Miles Wedderburn Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn, (24 August 1880 – 18 September 1964) was a British diplomat.
Background and education
Miles Lampson was the son of Norman Lampson, and grandson of Sir Curtis Lampson, 1st Baronet. His mother was Helen, daughter of Peter Blackburn, MP for Stirlingshire. He was educated at Eton. Lampson had grown up in the late Victorian era and tended to ascribe to the views of his times that non-white peoples were "inferior races" who needed to be ruled by the British for their own good, which influenced his attitudes during his service in China and Egypt. Lampson's great burning ambition was to be the Viceroy of India, and during his career as a diplomat in China and Egypt he often acted as if he was auditioning to be the next Viceroy of India.
Diplomatic career
Lampson entered the Foreign Office in 1903. He served as Secretary to Garter Mission, Japan, in 1906, as 2nd Secretary at Tokyo, Japan, between 1908 and 1910, as 2nd Secretary at Sofia, Bulgaria in 1911, as 1st Secretary at Peking in 1916, as Acting British High Commissioner in Siberia in 1920 and as British Minister to China between 1926 and 1933. While in Tokyo, Lampson served alongside Sir Nevile Henderson, with whom he corresponded with until Henderson's death in 1942. The Central Office In 1920, the Imperial Japanese Army staged the Gando Massacre killing 5,000 ethnic Korean civilians in the town of Gando (modern Jiandao) the Manchuria region of China, most of whom were Christian converts along with assaulting a number of Canadian Presbyterian missionaries who had been tending to the Korean converts. In turn, there were numerous complaints in Canada that the Foreign Office was doing too little to protect Canadian missionaries in Manchuria. In July 1921, the Canadian diplomat Loring Christie met with Lampson in London to discuss the issue, and where Lampson promised that the Foreign Office was doing upmost to raise the issue with the Japanese government and to protect Canadian missionaries. Lampson admitted that the massive media attention the Gando massacre had received in Canada owning to the mistreatment of the Canadian missionaries had "made a considerable stir in Canada". The issue was sensitive as the allegations that the Foreign Office was indifferent to the plaint of the missionaries had led to the demands that Canada have its own diplomatic service, which the Foreign Office was strongly opposed to. Christie came away from his interview with Lampson with the feeling that the Foreign Office was trying strenuously to protect the missionaries and for moment Canada dropped the demand for its own diplomatic corps.
A protégé of the Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, Lampson held a series of high posts in the Foreign Office in the 1920s. Lampson served as the chief of the Central Department of the Foreign Office, which had the responsibility of dealing with western Europe. Lampson took part in the Locarno conference in October 1925, attending alongside Chamberlain, the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, the German Chancellor Hans Luther and the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. Lampson wrote in his diary: "Briand, Stresemann, and Luther sit opposite to another in the Conference room and discuss with the utmost discretion and good humor their various difficulties. Each goes out of his way to show he realises those of the other...I was trilled to the bone once or twice by the eloquence and obvious sincerity of both Briand and Stresemann". In common with Chamberlain, Lampson believed that the Locarno conference marked the beginning of a new era in Franco-German relations which he believed would end forever the possibility of another world war.
Lampson strongly supported Chamberlain's policy of seeking better relations with Germany and supporting Germany peacefully taking back the lands lost to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. As such, Lampson turned down repeated Polish requests for a British guarantee of the current German-Polish border, saying that Britain had no interest in maintaining these borders. In the 1920s, the country British decision-makers feared the most was the Soviet Union, which was committed to exporting its Communist revolution to the rest of the world. As part of its efforts to promote chaos and Communism, the Soviets supported any state that sought to challenge the international order such as Germany in Europe, Turkey in the Middle East and China in Asia. In 1922, Germany and Soviet Russia had signed the Treaty of Rapallo, and the fear of a German-Soviet bloc served as the major impetus for Chamberlain's support of revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany's favor. Likewise, Lampson had a very favorable view of the Anglophile Hungarian prime minister István Bethlen, whom he believed to be the best man to govern Hungary. In 1926, the reputation of Hungary had been badly damaged by the Franc affair when Hungarian officials had conspired to circulate thousands of forged French francs in a bid to wreck the French economy. Lampson wrote in response: "As we all know many Hungarians are not quite normal when it is a question of recovering Hungary's lost dominions or of re-establishing the Crown, but I repeat that I refuse to believe that either Bethlen or any other responsible Hungarian (I of course include Horthy) can have anything whatever to do with this madness".
Lampson was very close to Sir Eric Phipps, the First Secretary at the British Embassy in Paris, whom he wrote to on a daily basis. Like almost everyone else in interwar Britain, Lampson believed that the Treaty of Versailles was far too harsh on Germany and he supported German demands for a revision of the treaty. Alongside his opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, Lampson believed that France was the greatest danger to world peace and felt that a stronger Germany was needed to check French power. In common with everyone else at the Foreign Office, Lampson accepted that Eastern Europe should be in Germany's sphere of influence and felt that the French alliance system in Eastern Europe was highly dangerous to the peace of the world.. France had signed alliances with Poland in 1921, Czechoslovakia in 1924, Romania in 1926 and Yugoslavia in 1927. Lampson would had much preferred that the French abrogate their alliances in Eastern Europe and supported the Locarno Treaties as the first step towards ending the French alliance system. The British historian Robert Boyce wrote that the Phipps-Lampson letters from the 1920s "captures the mixture of impatience, scorn and racism which British diplomats regarded their Gallic neighbors". In a typical letter to Phipps, sent in May 1926, Lampson wrote: "Are the French mad? If they delay German entry into the League of Nations, they risk losing Locarno. Do they realise if they lose Locarno, they will have lost almost certainly for all time all chance of a guarantee from us". Phipps wrote back: "I do not think that the French are mad, but they are very feminine", leading Lampson to reply that being feminine and being insane were "almost identical".
Lampson, Phipps, Chamberlain and almost everyone else at the Foreign Office tended to dismiss French fears of German power as "hysteria" and in revealing gendered language as "feminine". Boyce wrote that Lampson and the other British decision-makers of the 1920s vastly exaggerated French power along with the supposed severity of the Treaty of Versailles, and seemed incapable of understanding that the long-term power balance was in favor of the Reich, which still held "a formidable war-making potential" in the form of the world's second largest economy along with having three powers the population of France. Likewise, Boyce noted that British decision-makers did not understand that the vast majority of the German people sincerely believed in the Dolchstoßlegende ("stab-in-the-back-legend:), which held that Germany actually won World War One in 1918 and was only "stabbed in the back" at the moment of victory by the Jews. The logical corollary of the Dolchstoßlegende was that Germany should start another world war, which it win provided that proper measures were taken to stop the Jews from doing another "stab in the bacK". Boyce wrote that the French fears of Germany were "essentially sound" given that most Germans wanted to start another world war and were prevented from doing so by the checks imposed on the Reich by the Treaty of Versailles, but once those checks were removed, it was inevitable that another world war would come. By contrast, British decision-makers were very dismissive of French fears, ignored the implications of the Dolchstoßlegende, and tended to feel that if only the Treaty of Versailles were revised, there would be no danger of another world war.
Minister-plenipotentiary to China In October 1926, Lampson was sent out as the British minister-plenipotentiary to China. At a time of very troubled Anglo-Chinese relations, the Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain had personally selected his friend Lampson as the best time to handle relations with China. On 30 May 1925, the Shanghai Municipal Police had opened fire on demonstrators, which sparked the May Thirtieth Movement calling for the end of all the special rights held by foreign powers in China. Chamberlain privately admitted that because of its sheer size and population that a war against China was impossible, all the more so because of the Ten Year Rule which governed British defense spending since 1919, namely it was to be assumed that there would be no major war within the next ten years. Given this situation, Chamberlain wanted a British minister-plenipotentiary to China who would be forceful in upholding British interests within China without being so belligerent as to cause a war that Britain could not hope to fight. Chamberlain called Lampson "my right-hand man" and argued that given the gravity of the crisis in Anglo-Chinese relations that he was the best man to represent Britain in China. The previous minister-plenipotentiary, Sir Ronald Macleay, had strongly supported the claim of the warlord Zhang Zuolin, the "Old Marshal" who ruled Manchuria, to be China's leader. However, Zhang had been defeated by the Soviet-trained National Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang during the Great Northern Expedition, which led Chamberlain to conclude that Macleay could not longer effectively represent Britain in China. Chamberlain and Lampson both hoped that British recognition of the Kuomintang government might strengthen the right-wing of the Kuomintang against the left-wing of the Kuomintang, and pull the new regime away from its alliance with the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union. In December 1926, Chamberlain issued the "December Memorandum", offering to negotiate the end of the 19th century "unequal treaties", a move that Lampson supported as a way of undercutting the radical elements in the Kuomintang who favored the immediate abrogation of the "unequal treaties". In January 1927, Lampson refused a request from Zhang for British financial support, stating that Britain had no interest in backing the losing side.