Word: macmillan
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Cast'e for Coal. In all Britain last week, there was probably only one community where Macmillan's choice of a successor was hailed with unmixed joy. To the 2,000-odd people of Coldstream, a Berwickshire border village flanked by 5,000 acres of Home's ancestral lands, the news of the laird's new job stirred the greatest celebration since the 6th Lord became the 1st Earl in 1605. The clan once foregathered also at Douglas Castle, or "Castle Dangerous," as Sir Walter Scott called it, on their Lanarkshire estate, but in 1937, when...
...taken for granted that Macmillan, who had been his own Foreign Secretary when Selwyn Lloyd officially held the job, had picked a colorless yes man. "The Foreign Secretary," pronounced the late Hugh Gaitskell, "is now a puppet...
...bale of documents with the note, "The Secretary of State will be interested in reading this," Home sent back the bundle with the reply: "A kind thought, but entirely erroneous. Please abstract." From the outset he adopted a show-me attitude to the Russians that was notably tougher than Macmillan's conciliatory approach. When Soviet fighters threatened Allied traffic in the Berlin air corridors not long after he took over, Home fired off an angry note to Moscow, and only then notified the Prime Minister...
...Alec's younger brother, Playwright William Douglas-Home, warns that his "apparent mildness, his good-natured absent-mindedness," even his grin, are deceptive. William also vows that under Home, unlike Macmillan, "there won't be any nepotism." Says he: "Sister Bridget won't be chairing the Tory conference at Blackpool, my bird-watching brother Henry won't be next Secretary of State for Scotland, I will not be sent to the U.N., and Edward, my youngest brother, who spent four years on the Burma railway as a prisoner of war, will not be Minister without Portfolio...
Political Blood. To his father's regret, young Alec Home lost interest in fox hunting after falling off a walking horse the first time he rode to hounds. Home still follows his other boyhood pursuits: bird watching, butterfly collecting, flower arranging, piano playing. Macmillan occasionally visits the Homes for the grouse shooting, and, friends say, was about to tip the gillie ?2 one day, when the thrifty Earl advised him sharply: "Half as much will...