From THE CITY OF OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE VoL. LIII, ii MARCH 1961 No. 171
Lord Salter, after whom Salter House was named, was at the School from 1890-99, and was the first Treasurer of the Old Boys Club between 1903 and 1906.
He was a Scholar of Brazenose College and took a double first. He became an Honorary Fellow of his own college and Fellow of All Souls.
He had a distinguished career in the Civil Service. He was the junior MP for Oxford University from 1937 until university seats were abolished in 1951, after which he became MP for Ormskirk.
He sat in the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1945 and Minister of State for Economic Affairs in 1951, and went to the House of Lords in 1953 as Baron Salter of Kidlington.
His literary works were extensive, and from 1933 to 1950 he held the Chair of Gladstone Professor of Political Theory and Institutions at Oxford University.
Lord Salter is what is known as a House Patron, that is: one of the four school houses was named in his honour.
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From THE CITY OF OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE VoL. LVI, ii MARCH 1964 No. 180
A subsequent appreciation by Headmaster FC Lay, in a review of “Memoirs of a Public Servant” by Lord Salter (Faber)
We are in the fortunate position as a School that among distinguished men of letters who had their early education here, two of them have also written their autobiographies.
Some years ago John Drinkwater wrote his reminiscences under the title ‘Inheritance’. For Oxonians in general, and the School in particular, such books form a happy bond across the years. For example, Drinkwater refers to the Fifth Form room and with gratitude to H. G. Belcher, the Classics Master, who presided there and recalls his life as a boarder in the School boarding house in Bevington Road.
More recently a second autobiography has appeared – Lord Salter’s Memoirs of a Public Servant and has been acquired for the section of the School Library devoted to Oxoniana. Thus a new perspective is given to his earlier works: Inheritance (1931), Recovery (1932), The United States of Europe and other Essays (1933), Security 1939) and Personality in Politics (1947).
The book begins with his early days at home and at School among scenes and stones which are equally familiar to ourselves and we are carried through almost three generations of time until finally, as a member of the House of Lords, a Privy Councillor and an Elder Statesman ripe with experience and honour, he finds time to look back upon the story of this century, not as a mere bystander but as one who has always been at or near the centre of things. It is, in fact, a history book, modestly narrating not merely the bare bones of facts and dates but a story of events as seen by the one on whom rested some of the critical burdens and responsibilities of the times. It is not everyone who can measure up to such a challenge and be found adequate to the occasion.
Naturally he spares but short space for his boyhood and school years but his kindly comments on the latter are incisive and his candid words set for us a standard by which we may be measured. He is full of praise for the Headmaster, A. W. Cave, ‘an exceptionally good teacher of mathematics’. He gave the School ‘a jealous love, always fearful (and not without reason) that its educational freedom and liberal traditions would be impaired…’; full of praise too, like Drinkwater, for H. G. Belcher, ‘to whom my debt is great indeed…’ Those who had discerning eyes saw in him what true scholarship could be, and what the classics could mean.
Lord Hurcomb was among his pupils and doubtless respects his memory as I do. In those days to balance his budget the Headmaster made up his Staff by appointing young men who needed to stay up in Oxford and who wanted to earn enough to keep themselves. They were therefore not trained teachers although amongst them were several brilliant men who later became renowned in one way or another. ‘Hence there was a certain amateurishness… Nevertheless this amateurishness had its great advantages. We were less instructed, but we were better educated.’ Times have changed and the demands and and scope of education have so materially altered that there is no going back as Lord Salter is ready to admit, though he adds of the School: ‘Many of us older boys probably look back with affection and regret to the more amateur-ish, and more liberal, traditions of its early years.’
The School Register of 1937 only gives us the outline of his career up to that year and so much more of Lord Salter’s public life has happened since, that this is an opportunity to call attention to his almost unique career as civil servant, author, journalist, holder of a Chair, a member of parliament and finally a Minister, one who had become a national and an international figure. It is hoped that members of the School will find an early opportunity of reading his Memoirs, particularly if they are students of history.
They are full of references to men who were his friends and acquaintances at home and abroad, men he worked with and to many of whom he expresses generously his admıration, loyalty and thanks. Three in particular were those under whom he immediately served—Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Winston Churchill and perhaps these three represent milestones or even turning points—in his long career of service – Mr. Masterman as the Minister who had to implement the Lloyd George National Insurance Act, Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League of Nations and Mr. Churchill (as he then was) who persuaded him to fight an election at Ormskirk to get back into the House so that his services might ultimately be available in the Cabinet.
But there are many other names interspersed throughout the pages. His Open Classical Scholarship to B.N.C., his First in Greats, and his decision to go into the Home Civil Service had been followed by seven years of an apprenticeship in a kind of backwater in the Admiralty which, he confesses, gave him no vision of prospects. Yet these early years n rooms in London were by no means wasted. With the passing of the National Insurance Act he threw himself heart and soul into this beginning of the Welfare State and he made himself an expert and an authority on it in his capacity as Private Secretary to Mr. Masterman. But the years at the Transport Department of the Admiralty in peace time were not after all wasted, as he was summoned back to it at the outbreak of the 1914 war to help to expand it into the vast and complex machine which had to combat the submarine menace, by requisitioning, controls and shipbuilding on a scale and at a pace hitherto unheard of, and at a time when it became a question not merely of transporting troops and munitions but also of feeding Europe.
Thus he became Director of Ship Requisitioning in 1917 and, in 1918 when at last the allies saw the value of pooling their resources, Chairman of the Allied Maritime Transport Executive. This in turn led to his work in Paris as Secretary of the British Department of the Supreme Economic Council in 1919. The same year he met again T. E. Lawrence who was at the Peace Conference. They had overlapped at School, Lawrence having been in the junior forms for three years before Salter left in 1899. Among the many asides about men and things which make his Memoirs such interesting reading, is his lengthy vindication of T.E. and his castigation of those who sought to denigrate a truly great character.
Lord Salter tells us that by far the happiest period of his life began when after the war he was General Secretary of the Reparations Commission and for some ten years directed the Economic and financial work of the League of Nations at Geneva. A firm supporter of the Covenant, he was now to help in the resettlement of Europe. Breaking the blockade was in itself not easy, the main problem being to get supplies moved in with the diminished shipping facilities available. Austria, crippled, without food, without credit and its paper currency reduced to value of scribbling paper, had appealed to the League.
Putting her on her feet again has been a classic example to all economists. At Count Bethlen’s invitation, Lord Salter went to Hungary too and drew up a scheme which was accepted at Geneva. Other problems followed such as the plight of the Greek refugees from Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Bulgaria, and Constantinople and the problem of Bulgarian refugees returning to their own country. Before he resigned his official career in 1931, he went as a special officer of the League on delegations to India and China to advise on economic and financial questions. These in themselves formed whole major episodes as did a second visit to China, not as a League official but at the direct invitation of the Chinese Government.
At the age of fifty he was therefore back in London as a freelance though he was a constant visitor to the Foreign Office and was consulted daily by Ramsay MacDonald and others during the World Economic Conference of 1933. He watched with anxious eyes the new drama unfolding of Hitler’s rise to power in 1936. In 1932 he had accepted the new Gladstone Chair of Political Theory and Institutions at Oxford, happily combined with a Fellowship at All Souls. This return to rooms in Oxford within a stone’s throw of his old college, B.N.C., he admits was a very happy experience, although he longed for London and Westminster.
This was realised in 1937 when as an Independent he was pressed by members of all three parties to stand in the bye-election as a University Member in succession to Lord Hugh Cecil. In company with a small group of colleagues who could read the writing on the wall, he sought every opportunity to stir the government to prepare for the new struggle, but he met almost continuous resistance and procrastination in building up supplies of food and materials until it was almost too late. When the second war did come, however, he was invited by Mr. Neville Chamberlain to become Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Shipping which he had known so well in the previous war; moreover Sir Cyril Hurcomb was Director General of Shipping so that they found themselves together again meeting the same problems once more. The provision of shipping to get munitions and food across the Atlantic when Britain stood alone and again in the days after Pearl Harbour was a problem which took him repeatedly to America and as far afield as the shipyards on the Pacific coast. That it was eventually solved successfully the world gratefully knows, but it meant six years of unremitting toil.
Though still an Independent, on the break-up of the Coalition he was invited by Mr. Churchill to join the Caretaker Government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an office of Cabinet rank. At the General Election which followed the end of hostilities he was again returned, this time as the Senior Burgess of the University, though out of office in the Labour Government. The disappointment in being unable to help and direct at the conclusion of the war was mitigated somewhat by an election which gave him much nostalgic pleasure. He was included by All Souls in the list of Distinguished Persons Fellowships – the highest honour a college could give and which gave him a pied à terre in Oxford, since elections though renewable are for seven years. The University had already given him at an Encaenia in 1932 an Honorary D.C.L..
University seats were abolished by an Act of 1948 taking effect in 1950. In his Memoirs he gives a disapassionate and full account of the pros and cons of this controversy. The year 1951, however, saw him re-elected to the House having been pressed by Mr. Churchill to contest Ormskirk in a bye-election this time as a Conservative. Re-elected at the General Election in the following October Mr. Churchill offered him a post in the Government. At first he became second Minister to the Treasury, and after a year he was appointed Minister of Materials to superintend the winding-up of controls and the transfer of its duties to other departments. This was complete in 1953 and on his resignation he was elevated to the House of Lords where his advice and great experience can still be placed at the service of his country.
In a moving passage at the end, he confesses that it is with humble gratitude for so much — as he modestly puts it – unmerited good fortune that he can look back on life, a passage which he concludes with a statement of faith that ‘the quality of the best of mankind… is perhaps the most convincing evidence of the divinity immanent in man, and the surest hope of his survival’.
As a coda to this appreciation, it is with no small pride we as a School can think of him as one of the founders of the Old Boys Club and its first Secretary in 1903. At this time the School Magazine was started: in its first number he was a contributor to a series of articles on the history of the School and later contributed to the Jubilee Number in 1953. He presented the Prizes at Speech Day in the Town Hall in 1947 and spoke at the Jubilee Dinner in 1953. One of his addresses to us was as recent as 1962 at the last dinner of the Old Oxford Citizens’ Society as such.
F.C.Lay