As organized, the Institute consisted of a council with a chairman and two honorary
secretaries, and a small group of paid employees. Among these latter, A. J. Toynbee,
nephew of Milner's old friend at Balliol, was the most important. There were about 300
members in 1920, 714 in 1922, 17D7 in 1929, and 2414 in 1936. There have been three
chairmen of the council: Lord Meston in 1920-1926, Major-General Sir Neill Malcolm in
1926-1935, and Lord Astor from 1935 to the present. All of these are members of the
Milner Group, although General Malcolm is not yet familiar to us.
General Malcolm, from Eton and Sandhurst, married the sister of Dougal Malcolm of
Milner's Kindergarten in 1907, when he was a captain in the British Army. By 1916 he
was a lieutenant colonel and two years later a major general. He was with the British
Military Mission in Berlin in 1919-1921 and General Officer Commanding in Malaya in
1921-1924, retiring in 1924. He was High Commissioner for German Refugees (a project
in which the Milner Group was deeply involved) in 1936-1938 and has been associated
with a number of industrial and commercial firms, including the British North Borneo
Company, of which he is president and Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. It must not be
assumed that General Malcolm won advancement in the world because of his connections
with the Milner Group, for his older brother, Sir Ian Malcolm was an important member
of the Cecil Bloc long before Sir Neill joined the Milner Group. Sir Ian, who went to
Eton and New College, was assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury in 1895-1900,
was parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George
Wyndham) in 1901-1903, and was private secretary to Balfour in the United States in
1917 and at the Peace Conference in 1919. He wrote the sketch of Walter Long of the
Cecil Bloc (Lord Long of Wraxall) in the
From the beginning, the two honorary secretaries of the Institute were Lionel Curtis
and G. M. Gathorne-Hardy. These two, especially the latter, did much of the active work
of running the organization. In 1926 the
Honorary Officers." The burden of work was so great on Curtis and Gathorne-Hardy by
1926 that Sir Otto Beit, of the Rhodes Trust, Milner Group, and British South Africa
Company, gave £1000 for 1926 and 1927 for secretarial assistance. F. B. Bourdillon
assumed the task of providing this assistance in March 1926. He had been secretary to
Feetham on the Irish Boundary Commission in 1924-1925 and a member of the British
delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919. He has been in the Research Department of
the Foreign Office since 1943.
The active governing body of the Institute is the council, originally called the
executive committee. Under the more recent name, it generally had twenty-five to thirty
members, of whom slightly less than half were usually of the Milner Group. In 1923, five
members were elected, including Lord Meston, Headlam-Morley, and Mrs. Alfred
Lyttelton. The following year, seven were elected, including Wilson Harris, Philip Kerr,
and Sir Neill Malcolm. And so it went. In 1936, at least eleven out of twenty-six
members of the council were of the Milner Group. These included Lord Astor
(chairman), L. Curtis, G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, Lord Hailey, H. D. Henderson, Stephen
King-Hall, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Sir Neill Malcolm, Lord Meston, Sir Arthur Salter, J.
W. Wheeler-Bennett, E. L. Woodward, and Sir Alfred Zimmern. Among the others were
A. V. Alexander, Sir John Power, Sir Norman Angell, Clement Jones, Lord Lytton,
Harold Nicolson, Lord Snell, and C. K. Webster. Others who were on the council at
various times were E. H. Carr, Harold Butler, G. N. Clark, Geoffrey Crowther, H. V.
Hodson, Hugh Wyndham, G. W. A. Ormsley-Gore, Walter Layton, Austen Chamberlain,
Malcolm MacDonald (elected 1933), and many other members of the Group.
The chief activities of the RIIA were the holding of discussion meetings, the
organization of study groups, the sponsoring of research, and the publication of
information and materials based on these. At the first meeting, Sir Maurice Hankey read a
paper on "Diplomacy by Conference," showing how the League of Nations grew out of
the Imperial Conferences. This was published in
exists of the meetings before the fall of 1921, but, beginning then, the principal speech at
each meeting and resumes of the comments from the floor were published in the
At the first of these recorded meetings, D. G. Hogarth spoke on "The Arab States," with
Lord Chelmsford in the chair. Stanley Reed, Chirol, and Meston spoke from the floor.
Two weeks later, H. A. L. Fisher spoke on "The Second Assembly of the League of
Nations," with Lord Robert Cecil in the chair. Temperley and Wilson Harris also spoke.