Rab Butler
Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, also known as R. A. Butler and familiarly known from his initials as Rab, was a prominent British Conservative Party politician; he was effectively deputy prime minister to Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, although he only held the official title for a brief period in 1962–63. He was one of his party's leaders in promoting the post-war consensus through which the major parties largely agreed on the main points of domestic policy until the 1970s; it is sometimes known as "Butskellism" from a fusion of his name with that of his Labour counterpart, Hugh Gaitskell.
Born into a family of academics and Indian administrators, Butler had a distinguished academic career before he entered Parliament in 1929. As a junior minister, he helped to pass the Government of India Act 1935. He strongly supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938 to 1939.
Entering the Cabinet in 1941, he served as President of the Board of Education and oversaw the Education Act 1944. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, First Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary. Butler had an exceptionally long ministerial career and was one of only two British politicians to have served in three of the four Great Offices of State, but not to have been prime minister for which he was passed over in 1957 and 1963. At the time, the Conservative leadership was decided by a process of private consultation, rather than by a formal vote.
After retiring from politics in 1965, Butler was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and served until 1978. He died of colon cancer in 1982.
Family background
Butler's paternal family had a long and distinguished association with the University of Cambridge, dating back to his great-grandfather George Butler. His great-uncle Henry Montagu Butler was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Dean of Gloucester, and his uncle Sir Geoffrey G. Butler, a Cambridge historian and Conservative MP for the university. His father was a Fellow and later Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge.Butler's maternal grandfather, George Smith, was Principal of Doveton Boys College, Calcutta.
Early life and education
Richard Austen Butler was born 9 December 1902 in Attock, British India, the eldest son of Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Anne Smith. He had two sisters, Iris, who married Lieutenant-Colonel Gervase Portal and became a writer, and Dorothy, the wife of Laurence Middleton. His younger brother John was killed in an air crash on active service in January 1943.In July 1909, at the age of six, Butler's right arm was broken in three places in a riding accident, which left his right hand permanently disabled. He attended a preparatory school in Hove but rebelled against going to Harrow School, where most of his family were educated. Having failed to win a scholarship to Eton College, he instead attended Marlborough College, leaving in December 1920.
In June 1921, Butler won an exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. At that stage, he planned a career in the Diplomatic Service. He entered Pembroke College in October of that year and became President of the Cambridge Union Society for Easter term of 1924. Initially studying French and German, he graduated in 1925 with one of the highest first-class degrees in history in the university. He was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and gave lectures on the politics of the French Third Republic. At Cambridge, he met Sydney Courtauld; after they married in 1926, his father-in-law awarded him an income of £5,000 a year after tax for life, which was comparable to a Cabinet Minister's salary and gave him the financial freedom to pursue a political career.
Early political career
With the help of his Courtauld family connections, Butler was selected unopposed as the Conservative candidate for Saffron Walden on 26 November 1927. He was elected in the 1929 general election, and retained the seat until his retirement in 1965.Even before being elected to Parliament, Butler had been private secretary to Samuel Hoare. When the National Government was formed in August 1931 Hoare was appointed Secretary of State for India, and Butler was appointed as Hoare's Parliamentary Private Secretary. In January 1932, he visited India as part of Lord Lothian's Franchise Committee, which was set up by the Round Table Conference and which recommended a large increase in the Indian electorate.
On 29 September 1932, Butler became Under-Secretary of State for India after the resignation of Lord Lothian and other Liberals over abandonment of free trade by the National Government. At 29, he was the youngest member of the government and was responsible for piloting the Government of India Act 1935 through Parliament in the face of massive opposition from Winston Churchill and the Conservative right. He retained this position in Stanley Baldwin's third government, and when Neville Chamberlain replaced Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937, Butler was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour.
Foreign Office: 1938 to 1941
In the reshuffle caused by the resignation of Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and Lord Cranborne as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in February 1938, they were replaced by Lord Halifax and Butler, who became the main Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons.In internal discussions after Germany's annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, Butler counselled against giving Czechoslovakia a guarantee of British support and approved the Cabinet decision on 22 March not to do so, facts that he later omitted from his memoirs. During the Sudeten Crisis, he was attending a League of Nations meeting in Geneva but strongly supported Chamberlain's trip to Berchtesgaden on 16 September, even if it meant sacrificing Czechoslovakia in the interests of peace. Butler returned to Britain to make the winding-up speech for the Government in the Parliamentary Debate on the Munich Agreement on 5 October. After Churchill had spoken, Butler said that war solved nothing and that it was better to "settle our differences with Germany by consultation". However, he did not directly defend the Munich settlement; the motion was to support the avoidance of war and the pursuit of lasting peace.
Butler became a Privy Counsellor in the 1939 New Year Honours list, the youngest person so appointed since Churchill in 1907.
After Prague
After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, Butler, like Chamberlain, was shocked at Hitler's duplicity in breaking the Munich Agreement. The evidence suggests Butler did not support Halifax's new policy of attempting to deter further German aggression by pledging to go to war to defend Poland and other Eastern European countries.Butler became a member of the foreign policy committee, which agreed to seek an Anglo-Soviet alliance in May 1939, contrary to Chamberlain's and Butler's wishes, but Butler and Horace Wilson persuaded Chamberlain to hamstring the search for an agreement by including a requirement that Britain would not fight without League of Nations approval. Throughout the summer of 1939 Butler continued to lobby for closer Anglo-German relations and for Britain to lean on Poland to reach agreement with Germany.
After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was announced on 23 August 1939, Butler vainly advised against honouring Britain's guarantee to defend Poland against Germany but instead favoured Hitler's proposal to allow Germany to settle matters with Poland as it wished and, in return for concessions over her former colonies, to sign an Anglo-German alliance. Oliver Harvey recorded that Butler and Horace Wilson were "working like beavers" for "another Munich".
As late as early September 1939, with German invasion of Poland imminent, comments in Channon's diary suggest that Butler was sympathetic to last-minute Italian efforts to broker peace and that he and Butler were heartened by the delay in the British declaration of war on Germany caused by lack of agreement with the French over timing.
Foreign Office Minister: later views and Butler's memoirs
Butler's close association with appeasement was often held against him later in his career. Although he later held many senior Cabinet positions, by the time of Suez in 1956, his past, coupled with his lack of personal military experience, damaged his reputation in the eyes of the younger generation of Conservative MPs, many of whom were Second World War veterans. At the time, Butler strongly supported reaching agreement with Hitler as necessary for peace, but in his memoirs, The Art of the Possible, he defended the Munich Agreement as essential to buy time to rearm and gain public support for war in Britain and the Dominions, and he also claimed that he had little input into foreign policy.Later commentators argue that Butler's suggestion in his memoirs that he supported Halifax in leading the drive away from appeasement after Prague is "wholly false". His own papers suggest that he went to "greater lengths to meet Hitler's demands than any other figure in the British government" in 1939. His efforts to revoke the Polish guarantee that summer went beyond even Horace Wilson's, and it seems doubtful whether he was willing to fight Hitler over Poland at all. Patrick Cosgrave argues, "Butler did not merely go along with appeasement he waxed hard, long and enthusiastic for it, and there is very little evidence... he took the slightest interest in the rearmament programme to which he devotes such emphasis in his memoirs". Jago concludes that Butler "distorted the facts" and "grossly misrepresented his responsibility and attitudes in 1938". Although not the direct cause of his defeats in 1957 or 1963 "it was... always there, the blemish that he could not quite reason away".