[BITList] Quite a job

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-01-11



MacDonald,  Malcolm John  (1901-1981), politician and diplomatist, was born on 17 August 1901 at Lossiemouth, Scotland, the second of the three sons (among six children) of (James) Ramsay MacDonald  (1866-1937), journalist, politician, and later prime minister, and his wife, Margaret Ethel Gladstone MacDonald  (1870-1911), daughter of John Hall Gladstone FRS, a distinguished scientist, and an active social and religious worker.

Early life and education

Throughout their marriage Ramsay and Margaret MacDonald worked closely together on political and social issues, and from his earliest years Malcolm got to know early socialist pioneers such as Keir Hardie from among the stream of visitors who came to their crowded flat in Lincoln's Inn Fields which doubled as an office-cum-workplace as well as a family home. Margaret died in September 1911 at forty-one, just eighteen months after the birth of her third and youngest son, David, who also soon died. Thereafter Malcolm, his elder brother, Alister, and his three sisters were drawn even closer to their widowed father. Malcolm's career in particular was crucially affected by that of his father right up to the latter's retirement as prime minister in June 1935.

Malcolm MacDonald was at Bedales School, near Petersfield in Hampshire, for eight years from 1912 to 1920, the same school that Alister attended. Both brothers later testified to the tolerance and friendships they enjoyed there, despite the public reviling and criticism their father suffered during the First World War for his conspicuous role as a Labour leader and conscientious objector to military service. At that time Bedales was best-known for being the only co-educational boarding-school for teenagers in England. Malcolm, especially in his final two or three years, was much influenced by the remarkable founding headmaster of Bedales, John Haden Badley. By his last year he had achieved what he later termed, somewhat laconically in his unpublished autobiography, 'a certain eminence'  (MacDonald papers). He captained the soccer team and was vice-captain of the cricket eleven; he was a school record-breaking swimmer and athlete, captain of the fire brigade, and head prefect. He was a leading actor and producer in school plays. He seemed to shine at everything except scholarship, where his performances were adequate but undistinguished, though he did win a minor history exhibition to Queen's College, Oxford.

MacDonald's four years at Oxford from 1920 to 1924 set him on course for a career in politics, and for his lifetime interest in travel and in international affairs. After a slow and rather quiet start in his first two years, he gradually became a relatively frequent and increasingly skilful debater at the Oxford Union, and in 1924 he was runner-up in the contest for presidency of the union to Gerald Gardiner, forty years later lord chancellor in Harold Wilson's Labour government. In that year his father became Britain's first Labour prime minister and he was able to invite some of his Oxford friends to visit the prime minister's country residence at Chequers. He was president for one term during his last year of the prestigious Ralegh Club, was active with several of his Canadian friends in Oxford at the 'Oh Canada! Club', and was a founder member of the Queen's-based informal Paragon Club. He obtained a second-class degree in modern history in 1923. He stayed on for a further postgraduate year, reading for a diploma in economics (in substance mostly economic history) and politics, and gained a distinction in 1924 which later encouraged him to comment rather wryly about economic expertise.

From August 1924 until June 1925 MacDonald enjoyed, as one of a three-man debating team from Oxford, an extensive-and busily social-tour of the United States, Canada, Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. Then he visited Hawaii and Kyoto in 1927 and 1929 respectively as secretary to the British delegation to conferences of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Although unsure whether he wished to pursue a lifetime career in politics he served as a member of the London county council from 1927 to 1930; and in 1929, at his third attempt (having been defeated in 1923 and 1924), MacDonald was elected to the House of Commons as Labour member for the Bassetlaw division of Nottinghamshire.

Politician and high commissioner

In August 1931 the formation of the National Government split the Labour Party and MacDonald followed his father as one of a small group of National Labour MPs. He was immediately appointed parliamentary under-secretary in the dominion office and in this capacity moved the third reading of the Statute of Westminster. Between 1935 and 1940 he was a cabinet minister holding one or both of the offices of secretary of state for dominion affairs and secretary of state for the colonies. In Whitehall and Westminster circles in the 1930s, Malcolm MacDonald had to prove to himself and to others that he owed successive ministerial offices to merit rather than merely to his father, although he was unashamedly a close confidant and supporter of his father, especially in Ramsay's last years.

MacDonald played as well as worked hard. Throughout the 1930s his long active days (of 12-14 hours) were mostly devoted to Whitehall. Yet he often spent the evening and small hours consorting with an extensive company of actor and actress friends in or around London's theatreland. These included Ivor Novello, Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Beatrice Lilley, and, above all, Dorothy Dickson. Ministerially he was intimately involved in the controversies in these years over Eire, Palestine, the West Indies, and the promotion of colonial development and welfare policy, becoming the first active ministerial advocate of Commonwealth as a desirable outcome of empire. As dominions secretary from 1935 to 1939 he negotiated the end of the British-Irish trade war and settled the annuity and 'treaty ports' disputes in 1938. He was well nigh unique among British ministers in gaining the trust and perhaps the friendship of Eamon de Valera, partly because of a shared interest in ornithology. During 1940-41, with Winston Churchill's reluctant concurrence, he visited de Valera in Dublin three times to discuss Ireland's role in the war, albeit not productively.

Although MacDonald lost his parliamentary seat at the general election of 1935, he was re-elected to the House of Commons at a by-election in 1936 for Ross and Cromarty; and he remained its MP, even through his war years in Canada, until 1945. In Churchill's government of 1940 he was minister of health, a post which involved him in such matters as food rationing, hospitals, and air-raid shelters during the blitz; this last responsibility involved him in inspecting London's war damage, occasionally in the company of the king and queen.

In 1941 MacDonald was appointed Britain's high commissioner to Canada, and his youngest sister,  [see below], accompanied him as his hostess. During his five years there he played a significant and characteristically unpublicized role in smoothing relations between the prickly bachelor Canadian prime minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, through a time when Canada's contribution to the war effort and to post-war planning was of the utmost importance. The fact that King virtually regarded MacDonald as an adopted son was a considerable asset to Britain. MacDonald was present at the Quebec conferences between Churchill and Roosevelt, nominally attended by King too. It was indicative of the regard and confidence King reposed in him that when the activities of the Soviet spy Igor Gouzenko were being investigated by Canadian intelligence, MacDonald was told of this earlier and was given details that King did not reveal to all his cabinet colleagues.

King and many of his cabinet colleagues attended Malcolm MacDonald's wedding in Ottawa in December 1946. This was to a young Canadian war widow, Audrey Marjorie Rowley, daughter of a civil servant, Kenyon Fellowes. They met on a ski slope north of Ottawa, not long before his high commissionership came to an end. His wife had a son and a daughter from her first marriage. The couple also had a daughter, Fiona, born in 1949. Because of her father's itinerant life, and because her mother lived in Ottawa much of the time to look after her aged mother, Fiona wrote rather wistfully in the late 1990s: 'I thought of him more as a statesman than a father'  (private information).

South-east Asia and India

On his return from Ottawa, having ceased to be an MP in 1945, MacDonald was appointed governor-general of the Malay States and Singapore in 1946, refusing Attlee's offer of office in his government or some other prestigious post. Thus began what turned out to be more than eight years of being based in south-east Asia. During that time MacDonald worked hard for inter-communal co-operation, for civil government, and for an eventual federalizing of Britain's Malayan possessions. In late 1946 British Borneo had been added to his responsibilities. In 1948 his direct responsibilities over the myriad territories later joined together in Malaya were superseded by the more general and undoubtedly ambiguous role of being in charge of overseeing and helping to co-ordinate Britain's relationships with the former Indo-China, as UK commissioner-general for south-east Asia. This was no easy task, with the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the War Office being just three of the most prominent Whitehall interests actively involved in Malaya throughout the counter-insurgency war, euphemistically known in official British parlance as 'the Emergency' (1948-60). MacDonald's commission was, however, reconfirmed several times by Conservative as well as Labour governments. In a remarkable tribute to his interest and high standing among Borneo peoples, he was adopted as a 'son' of the Iban paramount chief Temonggong Koh.

MacDonald was Britain's high commissioner to India from 1955 to 1960, years that saw a considerable increase in both Soviet and American interest, as rivals, in the subcontinent and some consequent diminution of British interest in military and economic matters. The years 1954 to 1958 also marked a high point in official Sino-Indian cordialities before border disputes and other matters led to a swift decline and then war in 1962. During MacDonald's five years in New Delhi the British diplomatic presence in India was extensive, with large offices in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta as well as the main mission in the capital city. MacDonald toured extensively around India (occasionally meeting elderly Indians who purported to remember the visit of his parents much earlier in the century), entertained an extensive retinue of visitors, and extended his ornithological interests by writing (with the help of his Singapore-Chinese friend Christina Lohe) a book entitled Birds in my Indian Garden (published in 1961), in addition to lengthy dispatches ruminating on aspects of Indian life.

First and foremost, however, the second half of MacDonald's high commissionership was notable for his efforts, largely successful, to repair official Indo-British relations after the Suez misadventure in late 1956. This fence-mending was helped by Nehru's knowledge that MacDonald had criticized Eden's Suez Canal policy from the start. Once the canal zone had been invaded MacDonald drafted a letter resigning his high commissionership; but the swift passage of events and Eden's illness and resignation as prime minister made this unnecessary.

It was a mark of Malcolm MacDonald's unique standing and experience that he was soon called out of his subsequent semi-retirement in England to be co-chairman and leader of the British delegation at the international conference on Laos held in Geneva in 1961-2. Here his tact, patience, and diplomatic skills were fully stretched: he played an important role involving China constructively with the enterprise, a process aided by his friendship with China's foreign minister, the sagacious Zhou Enlai.

Africa

In 1963 at the urging of Duncan Sandys, the colonial secretary, MacDonald agreed to become Britain's last governor and commander-in-chief in Kenya in the period leading to independence, a process he came to believe should be hastened, especially as the project for an East African Federation foundered and was abandoned by Britain. He was governor-general for the two critical years of transition (1963-4). Then, as a clear testimony to the trust and standing he enjoyed with Jomo Kenyatta, MacDonald returned as Britain's second high commissioner (1964-5) to independent Kenya, succeeding Sir Geoffrey de Freitas, who was disappointed and disillusioned by the failure of the East African Federation scheme. MacDonald's friendship with Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and a few other key Kenyans undoubtedly smoothed what could otherwise have been very strained UK-Kenyan relations.

For three more years, from 1967 to 1969, MacDonald served as a roving ambassador in Africa for Harold Wilson's Labour government. His many contacts and his open and friendly sympathy for post-colonial leaders, peoples, and societies helped to diminish suspicion and opposition to British policies in Africa-especially stemming from Rhodesia and Ian Smith's illegal regime, and Nigeria's civil war. However, despite being a loyal servant of the crown he was privately somewhat uncertain of the bona fides of the Wilson administration, and found his position trying and uncomfortable. As he wrote in a letter to his wife on 22 August 1967: 'It is quite a job trying to cope with the affairs of a dozen different countries in different parts of eventful Africa'  (MacDonald papers).

Character and achievements

Early in his adult life Malcolm MacDonald became an enthusiast for the Commonwealth, and throughout his life he helped to sharpen the contrast between empire and Commonwealth in practical terms and without gratuitously disavowing Britain's imperial past. In this he used to say that he was helped by being Scottish not English-though indubitably he was always British, as well as a self-styled citizen of the world. No linguist-at best he knew a little French-his character and broad interests and sympathies nevertheless brought him friends in many countries. His hobbies (especially bird-watching and collecting books, porcelain, and pictures) intermingled, sometimes creatively, with his official life.

MacDonald had been sworn of the privy council in 1935 but he was markedly reluctant to accept 'social' honours and discouraged several overtures regarding a knighthood or a peerage. The notable exception came in 1969 when he accepted the Order of Merit. He received, however, many academic and some civic honours, and was made freeman of the city of Singapore in 1955 and of the burgh of Lossiemouth in 1969. His continuing devotion to young people and to education was shown in many ways: as a Rhodes trustee from 1948 to 1957, chancellor of the University of Malaya from 1949 to 1961, visitor for the University College of Kenya, a senior research fellow at the University of Sussex (1971-3), and chancellor of the University of Durham.

MacDonald was small, wiry, and remarkably friendly, with something of a reputation as a ladies' man. He wore spectacles from youth to middle age and then, following an accidental breakage during the Second World War, he found that he was able to do without them. In later life he ate one main meal a day, though his diary sometimes registered two or three 'tea-times' in a single afternoon, usually at the Royal Commonwealth Society. In fact he always ate sparingly, turning his plate over at public mealtimes to indicate that he was forgoing a particular course. He required no more than a few hours' sleep each night. His painstaking application often kept him working late into the night, but he was usually up at dawn to renew his passionate interest in ornithology, which led him to produce books on the birds of Ottawa, Delhi, and Kenya. His other published writings were either reminiscences and pen portraits of people he had known or travelogues; they included People and Places (1969) and Titans and Others (1972).

In early manhood there was a certain bespectacled gawky toothiness about MacDonald's appearance, and in the Whitehall of the 1930s his dress generally conformed with the formal wear of senior civil servants and ministers. From middle age he matured into a more distinguished-looking silver-haired statesman, albeit one who generally dressed casually in old age, dispensing with a necktie and the more formal clothes of earlier life. For years he listed his recreations in Who's Who as 'ornithology, collecting, skiing'; the first two undoubtedly occupied much more of his time than the third-his collection of Chinese porcelain is now at Durham University. MacDonald died at his home, Raspit Hill, Ivy Hatch, near Sevenoaks in Kent, on 11 January 1981. He had gone outside late on a frosty night to ensure that his greenhouses were properly closed, and suffered a heart attack.

A nondenominational service of thanksgiving for Malcolm MacDonald's life and work was held in Westminster Abbey on 3 March 1981. In the commemorative address Sir Shridath Ramphal, the Commonwealth secretary-general, summed up his richly varied life by saying that he was a quintessential Commonwealth man. He stressed how MacDonald had brought to his extensive representational work the highest diplomatic qualities: he was 'the supreme interlocutor'.

MacDonald's youngest sister, Sheila Ramsay Lochhead  [née MacDonald]  (1910-1994), prison visitor , was born on 7 December 1910 in London. Her mother died less than a year after her birth, and she was for a time looked after by family friends. She grew up immersed in Labour Party politics. She attended North London Collegiate School, where she became head girl, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she won a hockey blue and narrowly missed a first in philosophy, politics, and economics. She hoped to enter politics and in the 1931 election, her father wrote, 'made a fine beginning on the political platform'  (Marquand, 780), but her father's decision to form the National Government effectively ended her political career. When her eldest sister, Ishbel, married she became her father's political hostess, while also working as a classifying officer at Wormwood Scrubs prison. She accompanied her father on several visits overseas, and was with him in November 1937 on the voyage to South America on which he died. She then lived with her brother Malcolm in London-where during the war she helped establish a primary school for unevacuated children-and in Canada. In 1948 she married Andrew Van Slyke Lochhead (b. 1911), a lecturer in social administration; they had three children. They lived in Swansea, where he worked at the University College. She continued prison visiting and from 1962 was also a magistrate. She advocated penal reform and was active in the National Association of Prison Visitors, of which she was national chairwoman for three years. In Swansea she established a hostel for former prisoners and a shelter for homeless persons. In 1993 she published Outside in, a history of prison visiting. In 1993 a major stroke paralysed her down one side. She died on 22 July 1994 at her home, 43 Langland Road, Swansea, and was survived by her husband and their three children.

Peter Lyon 

Sources  MacDonald papers, U. Durham L. [incl. unpubd autobiography, 'Constant surprise' in typescript] + C. Sanger, Malcolm MacDonald: bringing an end to empire (1995) + R. F. Holland, Britain and the commonwealth alliance, 1918-39 (1981) + K. Kyle, The politics of independence of Kenya (1999) + Provost's entrance book, 1920-1922, Queen's College, Oxford + J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis, eds., The Oxford history of the British empire, 4: The twentieth century (1999) + M. MacDonald, Titans and others (1972) + M. MacDonald, People and places (1969) + J. Garner, Commonwealth office, 1925-1968 (1978) + WWW + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1981) + private information (2004) + The Times (12 Jan 1981) + D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977) + The Times (26 July 1994) + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1994)
Archives Bodl. RH, corresp. relating to African affairs + U. Durham L., corresp. and papers; additional papers | BL, letters to Albert Mansbridge, Add. MS 65253 + Bodl. Oxf., letters to Sir Alfred Zimmern + Bodl. RH, corresp. with Sir Harry Batterbee; corresp. with Sir Henry Brooke-Popham; corresp. with Sir Granville Orde Browne; corresp. with Arthur Creech Jones; corresp. with Lord Lugard; corresp. with J. H. Oldham; corresp. with Margery Perham and related papers; corresp. relating to African affairs + Parl. Arch., letters to Lord Samuel + Mitchell L., Glas., corresp. with J. L. Kinloch + NA Scot., corresp. with Lord Lothian + Rice University, Houston, Texas, Woodson Research Center, corresp. with Sir Julian Huxley + Ruskin College, Oxford, letters to James Middleton + State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, corresp. with John Jones + U. Durham, additional papers
Likenesses  L. Whelan, oils, exh. Royal Society of Portrait Painters 1937, NPG [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £400,704: probate, 2 April 1981, CGPLA Eng. & Wales · £416,091-Sheila Lochhead: probate, 25 Oct 1994, CGPLA Eng. & Wales


ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.