ABSTRACT

Eden, (Robert) Anthony (1897-1977), British Foreign Secretary for twelve years and Prime Minister for twenty-one months: born at Bishop Auckland, Durham, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he specialized in oriental studies and was President of the University Asiatic Society. He served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918, winning the Military Cross. In 1923 he was elected Conservative MP for Warwick and Leamington, his defeated Labour rival being his sister’s mother-inlaw, the Countess of Warwick, once an intimate friend of EDWARD VII. Ed represented the constituency continuously for thirty-four years. He had originally planned to enter the diplomatic service, and foreign affairs remained his absorbing interest. Except for the two years of Labour government (1929-31) he worked with the senior officials in the Foreign Office from July 1926 to February 1938, serving for three years as the Foreign Secretary’s parliamentary private secretary, and for another three as Under-Secretary. In June 1935 he entered the BALDWIN Cabinet as Minister for League of Nations Affairs and became Foreign Secretary six months later. Differences with Neville CHAMBERLAIN over the appeasement of MUSSOLINI’S Italy led Eden to resign on 20 February 1938, both the German and Italian dictators boasting that they had caused his fall. He returned to office as Dominions Secretary on the outbreak of war and was War Minister under Winston CHURCHILL from May to December 1940, making on 14 May the famous radio appeal for ‘local defence volunteers’ against paratroop landings, the force’s name being changed to ‘Home Guard’ six weeks later. Eden re-entered the Cabinet when he succeeded Lord HALIFAX as Foreign Secretary in December 1940 but was soon recognized as Churchill’s ‘heir apparent’. He did not always agree with Churchill’s attitude world affairs, being less enthusiastic about the ‘special relationship’ linking Britain and the United States, and he overrated the value of the smaller European powers in any future world order. Eden headed the British delegation to the San Francisco Conference of 1945, using his long experience of the League of Nations to advantage in creating the fabric of the United Nations Organization. He was Foreign Secretary again from 1951 to 1955, but his health began to suffer, partly from his extraordinarily long hours of work and partly because of a conflict between his sense of loyalty to Churchill and his desire for the succession. When

he became Prime Minister, on 6 April 1955, he continued to take the greatest interest in world affairs, sometimes making false analogies with events twenty years previously and tending to see in NASSER a new Mussolini. Eden’s support for Anglo-French military intervention when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal-although disguised as a ‘police action’ to keep peace in the Middle East-alienated many other governments, including the American, and was roundly condemned in the United Nations. His popularity in Britain, high ever since the early 1930s, slumped and there were ‘Eden must go’ demonstra tions in London (4 November 1956). He had already undergone three operations and, under the strain of the Suez Crisis, his health collapsed entirely in the closing weeks of the year. He resigned on 9 January 1957, MACMILLAN succeeding him in the premiership. Eden, whose statesmanship had been recognized by conferment of the Garter in 1954, was raised to the peerage as Earl of Avon in 1961; but in the last twenty years of his life he took no part in public affairs. Avon, Lord: Memoirs; Full Circle (1960), Facing the Dictators (1962), The Reckoning (1965); R.Rhodes James: Anthony Eden (1986); V.Rothwell: Anthony Eden, a Political Biography (1992); D.Carlton: Anthony Eden; a Biography (1981). Edward VII (1841-1910), King of Great Britain and Ireland, etc., and Emperor of India from 1901 to 1910: born in Buckingham Palace, the second child and first son of Queen VICTORIA and Prince Albert. He was created Prince of Wales twenty-eight days after his birth and educated strictly and intensively under his father’s direction, spending a few largely profitless terms at Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as receiving ten weeks’ military training at Dublin, during which he rose rapidly from Second Lieutenant to Colonel. Youthful indiscretions caused his widowed mother to distrust him from 1861 onwards and he was not allowed to see Cabinet papers until he was over 50. Marriage to Alexandra of Denmark (1844-1925) and his sister’s marriage to the future German Emperor, FREDERICK III, gave him an interest in European affairs, accentuated by his own predilection for continental spas and the gaiety of Paris. As King he used his natural affability to encourage AngloFrench understanding, notably on a state visit to Paris in 1903; but he had less political power than continental statesmen and writers believed, and he never sought the ‘encirclement’ of Germany. Frequently he found his nephew, Kaiser WILLIAM II bumptious and exasperating, but he recognized the Kaiser’s desire for better Anglo-German relations on at least three occasions. Edward VI I enjoy e d a p larity unknown to any English king since the years immediately following Charles II’s restoration in 1660. S.Lee: King Edward VII (2 vols) (1925, 1927); P.Magnus: King Edward the Seventh (1964); C. Hibbert: King Edward VII (1976); G. Battiscombe: Queen Alexandra (1969). Edward VIII (1894-1972), uncrowned King-Emperor for 326 days in 1936: born at White Lodge, Richmond, the first child of the later King GEORGE v and Queen Mary. He was educated privately until the age of 12 when he entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne. In June 1910 he was created Prince of Wales

and, at Caernarfon on 13 July 1911, he became the first Prince solemnly invested since 1616. Two years’ study at Magdalen College, Oxford, were immediately followed by four years’ active service in the army, close to the front line in France, Flanders, Egypt and northern Italy. From August 1919 to October 1925 the Prince of Wales undertook four official overseas tours, travelling mostly in the battlecruiser Renown. He visited, in all, forty-five countries inside and outside the empire and subsequently undertook three semi-official visits to East Africa and South America. No previous member of a royal family had become known to so many people and for fifteen years he basked in the popularity of a youthful-looking bachelor prince. From 1933 the Prince was frequently in the company of Mrs Wallis Simpson, a Baltimore-born divorcee married to a former Grenadier Guards officer. Voluntary censorship kept this affair out of the British newspapers. At the same time Edward disturbed the Foreign Office by illconsidered public remarks which seemed to show sympathy with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Soon after his accession (20 January 1936) he resolved to marry Mrs Simpson when she was divorced from her second husband. Concern over the King’s intention first seriously troubled the Prime Minister, BALDWIN, early in October 1936. Marriage to a divorcee seemed to him inconsistent with the King’s status as ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England; and he found the dominion Prime Ministers no less strongly opposed to having Mrs Simpson as Queen than he was himself. When the affair was made public in England on 3 December 1936, most people agreed with Baldwin. Faced with a choice between giving up Mrs Simpson or the throne, Edward VIII abdicated (1 December 1936). He was succeeded by King GEORGE VI who immediately created Edward Duke of Windsor. Seven months later he married Mrs Simpson. In 1940 he became an unwitting agent of Nazi intrigue after escaping from France to Portugal. He served as Governor of the Bahamas from 1940 to 1945, spending his last years mainly in France. He died suddenly in Paris on 28 May 1972 and was buried at Frogmore, Windsor. Duke of Windsor: A King’s Story (1951); Duchess of Windsor: The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956); P.Ziegler: King Edward VIII (1990); F.Donaldson: Edward VIII (1974); M.Bloch: Wallis and Edward; Intimate Correspondence 1931-37 (1987), The Duke of Windsor’s War (1982). Eichmann, (Karl) Adolf (1906-62), German Austrian Nazi: born at Solingen, Bavaria, but-like HITLER before him-received his main education at Linz, in Upper Austria. Eichmann was a travelling salesman of vacuum cleaners from 1928 until 1932, when he joined the Nazi Party, soon becoming a guard at Dachau concentration camp (1933-4). He spent some months in Palestine on an assignment for the Jewish Activities Department of the German Secret Service. After the Anschluss (German-Austrian union) in 1938 he was sent to Vienna to control Jewish emigration: a year later he discharged similar responsibilities in Prague. By 1941 he was an SS Colonel, a departmental head in the Gestapo, supervising Jewish affairs. For three years from January 1942, Eichmann systematically organized the extinction of unwanted Jewish internees. In the

summer of 1944 he controlled the deportation of Hungary’s large Jewish population, organizing a special detachment of slave labourers from among them, while also attempting to strike cynical commercial bargains-‘goods for blood’— with spokesmen for Hungarian Zionists by which favoured Jews could escape to Palestine. Although interned by US troops in 1945 Eichmann escaped from custody and fled to South America, where by 1950 he was living, in some obscurity, outside Buenos Aires. But in May 1960 Eichmann was unmasked by agents of Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, who brought him secretly from Argentina to Jerusalem. There he was accused by the Israeli government of crimes against the Jewish people and in April 1961 put on trial on fifteen specific charges of causing the death and persecution of millions of Jews. He was hanged on 31 May 1962. G. Hausner: Justice in Jerusalem; the Eichmann Trial (New York, 1966); P.Z. Malkin and H.Stein: Eichmann in My Hands (1990). Eisenhower, Dwight David (1890-1969), American General and President from 1953 to 1961: born at Denison in Texas, spent his boyhood at Abilene, Kansas, passing out of West Point in 1915. Between the wars he was known as a competent staff officer, assistant military adviser to MACARTHUR in the Philippines from 1935 to 1940. In February 1942 he was chief of the war-plans division in Washington, and was then appointed commander of the Allied forces which landed in French North Africa in November 1942, his baptism of fire. Three months later he became Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa, having under his orders such veterans as Harold ALEXANDER, MONTGOMERY and his compatriot, PATTON. Eisenhower’s tact charmed into cooperation every commander whom he encountered except DE GAULLE. His successes in the Mediterranean led to command of the invasion of western Europe in 1944. He personally decided the timing of D-Day. His broad front advance into Germany was criticized by Montgomery, who favoured a narrow concentrated thrust eastwards, but Eisenhower was able to reach the Elbe and establish contact with his Russian allies by mid-April 1945. His greatest achievement was the maintenance of inter-Allied unity, avoiding nationalistic friction. From December 1945 to the summer of 1948 he was Chief of Staff in Washington. After three years as President of Columbia University he returned to Europe in 1951 as Supreme Commander, NATO. On 28 April 1952 he resigned from the army in order to allow his name to go forward as Republican nominee for the presidency. His personal popularity ensured his election, with more popular votes than had ever been cast for any previous presidential candidate, and he took office on 20 January 1953, the first professional-soldier President for seventy-six years. He showed firmness in implementing civil rights, in curbing Senator MCCARTHY, and in securing passage through Congress of social laws. But he tended to rely in foreign affairs on the experienced DULLES, in domestic matters on the former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams (his chief of White House staff until 1958), and in many matters on his Vice-President, Richard NIXON. Eisenhower was at his best in inter-Allied conferences, notably with Winston CHURCHILL and with

MACMILLAN, and at the Geneva summit meeting in July 1955. He was reelected, with an even larger popular vote (35,590,000), in November 1956. In 1960 he encouraged the nomination of Nixon, whose failure to exploit presidential backing irritated him. After the victory of John KENNEDY the exPresident retired to his farm in Pennsylvania, where he died in March 1969. D.D.Eisenhower: Crusade in Europe (1948), Mandate for Change (New York, 1963); S.E.Ambrose: The War Years of General Dwight D.Eisenhower (1971), Eisenhower, 1890-1952 (1984), Eisenhower, Soldier-President (1990). Elizabeth II (1926-), Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and sixteen other realms, Head of the Commonwealth: born in Bruton Street, London, the elder daughter of the Duke of York (later GEORGE VI). Princess Elizabeth served in the Auxiliary Transport Service in 1945. On 20 November 1947 she married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (born in 1921 a Prince of Greece, created Duke of Edinburgh on his marriage). She succeeded to the throne on 6 February 1952. The two outstanding characteristics of her concept of monarchy have been the identification of the sovereign with a multinational and multiracial Commonwealth, a process aided by frequent overseas tours mostly by air, and the reconciliation of a dignified regal tradition with the modern craving for recognizably ordinary behaviour in eminently extraordinary families. From 1963 onwards royal ‘walkabouts’ during official visits and the increasing use of television helped to lower social barriers separating Crown and people. But, as in Queen VICTORIA’S reign, criticism of the monarchy as an expensive anachronism recurred some thirty-five years after Elizabeth II’s accession. It was fed by intrusive journalism, probing the private lives of the younger members of the royal family, and by envy of apparent tax privileges. Although the sovereign is not legally bound to pay income tax, in November 1992 the Queen offered to pay tax on a voluntary basis from the following year, an arrangement settled by a parliamentary ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, presented in the Commons on 11 February 1993. Outside the United Kingdom, republican sentiment increased in Australia and Canada, particular attention being given to the limitations of an ‘absentee’ Head of State. Nevertheless the Queen’s sense of inherited duty never wavered. She regularly attended biannual meetings of Commonwealth heads of government, although never as an active participant in political discussions. E.Longford: Elizabeth R. (1983); P Ziegler: Crown and People (1978). Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), pioneer communist: born at Barmen in Germany, the son of a textile manufacturer. As a young man he was a radical poet rather than a socialist. He became Manchester agent of his father’s business in 1842 and three years later compiled, largely from official commissions of inquiry, his remarkable Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (a German work, only translated into English three years before the author’s death). Engels first met Karl MARX in Paris in the autumn of 1844, their collaboration lasting for thirty-nine years. Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1847 but it was virtually rewritten by Marx before publication in London in the

last week of February 1848. He personally participated in the Badenese revolutionary movement later that year, but thereafter he settled in Manchester, enjoying a considerable private income in his later years. Most of his money was used to support Marx and his family. Engels, too, provided Marx with the precise facts on which he could build his theories of capitalism in decline. His later years were spent mainly in London, editing Marx’s final volume of Das Kapital, a task completed a year before his own death. G.Mayer: Fried rich Engels (abridged translation, ed. R.H.S.Crossman, 1935); G.Carlton: Friedrich Engels, the Shadow Prophet (1965); G.Lichtheim: Marxism (rev. edn 1964). Enver (1881-1922), Turkish soldier and dominant politician from 1910 to 1915: born at Apana, commissioned in the Ottoman Army in 1900, receiving specialized military training in Germany. While stationed in Salonika with the Third Army he joined the Ottoman Freedom Society, a revolutionary body opposed to the rule of Sultan ABDUL HAMID II . July 1908, fearing arrest, Enver disobeyed orders to return to Constantinople for ‘promotion’, leading a mutiny in the hills behind Salonika. Within days the mutiny spread throughout the garrison in the city and prompted similar acts of defiance by ‘Young Turk’ officers in Adrianople and Damascus, threatening revolution at the heart of the empire as well. The Sultan capitulated to the ‘Young Turk’ demands. Enver, spokesman for the extreme nationalist and anti-liberal officers’ wing of the ‘Young Turk’ movement, was sent to Berlin as military attaché in 1909-10. He returned to Constantinople an ardent champion of Germano-Turkish military collaboration. Active service against Italy in Libya in 1911 and in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 emphasized to Enver Turkey’s need of modern equipment. As Minister of War in 1914, he encouraged the establishment in Turkey of a powerful German military mission and headed a pro-war party. The sudden naval attack on Odessa, on 28 October 1914, appears to have been concerted between the German military and naval missions in Constantinople and Enver himself. The attack led to Russian, British and French declarations of war against Turkey, with Enver personally assuming field command for an advance into the Caucasus in the hopes of establishing a ‘Pan Turania’. Obsession with this objective, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, blinded Enver to Turkey’s weakness on other fronts. After the Turks sued for peace in 1918, Enver continued to lead armed groups against the Bolsheviks in Turkestan. He was killed in a cavalry skirmish with Soviet forces early in 1922. F.Ahmad: The Young Turks (Oxford, 1969); A.Palmer: The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (1992). Erhard, Ludwig (1897-1977), Chancellor of the Federal German Republic from 1963 to 1966: born at Fürth, becoming a professional economist in the 1920s and serving as Professor of Economics at Munich University from 1945 to 1949. As Dr Erhard had specialized in the study of boom and slump under the Weimar Republic, his expert advice was of considerable assistance to the Bavarians in their attempts to reconstruct the industrial system destroyed by war and the collapse of a unified Germany. In 1948 he was appointed Chairman of the

Economic Executive Council which functioned throughout the British and American zones of occupation. A year later he was elected to the newly formed Bundestag as a Christian Democrat, and was made Minister of Economic Affairs by ADENAUER in his first government (September 1949). This post Dr Erhard held continuously for fourteen years, directing the ‘economic miracle’ which gave West Germany the soundest prosperity the region has ever known. From 1957 to 1963 he was Deputy Chancellor to Adenauer, a leader who, at times, exasperated Erhard by failing to take all his colleagues into his confidence. Erhard at last became Chancellor on Adenauer’s retirement in October 1963. In his chancellorship he was hampered by his predecessor’s continued influence within the party and by his own inability to maintain equable relations with President DE GAULLE. Friction within the Common Market convinced Erhard of an imminent economic recession and he therefore proposed to control the economy by tax increases in the late summer of 1966. Despite his prestige as an economist, he failed to win support from his ministers in this policy and resigned, retiring into private life (November 1966). D.L.Bark and D.R.Gress: History of West Germany, 1945-1988 (2 vols) (Oxford, 1989); R.Hiscocks: Germany Revived (1966). Evatt, Herbert Vere (1894-1965), Australian Minister of External Affairs from 1941 to 1949: born in East Maitland, South Australia, but spent all his adult life in New South Wales. He gained a doctorate from Sydney University and practised as a lawyer, specializing in trade union matters. Throughout the 1930s he was a High Court Justice but he entered the Canberra Parliament in 1940 and was appointed Minister of External Affairs by the Labour government of John Curtin (1885-1945) in October 1941. Dr Evatt acquired an international reputation for his statesmanship, partly through his representation of Australia at successive conferences in Britain in 1942-3, but even more because of his leadership of the smaller powers at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. He thus had considerable influence on the form of the United Nations, successfully proposing twenty-six detailed amendments to the UN Charter so as to counteract the dominance of the permanent members of the Security Council. His eloquent protests at the veto powers of permanent members proved unavailing. As Minister of External Affairs under CHIFLEY, Evatt strengthened Australian ties with the United States, to some extent at the expense of the old imperial connection with the ‘home country’. The victory of MENZIES in December 1949 forced Evatt into opposition. He was leader of the Australian Labour Party from 1951 to 1960 but was hampered by an active pressure group of Roman Catholic party members from Victoria who thought him ‘soft’ on the menace of communism largely because he appeared as defending counsel for the leaders of the Communist Party when the Menzies government sought to proscribe Marxist bodies in 1950-1. After nine years in opposition Evatt retired from politics in 1960, returning to the bench as Chief Justice of New South Wales for two years. P.Crockett: Evatt, a Life (1993); K. Buckley, B.Dale and W.Reynolds: Doc Evatt (Melbourne, 1994).