In February 1921, from the south of France, Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband, Winston, who four days before had been moved by Prime Minister Lloyd George from secretary of state for war to secretary of state for the colonies. In reviewing his various cabinet colleagues, she described Sir Hamar Greenwood, the chief secretary for Ireland, as “nothing but a blaspheming, hearty, vulgar, brave, Knockabout Colonial.”¹

I chanced on Clementine Churchill’s letter while writing another book. With a little digging, I soon learned that although today he is almost forgotten, Hamar Greenwood was in his lifetime a well-known and controversial...

The future Viscount Greenwood of Holbourne was born Thomas Hubbard Hamer Greenwood on 7 February 1870 in the small county seat of Whitby in the Province of Ontario, fifty kilometres east of Toronto and two or three kilometres from the flat shores of Lake Ontario. Less than three years before his birth, four of the British North American colonies had come together in the new Confederation of Canada, apprehensive as they were of the ambitions of those in a now imperialist United States that espoused a “manifest destiny” to take over the whole of North America following its predatory Mexican...

Upon graduation from the University of Toronto and completion of his annual militia training in the summer of 1895, Greenwood, now twenty-five, made his second crossing to Britain. This time it was in that lowest but time-honoured role of the impecunious student, mucking out the livestock decks of a cattle boat as the wretched animals staggered to keep their footing. He arrived in Liverpool dirty and virtually penniless. From his visit with his father ten years before, he was aware that of his several Welsh relatives, the only one who might be able to help him, even marginally, was his...

The 1906 election in Britain resulted in 401 Liberal, 157 Conservative, 83 Irish Nationalist, and 29 Labour members. The new prime minister was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a minister in Gladstone’s previous two governments, and already a sick man. Campbell-Bannerman set his new government on a decidedly liberal track, appointing Asquith chancellor of the exchequer and Lloyd George president of the Board of Trade. But he gave little priority to Home Rule for Ireland, partly by inclination and partly as a result of his preoccupation with restoring party unity following his and Lloyd George’s controversial opposition to the South African War....

Greenwood spent most of the eleven months between the two elections of January and December 1910 pursuing both his growing legal practice and his frequent platform appearances, being “kept busy by Whips … in support of Government policy and bills, especially the budget of 1910” (when it was finally adopted by the Lords). Although he had begun to represent in London Canadian mining interests, he had to wait more than two years for a brief from Ottawa, but when it arrived, it was a major and highly visible assignment.

Churchill had been informed by the governor general in Ottawa and...

At the wedding of Hamar Greenwood and Margery Spencer, the recently elected Conservative member of Parliament Max Aitken and Greenwood’s brother, Billy, were much together. At Greenwood’s suggestion, Billy, upon his return to Toronto, began a correspondence with Aitken. He congratulated him upon his knighthood, which, after only six undistinguished months in the House of Commons, had appeared to some an act of gross political cynicism. Billy’s second purpose in writing was to propose what might best be done with the money-losing periodical theCanadian Century, which Aitken and three corporate colleagues had begun the year before. (Aitken had already...

With the declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Greenwood was one of several sitting members of Parliament already officers in the army reserve who immediately volunteered for active military service. Being a member of Parliament was not the full-time, well-paid job that it was eventually to become. (The pastoral functions of MPs were also less.) An annual stipend of £400 had been introduced in 1911, but those who were qualified still sought to supplement their income by continuing to practise law or other professions. Accordingly it was not a major disruption to the wartime Parliament to have...

Following the Armistice of 1918 ending the First World War, and the general election the following month, Lloyd George appointed a peacetime coalition cabinet, although he had no intention of summoning it at any early date to replace his highly convenient, five-member wartime cabinet. (The full cabinet did not in fact meet for almost a year, only in late October 1919.) Greenwood was not included. His failure to win a place at the cabinet table was not for want of trying on the part of the Greenwoods, but despite their chagrin they were realistic enough to recognize that the prime...

The centuries of background to the Irish “troubles” of the early 1920s have been described so often and so variously in so many books that a small library could be readily compiled of the detailed histories, local reviews, partisan tracts, polemics, personal reminiscences, novels, plays, poetry, gross exaggerations, and understated reflections. This is not the place to attempt more than a brief review of the convoluted sentiments, calamities, policies, and bigotries that contributed to the breaking point in Anglo-Irish relations during the First World War and immediately thereafter.

It is perhaps sufficient to recall here the disastrous famine of the...

Given the widely acknowledged ramshackle civil administration in Dublin, “new men and new measures” were finally seen as essential. During the First World War, Dublin Castle had become an administrative backwater to which the exhausted, invalided, and inadequate could be banished to join long-serving and entrenched Irish bureaucrats, the more effective and sound soldiers and civil servants being employed elsewhere in the still elusive pursuit of victory. Sir Henry Robinson, a senior public servant in Dublin, wrote despondently in March 1918, “the whole staff … have become cowed, inefficient and lacking in resource … you would be driven mad by...

In May 1920, immediately before the Greenwoods embarked for Dublin, Margo met alone with her past – or present – lover. She and Lloyd George agreed between them how in the time ahead she would send to him her own observations about events, people, and policies in Ireland. The channel was to be Frances Stevenson, to whom she soon reported from Dublin that the “interview I was granted after lunch the day we left … I’ll never forget.”¹ That Margo should have found the tête-à-tête unforgettable is hardly surprising, since the prime minister was asking her to go behind the...

The first major controversy that marred the course of Greenwood’s Irish secretaryship was, as already described, over his endless optimism, to the point of his being accused of mendacity. The second major controversy was reprisals. They fed the rancorous Irish debates at Westminster that took much of the second half of 1920. It was, however, well before Greenwood’s appointment that the melancholy, year-long litany of reprisals began. The Greenwoods arrived in Dublin to be confronted with a “degeneration of the conflict into tit-for-tat killings and reprisals.”¹ Throughout that summer, violence continued to mount, with both the ira and the ric,...

Despite continuing tensions and accusations in both London and Dublin over reprisals, informal contacts between Sinn Fein and Whitehall proliferated as aspirations and contradictions multiplied and led to even greater untidiness and anomalies in policy. John Wheeler-Bennett, in his biography of John Anderson, has summed up how it proceeded in Dublin from the British side:

Both John Anderson and his two Assistant Secretaries [Sturgis and Cope] were involved in varying degrees in these activities, but Anderson preferred, on the whole, to leave such matters in the hands of his [two] subordinates, perhaps wisely. In him [Anderson] the Sinn Fein leaders...

After a month of effort, the persistent attempts of Lady Greenwood and Sturgis to effect a meeting between Carson and de Valera finally came to naught. The last stage of their long manoeuvres is presumably described in two letters from Margo to Sturgis of 17 and 26 February 1921 in which she signs herself anonymously as “Statesman.”* “Using the code names of Violet for de Valera, Carrie for Carson, and Bishop for Lloyd George, Lady Greenwood and Sturgis strove unsuccessfully to bring de Valera and Carson together in London.”¹ Instead a meeting was substituted with James Craig, who had assumed...

Only one day after the king’s speech, the prime minister suddenly confirmed to Greenwood, newly arrived in London with Macready and Anderson from the parliamentary ceremonies in Belfast, that he had decided to embark upon an attempt to negotiate a settlement. The following day, 24 June, Cope too was summoned from Dublin to a cabinet meeting to endorse the offer of negotiation. (Anderson was in London with Greenwood for much of the six months between the king’s speech and the end of the year, leaving Sturgis next in line as Anderson’s surrogate at Dublin Castle.) Cope, at the epicentre of...

With the signature of the agreement, Greenwood continued to be available in the House of Commons where his primary task now was to counter the bitter attacks of diehards on the agreement as a sell-out.* Here again, G.C. Duggan, the witty Irish civil servant, was amused to see how with “an air of great earnestness and appearance of sincerity, [Greenwood had previously] scouted all suggestions that the Black and Tans were other thanchevaliers sans peur et sans reproche, so now everything that the Sinn Fein did was held up in the British House of Commons as either a model...

Beaverbrook had the political situation in 1922 about right when he observed trenchantly that Lloyd George had been a strong man but was now a weak one. As a weak man, Lloyd George never rewarded Greenwood for his role in helping to create the circumstances to make it possible to get out of Ireland without immediately splitting his coalition government. Despite persistent rumours from as early as March 1920 that the prime minister would make Greenwood either home secretary or, less likely, secretary of state for India, he did neither. Some interpreted that omission as simply arising from a desire...

The time of Leo Amery, the new colonial secretary, was much taken by a myriad of Middle East questions, but among the most pressing of them was the rise of nationalism in Egypt. In the hope that a firm hand there, as in Ireland, would maintain law and order, Lloyd George had in early 1919 appointed Field Marshal the Viscount Allenby as high commissioner to Egypt, which Britain had regarded as a protectorate since the construction of the Suez Canal more than fifty years before. Lord Allenby’s appointment reflected his renown as the determined general who had served with distinction...

On his return with Margo from Egypt and Palestine in February 1925, Greenwood resumed his various activities at Westminster, in his London constituency, at Gray’s Inn, and in the City. Against a background of continuing labour unrest (including a short-lived general strike in May 1926 and a much longer coal strike), Greenwood in a low-key way – and with continuing police protection – consolidated his hold on Walthamstow East. In November 1925, Laming Worthington-Evans, his former cabinet colleague and now secretary of state for war, joined him as a speaker at a local Conservative rally. The same month, Dame Margo,...

As the introduction to this quest for the Greenwoods noted – and regretted – there is a dearth of material about their public and private lives during the 1930s and 1940s. Most of their papers were destroyed in the London Blitz, and Lady Greenwood destroyed other papers shortly before her death. As a result, a range of questions are left unanswered. For example, how often during those two decades did Viscount Greenwood attend the House of Lords? Early in the war, he and Lady Greenwood appear to have removed themselves from the London scene by spending long periods in the...

Greenwood’s life ended, mourned by few, excoriated by Irish Republicans and patronized, if not despised, by those who had cynically manipulated him. Beset by the waywardness of his ambitious wife, the alienation of his erratic children, and the treason of his nephew, his later personal life offered him no more solace than his official life. To be sure, by his death in 1948 he had become something of an anachronism. The British Empire, an icon throughout his life, was evolving peacefully into a Commonwealth but was incapable of playing the vigorous liberal imperial role that Greenwood cherished from his boyhood...