There is no record of how the Crookshanks felt when Cromer gave credit to Coles rather than Harry Maule as the man ‘to whom the credit of reforming this branch of the Public Service is mainly due’. It was not in Harry Maule’s nature to push himself forward. Indeed, Coles felt that Crookshank had been unnecessarily diffident in his dealings with Cromer.23 It would seem even so that Crookshank’s performance in fourteen years of overseeing the prisons was rated highly enough for him to be given another important and far more agreeable job within the administration. In 1897 he was made controller of the Daira Sanieh Administration. The Daira estates were lands that the former ruler of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, had ‘contrived, generally by illicit and arbitrary methods, to accumulate in his own hands’. By the time the British arrived they amounted to over half a million acres. They were, however, very heavily mortgaged. When the profligate Ismail had got into severe financial difficulties he had borrowed £9.5 million on the security of the properties.
Under the Cromer regime the estates were run in the manner that became standard practice: giving the appearance of authority to Egyptians but severely trammelling their power. The putative administrator of the lands was an Egyptian director-general, but he was joined on a board of directors by two controllers, one British, the post Crookshank took on, and one French. The controllers ‘had ample powers of supervision and inspection. They alone were the legal representatives of the bondholders.’ Cromer regarded Crookshank’s performance as British controller as admirable. The main problem for the board was that the estates were so heavily indebted that expenditure on loan repayments always outran revenue. The first step, taken before Crookshank’s time, was to extract higher revenues from the estates.
From 1892 onwards, the properties started to yield a profit, though there was a brief crisis in 1895 not long before Crookshank’s arrival. By Crookshank’s last years in office, revenue was very healthy indeed, amounting to over £800,000 in 1904–5. Under Crookshank, however, a new policy was instituted. Cromer had close relations with the banker Ernest Cassel. Cassel thought that a great deal of money could be made from the estates. In 1898 the estates were made over to a new company charged with selling them off in lots. By the time Crookshank demitted office, all the lots had been sold, yielding a net profit for the government of over £3.25 million.24 Crookshank was leaving at a good time. When Cromer retired, the speculation in Egyptian land and shares in which Crookshank had been a pivotal figure rebounded into a financial crisis. Cromer’s successor, Eldon Gorst, concluded that the relationship between financiers and Cromer’s apparat had been rather too close for comfort. Profit had not necessarily walked hand in hand with good governance.25 Crookshank slipped into comfortable retirement in the wake of his master. He had been a faithful and discreet servant.
In later life Harry Crookshank was proud of and interested in his father’s official career. He too was to serve as an official in what was by then the former Ottoman Empire. He planned to make Egypt and Turkey his areas of particular expertise when he first entered the House of Commons, though these plans went awry. In many ways it was the position that Harry Maule’s achievements gave him in society that shaped Harry Comfort’s world. In 1890, at the mid-point of his term in the prison administration, Harry Crookshank was accorded the honorific ‘Pasha’. It was as Crookshank Pasha that he was known thereafter. Although his job had not changed, the oriental glamour of his new status helped him to woo a young Vassar-educated American visitor to Egypt, Emma Walraven Comfort.
Crookshank’s marriage to Emma Comfort in 1891 was wholly advantageous. Her father, Samuel Comfort, was one of the founders of Standard Oil, the company created by his contemporary John D. Rockefeller in 1870. By the end the 1870s Standard Oil had come to control the entire American oil market. In 1882 its owners created the ‘Trust’: at the time Crookshank met Emma the conflict between Standard and the ‘trustbusters’ was one of the most important struggles in American political life. Samuel Comfort was a ‘robber baron’ of the ‘Gilded Age’.26 He was rich and Emma was his only daughter. When Harry Comfort Crookshank was born in 1893, his way of life had already been determined. He would never have to work for a living. Money would continue to flow in from the most ‘blue chip’ stocks and shares imaginable, given to or inherited by his mother.
One of Crookshank Pasha’s enthusiasms had a profound effect on his son’s life. In his annus mirabilis of 1891, Harry Maule Crookshank was installed in the Grecia Lodge in Cairo. The lodge’s best-known member was Kitchener, who became master the year after Crookshank joined.27 Like his father Harry Comfort was to be a passionate Freemason. He joined the Apollo Lodge as soon as he arrived in Oxford in 1912, the earliest possible opportunity. His attachment to Freemasonry thus predated his political ambitions. He would pursue his Masonic career with as much enthusiasm and ambition as he embraced Parliament.
Crookshank spent his early childhood in Cairo, but in 1903 he was sent to school in Lausanne.28 In May 1904 he arrived at Summer Fields, a prep school at Oxford, to find Harold Macmillan already installed. Macmillan’s road to Summer Fields had been much less exotic. His father, Maurice, had after a few years schoolmastering joined the family publishing firm. On a trip to Paris he met a young American widow, Nellie Hill. Nellie was the daughter of a Methodist preacher in Indiana. At the age of eighteen she had married into a well-to-do family in Indianapolis. Her husband survived only five months of marriage. Using the money he left her, Nellie decamped for Europe in the late 1870s. She had no fondness for the American Midwest and was happy to move to England with Maurice when they married in 1884. Unlike his new friend Harry Crookshank, Harold was a late child, born ten years later when his mother was forty. By then the family was firmly established in a tall, narrow house in Cadogan Place, the connecting link ‘between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square and the barbarism of Chelsea’. There was also a substantial if inelegant country house in Sussex, Birch Grove.
In contrast to the Crookshanks, where the mother’s wealth was paramount, it was Maurice Macmillan who financed the family’s lifestyle. Yet there was no doubt that the ‘master of the house’ was the dominant figure of Nellie Macmillan. Mrs Macmillan threw herself with gusto into the public life of her adopted country. Her milieu was the societies of rich and well-connected ladies devoted to some public cause. Her main efforts were expended on the Victoria League, a body of imperial enthusiasts founded in memory of the recently deceased Queen-Empress, of which, for many years, she was honorary treasurer. She became acquainted with her fellow American imperial enthusiast Emma Crookshank.
For both the Macmillans and the Crookshanks to send a son to Summer Fields was a clear declaration of intent. The establishment had been created so that its pupils could compete for scholarships to the major public schools. Between 1897 and 1916 the school averaged more than five Eton scholarships a year. By the time Macmillan and Crookshank reached College, one in three of their fellow scholars had been to Summer Fields.29 As Henry Willink, who scraped into the same election at Eton as Macmillan and Crookshank, recalled: ‘I had not been skilfully prepared for the Scholarship examination as…boys at Summer Fields were prepared.’30 ‘If,’ as the school history puts it, ‘the boys were not force-fed they were certainly stuffed.’ Summer Fields, where Macmillan and Crookshank became close friends, duly delivered on its promises. Both boys were placed on the list of seventeen that made up the Eton election of 1906.
Eton in 1906 was undoubtedly the most famous and prestigious school in England.31 It was also in many ways the perfect microcosm of the social universe represented by Macmillan and Crookshank on the one hand and Lyttelton and Cranborne on the other. Eton was divided into two unequal parts. In College there