Philip Kerr and Reginald Coupland. He took his degree in 1908 and was made a Fellow
of New College in 1936. A Conservative member of Parliament from 1910 until he went
to the Upper House in 1938, he spent the early years of the First World War in military
intelligence, chiefly in Egypt. In 1913 he married Lady Beatrice Cecil, daughter of the
fourth Marquess of Salisbury, and four years later became Parliamentary Private
Secretary to Lord Milner as well as assistant secretary to the War Cabinet (associated in
the latter post with Hankey, Kerr, W. G. S. Adams, and Amery of the Milner Group).
Ormsby-Gore went on a mission to Palestine in 1918 and was with the British delegation
at the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on the Middle East. He was Under Secretary
for the Colonies with the Duke of Devonshire in 1922-1924 and with Leopold Amery in
1924-1929, becoming Colonial Secretary in his own right in 1936-1938. In the interval he
was Postmaster General in 1931 and First Commissioner of Works in 1931-1936. He was
a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission (1921-1923) and of the Colonial
Office Mission to the British West Indies (1921-1922), and was Chairman of the East
African Parliamentary Commission in 1924. He was High Commissioner of South Africa
and the three native protectorates in 1941-1944. He has been a director of the Midland
Bank and of the Standard Bank of South Africa. He was also one of the founders of the
Royal Institute of International Affairs, a member of Lord Lothian's committee on the
African Survey, and a member of the council of the Institute.
The Milner Group also influenced Commonwealth affairs by publicity work of great
quantity and good quality. This was done through the various periodicals controlled by
the Group, such as
books published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs and individual members of
the Group; by academic and university activities by men like Professor Coupland,
Professor Zimmern, Professor Harlow, and others; by public and private discussion
meetings sponsored by the Round Table Groups throughout the Commonwealth, by the
Institute of International Affairs everywhere, by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR),
by the Council on Foreign Relations, by the Williamstown Institute of Politics, by the
Rhodes Scholarship group; and through the three unofficial conferences on British
Commonwealth relations held by the Group since 1933. Some of these organizations and
activities have already been mentioned. The last will be discussed here. The rest are to be
described in Chapter 10.
The three unofficial conferences on British Commonwealth relations were held at
Toronto in 1933, at Sydney in 1938, and at London in 1945. They were initiated and
controlled by the Milner Group, acting through the various Institutes of International
Affairs, in the hope that they would contribute to the closer union of the Commonwealth
by inclining the opinion of prominent persons in the Dominions in that direction. The
plan was originated by the British Empire members of the Institute of Pacific Relations at
the Kyoto meeting in 1929. The members from Great Britain consisted of Lord Robert
Cecil, Sir Herbert Samuel, Sir Donald Somervell, Sir John Power, P. J. Noel-Baker, G.
M. Gathorne-Hardy, H. V. Hodson, H. W. Kerr, A. J. Toynbee, J. W. Wheeler-Bennett,
and A. E. Zimmern. Of these, two were from the Cecil Bloc and five from the Milner
Group. Discussion was continued at the Shanghai meeting of the Institute of Pacific
Relations in 1931, and a committee under Robert Cecil drew up an agenda for the
unofficial conference. This committee made the final arrangements at a meeting in
Chatham House in July 1932 and published as a preliminary work a volume called
The conference was held at the University of Toronto, 11-21 September 1933, with
forty-three delegates and thirty-three secretaries, the traveling expenses being covered by
a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The United Kingdom delegation consisted of the
eleven names mentioned above plus R. C. M. Arnold as private secretary to Lord Cecil
and J. P. Maclay (the famous shipbuilder) as private secretary to Sir Herbert Samuel. The
Australian delegation of six included Professor A. H. Charteris, Professor Ernest Scott,
A. Smithies (a Rhodes Scholar of 1929), Alfred Stirling (an Oxford B.A.), W. J. V.
Windeyer, and Richard Latham (a Rhodes Scholar of 1933). The Canadian delegation
consisted of N. W. Rowell, Sir Robert Borden, Louis Cote, John W. Dafoe, Sir Robert
Falconer, Sir Joseph Flavelle, W. Sanford Evans, Vincent Massey, René L. Morin, J. S.
Woodsworth, W. M. Birks, Charles J. Burchell, Brooke Claxton, Percy E. Corbett, W. P.
M. Kennedy, J. J. MacDonnell (Rhodes Trustee for Canada), and E. J. Tarr. The secretary