The deaths of l w ord Perth and Hilary St. George Saunders
on successive days will throw many people's minds back to the earliest phase of the League of Nations. The former, I think, will live in history by his earlier name of Sir Eric Drummond, ' for it was $ir Eric who, by his creation of the Secretariat of the League, the first international civil service worthy of the name, laid the essential foundation for the success which the League enjoyed till in 1931 events beyond the control of the Secretariat dealt a fatal blow at its stability. Absolutely impartial nationally, absolutely impartial politically, unruffled, shrewd, diplomatic, a little pawky, he welded together into a single efficient instru- ment men and women of- fifty different nationalities—men of the calibre of Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter and William Rappard and Inazo Nitobe—till each one counted, and was assessed, on his individual merits regardless of what nationality he bore. On Drummond's staff for seventeen years was Hilary Saunders, doing rather dull administrative work but consorting with persons who were anything but dull, like Lord Cecil and Nansen (I have somewhere a photograph of Hilary steering his motor-boat on the Lake of Geneva, with those two eminent dele- gates as passengers) and writing, in conjunction with his colleague John Palmer, thrillers and historical romances under a pseudo- nym. He left the League to become Assistant Librarian, and then Librarian, of the House of Commons, and it was then that he found his real métier, as author-of a series of brilliant descrip- tive booklets beginning with the Battle of Britain. Another old League of Nations association was cemented when in 1947 his daughter became the wife of Philip Noel-Baker's son.
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