‘Pug’ Ismay was the personification of discretion and diplomacy. His book, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, is testimony to this: no revelations are included, no confidences betrayed, no secrets exposed. There is hardly an unkind word about any of the people he met or worked with. The same is true of all the interviews he gave and articles he wrote. And he did not keep a diary. All of this was and is off-putting for the potential biographer! Did he live a very dull life? Or did he choose to see only the best in people? Or perhaps he was just a very bad judge of character? However, dig down into his private papers, his correspondence with personal friends, their notes and diaries, and what emerges is what Ismay really thought of people. Quite revealing, both about the people concerned and about Ismay himself.
Take for example Winston Churchill, whom Ismay served as his chief staff officer for the entirety of World War Two. Ismay was among Churchill’s greatest admirers. He genuinely considered him to be a genius, if a flawed one. But in public, the flaws almost never surface. In his memoirs, Ismay says that that Churchill “knew more about waging total war than all his military advisers put together” and had been “the master planner” of victory. But, after the war. in a private letter to a close friend, he wrote that Churchill “was, and still is, completely ignorant of modern war and logistics”, and bewailed “his plans for picking up small and superficially attractive prizes which have no real bearing on the conduct of war as a whole”. Similarly, in the draft of his memoirs, Ismay remarks on Churchill’s “interference” in detailed operations; but in the published version this word is replaced by “intervention”, together with justification for it: “imparting to the commanders his own impetuous, adventurous and defying character.”
Ismay’s opinion of the Prime Minister’s cronies – the members of what Churchill called his ‘secret circle; (which included Ismay) – was similarly polite in public but less so in private. The group included Lord Beaverbrook, Professor Frederick Lindemann, Desmond Morton and Brendan Bracken. In his memoirs, he paid tribute to Beaverbrook, who, in 1941, led a mission, of which Ismay was a member, to Moscow to discuss strategy with Stalin; but, on return, dining with a friend, he remarked that “the one thing [Beaverbrook] knew nothing about was strategy”, later describing him as “very tiresome”. Ismay recorded that Lindemann was “obstinate as a mule… and seemed to have a poor view of the intellect of everyone with the exception of Lord Birkenhead, Mr Churchill and Professor Lindemann”. The same dining companion recorded that Ismay was “very anti-Desmond”. As for Bracken, Ismay was “alarmed at his inability to keep his mouth shut` and said that `no-one could ever know if he was speaking the truth”.
Ismay’s comments on the leading Indian politicians, with whom he dealt at the time of Partition in 1947, were always diplomatic in public but far from it off the record. In a letter to his wife, he described Mohandas Gandhi as “very old and at times doesn`t make much sense”. Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress Party, he said, was “very tired mentally and physically… and subject to “emotion” to an alarming degree”. And following his first meeting with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, he reported to a staff meeting: “the dominating feature in Mr Jinnah was his loathing and contempt of the Hindus. He apparently thought that all Hindus were sub-human creatures with whom it was impossible for the Muslims to live.”
Finally, the objects of some of Ismay’s most acerbic private criticisms were senior military officers, about all of whom he was complimentary in his memoirs. The appointment of General Lord Gort, Chief the Chief Imperial General Staff prior to the outbreak of the war, was “a disaster in the highest councils because his type of mind was quite wrong for the job”. General Wavell’s appointment in 1941 as Commander in Chief India was “not a good one… a lucky general…every decision he has made in this war has been wrong”. Lord Mountbatten, his boss in India, was “a grand chap in a thousand ways, but precision of thought is not his strong suit”. But the most intense vitriol was reserved for Field Marshal Montgomery. A decade after the war, Ismay wrote: “If only someone would muzzle, or better still chloroform Monty, I should be spared the constant danger of high blood pressure. I have come to the conclusion that his love of publicity is a disease, like alcoholism or taking drugs, and that it sends him equally mad.”
The personification of discretion and diplomacy did not mince his words in private!
John Kiszely is a former senior army officer and the author of General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay: Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat – A New Biography, which was Aspects of History‘s Book Club pick for February 2026.
