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Articles
Great Contemporaries: Anthony Eden (Part 1), 1897-1934
- By FRED GLUECKSTEIN
- | March 18, 2022
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries
Andrew Roberts pointedly observed that most of Churchill’s allies in resisting appeasement of Hitler were veterans of the Great War. Anthony Eden was one of these and a war hero. In Parliament, though not always an early supporter of Churchill in the rearmament debate, he knew in the end where the right lay. Together they forged an alliance of purpose that proved useful in the war to come.
Young Anthony
Robert Anthony Eden KG, MC, PC, First Earl of Avon, was born 12 June 1897 at Windlestone Hall, County Durham. His family was landed gentry. His father, Sir William Eden, 7th Baronet of West Auckland, 5th Baronet of Maryland, was a former colonel and magistrate. Anthony’s mother, Sybil Frances Grey Eden, was a member of the prominent Grey family of Northumberland. Eden had an older sister, Marjorie, and was third among four brothers, Jack, Tim and Nicholas.
Anthony Eden entered Eton College in January 1911. Three years later, when the First World War began, he was eager to serve but was too young to join. However, he did become a member of the Eton Officers Training Corps. The Great War struck his family early, in October 1914, when his 26-year-old brother Jack was killed in action. Windlestone Hall then became a hospital and convalescent home for wounded soldiers.
At the age of eighteen, Eden was recruited by the Earl of Feversham, who commanded the 21st Battalion, Yeoman Rifles, of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Eden had the rank of second lieutenant. The 21st Battalion arrived in Belgium in April 1916 and positioned at Ploegsteert Wood, called “Plugstreet” by British tommies. A year earlier, Winston Churchill had served there, commanding the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. Shortly after arrival, Eden lost his youngest brother Nicholas, aged 16. Nicholas, a midshipman on the battle cruiser HMS Indefatigable, died when the ship blew up and sank at the Battle of Jutland.
Heroism and horror
Near Ploegsteert one a summer night in 1916, Anthony Eden led a raid into a German trench to kill or capture enemy soldiers and identify their unit. Returning to the British trenches, he and his men were pinned down under German fire in No Man’s Land.
Hearing groans, Eden discovered Sergeant Bert Harrop, bleeding profusely from a thigh wound. He had been positioned with two other riflemen halfway across No Man’s Land. Eden sent for a stretcher to get Harrop back to the British trenches before dawn. Two soldiers returned with one, without being spotted by the Germans. “Then came the difficult decision,” Eden wrote:
We had only 50 yards to go, and even though we stooped, we would all four have to stand up to carry Harrop’s stretcher. The longer we waited the better the chance of the night growing quieter, but the worse for Harrop and the more extended the risk for all. I wanted to get it over with, and we did. To this day, I do not know whether the enemy saw the stretcher and held his fire, or saw nothing in the Very lights. There was a chilly feeling down our spines anyway.”1
Anthony Eden was awarded the Military Cross (MC) for “exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy.” Eden did not mention the MC in his memoirs.
On 15 September 1916, Eden’s Battalion attacked at Delville Wood in the horrific Battle of the Somme. They suffered 394 casualties, of whom 127 were killed; the Earl of Feversham, who recruited Eden, was among the dead. Following the battle, Eden wrote in part to his mother: “I have seen things lately that I am not likely to forget”2
War’s end
On 3 October 1916, Eden was appointed an adjutant, with the rank of temporary lieutenant during that appointment. Still only 19, he was the youngest adjutant on the Western Front, and his battalion fought numerous engagements. A year later Eden transferred to the General Staff with the temporary rank of captain. On 26 May 1918, he was appointed brigade major of the 198th Infantry Brigade, part of the 66th Division. Now he was the youngest brigade major in the British Army.
The war ended six months later and Anthony pondered his future: “I really don’t know whether to stick to soldiering after the war,” he wrote his sister. “I am afraid that it will be a dreadfully slow game for a bit until the next war comes!”3 Here apparently was one officer who didn’t swallow the slogan about the war to end wars.
Anthony in his youth was a Tory Free Trader. He even criticized his father for opposing a Free Trade uncle running for Parliament. He had not, however, shown any interest in politics himself until three days after the Armistice. “At the present moment,” he wrote to his only surviving brother Tim, “I am thinking very seriously about standing for Parliament.”4
The impulse apparently passed. Instead Anthony attended Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Oriental languages (Arabic and Persian). He had developed an interest in foreign affairs and thought of joining the diplomatic service. He graduated from Oxford with a Double First in 1922.
Early views on Churchill
Anthony Eden shared Churchill’s Free Trade principles, but the Great War found the younger man a critic. Over the Dardanelles Campaign Eden wrote: “Why can’t W. Churchill look after those sort of things [Navy ships] instead of making strategical plans about which he knows nothing at all?” He also wrote: “I should like to hang, draw & quarter Haldane, Asquith, Winston Churchill & McKenna. Ye Gods! What a quartet!”5
Around the same time, another future Churchill colleague was forming a similar opinion. At a 1918 dinner at Gray’s Inn Court “he acted like a stinker,” said Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. “I’m giving him attention because there is a strong possibility that he will become Prime Minister and I want to get my hand in now.”6 By 1939 Anthony Eden would find himself in the same position.
Eden’s impression of Churchill warmed when they became colleagues.7 In January 1924 young Anthony took his place as Conservative Member for Warwick and Leamington. In October, Churchill was elected Member for Epping, and soon became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. In his maiden speech on 19 February 1924, Eden supported a motion favoring air defense proposed by Tory colleague Sir Samuel Hoare. “His early espousal of strong air defence was to serve him well,” wrote Robert Rhodes James.8 In 1925 Churchill delivered the first of his five Budgets. Eden wrote in his diary that Churchill’s presentation in the Commons had been ‘‘2 2/1 hours and a masterly performance.”9
In July 1926, Eden became parliamentary private secretary to Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. He honed his understanding of foreign affairs from Sir Austen, a strong champion of the League of Nations.
Disagreements over Disarmament
In September 1931, Eden took his first ministerial office: Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the National Government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. This obligated him to take collective responsibility for government actions, including Disarmament, for which there was much public clamor. In March 1933, MacDonald presented to Parliament his proposals for the forthcoming Geneva Disarmament Conference. He emphasized that his government’s goal was “equality of status” for Germany in the sphere of armaments.
Churchill had earlier opposed proposals to reduce Royal Air Force spending and flying schools, and to pressure France to reduce its air force. He now spoke against MacDonald, while Eden replied on behalf of the Government. It was unfortunate, he observed, that Churchill had chosen so serious a debate to practice his “quips and jests.” To accuse MacDonald of being responsible for deteriorating international relations was a “fantastic absurdity.” The causes of that deterioration “went back to a time when Mr. Churchill himself had a considerable measure of responsibility.” (Churchill as Chancellor had several times favored reductions in military spending in the 1920s.)
Without French disarmament, Eden continued, “they could not secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed.” (The word “appeasement” was still used in dictionary sense of “seeking to settle strife.” Only later in the decade would it come to acquire a pejorative meaning.)
The House cheered Eden and was in “an ugly mood towards Mr. Churchill,” reported the Daily Despatch. Churchill’s only letter of support was from old Admiral Sir Reginald Cunstance: who wrote: “You were really setting forth the fundamental principle of war and were talking over the heads of your audience who for the most part are quite ignorant of that principle.”10
Moving on up
Eden held the office of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs until 18 January 1934. Six months later The London Gazette, which published official statutory notices, reported among George V’s birthday honors:
The KING has been graciously pleased, on the occasion of His Majesty’s Birthday, to declare that the undermentioned shall be sworn to His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council: Robert Anthony Eden, Esq., MC JP MP, Lord Privy Seal since January 1934, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1931-1933. Member of Parliament for Warwick and Leamington since 1923, as a member of the Privy Council.11
Anthony Eden was now, like Churchill, part of the formal body of advisers to the His Majesty.
Continued in Part 2…
Endnotes
1 Anthony Eden, Another World: 1897-1917 (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 97-98. Note: A “Very light” was a rocket fired from a brass pistol, used at night in the front lines to illuminate No Man’s Land. Sergeant Harrop survived, but his wounds required many operations.
2 Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 46.
3 Ibid., 54.
4 Ibid., 55.
5 Ibid., 34.
6 David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (New York: Overbrook Press, 2000), xvi.
7 Rhodes James, 34.
8 Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018), 79.
9 Ibid., 316.
10 Cunstance to Churchill, 24 March 1933, in Martin Gilbert, Churchill; A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000), 515.
11 Supplement to The London Gazette, 4 June 1934.
The author
Mr. Glueckstein, of Kings Park, New York, writes about people and places related to the Churchill saga.