The Association of Helpers
The outer concentric ring of Rhodes's 1891 secret society, the practical successor to the Society of the Elect
Also known as: The Association of Helpers, Association of Helpers, the outer circle, the Helpers
Quigley's term, drawn from the surviving 1891 Rhodes-Stead documents, for the outer concentric ring of Cecil Rhodes's secret society — the larger circle of allies surrounding the inner 'Society of the Elect.' Established alongside the inner circle in February 1891 by Rhodes, Stead, and Brett (AAE 4, 33-34), the Association of Helpers absorbed the bulk of the society's actual operational membership after the original inner Circle of Initiates fell apart with Rhodes's death and Stead's eclipse. By the late 1890s, 'the secret society came to be represented almost completely by The Association of Helpers — that is, by the group with which Milner was most directly concerned' (AAE 34).
Origin in the 1891 Plan
When Rhodes, Stead, and Brett drew up the 'ideal arrangement' for the secret society in February 1891, the structure had five layers: General of the Society (Rhodes); Junta of Three (Stead, Brett, Milner); Circle of Initiates (Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Bramwell Booth, 'Little' Johnston, Albert Grey, Arthur Balfour); The Association of Helpers; and a planned College under Professor Seeley 'to be established to train people in the English-speaking idea' (AAE 33-34). The College never came into being. The Circle of Initiates eroded — Manning died 1892, Booth aged out, Balfour drifted into Cabinet duties. What remained was the Junta and the Helpers. 'Within the next few weeks Stead had another talk with Rhodes and a talk with Milner, who was "filled with admiration" for the scheme' (AAE 34). The melodramatic apparatus of oaths and signs was dropped at Milner and Brett's insistence: 'To them secret signs or oaths were so much claptrap and neither necessary nor desirable, for the initiates knew each other intimately and had implicit trust in each other' (AAE 34).
Functional Definition
Quigley defines the Association of Helpers by epistemology rather than by formal initiation. 'The distinction between the initiates and The Association of Helpers rested on the fact that while members of both circles were willing to cooperate with one another in order to achieve their common goal, the initiates knew of the secret society, while the "helpers" probably did not' (AAE 34). The distinction soon broke down — 'this distinction rapidly became of little significance, for the members of The Association of Helpers would have been very stupid if they had not realized that they were members of a secret group working in cooperation with other members of the same group' (AAE 34). What replaced the formal initiation/helper boundary was a gradient of intimacy. 'Within this Association of Helpers there appeared in time gradations of intimacy, the more select ones participating in numerous areas of the society's activity and the more peripheral associated with fewer and less vital areas' (AAE 34). Quigley's appendix accordingly splits the Helpers into an Inner Circle and an Outer Circle for analytical purposes (AAE 260-262).
Inner Circle of Helpers
The 'Inner Circle' of the Association of Helpers, by Quigley's tentative roster, comprised approximately thirty figures — substantially overlapping with Milner's Kindergarten and its closest affiliates. The list: Sir Patrick Duncan, Robert Henry Brand, Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Lionel Curtis, William L. Hichens, Geoffrey Dawson, Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), H. A. L. Fisher, Leopold Amery, Richard Feetham, Hugh A. Wyndham, Sir Dougal Malcolm, Basil Williams, Basil Kellett Long, Sir Abe Bailey, Jan Smuts, Sir William Marris, James S. Meston (Baron Meston), Malcolm Hailey (Baron Hailey), Flora Shaw (Lady Lugard), Sir Reginald Coupland, Waldorf Astor (Viscount Astor), Nancy Astor (Lady Astor), Maurice Hankey (Baron Hankey), Arnold J. Toynbee, Laurence F. Rushbrook Williams, Henry Vincent Hodson, and Vincent Todd Harlow (AAE 260-261). The substantial overlap with the Kindergarten roster is not coincidence — the Kindergarten alumni were the natural recruits to the operational inner ring once the South African work was complete and the imperial-federation project began.
Outer Circle of Helpers
The 'Outer Circle' of the Association of Helpers — approximately fifty figures in Quigley's appendix (AAE 261-262) — included figures who supported the Group's projects, attended its meetings, contributed to its journals, but were not part of the daily operational core. The roster includes John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir), the novelist; Sir Fabian Ware; Alfred Zimmern; Gilbert Murray, the classicist; Robert Cecil (Viscount Cecil of Chelwood) — Nobel laureate for his League of Nations work, technically a Cecil Bloc figure but functionally a Helper from 1920; Sir James Headlam-Morley; Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India; Sir Valentine Chirol; Edward Wood (Earl of Halifax) — whom Quigley admits 'should probably be placed in the inner core' (AAE 3); Sir Arthur Salter; Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland; William Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech); Frederick Lugard (Baron Lugard); John Simon (Viscount Simon); Samuel Hoare (Viscount Templewood); William G. S. Adams; Sir Maurice Gwyer; Sir Donald Somervell. The Outer Circle includes — by Quigley's analytical judgement — almost every senior Cabinet figure of the inter-war Conservative governments who was not formally of the Cecil Bloc.
Operational Importance
By the period 1900-1920, Quigley argues, the Association of Helpers had effectively replaced the original Society of the Elect as the operating body of the secret society. 'As a result, the secret society came to be represented almost completely by The Association of Helpers — that is, by the group with which Milner was most directly concerned' (AAE 34). The Society of the Elect continued in name but had lost most of its founding members (Rhodes 1902, Stead 1912, Esher 1930) and rarely met. The Helpers, by contrast, met constantly — at 175 Piccadilly, at Cliveden and Blickling, at All Souls high table, at the editorial offices of The Times and The Round Table. The Helpers were where the work was done. The relationship to the inner Society of the Elect, after 1910, was largely nominal: 'It is a very difficult task to decide who is and who is not a member of the society as a whole, and it is even more difficult to decide if a particular member is an initiate or a helper. Accordingly, the last distinction we have largely abandoned in this study' (AAE 35).
The Two Names: Milner's Kindergarten and Round Table
'The Milner Kindergarten and the Round Table Group, for example, were two different names for The Association of Helpers and were thus only part of the society, since the real center of the organization, The Society of the Elect, continued to exist and recruited new members from the outer circle as seemed necessary' (AAE 5). This identification is important. When the press in 1909-1910 spoke of Milner's Kindergarten, when the editorial board of The Round Table magazine met in 1911, when contemporary observers wrote of the Cliveden Set in 1937 — they were each, in Quigley's analysis, describing a different subset of the same Association of Helpers. The Society of the Elect remained a smaller, mostly-symbolic inner sanctum. The actual political and journalistic work flowed through the Helpers, and the public labels — Kindergarten, Round Table, All Souls group, Times crowd, Cliveden Set — were journalistic catches for parts of the Helpers' activity rather than for the secret society as a whole.
Significance and Limits of the Category
The Association of Helpers is, in Quigley's terminology, the workhorse category — the bin in which most of the substantive analysis of The Anglo-American Establishment occurs. Almost every senior figure in the Milner Group discussed at length in the book — Curtis, Brand, Lothian, Dawson, Amery, the Astors, Halifax, Hoare, Simon, Coupland, Zimmern — is in the Helpers' two circles. The Society of the Elect, by contrast, is mostly historical: its named members are dominantly founders and patrons (Rhodes, Stead, Esher, Rothschild, Bailey, Beit, Rosebery, Balfour) plus the South African and Round Table generation that had to be promoted in to keep it nominally alive (Lothian, Curtis, Dawson, Smuts, Amery, the Astors). The double-roster Quigley provides at AAE 258-262 is therefore best read as a single roster of the Group's operational membership, sorted by Quigley's best evidence about who was conscious of the underlying conspiracy and who merely served it. The Helpers' significance, in his account, is structural: a permanent informal body of about a hundred trusted operators who carried out the work the Society of the Elect had set in train in 1891 and whom no formal institution could replace once the original founders were gone.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 4 Quigley
The plan of organization provided for an inner circle, to be known as 'The Society of the Elect,' and an outer circle, to be known as 'The Association of Helpers.'
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 5 Quigley
The Milner Kindergarten and the Round Table Group, for example, were two different names for The Association of Helpers and were thus only part of the society, since the real center of the organization, The Society of the Elect, continued to exist and recruited new members from the outer circle as seemed necessary.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 33 Quigley
First they discussed their goals and agreed that, if necessary in order to achieve Anglo-American unity, Britain should join the United States. Then they discussed the organization of the secret society and divided it into two circles: an inner circle, 'The Society of the Elect', and an outer circle to include 'The Association of Helpers'.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 34 Quigley
The distinction between the initiates and The Association of Helpers rested on the fact that while members of both circles were willing to cooperate with one another in order to achieve their common goal, the initiates knew of the secret society, while the 'helpers' probably did not.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 34 Quigley
This distinction rapidly became of little significance, for the members of The Association of Helpers would have been very stupid if they had not realized that they were members of a secret group working in cooperation with other members of the same group.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 34 Quigley
The secret society came to be represented almost completely by The Association of Helpers — that is, by the group with which Milner was most directly concerned.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 34 Quigley
Within this Association of Helpers there appeared in time gradations of intimacy, the more select ones participating in numerous areas of the society's activity and the more peripheral associated with fewer and less vital areas.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 35 Quigley
It is a very difficult task to decide who is and who is not a member of the society as a whole, and it is even more difficult to decide if a particular member is an initiate or a helper.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 72 Quigley
He laid down the duties of public office with relief and devoted himself, not to private affairs, but to the secret public matters associated with his 'Association of Helpers.'
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 260 Quigley
B. The Association of Helpers. 1. The Inner Circle: Sir Patrick Duncan, Robert Henry Brand, Philip Kerr, Lionel Curtis, William L. Hichens, Geoffrey Dawson, Edward Grigg, Herbert A. L. Fisher, Leopold Amery, Richard Feetham.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 261 Quigley
2. The Outer Circle: John Buchan (Baron Tweedsmuir), Sir Fabian Ware, Sir Alfred Zimmern, Gilbert Murray, Robert Cecil (Viscount Cecil of Chelwood), Sir James W. Headlam-Morley, Frederick J. N. Thesiger (Viscount Chelmsford).