Samuel Hoare, 1st Viscount Templewood

Youth

Hoare was born in London on 24 February 1880, the eldest son of Sir Samuel Hoare, 1st Baronet, who was a Conservative MP from a by-election in 1886 until 1906, and to whose baronetcy he succeeded in 1915. His family were the Anglo-Irish branch of an old Quaker family, with a long history of involvement in banking. He was a descendant of Samuel Hoare, but the family had abandoned Quakerism in the mid-18th century and Hoare was brought up an Anglo-Catholic.

Hoare was educated at Harrow School, where he was a classical scholar, and New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate he was awarded a blue in racquets and was a member of the Gridiron and Bullingdon Clubs. Initially he studied classics, taking a first in Mods in 1901, before switching to Modern History, graduating with a first class B.A. in 1903. He was awarded his M.A. in 1910. He later became an Honorary Fellow of New College.

Michael Bloch comments that Hoare was "indubitably homosexual", but being highly ambitious and discreet (his nickname amongst colleagues was 'Slippery Sam'), may not have acted much upon it. On 17 October 1909, he married Lady Maud Lygon (1882–1962), youngest daughter of The 6th Earl Beauchamp. Their marriage was childless. It was, in the words of R. J. Q. Adams, "not at first a love match" but in time became "a devoted partnership". His biographer has stated, "it would probably be more appropriate to describe it as a mariage de convenance". Hoare inherited Sidestrand Hall in 1915. His London home was 18 Cadogan Gardens.

Hoare was short, slightly built and a dapper dresser. As a youth he took up games to bolster his physique, including figure skating. He became a tournament-level shot and tennis player. He was a poor speaker but a good writer. He was hard-working but cold.

Early political career

In 1905, Hoare's father arranged for him to be secretary to the Colonial Secretary Alfred Lyttelton to gain political experience. Hoare stood unsuccessfully in the 1906 General Election for Parliament at Ipswich, but became a justice of the peace for the county of Norfolk that year.

Hoare entered local politics in March 1907, when he was elected to the London County Council as a member of the Municipal Reform Party, the local government wing of the Conservative Party, representing Brixton. He served as Chairman of the London Fire Brigade Committee. He served on the LCC until 1910.

Hoare was elected to the House of Commons at the January 1910 general election as Member of Parliament (MP) for Chelsea. In the early years, he was a member of the Anti-Socialist Union.

During the Conservative Party leadership contest of November 1911, Hoare wrote pledging support to both leading candidates, Austen Chamberlain and Walter Long. There is no evidence that he made such an offer to Bonar Law, who became leader after the two front-runners withdrew to avoid a potential party split. Hoare showed little interest in the two largest issues of the day: House of Lords reform and Irish Home Rule. He supported tariff reform, female suffrage and public education. He opposed Welsh disestablishment quite strongly. He encouraged colleagues to call him "Sam" at the time to soften his hard and detached image.

Hoare was on the left wing of the Conservative party and once described himself as "a liberal amongst conservatives and a conservative amongst liberals". He joined the Unionist Social Reform Committee. Hoare held markedly "progressive" views, outside the mainstream of the Conservative Party, on issues such as education and penal reform. He was almost alone amongst the Conservatives in advocating the abolition of the death penalty.

First World War

Aged 34 at the time, Hoare joined the Army soon after the outbreak of the First World War. He was commissioned into the Norfolk Yeomanry as a temporary lieutenant on 17 October 1914. To his disappointment, he was initially only a recruiting officer and illness prevented him from serving at the front. He was promoted to temporary captain on 24 April 1915.

While acting as a recruiting officer, he learnt Russian. In 1916, he was recruited by Mansfield Cumming to be the future MI6's liaison officer with the Russian Intelligence service in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). He soon became head of the British Intelligence Mission to the Russian General Staff with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was accompanied by Lady Maud and Winifred Spink. In his post, he reported to the British government the death of Rasputin and apologised, because of the sensational nature of the event, for having written it in the style of the Daily Mail.

In March 1917 he was posted to Rome, where he remained until the end of the war. His duties included helping to dissuade Italy from dropping out of the war. In Italy, he administered the subsidisation of the former socialist leader Benito Mussolini's interventionist newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, with a wage of £100 per week (equivalent to £5998 in 2026).

For his services in the war, Hoare was twice mentioned in despatches, appointed Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1917, and awarded the Orders of St Anne and St Stanislas of Russia, and of St Maurice and St Lazarus of Italy.

Interwar period

Secretary of State for Air

Hoare was re-elected to Parliament in 1918 as a Conservative; his party were then in Coalition with the Lloyd George Liberals. During the Russian Civil War, he strongly supported the call by the War Secretary Winston Churchill (by all accounts the most anti-Communist member of Lloyd George's cabinet) for British intervention in the Russian Civil War on the side of Whites. On 31 May 1919, he wrote to Churchill to say: "For the last six months, I have been convinced that the whole future of Europe and indeed of the whole world depends upon the Russian settlement and the destruction of Bolshevism". In late 1921-early 1922, Hoare served as the deputy League of Nations commissioner for Russian refugees in Asia Minor, and was charged with finding a country willing to accept them. By October 1922, he had become disillusioned with David Lloyd George after the honours scandal and the Chanak Crisis. He helped organise the backbench revolt at the Carlton Club meeting (19 October 1922), which brought down the Lloyd George Coalition. In Bonar Law's new Conservative government he was made a Privy Councillor and Secretary of State for Air, but he was not made a member of the Cabinet until Stanley Baldwin succeeded Law as Prime Minister in May 1923.

In 1923, Hoare presided over the merger (with £1 million state subsidy) of the four principal private air carriers to form Imperial Airways, an ancestor of today's British Airways. The Conservatives fell from power in January 1924, but Hoare was once again Secretary of State for Air in Baldwin's Second Government (1924-1929). As Secretary of State for Air he sided with Trenchard on the importance of the Royal Air Force remaining an independent service. Hoare often quarrelled with the First Sea Lord, Admiral David Beatty, over where to allocate defence expenditure, leading Beatty to label Hoare "an intriguing little brute" who was intent upon starving the Royal Navy of funds in order to build up the Royal Air Force. He established air squadrons at Oxford University and Cambridge University to train students as potential RAF officers and re-established a permanent air cadet college at Cranwell.

Lady Maud was awarded the DBE in February 1927, and Hoare was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire (GBE) in June 1927. Hoare and Lady Maud travelled by air whenever possible, including the first civilian flight to India in 1927. In 1927 he published a book, India by Air. By 1929 there were regular scheduled routes to India and Cape Town.

Hoare continued his interest in aviation affairs as Honorary Air Commodore of No 601 (County of London) (1930–32) and No 604 (County of Middlesex) (1932–57) Bomber Squadrons of the Auxiliary Air Force.

In opposition

Hoare was treasurer of the Conservative Party in opposition in 1929–1931.

In 1930, he published The Fourth Seal on World War I Russia.

Hoare was a delegate to the First Round Table Conference on India's constitutional future in 1930–1931. He also helped to mediate between Baldwin and the press barons Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, who were intriguing for his removal as Conservative leader.

Secretary of State for India

Hoare was one of the Conservative negotiators in talks with Ramsay MacDonald in August 1931 over the formation of the National Government. On 26 August 1931 Hoare was appointed Secretary of State for India.

At the Second Round Table Conference, Hoare enjoyed good relations with Mahatma Gandhi. As India Secretary, Hoare was mostly concerned with the Indian Communist Party, which led him to favour the Congress Party as the best alternative. He committed Britain to eventual self-government for India, but that was not enough for Gandhi, who wanted full independence. Lord Lothian's report on the extension of the Indian franchise was considered. A major issue that derailed the Round Table talks was the demand that the Indian Muslims along with the Dalits (untouchable caste) be awarded separate electorates, a demand that Gandhi rejected. When Gandhi told Hoare in September 1932 that he would "fast unto death" rather than accept a separate electorate for the untouchable caste, Hoare replied: "The dogs bark, the caravan moves on". A White Paper containing the government's legislative proposals for India's constitution was drawn up in March 1933. A Select Committee of Both Houses began to meet for over a year and half in April 1933 to consider the government's plans. In January 1934, Hoare was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Star of India (GCSI) in the New Year Honours. At his meeting with Ivan Maisky, the new Soviet ambassador, in 1932, Hoare told him: "It would be extremely difficult to persuade the Conservatives in this country [to adopt] a pro-Russian policy if the Soviet government failed to eliminate the source of the trouble which has often poisoned relations in the past", by which he meant the Comintern support for the British Communist Party.

Hoare's Indian policy faced much opposition from the "die hard" right-wing of the Conservative Party, with whom Winston Churchill allied himself. Ill feeling between Hoare and Churchill reached its peak in April 1934. The British government proposed for the Indian government to retain the power to impose tariffs on British textiles. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce, representing the Lancashire cotton trade, initially opposed that since it wanted Lancashire goods to be exported freely to India. Churchill accused Hoare of having, with the aid of the Earl of Derby, breached parliamentary privilege by improperly influencing the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to drop its opposition. Churchill was refused the right to question some witnesses, some documents which he requested were not produced and some of his written evidence was suppressed as contrary to the public interest. It was ruled that Churchill was correct that Hoare and Derby had pressured the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to withdraw their paper objecting to the White Paper, but as the Joint Select Committee was not a judicial committee it was not a breach of privilege to pressure witnesses. Hoare complained that “I do not know which is the more offensive or mischievous, Winston or his son (Randolph Churchill, who was then a journalist)." After Hoare's exoneration by the Committee on Privileges, Churchill gave a powerful speech in the Commons Chamber that attacked the committee's findings. On 13 June 1934, Leo Amery spoke, arguing that Churchill's true aim was to bring down the government under the cover of the doctrine fiat justicia ruat caelum ("may justice be done, though the heavens fall"). Churchill, who was neither a lawyer nor a classicist, growled "translate it!" Amery replied that it meant "If I can trip up Sam, the Government's bust". The ensuing laughter made Churchill look ridiculous.

Foreign Secretary

In June 1935, Baldwin became prime minister for the third time. He offered Hoare a choice of the job of Viceroy of India or Foreign Secretary. Hoare, who was ambitious to become Prime Minister, chose the latter to enable him to remain active in domestic politics. The position would later make him notorious. Hoare's exhausting time as India Secretary had given him little chance to study foreign affairs, and as Foreign Secretary he tended to follow the advice given to him by Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office who saw Italy as a potential ally against Germany. Vansittart argued to Hoare that Italy could threaten British control of the Mediterranean Sea and hence the sea-lanes running through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, Egypt and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean that linked Britain to its colonies in Asia. Although the bombast of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was not taken very seriously in Britain, Italy, which also controlled Libya, straddled Britain's sea route across the Mediterranean. In particular, Vansittart stressed that deployment of naval forces to deter Japan (the Singapore strategy) depended upon a friendly Italy not challenging Britain in the Mediterranean. Finally, Vansittart argued that Italy was the chief supporter of Austria against German ambitions for an Anschluss (e.g. in 1934 when Italy had deployed troops to the Brenner Pass to deter Germany) and that a friendly Italy would allow France to concentrate its forces on the Rhineland. For all reasons, Vansittart argued that Ethiopia would have to be sacrificed to win the friendship of Italy. The historian John Charmley argued it was no accident that Hoare along with other "appeasers" such as Lord Halifax and Sir John Simon had devoted significant parts of their careers to India, which he stated influenced their conduct of foreign affairs, writing: "In both case, nationalists were to be negotiated with until their lowest demands could be discovered and provided they were low enough granted. Nehru, Gandhi, and Hitler, however much the contemporary mind rejects the equation, had much in common to British ministers between the wars".

Hoare took office against a backdrop of what R.J.Q. Adams described as "much idle talk" of "mutual security". In March 1935, MacDonald's White Paper had committed Britain to limited rearmament. Hoare expressed much distrust of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who under the guise of collective security via the League of Nations, had been attempting to build up a bloc against aggression. Hoare believed that Litvinov was engaged in an "intrigue" intended to wreck the possibility of Anglo-German understanding and an arms control pact as he felt that the real aim behind Litvinov's foreign policy was to manipulate the Western nations into going to war with each other to allow the Soviet Union to dominate Europe.

First Lord of the Admiralty

It was widely recognised that Hoare had been a scapegoat for Cabinet policy. His return to Baldwin's Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty in June 1936 was widely praised in the press. It was too quick for Halifax. Eden later wrote in his memoirs that Halifax "criticised Baldwin sharply for yielding to Hoare's importunity". Hoare vigorously endorsed Britain's naval rearmament, including ordering the first three King George V-class battleships, and worked to reverse the subordination of the British naval aviation to the Royal Air Force. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Hoare frequently fought with Eden over the policy to pursue towards the Spanish Civil War. Hoare still subscribed to the viewpoint that Italy was worth having as an ally and favoured paying lip service to the principle of non-intervention in Spain. Eden by contrast was more concerned about the prospect of Germany and/or Italy having bases in Spain, and he favoured a more vigorous approach to enforcing non-intervention. As Italy was the nation that intervened in Spain on the largest scale, Eden suggested several times imposing a blockade to prevent the Italians from landing more troops in Spain, a proposal that Hoare stoutly resisted. Mussolini sent 80, 000 troops to Spain, by far the largest contingent of any power that intervened in Spain; Germany by contrast only sent 19, 000 troops to Spain. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Hoare was greatly influenced by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Ernle Chatfield, whose sympathies were with the Spanish Nationalists.

Hoare tended to share Chatfield's dislike of the Spanish Republic, writing: "For the present it seems clear that we should continue our existing policy of neutrality-When I speak of 'neutrality' I mean strict neutrality, that is to say a situation in which the Russians neither officially nor unofficially give help to the Communists. On no account must we do anything to bolster up Communism in Spain, particularly when it is remembered that Communism in Portugal, to which it would probably spread and particularly to Lisbon, would be a great danger to the British Empire". In contrast to Léon Blum in France, British leaders such as Hoare felt that the power to impose a naval blockade on Spain (a nation whose population exceeded its agricultural capacity, making Spain very dependent on food imported from abroad) would deter Franco from going too far with his alliance with Axis powers. Furthermore, the civil war devastated Spain and as Britain had the world's third largest economy at the time, it was felt that the appeal of the pound sterling would counter any pro-Axis tendencies in Nationalist Spain as it was believed Franco would not want to be too dependent economically on Germany and Italy for post-war reconstruction. Blum and other French leaders tended to feel that the prospect of a pro-Axis Spain as a neighbour would be a threat to France and were especially worried about the prospect of German and/or Italian bases in Spain as over one-third of the French Army was recruited in France's North African colonies, making control of the western Mediterranean Sea a crucial concern for France.

Home Secretary

On Baldwin's retirement, the new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered Hoare any office that he liked except the Exchequer, which Hoare would have liked but had been promised to Sir John Simon. Hoare chose the Home Office (28 May 1937). Hoare was still seen as a possible successor to Chamberlain. The French ambassador Charles Corbin stated in his reports to Paris that British politics in the late 1930s were dominated by a "big four" that consisted of Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon and Hoare, whom he described as being the most powerful men in the cabinet and all of whom he clearly disliked. Hoare was widely viewed as being too ambitious to be prime minister one day and as a sycophant to Chamberlain. The future prime minister Harold Macmillan, then a rebellious backbencher, called Hoare "one of the worst and most sycophantic of Neville Chamberlain's advisers". Despite his position as Home Secretary, Chamberlain used Hoare as a minister for "general policy" as he served as of Chamberlain's most closest and trusted advisers. Much of Chamberlain's "personal diplomacy" towards Adolf Hitler was due to advice from Hoare that the Foreign Office was too "anti-German" to properly execute the prime minister's policies, and that Chamberlain should by-pass the Foreign Office as much as possible. Hoare later stated about Chamberlain's leadership: "If nines times out of ten he had his way, it was because it also the Cabinet's way". The "big four" of the Chamberlain cabinet were a part of a wider "inner group" in the Chamberlain government that also included Sir Horace Wilson, the Chief Industrial Adviser to the government and one of Chamberlain's closest friends; Rab Butler, the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs; Sir Joseph Ball who ran the prime minister's press office; and Sir Warren Fisher, the Permanent Undersecretary of the Treasury.

Hoare had a long family interest in judicial and penal reform. The Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry was his great-great aunt. RJQ Adams wrote highly of his time as Home Secretary. Roy Jenkins wrote that Hoare was the most liberal Home Secretary between H. H. Asquith (1892–1895) and Rab Butler (1957–1962).

In 1938, Hoare was instrumental in obtaining approval for the British rescue effort on behalf of endangered Jewish children in Europe, which was known as the Kindertransport.

In September 1938, Hoare was part of the informal inner Cabinet, along with Simon and Halifax, and was one of the few consulted by Chamberlain about "Plan Z" to fly to meet Hitler for a summit meeting about Czechoslovakia, a decision that was then popular. Plan Z was a bold bid to solve the Sudetenland crisis under which Chamberlain was to fly to Germany for a summit intended to resolve the crisis once and for all, through Hoare did warn Chamberlain that "Plan Z" carried "great political risk". Hoare along with Simon, Halifax, Wilson and Cadogan were the only ones aware of "Plan Z" and the rest of the cabinet was not informed in advance nor were the French and Czechoslovak governments. Hoare's later account of the Munich Agreement was anguished. Hoare had close links to the Czechoslovak government. In retirement, he stood strongly by Chamberlain's essential judgements but regretted Chamberlain's lack of sensitivity in foreign affairs and his tendency for personal intervention that led to his failure to retain Eden and to override his Foreign Office advisers. However, Hoare repeatedly pointed out that public opinion was vociferously pacifist and that Chamberlain's actions were widely endorsed at the time, not least by US President Franklin Roosevelt. Also, the Labour opposition strongly opposed rearmament and the introduction of conscription, even after Munich.

Second World War

On the outbreak of war, Hoare became Lord Privy Seal in the nine-man War Cabinet (3 September 1939), with a wide-ranging brief. On 5 April 1940, Hoare briefly returned to the Air Ministry, swapping places with Sir Kingsley Wood, and later that month came under fire during the Norway Debate which brought down the Chamberlain government. Then, the resignations of himself, Chamberlain and Sir John Simon were essential preconditions for Labour to join a coalition government. Hoare was one of the foremost Chamberlain loyalists and was shocked at the apparent disloyalty of others, such as Halifax.

Following Winston Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, Hoare was dropped from the government altogether unlike Chamberlain, Halifax and even Simon. He still hoped in vain to be Viceroy of India. Of the "big four" of the Chamberlain government, Hoare was the only one excluded from the government that Churchill formed on 10 May 1940 as Chamberlain became the Lord President of the Council, Halifax continued as Foreign Secretary and Simon became the Lord Chancellor.

Alexander Cadogan saw Hoare as a potential quisling in 1940, but Leo Amery and Lord Beaverbrook thought highly of him. Another Foreign Office mandarin, Robert Vansittart, thought him prim and precise but not a resilient figure in political struggle. Hoare was named as one of the fifteen "Guilty Men" in the influential July 1940 book of the same name. Guilty Men inflicted another blow on Hoare's reputation, which still lasts to this day.

After a brief period of unemployment Hoare was sent as Ambassador to Spain, with his wife, Lady Maud Hoare. In that demanding and critical role he helped to arrange the return of thousands of Allied prisoners from Spanish gaols and successfully helped to dissuade Francisco Franco from formally joining the Axis. The decision to appoint Hoare as ambassador to Spain was widely seen as an insult, likened by Dutton to being "made a manager of a Siberian power station" (the demeaning job given to former Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov in the late 1950s). Cadogan thought that instead of being made ambassador to Spain Hoare should have been sent to a penal settlement.

Hoare disliked Franco and found him an inconsistent and unresponsive negotiator. (Hoare found Franco's Portuguese counterpart, António de Oliveira Salazar, much more productive to deal with.) His memoir of the period, Ambassador on Special Mission, is an insight into the day-to-day life of a demanding diplomatic job, his primary challenges being to dissuade Franco from his preferred alignment to the Axis powers and to prevent the Allies from reacting with in haste to repeated Spanish provocations. Hoare's memoir is not fully transparent about his deployment of an array of bluff, leaks, bribery and subterfuge to disrupt unfriendly elements in Franco's regime and the operations of the German embassy, but those methods were noted by his staff.

Later life

In the House of Lords, Viscount Templewood served on the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee from 1950 and chaired it from 1954. He gave energetic support to penal reform, the Criminal Justice Act 1948 and the abolition of capital punishment. Templewood was the only Conservative peer who advocated the abolition of the death penalty in the 1950s. He took up many company directorships. In 1948, volume one of Churchill's memoirs/History of World War Two, The Gathering Storm, was published. In The Gathering Storm, Churchill finished off the assault on Templewood's reputation that Guilty Men had begun, by portraying the interwar period as a struggle between good vs. evil, and the "appeasers" were portrayed as almost as malevolent as Adolf Hitler. Churchill made the claim that Second World War was the "unnecessary war" that would have been avoided if only he had been prime minister in the 1930s. Churchill indicted the appeasers such as Templewood on two counts. The first count was a moral one, namely that Hitler was a deeply "wicked" man and the appeasers were variously cowardly and/or stupid not to have realised this. The second count was a practical one that they failed to prepare the country for the coming war by not spending money on defence and making the necessary alliances. Churchill's immense popularity made The Gathering Storm a bestseller in 1948, and the indictment that Churchill presented is still widely accepted today.

Hoare was President of the Lawn Tennis Association (1932–56), an elder brother of Trinity House (1936–1950), Chancellor of the University of Reading (1937 until his death in 1959), Chairman of the Council of the Howard League for Penal Reform (1947–59), President of the Magistrates' Association (1947–52), President of the Air League of the British Empire (1953-1956), and President of the National Skating Association (1945–57).

Templewood published a number of books after the war, including Ambassador on Special Mission (1946) about his time in Spain, The Unbroken Thread (1949), a family memoir, The Shadow of the Gallows (1951) on capital punishment, and Nine Troubled Years (1954), a memoir of the 1930s. Dutton described Nine Troubled Years as a "reasonable apologia for Chamberlain and appeasement", through he noted Templewood had to work within the highly restrictive rules imposed by Maurice Hankey about what he could and could not write about concerning cabinet debates, which gave a highly misleading picture of what actually happened. Furthermore, Dutton noted that Templewood displayed much loyalty to the memory of Chamberlain even when he was allowed to mention debates in the cabinet. For example, Templewood was completely silent in Nine Troubled Years about his disagreements with Chamberlain about his preference in 1939 for having the Soviet Union serve as the eastern pivot of the proposed "peace front" instead of Poland as Chamberlain wanted. Dutton noted that had he mentioned this it might had done something to dispel his image as Chamberlain's "yes man". Instead, Templewood just made a reference to an assessment by the Chiefs of Staff in 1939 that calculated the Polish Army was superior to the Red Army by a factor of three to one, which gave the impression that Chamberlain was quite rational in choosing Poland instead of the Soviet Union as the eastern pivot of the "peace front".

In media

In the 1981 TV serial Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, Hoare is portrayed by Edward Woodward.

Hoare, in his later role as Ambassador to Spain, appears in C.J. Sansom's WWII spy thriller Winter in Madrid.

The Apple TV streaming miniseries The New Look also depicts Hoare's time in Spain, featuring him meeting Coco Chanel during the latter's attempt to serve as an intermediary between Germany and the United Kingdom.