Empire Lost - Andrew Stewart [39]
Despite these pressures, those working for him found Caldecote 'a delightful chief, completely imperturbable and cheerful in the most desperate moments and crisis', but Churchill had decided it was time he should go and Eden and David Margesson, the chief whip, met secretly with him to discuss possible replace-ments.67 For some months the weary secretary of state had complained that he was little more than 'postman and correspondent', noting with some apparent regret that it had taken until mid-August before Churchill had sent him his first personal minute.68 The announcement, at the very beginning of October 1940, that he would be taking the Lord Chief Justice's chair as part of a major reconstruction of the government following Neville Chamberlain's resignation on health grounds, was well received within the ranks of the Dominion representatives.69 Sitting next to the Minister for Food, Lord Woolton, at a lunch, Waterson told him how Caldecote had gathered the high commissioners together to tell them in great secrecy that he would be leaving that evening. As the South African high commissioner put it, the group was 'so embarrassed that there was complete silence: they could not honestly say that they were sorry, because he had been quite useless in this as in every other Government office that he has achieved'.70 Duncan, the governor-general in South Africa, was also pleased at the move but could not understand why Churchill had not felt sufficiently confident to have gone even further and removed 'some of those whose only claim to remain in high office is that they were once fortunate enough to get there'.71
He was delighted, however, in the selection as new secretary of state, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil who, as Lord Cranborne, had resigned from Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1938 alongside Anthony Eden in protest at the government's foreign policy.72 The new appointee had been a popular figure within Whitehall to everybody aside from arch-Chamberlain supporters, such as Kingsley Wood, to whom he was one of the 'glamour boys'.73 The connection between Churchill and his newly appointed Dominions secretary was a long-standing one. Ever since Robert Cecil had acted as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, his family had enjoyed a significant role in British political affairs. The Third Marquess of Salisbury, Cranborne's grandfather, held the distinction of having been prime minister on three occasions.74 He had also been the man who had finally destroyed the career of Lord Randolph Churchill. For this reason, according to one who knew him well during the wartime period, the son 'could never quite make up his mind whether to admire the House of Cecil or resent it on his father's posthumous behalf'.75 Even before Cranborne's February 1938 speech to the Commons, following his resignation as the FO's under-secretary to the Foreign Office, the next generation of Cecils was among his closest acquaintances. On that occasion Churchill had in fact been one of the first to offer his congratulations.76
To close observers, what would prove perhaps more significant in terms of their wartime relationship, was their ability to put 'political quarrels in a compartment entirely separate from personal friendship'.77 This was clearly not always the case, Churchill confiding to his son towards the war's end of the difficulties of working with Cranborne who 'might easily be ill one fortnight and very obstinate the next'.78 The prime minister