Remembering 'Super Mac' 20 Years On
It's the 20th anniversary on December 29 of the death of former Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan who was born in Brixton in 1894. Many Lambeth residents associate Sir John Major with Brixton in the ranks of our former prime ministers, but 'Super Mac' as he was labelled by the cartoonist 'Vicky' was by common consent the greater of the two.
Like the current leader of the Conservative Party, Macmillan went to Eton followed by Balliol College, Oxford, but also served in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War and was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a foxhole with a bullet in his pelvis reading the Greek writer Aeschylus in the original language.
Coming to power after the Suez Crisis, Macmillan presided over a period of prosperity in the late 1950s best paraphrased as 'You've never had it so good,' although his exact words were "let me be frank about it - most of our people never had it so good." He was witty and famously unflappable. Responding to a remark by the Labour Leader Harold Wilson about not having any boots in which to go to school, Macmillan retorted, "If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school, it is because he was too big for them." When asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, Macmillan replied, "Events, my dear boy, events." Asked by President Kennedy whether it was true that his wife [Lady Dorothy] liked a drink or two, Macmillan replied, "If you think she's bad, you should have known her mother."
Macmillan retired from politics in 1964 and it was a decade later when he accepted a peerage as Earl of Stockton. A year before his death at the age of 92, Macmillan made a memorable speech at a dinner held by the Tory Reform Group (TRG) in which he appeared to criticise the Thatcher government's privatisation policy. "First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go." Profitable parts of the steel industry, and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom. "They were like the two Rembrandts still left." A few days later, he went to the Lords and explained that he was not against privatisation, but critical of the way the proceeds had been used as 'revenue'. Click here to hear the speech in full on the TRG weblog.
But like an old fox, Macmillan was wily and not afraid to stir controversy. In the Lords, he praised the miners then on strike, asserting that they had "beaten the Kaiser's Army" and "beaten Hitler's Army." In the last month of his life, he observed of his first parliamentary constituency: "Sixty three years ago...the unemployment rate in Stockton-on-Tees was then 29 per cent. Last November [1986] the unemployment rate [there] is 28 per cent. A rather sad end to one's life."
Like the current leader of the Conservative Party, Macmillan went to Eton followed by Balliol College, Oxford, but also served in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War and was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a foxhole with a bullet in his pelvis reading the Greek writer Aeschylus in the original language.
Coming to power after the Suez Crisis, Macmillan presided over a period of prosperity in the late 1950s best paraphrased as 'You've never had it so good,' although his exact words were "let me be frank about it - most of our people never had it so good." He was witty and famously unflappable. Responding to a remark by the Labour Leader Harold Wilson about not having any boots in which to go to school, Macmillan retorted, "If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school, it is because he was too big for them." When asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, Macmillan replied, "Events, my dear boy, events." Asked by President Kennedy whether it was true that his wife [Lady Dorothy] liked a drink or two, Macmillan replied, "If you think she's bad, you should have known her mother."
Macmillan retired from politics in 1964 and it was a decade later when he accepted a peerage as Earl of Stockton. A year before his death at the age of 92, Macmillan made a memorable speech at a dinner held by the Tory Reform Group (TRG) in which he appeared to criticise the Thatcher government's privatisation policy. "First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go." Profitable parts of the steel industry, and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom. "They were like the two Rembrandts still left." A few days later, he went to the Lords and explained that he was not against privatisation, but critical of the way the proceeds had been used as 'revenue'. Click here to hear the speech in full on the TRG weblog.
But like an old fox, Macmillan was wily and not afraid to stir controversy. In the Lords, he praised the miners then on strike, asserting that they had "beaten the Kaiser's Army" and "beaten Hitler's Army." In the last month of his life, he observed of his first parliamentary constituency: "Sixty three years ago...the unemployment rate in Stockton-on-Tees was then 29 per cent. Last November [1986] the unemployment rate [there] is 28 per cent. A rather sad end to one's life."
Labels: Harold Macmillan
posted by Cllr John Whelan on Saturday, December 23, 2006
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