for 2 years. I rather like her refined slightly expressionless face, and she is not at all stupid. She is a strong Tory and lives among the worst types, but was kept from being too aggressive by a faint sense of humour to which I ministered all I could. My main energies however were taken up with the Queen who sat on my other side. There was not a subject under Heaven—dress, the Opera, sea-sickness, the suffragettes & c & c—which I didn’t drag in by the scruff of its neck, & by the
end of dinner I was more exhausted than after a debate in the House. I played Bridge of a mild kind afterwards with Lady Kerry and Lady Selborne.

Much more usually he dined out (as he dined in Downing Street) with small parties of chosen political friends. To a remarkable extent his social life was organised around a few of the younger members of his Government. Montagu, treated in the correspondence as a figure of fun, but one to whom an almost obsessive attention was paid, was the most central. He was constantly staying at the Wharf and in and out of Downing Street; and Asquith would dine in “ the silken tent ”— or “ the tents of Shem in a variant of the same joke—twenty or more times a year. Then came the Churchills and the McKennas, with one or two minor figures, like Lord Lucas, the under-secretary for the Colonies and Harold Baker, the under-secretary for War, supporting the fringes. The Churchills were a frequent source of informal hospitality:

(18 June 1912) I am going to lunch on Friday with Winston and Clementine (at Eaton Sq.)
en petit comité
—for she is, as you know, out of action. Winston said he would ask you, which I thought an excellent idea. . . .

(13 December 1913) I dined last night at the Admiralty with the Winstons who keep curious company.... We had some Bridge, and Mrs. Keppel and I lightened the pockets of our host and hostess.

(5 February 1914) I dined at the Churchills’ last night. Winston slept placidly in his armchair while I played Bridge with Clemmie, Goonie
¹
and the Lord Chief Justice (Isaacs) being our antagonists. With some feeling of compunction I went home with £3 of Goonie’s money in my pocket.

¹
_{Lady Gwendoline Churchill.}

The McKennas also organised occasional small dinner parties for the Prime Minister, but not as often as the Churchills, although they were probably more frequently at Downing Street. Asquith sometimes testified to his social energy by summoning them at short notice when he found he had no other engagement:

(25 July 1914) As Margot was tired and in bed, I improvised a little dinner here, consisting of the 2 McKennae, Masterton Smith and myself. We played some really amusing Bridge. . . . Afterwards I went on with Pamela (McKenna) to supper at the
Assyrian’s who had been doing an evening with his constituents in the company of Birrell. Their respective accounts of one another’s speeches were quite entertaining. Violet and Bongie came in, but we did not stay late.

Another member of the Government who figured prominently in Asquith’s social life at the time was Sir John Simon, Solicitor-General until the autumn of 1913, and then Attorney-General. But Asquith was always a little cynical about Simon. He was not so much a friend as a very frequently encountered acquaintance; and on one occasion after a series of such meetings Asquith concluded his list of those present at a club dinner with a slightly weary “ and of course the Impeccable, who for these social purposes might almost be described as the Inevitable.”

Of his near contemporaries in the Government, even those who were politically very close to him, Asquith saw much less. Grey and Crewe were the two members of the Cabinet upon whom he most depended. The Foreign Secretary was an old friend, of course, but although their relations were always perfectly agreeable they never visited each other’s houses in the country during this period and their encounters in London were mostly semi-official. The same was true of Crewe. His wife (Rosebery’s daughter), and less frequently he, sometimes lunched at Downing Street, but the Asquiths rarely dined with them, or
vice versa
, and then only upon the rather grand basis which Asquith described after his encounter with the Queen and Lady Pembroke in February 1914. Morley, Birrell and John Burns were all fairly regular Downing Street luncheon guests, and were all considerable favourites of Margot’s. But they rarely appeared in the evenings and never themselves entertained the Asquiths. Their wives, for a variety of reasons, were hidden from public view, and would not have been likely, even had this not been the case, to make a particular appeal to the Prime Minister.

Asquith’s other contemporary in the Cabinet—and his oldest friend of the lot—was Haldane. But during these immediate pre-war years social relations with him were slight. Throughout 1913 and the first seven months of 1914 there is no record of Haldane visiting the Wharf, or attending any meal in Downing Street, or securing (or even attempting to secure) Asquith for a meal at his own house in Queen Anne’s Gate—only four doors away from the much visited Montagu residence. And on May 13, 1914, Asquith wrote:

“ To
night we are giving a wedding dinner (20th anniversary) mostly to old
habitués
of Cavendish Square in its earliest days. Haldane excused himself on account of the death of a step-brother who had just passed away in the Shetlands at the ripe age of 80! ”

There was one other Cabinet colleague of great note—Lloyd George. By virtue of his official residence at 11, Downing Street, he was the Prime Minister’s nearest neighbour. But their social relations were not as close as their houses. They never met casually at one of the Liberal houses where Asquith was a frequent guest. In part this was because they had a different circle of friends. This was particularly so outside politics. Lloyd George had no knowledge of, or interest in, the smart cultivated world of Margot’s luncheons and of the
jeunesse dore
whom the Asquith children (particularly Raymond) brought into their father’s life. The Parsons, the Horners, the Listers, Diana Manners, would all have been very shadowy figures to him.

Even in politics the circles did not much overlap. Lloyd George was never on remotely intimate terms with Grey or Crewe or Haldane, and there was a deep mutual antipathy between him and McKenna. But he knew Churchill well,
¹
and Montagu too, at least after February 1914, when “ the Assyrian ” became Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Yet he was never invited to Admiralty House or Queen Anne’s Gate when Asquith was to be present.

¹
_{Asquith wrote in March, 1914 of an evening when Morley, Birrell, Lloyd George and Churchill dined together, and “ Winston in a rather maudlin mood said to Ll.G: ‘ A wonderful thing our friendship! For 10 years there has hardly been a day when we haven’t had half an hour’s talk together ’.” Birrell commented that they must both be awfully bored by that time.}

Asquith himself assumed there was a certain restraint over their social relations. “ I am going to dine with Lloyd George (a very unusual adventure),” he wrote to Miss Stanley on March 2, 1914, “ to talk ‘ shop ’ with one or two choice colleagues (none I fear of your particular favourites).” Yet it was not in fact a particularly unusual adventure. He dined with Lloyd George on two other occasions in the next ten weeks, and the Chancellor lunched at No. 10 (with Edward Marsh and Lady Crewe) between the first and the second of these dinners. The restraint seems to have been more imaginary than real, with Asquith exchanging meals with Lloyd George more frequently
than with either Crewe or Haldane; and in the whole of this part of his voluminous correspondence with Miss Stanley the Chancellor (frequently if distantly mentioned) attracted less than his fair share of astringent remarks.
²

One social divide between Asquith and Lloyd George was that the Chancellor did not play bridge. Asquith’s comments on his enjoyment, or otherwise, of various evening engagements show how fond he was of this game.
^3
4
If there was no bridge he was a little inclined to sulk. It was one of his complaints about royal evenings. “ We didn’t play Bridge and I left fairly early this morning,” he somewhat inconsequently wrote after his Windsor evening in February, 1914. And three months later, during his stay with the Court at the Aldershot Royal Pavilion, he recorded: “We had a lot of generals to dinner, but the evening was dull—no Bridge—& everybody went early to bed.”

Yet to say he was an addict would be to use too strong a word. He rarely allowed one pursuit to interfere with his enjoyment of another. The chief impression of his private life which emerges from these years is of his extraordinary ability to fit in the widest possible range of activities. He even went to the opera, which he considerably disliked, two or three times a year. “ I spent about 2 hours at the Opera . . . and tried to get some pleasure out of Boris, not with any very successful result I fear,” he wrote on July 16th, 1914.
^s
“ There was a crowded house of fashionable people and others who seemed to be of a contrary opinion,” he added.

Mostly, however, his time was more sensibly spent. He transacted his official business with great speed, but without any suggestion of neglect, and he left himself plenty of time for his family and his friends, for a wider but by no means undiscriminating social life, for golf and bridge, for general reading, and for private letter writing. As Prime Minister he probably lived a more agreeable life than he had ever done before, but his satisfactions were by no means exclusively those of power.

1
_{Although he complained on this occasion, Asquith was in general a most enthusiastic motorist—although always as a passenger. He usually preferred to do journeys of 100 miles or so by road, and he made no effort to avoid them—frequently going this distance for a 24-hour stay. Even when in the country he often liked to motor somewhere else, particularly if the weather was bad, and female companions were available. “It poured continuously for 48 hours, and we were reduced to motoring to Sir Sympne’s (a private description of Sir John Simon) at Fritwell,” he wrote after a wet week-end in early 1914. And three weeks later, after having the Churchills to stay, he wrote: “ The weather was vile and we could not golf—only trundle about at a snail’s pace (in deference to Clemmie’s fears) in a shut-up motor.”}

2
_{Nor were Lloyd George’s occasional letters to Asquith in any way unfriendly. On December 28th, 1912 he wrote on the subject of a possible dissolution of Parliament, and after suggesting June, 1913, as a favourable month, concluded: “ Wishing you as brilliant a New Year as the present has proved itself to be.”
(Asquith Papers,
box xiii, ff. no 1).}

3
_{A
lthough, even in peace-time, strictly as an after-dinner pursuit (except perhaps for an occasional wet Sunday afternoon at the Wharf), readers of Mr. Robert Blake’s
The Unknown Prime Minister
may care to note.}

4
_{Three years later he wrote of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas as being “ almost the only form of music that has ever given me real pleasure.”
(Letters from Lord Oxford to a Friend
, 1, p. 19).}