1935), Secretary of State for War (1935), Lord Privy Seal (1935-1937), Lord President of
the Council (1937-1938), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1938-1940), and, finally,
Ambassador to Washington (as successor to Lord Lothian, 1941-1946). In Washington,
as we shall see, he filled the embassy with members of All Souls College.
There can be little doubt that Lora Halifax owed much of his rise in public affairs to
his membership in the Milner Group. His authorized biographer, Alan Campbell Johnson,
writes in connection with one appointment of Halifax's: "It is widely believed that the
influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of
him as an ideal Viceroy and whispered his name at the proper time both to the proper
authorities in George V's entourage and at 10 Downing Street." In connection with his
appointment as Foreign Secretary, Johnson says:
“Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and Brand, who used to congregate at Cliveden House as
the Astors' guests and earned the title of a "set," to which, in spite of imaginative left-
wing propaganda, they never aspired, urged Chamberlain at the decisive moment to have
the courage of his convictions and place Halifax, even though he was a Peer, in the office
to which his experience and record so richly entitled him. They argued forcibly that to
have a Foreign Secretary safely removed from the heat of the House of Commons battle
was just what was required to meet the delicate international situation.”
Another member of this South African group who was not technically a member of
the Kindergarten (because not a member of the civil service) was Basil Kellett Long. He
went from Brasenose to Cape Town to study law in 1902 and was called to the bar three
years later. In 1908 he was elected to the Cape Parliament, and a year later succeeded
Kerr as editor of the Kindergarten's propagandist journal, The State (1909-1912). He was
a member of the first Parliament of a united South Africa for three years (1910-1913) and
then succeeded Amery as head of the Dominions Department of
left this post and the position of foreign editor (held jointly with it in 1920-1921) to return
to South Africa as editor of the
important figures in the South African Institute of International Affairs after its belated
foundation. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he was put in charge of liaison work
between the South African branch and the parent institute in London.
The work of the Kindergarten in South Africa is not so well known as might be
expected. Indeed, until very recently the role played by this group, because of its own
deliberate policy of secrecy, has been largely concealed. The only good narration of their
work is to be found in Worsfold's
Milner, but Worsfold, writing so early, could not foresee the continued existence of the
Kindergarten as a greater and more influential group. Lionel Curtis's own account of
what the Group did, in his
unknown in the United States or even in England. The more recent standard accounts,
such as that in Volume VIII of the
even less than Worsfold. This will not appear surprising when we point out that the
chapter in this tome dealing with "The Formation of the Union, 1901-1910" is written by
Hugh A. Wyndham, a member of the Kindergarten. It is one of the marvels of modern
British scholarship how the Milner Group has been able to keep control of the writing of
history concerned with those fields in which it has been most active.
Only in very recent years has the role played by the Kindergarten as part of a larger
group been appreciated, and now only by a very few writers, such as the biographer of
Lord Halifax, already mentioned, and M. S. Green. The latter, a high school teacher in
Pretoria, South Africa, in his brief work on
(1946) gives an account of the Kindergarten which clearly shows his realization that this
was only the early stages of a greater group that exercised its influence through
All Souls. The work of union in South Africa was only part of the much greater task of
imperial union. This was always the ultimate goal of Cecil Rhodes, of Milner, and of the
Kindergarten. Milner wrote in his diary on 25 January 1904: "My work has been
constantly directed to a great and distant end—the establishment in South Africa of a
great and civilized and progressive community, one from Cape Town to the Zambesi—
independent in the management of its own affairs, but still remaining, from its own firm