Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Sheila Murphy (Dublin)

If you have not already seen it, you should read Gordon Walker’s article on the Commonwealth in the March 1952 issue of the ‘Twentieth Century’.

It is a good example of present day British official thinking about the Commonwealth. I know that the minds of the officials in the CRO tend to move along the grooves indicated by Gordon Walker and whatever about Mr. Churchill, Conservative Ministers are pretty certain to approach Commonwealth problems from the same angle. Mr. Churchill’s predilection for the ‘Commonwealth and Empire’ is a personal foible. Other Conservative Ministers know that his conception of Commonwealth relations is quite impracticable.

What seems to me to distinguish the state of mind in the CRO nowadays from what it was before the war is its increased sensitivity to opinion in other members of the Commonwealth and its virtually complete acceptance of the fact that, whatever other Commonwealth Governments decide to do, simply has to be put up with and made the best of. They are fearful even of using the methods of dissuasion in which they were so adept before the war. You will see traces of this in Gordon Walker’s article. He was probably more receptive than any of his predecessors to new ideas but, in spite of his denunciations of Mr. Churchill’s unrealistic terminology, he himself uses language which would not be regarded at all favourably by other Commonwealth Governments. For example, the phrase ‘the unity of the Commonwealth’ has by no means a pleasant ring in Canadian ears.

In private conversation Mr. Gordon Walker is inclined to be less emphatic about the importance of the crown as a link of the Commonwealth than he is in the article!