Lord Simon Remembers
Retrospect. By Viscount Simon. (Hutchinson. 25s.) IT has been almost roses, roses, all the way with Lord Simon, but not quite. Having decided to choose politics instead of the law, after demonstrating that at the Bar he could have had everything at his feet, he was faced more than once with those problems which in party politics confront every man with a judicially balanced mind. In the first days of August, 1914, he was for a time among the party in the Cabinet which opposed war and contemplated resignation. Whether, as has been stated in some quarters, he actually handed in a letter of resignation he does not in this volume make clear. He was, he says, prepared " if necessary " (the words need a little elucidation), to ' resign. But a tete-a-tete breakfast with Sir Edward Grey on August 3rd made all the difference, and Sir John, as he then was, remained a member of the Government till early in 1916, when he felt himself so strongly opposed to compulsory service that he resigned rather than support the measure imposing conscription. " 1 have long since realised that my opposition was a mistake," he now adds, and at the time he effectively rebutted any possible charge of pacifism by donning Royal Flying Corps uniform and joining Trenchard's staff in France. The third decision was between sup- porting the MacDonald-Baldwin coalition in 1931 and going into opposition with what were variously known as the Samuel and the Sinclair Liberals. This time he had no hesitation, and the Liberal Nationals, commonly called Simonites (Liberals seem to run to sibilants), came to being under his leadership.
The retrospective record of such a career could not fail, and does not, to be charged with interest throughout. It might perhaps have been more fully charged if Lord Simon had decided to devote greater space to his brilliant career at the Bar, and refer to rather more of the historic cases he was engaged in than he has done. His book is none too long, and good wine should not be stinted. But he has chosen to dwell rather on Oxford and Westminster. Certainly no one will question the wisdom of the first decision. Born in a Congregational manse in Manchester and sent north to Fettes to school, he went to Oxford with a major scholarship at Wadhatn (regrettably ignoring the advice of his favourite master, who urged Cambridge), which was then rejoicing in a remarkable vintage. Besides Simon, F. E. Smith and C. B. Fry, Roche, a future Law Lord, Home, a future Bishop of Wakefield, and Francis Hirst were there, and Hilaire Belloc was a contemporary participant in tourneys at the Union. If it has not been roses, roses, it has certainly been Oxford, Oxford all the way, for Simon is now Senior Fellow of All Souls, having been elected in company with Leo Amery in 1897, and High Steward of tlie-University, after serving for many years as its standing counsel. Pietas and good stories are the outstanding characteristics of his Oxford chapters.
But primarily this is a political autobiography, spanning the years from 1906, when Simon was carried into Parliament on the wave of the great Liberal victory, to 1945, when on the election of the Labour Government he ceased to be Lord Chancellor. The period covers both wars, the disintegration of the Liberal Party in 1916 resulting from the Asquith-Lloyd George breach and the coupon election of 1918, the General Strike (here Lord Simon, if anything, under- rates the importance of his own demonstration of the illegality of the strikers' action), the first two Labour administrations, the economic crisis of 1931, his own Royal Commission on India, the Abdication and the pre-war anxieties of the later thirties, culminating in the Munich agreement. At every point Lord Simon has something pertinent to contribute—except on the Abdication, regarding which, unlike another noble Lord, he abstains from gratuitous exhumation. That term cannot be applied to the deadly quotations from speeches by Mr. Attlee and Sir Archibald Sinclair, bitterly opposing in the 1935 Parliament what the latter called " the folly, danger and wastefuness of this steady accumulation of armaments"; this takes its place in the normal course of the narrative as one of the factors contributing to the tragedy of 1939. Regarding the whole of the Munich negotia- tions there will be controversy to the end of time, for it is never possible to declare with certainty what shape later events would have assumed if earlier events had been different • but no one should engage in the controversy in future without weighing well Lord Simon's defence of the Chamberlain policy ; it is doubtful whether the case has ever been better stated. In particular it is pointed out with force (if only in a footnote) that it is no argument to say that the year's respite gained in 1938 enabled Germany to increase her armaments more than we could ; the point is that it enabled us to build up ours, particularly the Air Force, just sufficiently to save us from destruction. Lord Simon writes currente calamo, sometimes perhaps nimium currente. There are too many mis-spellings of proper names (a successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer figures variously in text and index as Kingsley Wood, Kingsley-Wood, Wood, Kingsley, Sir and Kingsley Wood, Sir Charles, a Christian name which his parents had neglected to bestow on him); it was to J. A. Spender, not to Walter Hines. Page, that Grey used the historic words The lamps are going out all over Europe " ; the last India Act was passed in 1947, not 1949 ; Ralph Whigham, a Foreign Office official, should be Ralph Wigram ; and I suggest though I may be wrong here, that the interchange between Rosebery and C.B. on a quotation from Juvenal was actually between Gladstone and C.B. These are not major errata, but they are worth correcting in a second edition.
The author of this volume needs little addition to his distinctions, but the volume will in fact add to them. One of the best chapters, incidentally is the last, devoted to concise assessments of the five Prime -Ministers Simon served under. WILSON HARRIS.
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