Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne


Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, DSO & Bar, TD, PC, was a British Conservative politician, soldier and businessman. He served as the British minister of state in the Middle East until November 1944, when he was assassinated by the Zionist terrorist group Lehi in Cairo. The assassination of Lord Moyne sent shock waves through Palestine and the rest of the world.

Early life and family

Walter Guinness was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 29 March 1880, into the prominent Anglo-Irish Guinness family. He was the third and youngest son of Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh and Adelaide Maria Guinness; his brothers were Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh and Hon. Ernest Guinness. His family homes were at Farmleigh near Dublin, and at Elveden Hall in Suffolk. At Eton, Guinness was elected head of 'Pop', a self-appointing group whose members have a status similar to school prefects, and was also appointed as Captain of Boats.
On 24 June 1903, Guinness married Lady Evelyn Hilda Stuart Erskine, third daughter of Shipley Stuart Erskine, 14th Earl of Buchan. They had three children:
Guinness joined the yeomanry regiment The Loyal Suffolk Hussars as a second lieutenant on 15 November 1899, and volunteered for service in the Second Boer War, commissioned as a lieutenant in the 44th Company of the 12th Battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry on 7 February 1900. The company left London on the SS Cornwall for South Africa in early March 1900, and during the service he received the honorary rank of captain in the army. According to Wilson, "they had a devil-may-care ethos and distaste for military discipline... they made lightning raids on Afrikaner positions; they skirmished ahead of advancing columns." At the end of May 1900, led by Major-General Hamilton, they assaulted the ridge at Doornkop, though Guinness was wounded immediately after the battle at Witpoort. For his war effort, he was Mentioned in Despatches and was awarded the Queen's South Africa Medal with four clasps. Following the war, he was promoted to the substantive rank of lieutenant in the Suffolk Imperial Yeomanry on 12 March 1902, and promoted to the substantive rank of captain the next month, on 5 April 1902.
During World War I, he served with distinction in the Suffolk Yeomanry in Egypt, and at Gallipoli. He was appointed a brigade major in the 25th division in 1916. In the fighting around Passchendaele, he was awarded the DSO in 1917, and a bar to it in 1918 during the German spring offensive, for personal bravery, which was rare for an elected politician. He ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel attached to the 66th division. His laconic war diaries were published in 1987, edited by Professor Brian Bond.

Political career

In the 1906 general election as a Conservative candidate, he unsuccessfully contested Stowmarket, a constituency in which he had a family estate. A year later, in 1907, Guinness was elected to the London County Council on which he sat until 1910 and also, at a 1907 by-election, to the House of Commons as Conservative member for Bury St Edmunds, which he continued to represent until 1931. He took the conservative line on Home Rule for Ireland, suffragism and reform of the House of Lords. In 1912, the editor of the magazine Guinness owned, The Outlook, broke the Marconi scandal, accusing Lloyd George and other Liberal ministers of share frauds. Other publications developed the story, but it could not be proven even after lengthy debate. When his role was debated, Guinness explained that he was on safari in Africa at the start, and that his editor's target was inefficiency, not corruption. He visited eastern Anatolia in 1913 and reported that Armenians were being armed secretly by Russia.
World War I reduced Guinness's attendances and opponents accused him of cowardice for being in the House at all. In a heated Armistice speech, he insisted that Germany pay full war reparations, that no ties be made with Russian Bolshevism, and that "Since the days of Mahomet no prophet has been listened to with more superstitious respect than has President Wilson". Irish political developments after 1916 were a concern as the Guinness business was in Dublin. During the Easter Rebellion the brewery first-aid teams helped both sides. The Guinness family was opposed to the rebels, who hailed the Central Powers as "gallant allies." This attitude had to change, and by the time of the Treaty debates in 1922 which established the Irish Free State, he said he preferred "a slippery slope to a precipice" and voted in favour. Despite their politics, during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War his family was popular enough to escape loss or injury. In 1922, the Chanak crisis caused the coalition Prime Minister Lloyd George to step down unexpectedly in favour of Bonar Law. Guinness's comments on Turkey were a part of the debate; he had come to admire Atatürk, despite serving at Gallipoli and he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for War under Lord Derby. Thereafter, his pronouncements appear less dogmatic. He lost office when a Labour government came to power in January 1924, but the following month, Guinness was sworn of the Privy Council.
Though they had generally been political opponents in 1907–21, Guinness's working political relationship with Winston Churchill started after the Conservative election victory in October 1924, when he was made Financial Secretary under Churchill, the new Chancellor. His ties to Churchill were also strengthened through "The Other Club," an informal dining club for politicians in London that Churchill had founded in 1911 and that Moyne later joined. A rule was that members had to freely express their opinions.
A ministerial vacancy enabled him to join the Cabinet as Minister of Agriculture from November 1925 until June 1929, where his main success was in increasing the sugar beet area. The first beet processing factory was built in his constituency, partly on the advice of Martin Neumann, who became a manager there.
After the Conservative defeat in 1929, he had to retire from office. He did not stand for re-election in the 1931 election and was created Baron Moyne, of Bury St Edmunds in the County of Suffolk on 21 January 1932.
In 1930, Moyne and Churchill agreed that the government policies of dropping the Pound sterling off the gold standard and de-rating to cope with the Great Depression were inadequate, along with proposals for dominion status for India. Together, they put the Pound sterling back on the gold standard; a point of pride, but not a policy that lasted for long. When the 1931 coalition government was formed, their criticisms meant that as former ministers they were now out in the political cold.
From 1934, they also warned about Hitler's rise to power and German rearmament. Moyne was in The Other Club on 29 September 1938 when the bad news came of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich. Also present were Brendan Bracken, Lloyd George, Bob Boothby, Duff Cooper, J.L. Garvin, editor of The Observer, and Walter Elliot. "Winston ranted and raved, venting his spleen on the two government ministers present and demanding to know how they could support a policy that was 'sordid, squalid, sub-human and suicidal.'" At that time, they still shared the minority view in parliament; the majority agreed with Moyne's cousin-in-law 'Chips' Channon MP, who recorded about the Munich that "the whole world rejoices whilst only a few malcontents jeer."
On 11 September 1938, just before the Munich crisis, Churchill wrote an oft-repeated comment in a letter to Moyne: "Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later, on even more adverse terms than at present."

Later political career

Even though an elevation to the Lords ends many political lives, Moyne spent part of 1932 in the colony of Kenya overseeing its finances. In 1933, he chaired a parliamentary committee supervising English slum clearances, in light of his experience gained in his family's charitable trusts mentioned above. In 1934, he joined the Royal Commission examining Durham University, as well as a 1936 committee investigating the British film industry.
In 1938, Moyne was appointed chairman of the West Indies Royal Commission, which was asked to investigate how best the British colonies in the Caribbean should be governed, after labour unrest. The Report and notes were published in 1939 and are held by the PRO at Kew, London.
Just before he returned from the Caribbean, his wife Evelyn died on 21 July 1939.
From the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Moyne sought the internment of Diana Mosley, his former daughter-in-law, who had left his son Bryan in 1932. She had remarried in 1936 in Berlin to the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, with Hitler and Goebbels as witnesses. File No KV 2/1363 at the PRO, Kew is part of a collection released in 2004 on British right-wing extremists. The PRO's on-line archivist notes that "Diana Mosley was not interned on the outbreak of war, and remained at liberty for some time. There is a Home Office letter of May 1940 explaining the Home Secretary's decision not to intern her at that time, and then correspondence from her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, which seems to have resulted in her detention the following month." Moyne's friend Churchill had become prime minister on 10 May 1940. Moyne's last letter, dated 26 June 1940, is quoted in Anne de Courcy's book on Diana Mosley. Later that day her order of detention was signed by J.S. Hale, a principal Secretary of State.
From September 1939, given Hitler's Invasion of Poland, Moyne chaired the Polish Relief Fund in London and gave over his London house at 11 Grosvenor Place, in Belgravia near Buckingham Palace, for the use of Polish officers. From the elevation of Churchill in May 1940, Moyne held several positions in the Churchill war ministry, starting with a Joint Secretaryship in the Ministry of Agriculture. In a cabinet reshuffle in February 1941, he took on his post in the Colonial Office and led the Churchill government's business in the House of Lords, with the honorific title of Leader of the House of Lords.
Largely as a result of his travels and his work in the West Indies, Lord Moyne was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies by Churchill, serving from 8 February 1941 to 22 February 1942. Moyne was next appointed Deputy Resident Minister of State in Cairo from August 1942 to January 1944 and Minister-Resident for the Middle East from then until his death. Within the British system at that time, this meant control over Persia, the Middle East, including Mandatory Palestine, and Africa. The main task was to ensure the defeat of the Axis forces in North Africa, principally the Afrika Korps led by General Rommel. Another concern was the influence on Arab opinion of the Grand Mufti, a leader of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, who had moved on to Nazi German sanctuary in Berlin in 1941.