Victor Bulwer-Lytton

Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton, would have gone down in history as one of the many British aristocrats who governed the provinces of India, had it not been for a single task that he accepted reluctantly and at second hand. In 1932 he chaired the League of Nations commission that investigated the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The Lytton Report found that the Japanese army’s actions had not been self-defence and that Manchukuo was not a state created by the will of its inhabitants. On the strength of the report the League refused to recognise the puppet state, and Japan left the League. Lytton’s name became a symbol both of the thoroughness with which the League could establish the facts and of the impotence that left it unable to do anything about them.

The viceroy’s son

He was born on 9 August 1876 in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where his father, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, was then viceroy. His father, a diplomat and a poet who wrote under the pen name Owen Meredith, was created Earl of Lytton in 1880. Victor’s grandfather was the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii. Victor was the fourth son, but his two elder brothers had died in childhood, so on his father’s death in 1891 he inherited, at the age of fifteen, the earldom and the family seat at Knebworth in Hertfordshire. One of his sisters, Constance Lytton, was a well-known suffragette who was imprisoned and force-fed during hunger strikes; another, Emily, married the architect Edwin Lutyens.

He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1902 he took his seat in the House of Lords as a Conservative and married Pamela Plowden, with whom the young Winston Churchill had once been in love. Under his sister’s influence he became one of the few in his camp to support votes for women. In 1910 he chaired a cross-party committee that drafted a bill giving some women the vote. The bill did not pass, but Lytton remained loyal to the cause.

The Admiralty, the India Office and Bengal

He began his official career late, during the First World War, when the coalition government needed men. From 1916 to 1920 he held various posts at the Admiralty, and in 1919 he became a member of the Privy Council. In 1920–1922 he was Under-Secretary of State at the India Office, at a time when India was introducing limited provincial self-government, the so-called dyarchy, and Gandhi was leading the first great campaign of non-cooperation with the British authorities.

In February 1922 Lytton became Governor of Bengal, the most populous province of British India, with its capital at Calcutta. He governed it until 1927, in a turbulent period. The Swaraj Party of Chittaranjan Das, which had won a strong position in the provincial council, paralysed the dyarchy by refusing funds for ministers’ salaries, and the governor had to take over the portfolios that were supposed to be held by Indian ministers. At the same time secret revolutionary organisations active in Bengal were carrying out attacks on officials. In October 1924 the Bengal authorities, under an emergency ordinance, arrested dozens of activists without trial, among them the young Subhas Chandra Bose, who was sent to prison in Mandalay in Burma. During the Second World War the same Bose collaborated with Germany and Japan and commanded the Indian National Army, formed under Japanese patronage. In the mid-1920s, while the viceroy was on leave, Lytton deputised for several months in the post his father had once held.

In Geneva

After returning from India, Lytton led the Indian delegation to the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1927, and in 1931 he was a British delegate in Geneva. He was regarded as an experienced, conscientious administrator who knew Asia, although he had never been to Japan.

When the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden incident on 18 September 1931 and began occupying Manchuria, China appealed to the League of Nations. On 10 December 1931 the League Council decided to send a commission of inquiry to the scene. Lytton was not the British government’s first choice. According to historians of Anglo-Japanese relations, several other politicians turned the offer down before him, and he himself agreed only when the League raised the pay. In January 1932 the Council approved the commission’s membership: alongside Lytton sat the American general Frank McCoy, the French general Henri Claudel, the Italian diplomat Count Luigi Aldrovandi Marescotti and the German politician Heinrich Schnee. The members elected Lytton as chairman. The Chinese side was represented by Wellington Koo as an assessor, the Japanese side by the diplomat Isaburō Yoshida.

The Lytton Commission

The commission sailed from Europe at the beginning of February 1932, reached Yokohama by way of the United States and the Pacific on 29 February, and began with talks in Tokyo with the government, the military and industrialists. It then visited Shanghai, where the fighting had only just ended, as well as Nanjing, Hankou and Beijing. In China its members spoke with, among others, Chiang Kai-shek and Zhang Xueliang. From the second half of April to the beginning of June, for about six weeks, the commission studied the situation in Manchuria. In the newly proclaimed Manchukuo its members spoke with Puyi and his ministers, with Kwantung Army commanders and with Japanese officials. The Japanese police and gendarmerie made sure they had no contact with undesirable interlocutors, but the commission nonetheless received many letters and statements from Chinese people who almost unanimously rejected the new state. In July the commission visited Tokyo again, where the new foreign minister announced that Japan would recognise Manchukuo regardless of the League’s position. The report was drafted in Beijing and signed on 4 September 1932.

The report, published on 2 October 1932, was a carefully balanced document, due in no small part to Lytton, who had to reconcile the differing views of the commission’s members. The French general Claudel did not want Japan to be named outright as the aggressor. The report acknowledged that Japan had special rights in Manchuria, that the Chinese boycott and the chaos of civil war had damaged its interests, and that a return to the situation before 18 September was impossible. It stated plainly, however, that the military operations of 18 and 19 September could not be regarded as legitimate self-defence, and that Manchukuo had been organised by a group of Japanese military officers and officials rather than by a spontaneous independence movement, and did not enjoy the support of its inhabitants. It proposed autonomy for Manchuria within a sovereign China, the withdrawal of troops and international supervision. Japan had already recognised Manchukuo on 15 September 1932 and rejected the report. On 24 February 1933 the League Assembly adopted a report based on it, and on 27 March Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. Its delegate in Geneva was Yōsuke Matsuoka.

After the report

In 1933 Lytton was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of chivalry. The same year brought him personal tragedy: on 1 May his elder son Antony, Viscount Knebworth, a member of the House of Commons and a reserve air force pilot, was killed in a plane crash while rehearsing for an air display at Hendon. Lytton dedicated a book to him, Antony: A Record of Youth (1935).

His work on the commission made Lytton, as one historian put it, a reluctant expert on the Far East. In the years that followed he spoke out on Chinese and Japanese affairs, was disappointed by Japan’s rejection of his proposals and sided ever more clearly with China, especially after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. He was one of those British Conservatives who believed in the League of Nations and in collective security at a time when the League was failing one test after another: in Manchuria, in Abyssinia and in Spain. From 1937 he chaired the board of the London Associated Electricity Undertakings. In 1942 he published his Indian memoirs, Pundits and Elephants.

The Second World War took his second son. Major Alexander, Viscount Knebworth, was killed in 1942 at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Lytton died at Knebworth on 25 October 1947. Some sources, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, give the date as 26 October. Since both his sons had died before him, the title passed to his younger brother Neville.

Significance

The Lytton Report is one of the most important documents on the road to the Second World War in the Far East. It was the first serious international attempt to establish the facts about aggression by one of the great powers, and it did so thoroughly: its findings on the nature of Manchukuo were confirmed by later documents and by the Tokyo trial. At the same time it exposed the limits of the League of Nations. The commission worked for almost a year, and in that time Japan created faits accomplis. The powers accepted the report but had no intention of imposing sanctions. Japan left the League without any consequences, a lesson taken to heart by Mussolini in Abyssinia and Hitler in Europe. Lytton’s proposal that Manchuria should remain part of China came to pass only in 1945, after Japan’s defeat.