Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. Nicknamed "Supermac", he was known for his pragmatism, wit, and unflappability.
Macmillan was seriously injured as an infantry officer during the First World War. He suffered pain and partial immobility for the rest of his life. After the war he joined his family book-publishing business, then entered Parliament at the 1924 general election for Stockton-on-Tees. Losing his seat in 1929, he regained it in 1931, soon after which he spoke out against the high rate of unemployment in Stockton. He opposed the appeasement of Germany practised by the Conservative government. He rose to high office during the Second World War as a protégé of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the 1950s Macmillan served as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Anthony Eden.
When Eden resigned in 1957 following the Suez Crisis, Macmillan succeeded him as prime minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. He was a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition and supported the post-war consensus. He supported the welfare state and the necessity of a mixed economy with some nationalised industries and strong trade unions. He championed a Keynesian strategy of deficit spending to maintain demand and pursuit of corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. Benefiting from favourable international conditions, he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high—if uneven—growth. In his speech of July 1957 he told the nation it had "never had it so good", but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s. He led the Conservatives to success in 1959 with an increased majority.
In international affairs, Macmillan worked to rebuild the Special Relationship with the United States from the wreckage of the 1956 Suez Crisis (of which he had been one of the architects), and facilitated the decolonisation of Africa. Reconfiguring the nation's defences to meet the realities of the nuclear age, he ended National Service, strengthened the nuclear forces by acquiring Polaris, and pioneered the Nuclear Test Ban with the United States and the Soviet Union. After the Skybolt Crisis undermined the Anglo-American strategic relationship, he sought a more active role for Britain in Europe, but his unwillingness to disclose United States nuclear secrets to France contributed to a French veto of the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community and independent French acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1960. Near the end of his premiership, his government was rocked by the Vassall Tribunal and the Profumo affair, which to cultural conservatives and supporters of opposing parties alike seemed to symbolise the moral decay of the British establishment. Following his resignation, Macmillan lived out a long retirement as an elder statesman, being an active member of the House of Lords in his final years. He died in December 1986 at the age of 92.
Maurice Harold Macmillan was born on 10 February 1894 at 52 Cadogan Place in Belgravia, London, to Maurice Crawford Macmillan, a publisher, and the former Helen (Nellie) Artie Tarleton Belles, an artist and socialite from Spencer, Indiana. He had two brothers, Daniel, eight years his senior, and Arthur, four years his senior. His paternal grandfather, Daniel MacMillan, who founded Macmillan Publishers, was the son of a Scottish crofter from the Isle of Arran. Macmillan considered himself a Scot.
Education and early political views
Macmillan received an intensive early education, closely guided by his American mother. He learned French at home every morning from a succession of nursery maids, and exercised daily at Mr Macpherson's Gymnasium and Dancing Academy, around the corner from the family home. From the age of six or seven he received introductory lessons in classical Latin and Greek at Mr Gladstone's day school, close by in Sloane Square.
Macmillan attended Summer Fields School, Oxford (1903–06). He was Third Scholar at Eton College, but his time there (1906–10) was blighted by recurrent illness, starting with a near-fatal attack of pneumonia in his first half (term); he missed his final year after being taken ill, and was taught at home by private tutors (1910–11), notably Ronald Knox, who did much to instil his High Church Anglicanism. He won an exhibition (scholarship) to Balliol College, Oxford.
In his youth, he was an admirer of the policies and leadership of a succession of Liberal prime ministers, starting with Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who came to power when Macmillan was 11 years old and H. H. Asquith, whom he later described as having "intellectual sincerity and moral nobility", and particularly of Asquith's successor, David Lloyd George, whom he regarded as a "man of action", likely to accomplish his goals.
Macmillan went up to Balliol College in 1912, where he joined many political societies. His political opinions at this stage were an eclectic mix of moderate conservatism, moderate liberalism and Fabian socialism. He read avidly about Benjamin Disraeli, but was also particularly impressed by a speech by Lloyd George at the Oxford Union Society in 1913, where he had become a member. Macmillan was a protégé of the president of the Union Society Walter Monckton, later a Cabinet colleague; as such, he became secretary then junior treasurer (elected unopposed in March 1914, then an unusual occurrence) of the Union, and would in his biographers' view "almost certainly" have been president had the war not intervened. He obtained a First in Honour Moderations, informally known as 'Mods' (consisting of Latin and Greek, the first half of the four-year Oxford Literae Humaniores course, informally known as "Greats"), in 1914. With his final exams over two years away, he enjoyed an idyllic Trinity term at Oxford, just before the outbreak of the First World War.
Volunteering as soon as war was declared, Macmillan was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps on 19 November 1914. Promoted to lieutenant on 30 January 1915, he soon transferred to the Grenadier Guards. He fought on the front lines in France, where the casualty rate was high, including the probability of an "early violent death". He served with distinction and was wounded on three occasions. Shot in the right hand and receiving a glancing bullet wound to the head in the Battle of Loos in September 1915, Macmillan was sent to Lennox Gardens in Chelsea for hospital treatment, then joined a reserve battalion at Chelsea Barracks from January to March 1916, until his hand had healed. He then returned to the front lines in France. Leading an advance platoon in the Battle of Flers–Courcelette (part of the Battle of the Somme) in September 1916, he was severely wounded, and lay for over twelve hours in a shell hole, sometimes feigning death when Germans passed, and reading Aeschylus in the original Greek. Raymond Asquith, eldest son of the prime minister, was a brother officer in Macmillan's regiment and was killed that month.
Macmillan spent the final two years of the war in King Edward VII's Hospital in Grosvenor Gardens undergoing a series of operations. He was still on crutches at the Armistice of 11 November 1918. His hip wound took four years to heal completely, and he was left with a slight shuffle to his walk and a limp grip in his right hand from his previous wound, which affected his handwriting.
Macmillan saw himself as both a "gownsman" and a "swordsman" and would later display open contempt for other politicians (e.g. Rab Butler, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson) who had not seen military service in either World War.
Of the scholars and exhibitioners of his year, only he and one other survived the war. As a result, he refused to return to Oxford to complete his degree, saying the university would never be the same; in later years he joked that he had been "sent down by the Kaiser".