F E Smith - Lord Birkenhead

Lord Birkenhead

In 1919 he was created Baron Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County of Cheshire, and appointed Lord Chancellor by Lloyd George at the youthful age of forty-seven; the Morning Post dismissed his appointment as "carrying a joke too far". That year, in the House of Lords debate on the Amritsar Massacre, he courageously denounced Tories who declared General Dyer (the responsible officer) a hero. He played a key role in the passage of several key legal reforms, including the reform of English land law which was to come to fruition in the mid-1920s. He also unsuccessfully championed a reform of the divorce laws, which he judged caused great misery and which favoured the wealthy.

Despite his Unionist background, Smith played an important role in the negotiations that led to the signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, which established an independent Irish Free State the following year. Much of the treaty was drafted by Smith. His support for this, and his warm relations with the Irish nationalist leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, angered some of his former Unionist associates, notably Sir Edward Carson. Upon signing the Treaty he remarked to Collins, "I may have just signed my political death warrant", to which Collins dryly and with premonitory accuracy replied, "I have just signed my actual death warrant".

Also in 1921 he was responsible for the House of Lords rejecting a proposal, put forward by Frederick Alexander Macquisten, MP for Argyllshire, to criminalise lesbianism. During the debate, Birkenhead argued that 999 women out of a thousand had "never even heard a whisper of these practices".

Smith was created Viscount Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County of Chester, in the 1921 Birthday Honours, and then Viscount Furneaux, of Charlton in the County of Northampton, and Earl of Birkenhead in 1922. By 1922 Birkenhead and Churchill had become the leading figures of the Lloyd George Coalition and associated with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the attempt to go to war with Turkey over Chanak, later vetoed by the governments of the Dominions and, in Birkenhead's case if not Churchill's, the general whiff of moral and financial corruption which had come to surround the Coalition. Even a famous speech, the Rectorial Address to Glasgow University of November 1923, in which Birkenhead told undergraduates that the world still offered "glittering prizes" to those with "stout hearts and sharp swords", now seemed out of kilter with the less aggressive and more self-consciously moral style of politics advocated by the new generation of Conservative politicians such as Stanley Baldwin and Edward Wood, the future Lord Halifax. At an earlier meeting before Parliament broke up for the summer, and more famously at the Carlton Club meeting in October 1922, Birkenhead's hectoring of the junior ministers and backbenchers was one of the factors leading to the withdrawal of support from the Coalition.

Like many of the senior members of the Coalition, Birkenhead did not hold office in the Bonar Law and Baldwin governments of 1922-4. Unlike the others Birkenhead was rude and open in his contempt for the new governments. He sneered that Sir George Younger was "the cabin boy" who had taken over the ship, he referred to Lords Salisbury and Selborne as "the Dolly Sisters" after two starlets of the era and remarked that the new Cabinet was one of "second-class brains", to which the reply - variously attributed to Stanley Baldwin and Lord Robert Cecil - came that this was better than "second-class characters". In the House of Lords he accused the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon (who had deserted the Coalition in its final hours and thus retaining his office under Bonar Law) of making unauthorised promises of support to Greece in her war against Turkey; he was forced to apologise when Curzon produced the key documents which he had circulated to the Cabinet, and which Birkenhead had initialled as read. Lady Curzon retaliated by cutting Birkenhead at a ball, but as she remarked to her husband in a letter, he was "too drunk to notice" the snub.

A 1924 entry in Evelyn Waugh’s diary states that an English High Court judge presiding in a sodomy case sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead. "Could you tell me," he asked, "what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?" Birkenhead replied without hesitation, "Oh, thirty shillings or two pounds; whatever you happen to have on you."

From 1924 to 1928 he served as Secretary of State for India in Baldwin's second government; Baldwin had allegedly declined to reappoint him to the Woolsack on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for the Lord Chancellor to be seen drunk in the street. His views on India's independence movement were reactionary, he thought pre-partioned India's Hindu-Muslim religious divide insurmountable, and sought to block advances in native participation in provincial governments that had been granted by the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. His parliamentary private secretary recalled much time ostensibly on India Office business seemed spent playing golf. He was engaged outside the Office in negotiating for the government with the Trades Union Congress to try to avert the 1926 General Strike and he strongly supported the 1927 Trades Disputes Act which required union members to contract into the political levy.

After retiring from politics he became Rector of the University of Aberdeen, a director of Tate & Lyle, and High Steward of the University of Oxford. He died in London in 1930. After cremation at Golders Green Crematorium his ashes were buried in the parish churchyard at Charlton, Northamptonshire.

The opinion of Winston Churchill, who was a friend: "He had all the canine virtues in a remarkable degree — courage, fidelity, vigilance, love of chase." Of Margot Asquith, who was not: "F. E. Smith is very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head." Of Birkenhead's loyalty, Churchill added, "If he was with you on Monday, he would be the same on Tuesday. And on Thursday, when things looked blue, he would still be marching forward with strong reinforcements."

Gilbert Frankau recalled, in his own autobiography Self Portrait, that in 1928 Sir Thomas Horder confided: "Birkenhead's pure eighteenth-century. He belongs to the days of Fox and Pitt. Physically, he has all the strength of our best yeoman stock. Mentally, he's a colossus. But he'll tear himself to pieces by the time he's sixty." (Birkenhead died at the age of fifty-eight.)

His increasingly pompous oratory caused David Low to caricature him in the 1920s as "Lord Burstinghead".

As "Lord Birkenhead", he is dramatised in the film Chariots of Fire, as an official of the British Olympic Committee.

In the year of his death, he published his utopian The World in 2030 A.D. with airbrush illustrations by E. McKnight Kauffer.