Baron Dacre (created 1307), son of a Speaker of the House of Commons (1872-1884),
while his mother was Susan Cavendish, daughter of Lord George Cavendish, and niece of
the seventh Duke of Devonshire. His father, as Governor of New South Wales in 1895-
1899, was one of the original instigators of the federation of the Australian Colonies,
which came into effect in 1900. His older brother, the third Viscount Hampden, was a
lord-in-waiting to the King (1924-1936), while another brother, Admiral Sir Hubert
Brand, was extra equerry to the King (1922) and principal naval aide to the King (1931-
1932). His nephew, Freeman Freeman-Thomas (Baron Willingdon after 1910; Marquess
of Willingdon after 1936), in 1892 married the daughter of Lord Brassey, and became
Governor-General of Canada (1926-1931) and Viceroy of India (1931-1936).
Brand, who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1901, is chiefly responsible for the
Astor influence in the Milner Group. He went to South Africa in 1902 and was made
secretary of the Inter-colonial Council of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and
secretary of the Railway Committee of the Central South African Railways, with Philip
Kerr (the future Lord Lothian) as assistant secretary on both organizations. He was
secretary to the Transvaal Delegation at the South African National Convention (1908-
1909) and at once wrote a deliberately naive work published by Oxford University Press
in 1909 with the title
Kindergarten, and where it is necessary to speak of its work, this is done as if it were
performed by persons unknown to the writer. He says, for example (page 40): "The
Transvaal Delegation alone was assisted throughout the convention by a staff of legal
advisers and experts," and thus dismisses the Kindergarten's essential work. His own
work is passed over in silence, and at the front of the volume is placed a quotation in
Dutch from President Sir John Brand of the Orange River Colony, possibly to mislead the
ordinary reader into believing that there was a family connection between the South
African politician and the author of the book.
Brand's role in the Milner Group after 1910 is too great to be covered adequately here.
Suffice it to say that he was regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group and
became a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and Company, a director of
Lloyd's Bank, and a director of
1945. During the First World War, he was a member of the Imperial Munitions Board of
Canada (1915-1918) and deputy chairman of the British Mission in Washington (1917-
1918). While in Washington, he married Nancy Astor's sister, daughter of Chiswell
Dabney Langhorne of Virginia. It was this connection which gave him his entree to
Cliveden in the period when that name became notorious.
Brand was one of the important figures in international finance in the period after
1918. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he was financial adviser to Lord Robert
Cecil, chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. He was later vice-president of the
Brussels Conference (1920) and financial representative for South Africa at the Genoa
Conference (1922). He was a member of the committee of experts on stabilization of the
German mark in 1923, the committee which paved the way for the Dawes Plan. After an
extended period in private business, he was head of the British Food Mission to
Washington (1941-1944), chairman of the British Supply Council in North America
(1942- 1945, 1946), and His Majesty's Treasury Representative in Washington (1944-
1946). In this last capacity he had much to do with negotiating the enormous American
loan to Britain for postwar reconstruction. During the years 1942-1944, Brand put in his
own place as managing director of Lazard Brothers his nephew, Thomas Henry Brand,
son of Viscount Hampden, and, when Brand left Lazard in 1944, he brought the same
nephew to Washington as chief executive officer on the British side of the Combined
Production and Resources Board, and later (1945) as chairman of the official Committee
on Supplies for Liberated Areas. In all of his activities Brand has remained one of the
most central figures in the core of the Milner Group.
Just as important as Brand was his intimate friend Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian),
whom we have already seen as Brand's assistant in South Africa. Kerr, grandson, through
his mother, of the fourteenth Duke of-Norfolk, originally went to South Africa as private
secretary to a friend of his father's, Sir Arthur Lawley, Lieutenant Governor of the
Transvaal (1902). Kerr was Brand's assistant on the Inter-colonial Council and on the
Committee of the Central South African Railways (1905-1908). Later, as secretary to the
Transvaal Indigency Commission (1907-1908), he wrote a report on the position of poor
white laborers in a colored country which was so valuable that it was republished by the