Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance by Giles Milton Read Free Book Online

tensions between these competing nationalities and had been told grim tales of ill-treatment and massacres.
    Nor had his voyage been quite as comfortable as he had hoped. He finished his Cambridge sausages within a few weeks of setting out and had no option but to forgo the daily English breakfast he had promised himself.
    His spirits were temporarily raised when he reached Adana and had the good fortune to be invited to a picnic hosted by the local British consul. In a delightfully bucolic setting, the consular servants ‘spread a spotless table-cloth, set with table napkins, polished silver and bright glass’. As Childs regaled the consul with his experiences among the Greeks of Anatolia, a succession of platters were brought to the makeshift table. ‘Roast quails, salad and wine were merely the surprises of this wayside meal.’
    In spite of this end-of-voyage feast, Childs’ long walk had left him with a lingering feeling of indigestion. He reported back to Whitehall that Turkey’s different nationalities were close to being at loggerheads and he felt certain that any intervention by Greece in Turkey would drag the country towards catastrophe. ‘You can have no idea of racial hatred,’ he concluded, ‘until you have seen it in this land.’
    William Childs’ warning of the troubles ahead fell on deaf ears. Although his footsore trudge was rewarded with a desk job in Whitehall, few seem to have heeded his call for caution. Ministers had little compunction about meddling in the internal affairs of another country and even less intention of listening to a member of their own security service. Most had made up their minds about the ailing Ottoman empire long before Childs returned from his travels.
    At a dinner party held in Downing Street on 10 November 1912, Turkish affairs dominated the conversation for much of the evening. The guests at the meal table included some of the leading lights in Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government, as well as the newly appointed Greek consul in London, John Stavridi. The host was Asquith’s fiery Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George.
    Lloyd George’s dinner-table discourse was as indiscreet as it was revealing and it would have remained secret had it not been for the fact that Stavridi was making a note of everything that was said that night. Lloyd George was to reveal a passion for Greece that would ultimately leave Smyrna a smouldering ruin.
    At the time of the dinner party, he was still four years away from ousting Asquith from office and replacing him as prime minister, yet it was clear to everyone that his star was in the ascendant. ‘My supreme idea is to get on,’ he had written when still young. ‘To this idea I shall sacrifice everything – except, I trust, my honesty.’
    His time at the Treasury provided an inkling of what was to come. He had spent his time tearing apart discredited policies and injecting radical reform into Britain’s antiquated tax system. He seemed to relish the constitutional crisis that was provoked by his People’s Budget of 1909. He harangued his critics with searing clarity, making inflammatory speeches about the greed and rapacity of the landowning class. His National Insurance Act of 1911 was no less radical and provided the foundation stone of the welfare state.
    His private life was even more tumultuous than his political one and could easily have brought an abrupt end to his political ambitions. He had enjoyed a string of lovers before marrying his wife, Margaret, and saw no reason to stop his infidelities while serving in government. While Margaret lived in Wales with the children, Lloyd George enjoyed the company of his lover-cum-secretary, Frances Stevenson. It was an arrangement that suited him perfectly. In the guise of a working relationship, Lloyd George was able to spend all his time with Frances.
    Lloyd George would win the ultimate political prize in December 1916, seizing the post of prime minister in