The Guardsmen

The Guardsmen, a masterly contribution to contemporary history, is a collective biography of four Conservative politicians—Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttleton and Harry Crookshank—all of whom arrived at Eton in 1906, served in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards in 1914, entered Churchill's wartime coalition in 1940, and his peacetime Cabinet in 1951. ‘The history of a political generation seen from within reveals the true working of their system ... Each generation has its own “rules of the game”’. The First World War remained the crucial formative experience for the four, creating a bond which only death could dissolve. Other politicians were evaluated as being brave or cowardly in terms of their experience of military combat—or lack of it. More than forty years after the end of the First World War, in 1959, Harold Macmillan confided to his diary his ‘contempt for those “gentlemen of England now abed”, whether in the First or the Second [World Wars] who voluntarily missed their chance or chose to avoid danger by seeking positions of security’. He had learnt his celebrated unflappability, so he told an official at Conservative Central Office in 1961, ‘in early youth under fire on the battlefield. Unfortunately, for reasons which I wholly understand, this experience was not vouchsafed to Mr. Gaitskell, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Brown, Mr. Jay and the other leading members of the Labour front bench’

Ancient history · Art history · Battlefield · Biography · Cabinet (room · Contempt · Front (military · Peacetime · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Engineering · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact