2 - Ghosts in the machine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
Summary
I believe in the barefoot friars and not in a Minister of Education. Fishermen – not Fisher!! No great thing in this world has ever been achieved by organized effort … When ‘machinery’ begins to work, you get the Catholic Church or the British Cabinet.
Esher to L. B., 30 November 1919, Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, IV, 249.In democracies, particularly, the Leader sets the tone of the Party.
Lord Robert Cecil to Gladstone, 11 April 1922, Cecil MSS, 51163 fol. 80.Neil James Archibald Primrose, son of Lord Rosebery, son-in-law of the seventeenth Earl of Derby, brother-in-law to the Marquess of Crewe, went to war in 1917. By way of a send-off, Sir Alfred Mond organized a dinner in his honour; and one of those attending was Viscount Sandhurst, who found the occasion ‘interesting’ but evocative of certain sad memories since the house in which the party was held had once belonged to the late Lord Kimberley, with whom he had often dined in happier days. ‘But what a different gathering’, Sandhurst mused in his diary, ‘Gladstone, Granville, Spencers, Kimberleys, Breadalbanes and so on. The old order with a vengeance has given place to the new.’ Strength had been lent to the conviction, perhaps, by Sandhurst's immediate neighbours at the Primrose dinner, Lord Cowdray and Sir Robert Munro. The first was Asquithian and wealthy, a Yorkshire industrialist who wrote blank cheques for Liberal party funds, allowed Asquithian conclaves to meet at his house in Carlton House Terrace, and who was known pre-eminently in Liberal circles in his role as ‘the good angel of the W[estminster] G[azette]’.
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- The Liberal Mind 1914-29 , pp. 46 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977