§ 2.35 p.m.
§ THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND MINISTER FOR SCIENCE (VISCOUNT HAILSHAM)My Lords, before we proceed with the Business of the day, I am sure the House would wish that we should pay tribute to a great public servant who has only recently passed away. I refer to Lord Hankey, who brought his immense experience of the central direction of government in the First World War to the service of the country in the Second World War, when, as a Member of this House, he was called to the Cabinet in 1939 as Minister without Portfolio. It is by virtue of this tenure of office as Cabinet Minister while a Member of your Lordships' House that he comes within the Rules of the House on this occasion.
Perhaps I may be forgiven if, before I proceed, I say to the House, and to noble Lords opposite in particular, how very sorry I was not to be in my place last week to pay my tribute to the late Mr. Hugh Gaitskell. On that occasion we created a new precedent by adjourning as a mark of respect to a man of commanding stature in public life. Except that I must record my own sense of loss at the death of one with whom I had been on personal and friendly terms for quite a large number of years, and who only about this time last year shared with me membership of an all-Party delegation sent to Bermuda, I should not wish to add to what the noble Viscount the Leader of the Opposition called the just and moving testimony of my noble friend the Foreign Secretary. But I will say now how grateful I am to my noble friend for having then deputised for me as Leader 240 of the House, and for having said, in words which I cannot hope to match, what so many of us on this side felt about the late Mr. Hugh Gaitskell.
My Lords, I think it is remarkable that, but for the death of Lord Hankey, we should have had in the House at the same time former Secretaries to the Cabinet covering the entire period from the middle of the First World War to the present day. Lord Hankey, the first to hold that highly important office, was succeeded by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, and he, in turn, was succeeded by Sir Norman Brook, who has just retired and will, I hope, shortly be introduced into your Lordships' House under his recently gazetted title. Here is a great chain of public servants of the highest quality, men to whom the country owes far more than it knows, or can know, because the position which they have held is essentially confidential, not only in respect of matters of fact but also in respect of the conduct of Cabinet affairs and in the direction of government by public personalities who are the Ministers of the Crown.
Lord Hankey was a man whom Sir Winston Churchill is reported to have described as one "who knew everything and said nothing." It is for that reason that his contribution to the public is so little known to those outside the machinery of government, but the greatest testimony to his value to the country is surely that he served continuously throughout the long period between the year 1916 and the year 1939, for every Administration from that of the late Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor to that of Mr. Chamberlain, during which time he was indispensable to whatever colour or complexion of Government might from lime to time have been in office.
This is not the time to recall in detail his great career, but I think we should mention in passing that he was one of the most distinguished of those who have entered the public service, as it were, adventitiously. Each great war has seen the influx of talent to the public service from other walks of life. Some have stayed on in the service of the State; others, like Mr. Hugh Gaitskell, have gone on into public life itself; others again, like Lord Franks, have made great contributions to industry or commerce. This is a process which might well be encouraged in peace 241 time as in time of war. Lord Hankey was one whom the uninstructed might have regarded as the typical civil servant, but I think he thought of himself rather as an officer of the Royal Marines on secondment. It was perhaps this attitude which enabled him to be of such service to successive Prime Ministers and Cabinets, since he never took the narrow view.
Some of your Lordships will remember Lord Hankey in the days of his great service to the State, but perhaps most of us willl think of him as we knew him in the House since the war, when he spoke, not often but always with authority, from the Cross Benches, either in Service and Defence debates, on which subjects he could give to the House the benefit of his vast experience, or on a more restricted subject, such as, for instance, the composition of flour and bread, when he characteristically marshalled his facts and presented them to the House with scrupulous clarity.
My Lords, on all these grounds, and because he was a trusted friend and colleague of my father, and because I personally had ground to be grateful to him over many years for much kindness, I am glad that it has fallen to my lot to-day to bid him farewell on behalf of the House. He was a great public servant. We can look back on his life with thankfulness and pride: thankfulness at the service he was able to render to our country and pride that his membership of this House added to its lustre and will adorn its history.
§ VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGHMy Lords, I am very glad indeed to be associated with the Leader of the House in the tribute we are paying to-day. May I intervene first of all, however, to say how grateful I am for the tribute which he could not, because of his other duties, pay earlier to my great friend Hugh Gaitskell? I am very much obliged to him.
Lord Hankey will always be to me what he was familiarly called at all times by Ministers, Maurice Hankey. He was a very great person and truly, as the Leader of the House says, a great public servant. As to the entry of this great public servant into his duties, I think the Leader of the House was right when he referred to his proud association with the Royal Marines. He was never more 242 proud than when he liked to support something I said on the basis of the Royal Marines being the smallest yet the greatest corps in the world. He was particularly proud of having been what was sometimes referred to in those days as a Royal Marine of the Blues—he was a gunner, and had a very expert knowledge of the subject so far as it went up to that day. But he was not afloat for all that number of years. He went to the Admiralty on staff duty as far back as 1902, and in that very good training school among the staff officers he acquired much of the qualities and character necessary for the vast public duties he was afterwards to undertake in the Civil Service.
I have personal recollections of him as Secretary to the Cabinet which go back a very long way. While I was First Lord, from 1929 to 1931, he was, of course, Secretary of the Imperial Defence Committee, and it was amazing what a source of information he was to me, a comparatively junior member of the Cabinet, when I wanted information to help me to make up my mind on subjects which came before the Imperial Defence Committee. He was the Secretary of the London Naval Conference in 1930 when we came to the agreement with the United States of America and Japan upon the categories to be held, and their strengths, from cruisers down to the smallest types of ships. Again, his interest in the Navy and his knowledge of international fleets, which emanated from his previous Secretaryship of the Washington Naval Conference in 1921, were of vast assistance to us at that time. But when one sat with the Cabinet, how true it was that he rarely said anything unless he was asked a question by the Prime Minister! But again and again he was appointed with confidence to secretary-ships in world affairs in which we were concerned as a country, and to Imperial Conferences as well.
It was wonderful to be able to talk to him in after years. I remember talking to him in 1940, during the time of Dunkirk, and I recall his admiration for the system which had been set up in order to get all the small craft into service. I remember talking to him on the other matters to which he was transferred in 1941 and 1942, and how devoted he was to his country. Nations like ours must in the long run depend for the stability 243 of their expansion, in the best sense of the term, on the character of these people: they have to depend upon the leadership of Ministers and Services but also, to a very large extent—and this is so in the history of the great countries of the world—on loyal, devoted public service by those who are specially enlisted in that public service.
Maurice Hankey was to me always a personal friend. I mourn his departure, but I praise the great record he set and the example he has left for the others who follow him. May I add that we all sympathise very much with his family? I should like to feel that we, as a House, from our knowledge of him here, of his gentleness, his courtesy, his absolutely impeccable courtesy, look back upon that and we hope that in their sorrow his family will find some solace and be comforted by the record that we applaud.
§ 2.50 p.m.
LORD REAMy Lords, I should like to associate noble Lords on these Benches with the tributes so eloquently paid to-day. Lord Hankey, whose death is a personal loss to many Members of your Lordships' House, has recently been referred to in the Press as the greatest back-room figure in our political history. The word "back-room" has in recent years come to carry a connotation of high praise and admiration, and brings to mind a number of vitally important activities upon which the welfare and even the survival of the State depend. To give to our old friend Lord Hankey a pre-eminent place in this honourable field is a very high tribute which I feel he would have appreciated, in the honest realisation, of course, that he indeed deserved it.
As a man of almost clinical clarity of vision, and deeply versed, as he was, in the appraisal of the valuable against the less valuable, he must well have realised that, even apart from other positions of great trust and importance which he held for a number of years, a member of the War Cabinet with such gifts and experience as he had is most certainly a front-room figure, whatever great service he may also be giving in the background. But as a modest and quiet man whose ambitions, I am sure, were objective and altruistically patriotic, I think he may prefer to be thought of as a sort of distillation of reliability and efficiency upon 244 which progress and success depended. That is certainly what he was. We have lost a gentle and friendly colleague who gave great service to his country. He has left us full of years and full of honour, and we shall very greatly miss his presence among us.