Word: macmillan
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...proud that his grandfather was a Scottish crofter, or tenant farmer (he keeps a picture of the croft on his desk). In 1843 grandfather left his farm on the barren Isle of Arran and walked to London, there founded the famed publishing house, Macmillan & Co. Ltd. Macmillan's mother was an American girl, Helen Belles, from Spencer, Ind.,* who met his father when she, recently widowed, had gone to Paris to study singing and he to study music. Young Harold won scholarships to Eton and Oxford, where he was secretary of the Oxford Union and hailed by the undergraduate...
Called from his studies by World War I, Macmillan served gallantly in the Grenadier Guards, was wounded three times. After the war he served long enough as aide to the Duke of Devonshire, then Canada's Governor General, to meet and marry his daughter. Lady Dorothy Cavendish. Through his marriage, Macmillan acquired links with one of the few remaining great families which (as left-wing politicians like to say) "control the Tory Party." His wife's brother married a sister of Lord Salisbury, a member of the great Cecil family who have been advisers and ministers to Britain...
Elected to Parliament in 1924 from the tough shipyard and foundry constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, Macmillan was deeply moved by the suffering that the Depression brought to his constituents, established "dole schools" which he personally financed, to teach unemployed workers useful crafts. In Parliament he acidly attacked the inaction of his own Conservative Party, called it a "party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters." In 1936 he even crossed the aisle to vote with Labor in censuring the government's inaction in depressed areas. The task of his generation, he cried, was "to conquer poverty...
When Churchill came to power in 1940, he called Macmillan to serve in the Ministry of Supply. In 1942 Churchill sent him to North Africa as British political representative at the Allied headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower. There, in two years of close cooperation, they became "Mac" and "Ike." Macmillan, who was taught French by his mother before he spoke English, was given a large measure of credit for patching up the truce between the feuding French Generals Giraud and De Gaulle. He moved on to head the Allied Control Commission in Italy, where he conducted the negotiations with Italy...
...Macmillan returned to London bedecked with honors and praise, only to see the Conservatives go down to defeat. In the debacle he lost his own Stockton seat, but soon returned to Parliament from the safe constituency of Bromley, near London. In opposition, he turned his acid tongue on the Socialists ("The brave new world has turned into nothing but fish and Cripps"), but was gratified to find himself no longer a rebel in his own party-it now agreed with him. Laborites detested his tart, hectoring manner. The Laborite Daily Herald snapped: "He merely gibes and sneers and ogles...