Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian
Philip Henry Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, was a British politician, British Ambassador to the United States and editor of various journals. He was private secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George between 1916 and 1921 and as such played a major role in the Paris Peace Conference. After succeeding a cousin in the marquessate in 1930, he held junior ministerial offices in the Lords from 1931 in the National Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, until he resigned from it in 1932.
In the 1930s, Lothian promoted entente with Germany, and was considered by critics as a leading advocate of appeasement of Germany but his role was more complex than that. He felt the harshness of the ultimate German reparations in the Treaty of Versailles had been a great mistake. He also emphasised the dangers of Stalin's communism. He changed his mind about Hitler's intentions after reading an English translation of Mein Kampf. He then felt war was inevitable and it was vital that Britain speed up re-armament as their armed forces were no match for Hitler's at the time.
From 1939 to his death, he was Ambassador to the United States. As such he probably did more than any individual, other than the British prime minister Winston Churchill, to get a neutral United States finally involved in the Second World War and he proved highly successful in winning America's support for the British war effort, especially the Lend-Lease Act, which passed Congress after his death.
On Lothian's death, Churchill described him as "our greatest ambassador to the United States".
Background and education
Kerr was born in London as the eldest son of Major-General Lord Ralph Kerr, who was the third son of John Kerr, 7th Marquess of Lothian. He was the grandson of Duke of Norfolk, the lay head of the Catholic Church in Britain, through his mother Lady Anne Fitzalan-Howard, the daughter of Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 14th Duke of Norfolk, by the Honourable Augusta Mary Minna Catherine Lyons, the daughter of Vice-Admiral Edmund Lyons, 1st Baron Lyons.Kerr was a nephew of Edmund FitzAlan-Howard, 1st Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent, and a great-nephew of Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons. Via his descent from the Lyons family, Kerr was a relative of Maine Swete Osmond Walrond, who was the Private Secretary to the Private Secretary to Lord Milner and a fellow member of Milner's Kindergarten.
Kerr was educated at The Oratory School, Birmingham, Cardinal Newman's foundation, from 1892 to 1900, and at New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Modern History in 1904, subsequent to which, in 1904, he tried unsuccessfully for a Prize Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford.
The description of Kerr by Sir James Butler, formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge as he, his biographer, and his friends knew him was:
Athletic and strikingly good-looking in youth, possessed great charm and great ability, with a keen inquiring mind; informal in manner, unprejudiced and unconventional, courageously determined to follow his own line, he was always, as his friend Lionel Curtis put it, breaking new ground. Though not easy to know intimately, owing to an ingrained detachment and elusiveness, he was remarkable for his unselfish kindness and his loyalty in friendship. Whether in his early years as a Catholic or later years as a Christian Scientist he impressed all who knew him by his deeply religious outlook and the spirituality of his character.
As a young man Philip Kerr's appearance was usually untidy, to the despair of his friends, but it was redeemed by his boyish good looks and a lack of self-consciousness, typified by his arrival at Westminster Abbey, with his ermine, for the coronation of George V in a tiny Austin 7. Although he was normally renowned for his very fast driving of his Bentleys in which he sped around the country for his engagements. He was also a truly classless British aristocrat - terribly unusual at the time - which was part of why he loved and so admired the democratic example that the United States had given the world. He was interested in the views of any person he met regardless of his or her station.
The historian Michael Bloch, writes in his 2015 book that Kerr was known for his handsome, androgynous looks and that ' Lothian was derisively nicknamed ' Narcissus ' by his enemies. ' Bloch writes that although admiring of and admired by women, he speculates that he had no desire to marry or make love to them and he adds him to others he assumed to be repressed homosexuals. Bloch provides no sources for these conjectures in the four pages in his book that mention Lothian, other than an unpublished memoir by Lothian's secretary on a different matter regarding the importance to Lothian of his religion. Bloch wrote that it was very unlikely that the deeply religious Kerr ever engaged in homosexual relationships, but noted that he never married. Lord Brand, who was married to Phyllis Langhorne, Nancy Astor's sister, and a longtime friend and associate of Kerr since their Oxford University days wrote 'Most women fall in love with him sooner or later, as far as my experience goes'. Kerr's secretary at Blickling Muriel O'Sullivan wrote of Kerr "He did not seem dependent on the companionship of men in the way that the society of women seemed essential to his well-being."
Winston Churchill wrote of Lothian:
In all the years I had known him he had given me the impression of high intellectual and aristocratic detachment from vulgar affairs. Airy, viewy, aloof, dignified, censorious, yet in a light and gay manner, he had always been good company.
South Africa and Milner's Kindergarten
Kerr served in the South African government from 1905 to 1910 and was a member of what became called "Milner's Kindergarten", a group of colonial officers who deemed themselves reformist rather than an actual political faction. They believed the colonies should have more say in the Commonwealth. By the standards of the era, they were liberal: most of them had an interest in elevating the status of white colonials, rejected independence, and had a paternalistic view of nonwhites. Kerr became more liberal on these issues than his counterparts by admiring Gandhi and trying, if not entirely succeeding, to be more progressive than they were on racial issues.Kerr was based in Johannesburg, where he served on the Inter-Colonial Council where he specialised in the running of the railroads. Kerr helped write the Selborne Memorandum of 1907 calling for the four colonies of the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, Natal and the Cape Colony to be united into one and granted Dominion status as the new country of South Africa. In common with the other members of the Milner's Kindergarten, Kerr rejected the original British plan for the cultural genocide of the Afrikaners by forcing them to speak English regardless if they wanted to or not. Instead, he advocated reconciliation with the moderate Afrikaner nationalists led by Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Kerr envisioned the new nation of South Africa as a federation where the Anglos would share power with the Afrikaners. The black and Asian populations of South Africa were completely excluded from the political progress-the moderate Afrikaner nationalists were prepared to allow "coloureds" the right to vote, a concession opposed by the more extreme Afrikaner nationalists. Inspired by The Federalist Papers that led to the modern American constitution, Kerr founded in December 1908 a journal called The States that was published in both English and Afrikaans that urged for the federation of the four colonies and Dominion status. Kerr defined the purpose of The States as allowing "...for the South Africans to join in a state and became a nation". However, the Afrikaners would not accept a federation and instead preferred an unitary state as the greater number of Afrikaners vs. the Anglos would ensure the former would dominate South Africa rather than the latter. On 31 May 1910, the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal were merged into the new nation of South Africa, which was granted Dominion status.
The Round Table
In September 1909, Kerr took part in the conference at Plas Newydd that led to the Round Table movement. He returned to England in 1910 to found and edit the Round Table Journal, which he continued to edit until 1916 and thereafter remained on its Moot. It became a highly influential international quarterly during the inter-war years. After Lothian inherited Blickling Hall in Norfolk in 1930, the members of the Moot would often meet as his guests there with their wives for a few days or a weekend to agree on the editorial content. At a meeting in London in January 1910, Kerr called for "an organic union to be brought about by the establishment of an imperial government constitutionally responsible to all the electors of the Empire, and with the power to act directly on individual citizens". In November 1910, after Kerr became the first editor of The Round Table Journal, it attracted much attention with its plans to turn the empire into an imperial federation. In his article After Four Months of War that appeared in the December 1914 edition of The Round Table, Kerr called for "the voluntary federation of all free civilised states" as the best way to end war forever. In September 1915 edition of The Round Table in an article entitled The End of War, Kerr again called for a "world state" that would be "a responsible and representative political authority" for the entire world as the best way to end the war. In June 1916 edition of The Round Table, Kerr in his article The principle of Peace, Kerr repeated his call for a "world state", saying the present international condition was "like that of the Western states of America in the early days...So long as independent behave like independent sovereign individuals, from time to time they will massacre each other in defense of what they believe to be their rights. And they will not cease from doing so until they agree to draw up laws which secure justice for all, to obey those laws themselves, and until the nations of the earth are willing to be united into a World State".In a June 1933 article in the Round Table Lothian had urged that nations should be on their guard ' for history warns us that dictatorships and brutality and worship of force at home tend in due time express themselves also in foreign affairs. ' For the moment the essential thing was to support the League of Nations and the Peace Pact; but it was desirable to revise the Covenant and the Lucarno treaties '.