Valentine Lawford, the hidden hand behind Britain’s wartime diplomacy

When Halifax moved, he could be graceful and grave and shy simultaneously, like a tall water bird wading in the shallows. Eden moved always with the fluent ease of a river between its banks, almost with a suggestion of bravura. But Bevin had difficulty heaving himself out of a sitting position at all, and when he sat down again, his body seemed to swell up around him in great waves like the ocean seeking its level after an unnatural disturbance.

This is how the diplomat Valentine Lawford introduced an article in the Cornhill magazine in 1957, looking back over his seven straight years from 1939 to 1946 as private secretary to Britain’s three wartime foreign secretaries.  The fact that he was able to sustain for all that time the gruelling tempo of wartime work at the centre of power, and also to establish a close rapport with three very different politicians shows that Lawford was an exceptional private secretary. He was also an acute observer of the great men he served during the most perilous period of Britain’s modern history. He was often in the room where and when it happened. He was, for example, with Eden at Yalta, and in Churchill’s train in a siding near Portsmouth on the eve of D-Day when the prime minister and de Gaulle had one of their titanic rows.

Lawford joined the Foreign Office in 1934 and spent a happy three years at the embassy in Paris from 1937-39, before joining the Private Office on the eve of war. It was in Paris that he decided to call himself Nicholas, since in France Valentine was a girl’s name. And Nicholas he remained throughout his time in the Foreign Office.

He was always an untypical civil servant. Cultured and gregarious (and a single man), he was much in demand by Parisian hostesses. When the 16-year-old Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, Winston’s niece, was sent to Paris in 1938 to finish her education, Lawford took her under his wing. She later recalled that

Valentine Lawford with a charming, melancholy face and curly hair was my closest friend.

On his return to London, and despite marathon days in the Private Office, Lawford kept up his hectic social life. He spent evenings dancing with Clarissa and her flatmate Pamela Churchill (who had married Winston’s son Randolph), or dining with duchesses. The immensely rich socialite Lady (Emerald) Cunard, in her seventies and lonely in wartime London, even talked at the end of one bibulous evening of leaving her fortune to him.

Lawford was careful to keep in a separate compartment of his life a series of love affairs with young men, many of them serving in the armed forces. But he confided to his diary the heartbreak of snatched weekends and separations when his partners went back to the front, in some cases never to return.

The bond Lawford created with the three ministers whose lives he shared during the war shines through the affectionate pen portraits he drew for the Cornhill. In his quirky way, he detailed how they looked, what they wore and the ways in which they dealt with the relentless pressures of being foreign secretary in a world war.

Lord (Edward) Halifax was a country gentleman turned old-fashioned Tory politician and a former Viceroy of India. Lawford noted that

his back and legs were magnificently straight and he looked his best on a horse… there were the recognisable marks of the Squire and the Colonel of Yeomanry in the forward tilt of the bowler hat.

Anthony Eden ‘wore the sort of clothes that a good tailor would like everyone to wear’ but had long since tired of being ‘constantly referred to not merely as the best looking but also as the best dressed member of the Government’. As for Ernest Bevin, he

could never have suffered from looking too good… but if by all contemporary canons he was frankly ugly, there was nothing remotely disagreeable in his ugliness. The massive irregularities of such a head would have improved many a Roman Emperor.

Lawford was interested in how the very different life experience of his three ministers influenced their behaviour. Halifax and Eden came from families active in public life for centuries. They were the products of public school and Oxford University and had moved seamlessly into Tory politics as young men. Bevin was from very different stock. He was largely self-educated, having left school at the age of seven, worked as a farm-hand and then a delivery boy, before embarking on his rise to fame through the ranks of his Trade Union.

Both Halifax and Eden, for all their polish, tended to lose their temper when minor things went wrong. Halifax could be ‘ferociously indignant’ when sent to the wrong place for a meeting, even though at all other times he showed ‘composure in the face of the immeasurably greater disasters and tragedies of those years: a rare inner impregnability’. Eden, too, could ‘overwhelm one with fury over matters great and small. An official car which broke down in Piccadilly, the importunity of a bevy of flashlight photographers, a secret telephone which refused to “scramble” sometimes threatened to assume the proportions of a hideous departmental faux pas or a major diplomatic reverse.’ But the anger soon subsided.

Bevin, whose path to high office had been ‘incomparably rougher than either of his predecessors’ was less inclined by his upbringing to take it for granted that he would get Rolls Royce service. He was as a result

amazingly patient of lesser errors. And it was almost as though he were naively gratified… to find that he had been conveyed to the right place for an international conference at the right time with, miracle of miracles, the right papers in his Foreign Secretary’s box.  

At weekends, Halifax would ‘happily escape into the Chilterns for an afternoon alone with Lady Halifax and the Ordnance Survey map’, and took a certain satisfaction if he found on his return that he had missed several urgent calls from his private secretary. Bevin was also elusive at weekends and ‘a little sleepily incoherent, if still wonderfully polite, when a call from the Foreign Office on a Sunday afternoon caught him napping in his flat, a stone’s throw from High St Kensington’.

Eden, on the other hand, insisted on being accompanied by a private secretary on weekends at his country house, Binderton, on the Sussex Downs. This was mainly to ensure that he got the same regular flow of Foreign Office telegrams as Churchill did at Chequers (without this, Eden would complain that he felt like Robinson Crusoe). But these weekends also showed Lawford a more relaxed Eden, even if work was rarely out of his thoughts

an immensely considerate, yet almost equally preoccupied, host at the end of the dinner table… and when he picked an apple from his favourite tree or a fig from the Southern stableyard wall, one had the strong impression that the hospitable gesture only momentarily interrupted a political train of thought.

The Private Office was (and remains to this day) the pivot between the Foreign Office and Number 10. Lawford was, therefore, perfectly placed to observe the day-to-day relations between his three ministers and their political leaders. At the start of the war, Halifax’s instinctive respect for the office of prime minister had grown into ‘affection founded on experience shared’ for Chamberlain, even though they had differed sharply over Munich.

When Churchill came to power in May 1940, he kept Halifax in place. Lawford notes that the two had moved in the same political and social circles for decades, and this friendship bound them together until Churchill dispatched a reluctant Halifax to become ambassador in Washington at the end of 1940. Lawford comments that ‘though in his heart he can only have been hurt, Halifax went without bitterness or pride’.

Lawford touches only lightly on the much-chronicled Churchill-Eden relationship, noting that it was based on ‘the pride and indulgence of the old prophet and the devotion and patience of the chosen successor’. But he does identify one factor which helped bind the two together. That was

Eden’s ability, as a former soldier, to read maps, to argue confidently with Chiefs of Staff and to take just as passionate and interest as Churchill himself in the day to day direction of the world’s most hideously technical war… the most congenial common ground imaginable for a Foreign Secretary who had once so much enjoyed being a Rifleman and a Prime Minister who had never quite ceased to be a Hussar.

For Bevin, Clement Attlee was the one leading member of the parliamentary Labour Party who aroused in him affection and something approaching respect. With the rest of his political colleagues, Bevin’s relations were often strained. He was a famous bearer of grudges and would ‘brook no criticism’.

The contrasting styles of the three foreign secretaries meant that each had a distinctive relationship with the staff of the Foreign Office. The lofty and rather distant Halifax inspired a sense of filial respect. Eden’s deep expertise in foreign policy and places made for more of a fraternal relationship between professionals. Bevin’s down-to-earth manner and his idiosyncrasies earned him the affectionate nickname everyone used behind his back – Uncle Ernie. Bevin was also widely credited with the reforms introduced after the war that opened the upper reaches of the Diplomatic Service to a wider range of applicants, including women. But, as Lawford reminds his reader, it was in fact Eden who had been the driving force behind these changes.

Working for Bevin as a private secretary involved special skills, such as deciphering his handwriting (illegible to anyone unversed in it) and turning his stream of consciousness into intelligible English. Lawford recalled being summoned to the presence one afternoon with a new secretary in the Private Office, Miss Eames:

‘Missy’, said Bevin, ‘come in and sit down here beside me.’ Miss Eames cautiously sat down and took out her notepad… the natural apprehension that I had already noticed in her eyes changed to a look of examination hall despair as the Foreign Secretary, gazing quizzically up at the gilded girders of the ceiling, slipped into a rambling monologue, uninhibited by considerations of grammar or syntax… At the fifth or sixth page of her shorthand notebook, the soliloquy ceased as softly as it had begun. ‘All over, Missy’, said the Secretary of State with a wink, ‘and Lawford here will just turn that into English, if he can’.

Looking back on his seven years, Lawford was struck that, although each of the three ministers was criticised in the press and parliament for decisions they took in office, they never disparaged each other – a lesson in cooperation for the common good that has been lost somewhere in the last 80 years. Lawford also found that his diary entries revealed how close he had grown to each of them. In December 1940, as Lord and Lady Halifax departed sadly for Washington, he recorded that he would ‘miss them more than any two people I had ever met’. In July 1945, when the Churchill Government fell, he commented that ‘the Foreign Office would not only be a disaster but a desert without Eden’. And when Lawford finally left the Private Office in February 1946, he wrote of his sorrow at leaving Bevin, a man ‘sensible, human, sympathetic, practical and fearless’.

Nicholas Lawford’s talents were not lost on the Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan, who, like Lawford, had held his post for the entire war. When Cadogan was appointed in early 1946 as the first UK Permanent Representative to the UN in New York, he wanted tried and trusted colleagues around him. Having seen Lawford in action at close quarters throughout the war, Cadogan asked Lawford to join him on the UK delegation.

This was an offer not to be refused, and the move changed Lawford’s life. He loved New York, and soon met the German-American fashion photographer Horst P. Horst, who became his life-long partner. Lawford resigned from the Foreign Service in 1950 and settled with Horst on Long Island.

As I researched my book Peace Makers on the men and women of the Foreign Office in the Second World War, I found Lawford’s vivid diaries and journals full of insights and fascinating details of life in wartime London. They still await their editor in the archives of Churchill College, Cambridge.