Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [286]
In London, someone who knew more about the Ottoman empire than anyone in Paris had been watching all this with alarm and despair. Curzon, who had been left in charge of the Foreign Office in Balfour’s absence, sent a stream of memoranda and letters warning that it was dangerous to assume that the Turks were finished, and folly to delay a comprehensive settlement. Lloyd George paid him as little attention as he did most professional diplomats. Curzon represented so much that he disliked: the pedigreed aristocrat, the landowner, the polished product of Oxford and of London drawing rooms. He confided to Frances Stevenson how much “he loathed the Curzon set, and all that they stood for— loathed their mannerisms, their ideals, their customs, their mode of life.” In time the loathing mellowed into derision mixed with a grudging respect for Curzon’s knowledge and ability. 25 In the end, though, it was Curzon who brought Lloyd George down.
And it was Curzon who, with Atatürk and his armies, set the borders of the modern Turkey. The two men, the English statesman and the Turkish soldier, were adversaries but they never met. Both were stubborn, clever and proud, both had moments of profound insecurity, and both were more complex than they appeared. Curzon, the great viceroy of India, was also the man who was booed by his countrymen in Delhi because he had dared to punish a British regiment for killing an Indian; an English snob who preferred American wives; a statesman who adored paintings and furniture; and the arch-imperialist who knew the non-European world better than most of his contemporaries. Just as his frock coats concealed the pain of an injured back and the steel brace that held him upright, so his pomposity hid the man who wept when his feelings were hurt. He knew that some saw him as a caricature. He told the story against himself that, when he saw a crowd of ordinary soldiers bathing, his reaction was “Dear me! I had no conception that the lower classes had such white skins.”26
George Curzon was born into the class that, in the years before the Great War, dominated Britain and through Britain the world. His family had occupied an estate in Derbyshire for centuries, and he could have drifted through life if he had chosen. “My ancestors,” he once said, “have held Kedleston for 900 years, father and son, but none of them ever distinguished himself. They were just ordinary country gentlemen—M.P.s, Sheriffs, and so on. I made up my mind I would try to get out of the groove.” His parents, as was usual, left his upbringing to others, in his case a governess who hated toys but loved punishments, often for wholly imaginary sins. In later life Curzon came to the conclusion that she had been insane. It was only at Eton that he finally started to blossom. He made friends, some for life, and with, as he admitted, “a passionate resolve to be head of the class,” he won all the major prizes available. By the time he left he was a personage: flamboyant, popular, successful and more than a touch arrogant. Oxford merely confirmed these characteristics, but while there he also learned to speak in public, although some found his style too orotund. He also gained a reputation as a leading Conservative and dashed into a hectic social life. His failure to gain a first in his finals was a mere temporary setback in what most people agreed was a brilliant