Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne

Lord Moyne (left) with Richard Casey in Cairo, around 1942

Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne DSO and Spange QSAM PC (born March 29, 1880 in Dublin , Ireland , † November 6, 1944 in Cairo , Egypt ) was a British-Irish politician and brewery entrepreneur.

Youth and military service

Guinness was born in 1880 as the third son of Edward Cecil Guinness . His father was the majority shareholder in the Guinness brewery and was therefore considered the richest Irishman of his time. Guinness grew up in Farmleigh and Elveden . He later attended Eton College .

He took part in the Second Boer War with the City of London Volunteers of the Yeomanry , was Mentioned in Despatches and received the Queen's South Africa Medal . During the First World War he served in Egypt and Gallipoli . Because of his personal bravery in the fighting on the Western Front , he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and, after the Third Battle of Flanders , the medal clasp for repeated awards.

Political career

Lord Moyne (standing 3rd from right) in the Churchill cabinet, May 1940

Guinness was a member of the Unionist Party or from 1912 the Conservative and Unionist Party and from 1907 to 1931 for the constituency of Bury St Edmunds MP in the House of Commons . In 1922 Guinness became a member of the British government, first as Secretary of State in the War Department, from 1924 in the Treasury, and in 1925 as Minister of Agriculture. During this time, Guinness developed, not least through membership in The Other Club , a close personal friendship with Winston Churchill , with whom he shared many views. In 1929 both left office with the defeat of the Conservatives. In 1932, Guinness was raised to the nobility as Baron Moyne . In the 1930s he devoted himself to the state of the British colonies and stayed temporarily in Kenya and the British West Indies .

In World War II Guinness supported the policy of Churchill. From 1941 to 1942 he was British Secretary of State for the Colonies and Leader of the House of Lords . Then he became a British Minister of Middle East Affairs . Despite good relations with leading Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion , he was against the plan to establish a Jewish state in the British League of Nations Palestine , because he feared a strain on British-Arab relations. For the post-war order, he therefore proposed the establishment of a Jewish state on German soil.

assassination

After Heinrich Himmler's proposal submitted by Joel Brand to rescue up to a million Jewish people (especially from Hungary) in exchange for the delivery of goods by the Western Allies to Hitler's Germany, also on the advice of Moynes, and the Holocaust through Hungary , was rejected in May 1944 When Jews broke in, Brand joined the radical Zionist underground group Lechi . Lechi now saw Moyne as the “main person responsible for closing the gates of Palestine to the Jewish refugees”. On November 6, 1944, Lord Moyne and his driver were murdered in Cairo by Lechi members Elijahu Chakim and Elijahu Bet-Tzuri . The perpetrators were sentenced to death in early 1945 and executed, their bodies were transferred to Israel in 1975 and laid out there in the “Jerusalem Hall of Heroism”. Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and President Katzir paid their respects to the dead and the assassins were buried on the Herzlberg . Great Britain filed an official protest against it. In 1982 the Israeli Post paid tribute to the two Moyne assassins with a three-shekel stamp each, which came out with 18 other stamps in the memorial sheet "Martyrs of the Israeli struggle for independence".

Private

In June 1903 Guinness married Evelyn († 1942), the third daughter of the 14th Earl of Buchan . They became the parents of three children - Bryan , Murtogh, and Grania. After the First World War he had an affair with the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein and traveled with her a. a. the Komodo Islands . In addition to his political career, Guinness served on the brewery's board of directors and in various family charities.

Web links

Commons : Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Relationship with Ida Rubinstein

Individual evidence

1. ^ Israel defends honors for Moyne killers, The Times, Jul 1, 1975, p. 1

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Baron Moyne 1932-1944	Bryan Guinness