133 Facts About Leo Amery

Leo Amery was Secretary of State for the Colonies, opposed the National Government of the 1930s and served as Secretary of State for India during the Second World War.

Leo Amery was a prolific writer whose output included a multi-volume history of the Second Boer War and several volumes of memoirs and diaries.

Leo Amery was born in Gorakhpur, British India, to an English father and a mother of Hungarian Jewish descent.

Leo Amery's father was Charles Frederick Amery, of Lustleigh, Devon, an officer in the Indian Forestry Commission.

Leo Amery represented Harrow at gymnastics and held the top position in examinations for a number of years; he won prizes and scholarships.

Winston Churchill was born on December 1874 and was junior to him at Harrow, and on one occasion mistook Leo Amery, who was very short in stature, for a younger boy and pushed him into Ducker, the school outdoor swimming pool.

Leo Amery was elected a fellow of All Souls College.

Leo Amery could speak Hindi at the age of three years; Amery was born in India and would naturally have acquired the language of his ayah.

Leo Amery was the only correspondent to visit Boer forces and was nearly captured with Churchill.

The Boer War had exposed deficiencies in the British Army and in 1903, Leo Amery wrote The Problem of the Army and advocated its reorganisation.

Leo Amery described it as "a theoretical blast of economic heresy" because he argued that the total volume of British trade was less important than the question of whether British trade was making up for the nation's lack of raw materials and food by exporting its surplus manufactured goods, shipping, and financial acumen.

Leo Amery was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers, set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Leo Amery turned down the chance to be editor of The Observer in 1908 and of The Times in 1912 to concentrate on politics.

In 1911 Leo Amery stood in the 1911 Birmingham South by-election again as a Liberal Unionist, this time unopposed and became a Member of Parliament.

One reason that Leo Amery agreed to stand there under the Liberal Unionist label was that he had been a long-time political admirer of Joseph Chamberlain and was an ardent supporter of tariff reform and imperial federation.

Leo Amery was a noted sportsman, especially famous as a mountaineer.

Leo Amery continued to climb well into his sixties, especially in the Swiss Alps but in Bavaria, Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy and the Canadian Rockies, where Mount Amery is named after him.

Leo Amery was a member of the Alpine Club and of the Athenaeum and Carlton Clubs.

Leo Amery was a Senior Knight Vice President of the Knights of the Round Table.

On 16 November 1910, Leo Amery married Florence Greenwood, daughter of the Canadian barrister John Hamar Greenwood and younger sister of Hamar Greenwood, 1st Viscount Greenwood.

Later, working for the war cabinet secretariat in Lloyd George's coalition government, Leo Amery was vested with parliamentary under-secretary like powers, and at the request of Lord Milner, he redrafted the Balfour Declaration.

Leo Amery was greatly concerned with questions of grand strategy, and championed the idea of an "all-red route" to India, calling for Britain to control the sea-lanes to India not only via the Mediterranean-Suez Canal-Red Sea route, but around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and for Britain to control the main land routes to India in the Middle East as well.

Leo Amery regarded Britain's alliance with Imperial Russia as only temporary, and expected the traditional Anglo-Russian rivalry to resume after the war.

However, the nation that Leo Amery regarded as the most dangerous to the British Empire was Germany because the Reich had the world's second largest economy and its policy of Weltpolitik was aimed at having Germany replace Britain as the world's dominant power.

Leo Amery argued that German attempts to dominate Europe along with the Middle East were intended to serve as the basis to make the Reich the world's number one power.

Leo Amery argued that the Ottoman Empire had fallen into the German sphere of influence, and German efforts to push the influence of the Reich to the Persian Gulf were a major threat.

Leo Amery argued that under no circumstances should Britain and its allies return any of the German colonies in Africa and in the Pacific that had been captured by the Allies, arguing that the German colonial empire would allow the Reich to establish submarine bases that would threaten British shipping in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.

Leo Amery warned that he foresaw the day when technological advances would allow submarines greater range, which led him to argue that a "mesh" of land, air, and naval bases would need to be established and led him to call for British annexation of German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, the German colonies in the Pacific Ocean along with taking Mesopotamia and Palestine from the Ottoman Empire.

Leo Amery argued that with the Ottoman Empire having fallen into the German sphere of influence "and with Germany installed at the gates of Egypt on one side and in East Africa on the other, the Prussian instinct would never rest till the two were linked together, and the great railroad empire became continuous from Hamburg to Lake Nyasa".

In Europe, Leo Amery argued that Britain's chief aim was the liberation of Belgium.

Leo Amery took it for granted that both Germany and the Ottoman Empire would continue as major powers after the war, and advocated Britain seizing the Middle East in order to provide the best basis for maintaining British power in Asia after the war.

Leo Amery encouraged Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the formation of the Jewish Legion for the British Army in Palestine.

The Bolshevik coup in Russia in November 1917 followed by the decision by Vladimir Lenin to sign an armistice with Germany in December 1917 caused profound alarm for Leo Amery who argued that the new regime in Russia threatened to change the course of the war as Germany could now redeploy millions of soldiers from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, and allowed Germany the opportunity to dominate the Middle East via its proxy of the Ottoman Empire.

Leo Amery tended to be more concerned about the fate of the Middle East, writing that the Western front was a "sideshow" compared to the Near East.

Leo Amery expressed surprise that the Young Turk regime had not done more to achieve its pan-Turkish ambitions of uniting all the Turkic peoples into the Ottoman Empire, which he attributed to the backwardness of the Ottoman Empire.

Leo Amery argued that now that Russia was defeated Britain should fund and arm whatever Armenians had survived the Armenian genocide, along with Armenians who had served in the Imperial Russian Army, whom Leo Amery believed would fight on as it was their only hope of survival.

Leo Amery envisioned British officers taking command of the proposed Armenian army.

Leo Amery was an "easterner" on questions of grand strategy, believing that the war was to be won in the Middle East and was opposed to "westerners" such as William Robertson and Douglas Haig who believed that the war would be won on the Western Front.

Leo Amery argued in late 1917-early 1918 that the Caucasus should be the prime British concern and that Britain needed to send more forces to Palestine and Mesopotamia to create an offensive line running from Alexandretta to the Caucasus "in order to drive the Turks out of the Arab and Armenian regions and bring about a collapse of their forces and a demand for peace".

Besides the Middle East, Leo Amery was deeply concerned about Russia, writing that if the Bolsheviks took control of Odessa and the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, it would allow Germany all of the immense resources of Ukraine, and hence undercut the British blockade of Germany.

Leo Amery was opposed to the Constitution of the League of Nations because he believed that the world was not equal and so the League, which granted all states equal voting rights, was absurd.

Leo Amery instead believed that the world was tending towards larger and larger states that made up a balanced world of inherently stable units.

Leo Amery contrasted that idea with what he called US President Woodrow Wilson's "facile slogan of self-determination".

Leo Amery was First Lord of the Admiralty under Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin.

Leo Amery defended the financing of the Singapore Naval Base against both Liberal and Labour attacks.

Leo Amery argued that Sydney would serve as a secondary base, but could not serve as the main base as it was too far away from Southeast Asia.

Leo Amery convinced Bruce that the Singapore Strategy would serve to protect Australia and he dropped the demand for a naval base at Sydney.

Leo Amery was Colonial Secretary in Baldwin's second government from 1924 to 1929.

Leo Amery expanded the role of the Commercial Adviser into the Economic and Financial Advisership under Sir George Schuster.

Leo Amery created the post of Chief Medical Adviser, under Sir Thomas Stanton, and a range of advisers on education, agriculture, a Veterinary Adviser, and a Fisheries Adviser.

In effect, Leo Amery was saying that the East African Dominion would be run in the interests of the British settlers in East Africa, especially in Kenya which had attracted a considerable number of such settlers.

Tanganyika had attracted a number of German settlers when it had been the colony of German East Africa, and Leo Amery wanted to join link Tanganyika to Kenya both to give the proposed Dominion a larger white population and for economic reasons.

Uganda had not attracted many white settlers, but Leo Amery wanted to include Uganda in the proposed Dominion as its rich soil made it highly productive for agriculture.

Leo Amery insisted that Britain did own Tanganyika, and could with it as it pleased, and that the League of Nations mandate only imposed certain standards on Britain.

Leo Amery's speech was vigorously rebutted by Heinrich Schnee, the last governor of German East Africa, who in an article in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on 19 June 1926 pointed out that under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany had transferred sovereignty over German East Africa to the League of Nations, appointed Britain as the administering power over what was now called Tanganyika.

In 1927, Leo Amery toured Africa and concluded that Southern Rhodesia would only join South Africa on its own terms to preserve its "British character".

Leo Amery envisioned a future where the British settlers in Southern Rhodesia would build "an independent Central South African Dominion to check and counterbalance the parochial South African Union".

Leo Amery carried out a policy of "constructive Zionism": building infrastructure such as paved roads, public sanitation and a hydroelectric grid, intended to encourage Jewish immigration.

In Malta Leo Amery's name became associated with the Royal Commission which recommended self-government for the Maltese following the 1919 riots in which four locals and one servicemen were killed.

Leo Amery was not invited to join the National Government formed in 1931.

Leo Amery remained in Parliament but joined the boards of several prominent corporations.

Leo Amery spent a lot of time in Germany during the 1930s in connection with his work.

Leo Amery was not allowed to send his director's fees out of the country so he took his family on holiday in the Bavarian Alps.

Leo Amery had a lengthy meeting with Hitler on at least one occasion, and he met at length with Czech leader Edvard Benes, Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg and Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

Leo Amery was a driving force behind the creation of the Army League, a pressure group designed to keep the needs of the British Army before the public.

On 5 February 1936, Leo Amery was involved in a heated debate on the floor of the House of Commons with the former prime minister David Lloyd George who suggested that Britain and the Dominions return the former German colonies, saying that it was crucial for the peace of the world.

Leo Amery attacked Lloyd George, saying that the Reich lost its colonies as a result of a war that it had caused in 1914, and if Germany needed an "economic zone" to dominate, it should look to the "great markets of Central Europe", not Africa.

Leo Amery's statements indicated that he was open to Germany having Eastern Europe in its economic zone of influence.

At a conference of the Conservative and Unionist Party's local constituency associations in June 1936, Leo Amery spoke very strongly against returning any of the German colonies currently held as League of Nations mandates by Great Britain or the Dominions.

Leo Amery conceded that the present was an age of "economic nationalism" with nations imposing high tariffs on each other, and that Hitler's claim that the global trade war was hurting the German economy was correct.

Leo Amery ended by writing that the system of Imperial preference tariffs, which had turned the British empire into one economic unit, was what allowed Britain to be a great power, and it was up to Hitler to negotiate a similar system to the Imperial preference tariffs with the states of Eastern Europe.

Leo Amery advocated a higher level of expenditure, but a reappraisal of priorities through the creation of a top-level cabinet position to develop overall defence strategy so that the increased expenditures could be spent wisely.

Leo Amery thought that either he or Churchill should be given the post.

Leo Amery differed from Churchill in hoping throughout the 1930s to foster an alliance with fascist Italy to counter the rising strength of Nazi Germany.

Leo Amery thus favoured appeasing Italy by tacitly conceding its claims to Ethiopia.

Leo Amery later stated that feelings against the Soviet Union within the Conservative Party were running high in 1936 after the Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, but by 1937 the Soviet Union "hardly came into the picture" as the passions caused by Spain had cooled.

Leo Amery favoured Churchill's approach of creating a "grand alliance" of the Soviet Union, France and Britain to deter Germany from invading Czechoslovakia.

Leo Amery wrote in his diary that the main theme of the meetings was the importance of "bringing Russia into the picture" and that he was "all for pressing the government on this".

Leo Amery himself found advocating an alliance with the Soviet Union distasteful as he never concealed his dislike of the Communist regime, but felt in that 1938 it was the lesser evil.

However, Leo Amery admitted that as a Conservative MP it was difficult to be a rebel against Chamberlain, a man who commanded the loyalty and respect of most of the Conservative MPs, writing that Churchill "wished for some public declaration by us, as Conservatives, that we stood for co-operation with Russia, to which I strongly objected".

Leo Amery stated he could not make this declaration as it would be the effective end of his political career by rebelling against a popular leader in favour of an alliance with a state he hated.

Leo Amery further noted that it was widely understood by military experts that the purge of senior officers in the Yezhovschina had wrecked the Red Army at least for the moment and that the Soviet Union had no border with Czechoslovakia, writing that if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia "Russia could not, indeed, have sent direct aid to Czechoslovakia, even by air, without Romanian or Hungarian consent".

When Chamberlain announced his flight to Munich to the cheers of the House, Leo Amery was one of only four members who remained seated.

In 1939, Leo Amery joined Churchill, Lloyd George, Harold Macmillan, Brendan Bracken, Victor Cazalet and most of the Labour Party in voting against the White Paper introduced by the Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald that sharply limited Jewish immigration to the Palestine Mandate.

Leo Amery is famous for two moments of high drama in the House of Commons early in the Second World War.

Leo Amery was greatly angered, and Chamberlain was felt by many present to be out of touch with the temper of the British people.

Leo Amery himself noted in his diary that he believed that his speech was one of his best received in the House and that he had made a difference to the outcome of the debate.

Leo Amery was disappointed not to be made a member of the small War Cabinet, but he was determined to do all he could in the position he was offered.

Leo Amery was continually frustrated by Churchill's intransigence, and in his memoirs, he recorded that Churchill knew "as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies".

Leo Amery was the only India Secretary to have been born in India and he was fluent in Sanskrit, giving him a closer commitment to India than previous India Secretaries.

Leo Amery sent a message to Dorman-Smith ordering that U Saw was to be arrested immediately upon his return to Burma for his "treacherous act".

On 2 February 1942, Leo Amery told the cabinet that the recent British defeats in Asia had shattered the prestige of the British Raj at a time when Britain needed the support of the Indians the most, and that the government would have to change its policy and engage with Indian public opinion to win their support for the war.

Leo Amery seemed to regard the Cripps mission as only useful for its effect on American public opinion as he wrote to Linlithgow in March 1942 that American public opinion would be impressed by "us sending out someone who has always been an extreme Left-Winger and in close touch with Nehru".

Leo Amery believed that the Cripps would fail as the British offer of independence for India was tied to a partition of India, a condition that both he and Churchill knew would be rejected by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress Party who wanted independence without partition.

The Congress Party was deeply distrustful of the British and were angry about Leo Amery having apparently given the Muslim League the right to create Pakistan as part of the deal.

Linlithgow in a report to Leo Amery called the Quit India movement "the most serious [uprising] since that of 1857".

Linlithgow complained that the protests were being well covered by the American media and wrote to Leo Amery asking him "to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists".

Churchill expressed much anger at the Quit India movement, and Leo Amery complained about Churchill's "Nazi-like" attitude towards Indians, especially Hindus, along with a belief that Churchill was wrong in believing that 300 million Indians supported the Raj.

Leo Amery did not mention that being flogged with "light rattan canes" was immensely painful, but he argued that mass floggings were necessary as there were far more "hooligans" taking part in the Quit India protests than were prisons for them.

Leo Amery reported to the cabinet on 24 August 1942 that "the soldiers regard Congress as contemptible politicians".

Leo Amery stated that within the Indian Army the general feeling was that the prime danger facing India was a Japanese invasion, and most of the Indian soldiers felt that the timing of the Quit India movement was very wrong.

In January 1943, Leo Amery reported to the cabinet that food shortages were becoming a major problem in India.

When Linlithgow decided to retire as Viceroy in 1943, Leo Amery recommended to Churchill that he appoint either the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden or the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee as the next Viceroy.

Leo Amery concluded that since the "very best men" such as Eden and Attlee could not be spared to serve as Viceroy, "as a last resort, I have already offered you myself".

Leo Amery tended to support Wavell's efforts to reach a political solution and consistently spoke in defence of Wavell in cabinet meetings.

Leo Amery wrote in his diary that at a cabinet meeting on 4 August 1943 he made the case for the grain shipments "in as strong terms as I could", but was overruled by the cabinet.

Leo Amery opposed holding an inquiry for the 1943 Bengal famine, fearing that the political consequences could be "disastrous".

Unlike Churchill who had a marked dislike of Gandhi and the Congress Party and favoured Jinnah and the Muslim League, Leo Amery had a strong dislike of Jinnah, to whom he referred as "the future emperor of Pakistan", charging that Jinnah was championing the idea of partition of India because creating Pakistan was the only way he ever hope to attain power, as the Muslim League as suggested by its name represented only Muslims, and thus could not hope to win an Indian general election.

Leo Amery wrote that the concept of Pakistan was "essentially a negation" that would cause a bloodbath if the idea of partition of India was actually executed.

Likewise, Leo Amery was opposed to Churchill's offer of Dominion status for India being tied to Dominion status for the all 565 Princely States, which he called "princestan" and thought was unrealistic as most of the princely states were extremely small, being enclaves the size of a municipal borough.

Leo Amery told the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann about the "monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them".

Leo Amery expressed much sympathy writing that both he and Cripps were in favour of keeping the commitments made by the latter in 1942 while Churchill was not.

Leo Amery became increasing frustrated with what he regarded as Churchill's obstinate and unrealistic views on India.

Leo Amery felt that it was impossible for a liberal democratic state to repress the demands for independence from the better part of 400 million people without betraying its values, and that the best that could done in India was to make a deal with the moderate Indian nationalists for support for the British war effort in exchange for Dominion status after the war.

Leo Amery often wrote in his diary that Churchill's belief that no political solution was possible nor desirable and that the Indians could simply be repressed into being docile subjects of the Raj was as impractical as it was amoral.

The next day, Churchill drafted a reply to Gandhi's offer that demanded radical changes to the status of the untouchables as a precondition, which Leo Amery criticised as negotiating in bad faith, noting that Churchill had never been much interested in improving the conditions of the untouchables before, and his demand about the untouchables was a wedge issue intended to divide the higher caste Hindus from the untouchables.

At the 1945 general election, Leo Amery lost his seat to Labour's Percy Shurmer.

Leo Amery was offered a peerage but declined it, because it might, upon his death, have cut short his son Julian's political career in the House of Commons.

In February 1947, after Attlee announced that India would be granted independence and partitioned into the new nations of India and Pakistan, Leo Amery wrote a letter to the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, promising that he would write a lengthy letter to The Times "to steady Conservative opinion here in case Winston proved factious".

In retirement, Leo Amery published a three-volume autobiography My Political Life.

Leo Amery strongly supported the evolution of the dominions into independent nations bound to Britain by ties of kinship, trade, defence and a common pride in the Empire.

Leo Amery supported the gradual evolution of the colonies, particularly India, to the same status, unlike Churchill, a free trader, who was less interested in the Empire as such and more in Britain itself as a great power.

Leo Amery felt that Britain itself was too weak to maintain its great power position.

Leo Amery was very active in imperial affairs during the 1920s and 1930s.

Leo Amery was in charge of colonial affairs and relations with the dominions from 1924 to 1929.

Leo Amery maintained a very busy speaking schedule, with almost 200 engagements between 1936 and 1938, many of them devoted to imperial topics, especially Imperial Preference.

Leo Amery resented American pressure on Canada to oppose imperial free trade.

Leo Amery wanted to keep the UK and the newly independent British Dominions united by trade behind a common tariff barrier and away from the United States.

Leo Amery viewed American intentions regarding the British Empire with increasingly grave suspicion.

Leo Amery hoped the Labour government elected in 1945 would resist promises of trade liberalisation made by Churchill to the United States during the Second World War.

Leo Amery's father amended his entry in Who's Who to read "one s[on]", with the editors' permission.

Leo Amery served in the cabinets of Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Minister for Aviation and held junior ministerial office under Edward Heath.

Leo Amery is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in his father's home village of Lustleigh, and an ornate plaque in commemoration of him is inside the church.