with Harington. Curzon signalled a rebuke to them both. According to London the proposal
would involved [sic] consequences which Harington has not fully foreseen…The liberty accorded to Kemal could not in logic or fairness be unilateral. If he were permitted to cross into Europe to fight the Greeks and anticipate the decision of peace conference establishing his rule in Eastern Thrace, Greek ships could not be prevented from using non-neutral waters of Marmora at same time, in order to resist his passage…In this way proposed plan might have consequence of not only re-opening war between Turkey and Greece but of transferring theatre of war to Europe with consequences that cannot be foreseen.48
Crookshank cared not one whit that his plan had been shot down in flames. He was simply delighted that ‘Rumbold…got his fingers smacked for not having sent his comments at once’ and that ‘little Harry…[had] caused a Cabinet discussion and a slight flutter’.49 In fact his memorandum was the high point of the crisis as far as Crookshank was concerned. Harington and Rumbold put aside their differences to thwart London’s desire to provoke a shooting war with the Kemalists. As Crookshank was writing up his part in the proceedings, Harington left Constantinople to open direct negotiations with the Kemalists. Early on the morning of 11 October he signed the Mudania Convention: the British, French and Italians would remove Eastern Thrace from Greek control and in return the Turks would retire fifteen kilometres from the coast at Chanak.
The Chanak crisis was an exciting time for Crookshank at its epicentre. It also had profound reverberations for British politics. Indeed, the crisis did much to create the political arena which he and Macmillan subsequently entered. The Dominions had refused to support Britain in its potential war with the Turkish nationalists. The majority of Conservative MPs became convinced that they could no longer support a coalition led by Lloyd George. On 7 October the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, publicly criticized government policy in a letter to The Times. If the French were not willing to support Britain, the government had ‘no alternative except to imitate the Government of the United States and to restrict our attention to the safeguarding of the more immediate interests of the Empire’.50 No one stationed in Constantinople in the autumn of 1922 could hope for a sudden collapse of the British position – Crookshank feared ‘an internal pro-Kemal and anti-foreign outbreak in [Constantinople] itself…we have very little strength to cope with that, and one day we may find ourselves like the Legation did at Peking in Boxer times…how ignominious it would be to be killed by a riotous mob, after all the battles one has been through.’ Once the immediate threat of anarchy was averted at Mudania, however, Crookshank could not have agreed with Bonar Law more: ‘I am quite convinced,’ he wrote at the beginning of November, ‘that having made a stand in October, having refused to be browbeaten and having been vindicated we should now wash our hands of the whole thing.’51
Chanak convinced Crookshank that politics rather than diplomacy was the career to be in. Junior diplomats did not get the opportunity to fight for great causes. One incident further finally soured him on a diplomatic career. He despised Nevile Henderson, who was left in charge of the Commission when Rumbold departed to act as Curzon’s adviser at the conference convened at Lausanne to draw up a new peace treaty with Turkey. ‘Henderson goes on, with his temper fraying more and his long-winded words in dispatches misapplied more than ever! Lately he talked about Zenophobic and also mentioned the “opaque chaos” of the country. He will not hear of corrections and I can’t help thinking the Department must laugh a bit.’ It was not so much Henderson’s bad English that he found truly offensive as the fact that he was an egregious crawler. Any ambitious man in a hierarchical structure like the Foreign Office had to try and make a good impression on his superiors. What really stuck in Crookshank’s throat was Henderson’s willingness to chum up with any potentially powerful figure, however unacceptable.
In the autumn of 1922 the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald visited Constantinople. He did not have nice things to say about the Allies in Constantinople. ‘Away from the Galata Bridge,’ he wrote in The Nation, ‘the tunnel tramway leads up to the European quarter where the West, infected by the sensuous luxuriousness of the East, is iridescent with putrefaction, where the bookshops are piled with carnal filth, and where troops of coloured men in khaki can be seen in open daylight marching with officers at their head to where the brothels are.’52 MacDonald’s most famous moral stand was, however, not against pornography and prostitution but against war. He had been the most outspoken critic of the Great War from a pacifist standpoint. In February 1921 he tried to win the Woolwich by-election for the Labour party. It was a vicious campaign, his opponent being a former soldier who had won the VC at Cambrai. Placards on local trams asked, ‘A Traitor for Parliament?’ ‘The Woolwich exserviceman,’ MacDonald had retorted, ‘knows that military decorations are no indication of political wisdom, and that a Parliament of gallant officers will be a Prussian Diet not a British House of Commons.’53 In Constantinople Crookshank was certainly one gallant officer who agreed that MacDonald was a traitor. To Crookshank’s fury, Henderson, ‘with as always an eye on the main chance asked him to dine in the Mess which I was running at the time’. Crookshank kicked up a stink: ‘I point blank refused to be there and went out to an hotel.’ His valet, Page, a former guardsman, ‘like master like man…refused to wait at table on the “traitor”’. The spat, although minor, was hardly private: one of Crookshank’s friends heard about it while serving in the Sudan.54 Within two years MacDonald was prime minister, within nine years he was a prime minister at the head of the Conservative administration. Crookshank had made a dangerous enemy.
By November 1922 he was ‘fed up to the teeth’ with Constantinople ‘and everyone else and the preposterous Rumbold’.55 By the next summer Crookshank was ‘beginning to feel very desperate about this place’. The Turks having had their demands met by the great powers at Lausanne were cocky and unpleasant, ‘constant instances of rough handling, maltreatment etc. happen’.56 Even his hero Harington was beginning to irritate him: ‘The Army went off, as Harington told us about forty million times, with “flag flying high” – but the Turks let themselves go at once in scurrilous abuse. You never read such filth as they wrote. They had a final ceremony, entirely inspired by Harington – three Allied guards of honour and one Turkish and everyone saluting each others flags and then the Allies marching off leaving the Turks in situ. This resulted in a lot of stuff about “the Allies have bowed themselves before our glorious flag” and have “proved the victory of Eastern over Western Civilisation”. Ugh!’57 Those left when the troops marched away knew that this was not peace with honour but a bloody nose.
Crookshank believed that the British Empire should dish out punishment rather than receive it. He thus found a political hero in the South African prime minister, Jan Christian Smuts, who visited London in October 1923. Smuts charmed his hosts by heaping obloquy on the French for their arrogance, failures, unreliability and stupidity. More importantly, the former Boer leader propounded a noble vision of empire: ‘Here in a tumbling, falling world, here in a world where all the foundations are quaking,’ he declared in an address at the Savoy, ‘you have something solid and enduring. The greatest thing on earth, the greatest political [organization] of all times, it has passed through the awful blizzard and has emerged stronger than before…It is because in this Empire we sincerely believe in and practise certain fundamental principles of human government, such as peace, freedom, self-development, self-government.’ According to Smuts Irish independence, self-government in India, the end of the Protectorate in Egypt – which could all be read, like Chanak, as examples of British power buckling in the face of violent nationalism – in fact bore ‘testimony to the political faith which holds us together and will continue to hold us together while the kingdoms and empires founded on force and