Appeasement and All Souls College, like Neville Chamberlain and Munich, The Times and Geoffrey Dawson, or the Astors and the ‘Cliveden Set’ appear synonymously in any discussion of British foreign policy in the 1930s. They have been firmly associated since 1961 when A.L. Rowse, the historian, poet, and Shakespearean scholar published All Souls and Appeasement. Rowse denigrated appeasement as the foreign policy of ‘a class in decadence’ that reduced Britain to a second-rate power. Rowse asserted that All Souls was an important clearing-house for politicians, academics, intellectuals, and other establishment figures who supported appeasement as the only policy which could attain a settlement with Nazi Germany. The same claims also surrounded the social gatherings hosted by Waldorf and Nancy Astor at Cliveden, their country home in Berkshire, and the close association between The Times and the Foreign Office.

In early December 1937 Sir Arthur Salter began to organize the first of the All Souls meetings. By 11 December he had acceptances from Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Barratt Brown, Lionel Curtis, Harold Macmillan, Sir Walter Layton, Lord Allen of Hurtwood, and Basil H. Liddell Hart. Other affirmative replies followed from Lord Arnold, Will Arnold-Forster, Geoffrey Hudson, H.V. Hodson, and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Harold Nicolson also joined the group at its inaugural meetings on Saturday and Sunday, 18 and 19 December. His diaries recorded this.

It had been intended that the meeting of 16 March 1938 would discuss the question of publishing a statement, if agreement were reached. But given the pace of events in 1938, it was not surprising that individual thinking in the All Souls group was often subject to changes, sometimes dramatic, with regard to international affairs. Several members of the group, including Curtis, Murray, Nicolson, Salter, and Allen agreed to meet at Chatham House on 8 March, there to discuss a draft memorandum prepared by Toynbee for a speech he was to deliver at the same venue two days later.

Thursday, 31 March 1938

The House adjourns early and I go to Norman Angell's rooms where the All Souls group are meeting. We are somewhat inconclusive but our main line is that a purely negative policy gets us nowhere and that there must be some more constructive drive.

A meeting at All Souls, planned for Sunday and Monday, 5–6 June 1938, never took place, likely because of Allen's ill-health. In the meantime, the divisions within the group continued to grow.

On returning from his visit to Germany and Czechoslovakia from 6 to 15 August 1938, Lord Allen wrote that he had engaged in ‘hours and hours of talk and NOTHING else whatever’. Could the same assessment also be true of the All Souls Foreign Affairs Group? The group, in fact, never reconvened after the postponement notice sent out on 4 July 1938. What then can be asserted with regard to the impact and historical significance of the All Souls Foreign Affairs Group? Indeed, what was its ‘true character and influence’? Although its history was documented in the papers accumulated during the nine meetings from 18 December 1937 to 15 May 1938, what subsequent role did the more prominent members play in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War II? In reality, the group served precisely the purposes designed by Salter and Allen, essentially acting as a ‘Brains Trust’. The discussions helped the individual members, with diverse experience and with divergent views, to clarify their positions on foreign and domestic policy. They then spoke, wrote publicly, and lobbied the press and the Foreign Office, confident that the issues had been analysed by some of the best elite minds of the period.