Blanche Elizabeth Campbell Dugdale (1880–1948)

by unknown photographer

private collection / National Portrait Gallery, London

Dugdale [née Balfour], Blanche Elizabeth Campbell [Baffy] (1880–1948), author and Zionist, was born on 23 May 1880 at 32 Addison Road, Holland Park, London. Generally known as Baffy, she was the eldest of the five children of Eustace James Anthony Balfour (1854–1911), an architect and the youngest brother of the prime minister Arthur James Balfour, and his wife, Lady Frances Campbell (1858–1931) [see Balfour, Lady Frances], daughter of George Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll.

In her memoir, Family Homespun (1940), Baffy describes her family: on her mother's side the Campbells at Inveraray, ducal, Celtic, and feudal, on her father's the Balfours at Whittingehame, logical and tolerant, revering accuracy as much as the Campbells scorned it. It was at Whittingehame, where Arthur Balfour lived, adored by his numerous relations—including Baffy—that she spent much of her childhood. Her family spent half of the year at 32 Addison Road and half in Scotland. They felt very consciously Scottish: on their way north when exactly half-way across the Tweed they all cheered. On the southbound journey they 'hissed like serpents' (Dugdale, Family Homespun, 65).

Baffy had no formal education; but her mother read to her, mainly from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and she learned to read by puzzling out the words in Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, which she knew by heart. As she grew up 'the multiplication tables might remain a sealed book but if you had asked me the difference between a Conservative and a Liberal Unionist I could have told you by the time I was ten' (Dugdale, Family Homespun, 143). According to her difficult and passionately political mother, conversation was the one essential accomplishment: it was a high priority both at Whittingehame and at Hatfield, where she often stayed with her Cecil cousins.

Baffy ‘came out’ and was presented at one of Queen Victoria's last drawing-rooms in March 1898. On 18 November 1902 she married Edgar Trevelyan Stratford Dugdale (1876–1964), an underwriting member of Lloyds, the second son of William Stratford Dugdale of Merevale Hall, Atherstone, Warwickshire. They had two children, Frances and Michael, and lived at 1 Roland Gardens, South Kensington.

Baffy was jolted into public life by the First World War. From 1915 to 1919 she worked in the department of naval intelligence at the Admiralty. After the war, enthusiastic for international co-operation, she joined her cousin Robert Cecil in founding the League of Nations Union and was head of the union's intelligence department from 1920 to 1928. In 1932 she was a member of the British government delegation to the assembly of the League of Nations.

Meanwhile 1 Roland Gardens became well known for amusing, often political lunch parties; good conversationalists like Bob Boothby, Harold Nicolson, and Robert Cecil were frequent guests. Tall, with wide-apart eyes and a generous mouth, Baffy was excellent company; her enthusiasms were infectious, though she was also 'capable of deflating pretension with deadly effect' (The Times, 18 May 1948).

When Arthur Balfour retired from public life Baffy encouraged him to write his memoirs (published as Chapters of Autobiography, 1930), organizing his papers and acting as his secretary. When he died she wrote Arthur James Balfour (1936), his authorized biography. The Times described it as 'penetrating' and 'the most intimate since Boswell'. It is a magisterial work in two volumes and is a standard work for students of Balfour's life. As well as describing his political career it gives a sensitive, entertaining, and of course well-informed picture of his life at Whittingehame, his friends the Souls, and his passion for golf. Baffy also wrote numerous political articles for newspapers and journals, and her perceptive and entertaining memoir Family Homespun was published in 1940.

Baffy had been deeply impressed by the Balfour declaration. The idea of the British government helping to establish a national home for the Jewish people fired her imagination, and as a woman of action she started working for the cause. By 1936, the year in which her diary (edited by N. A. Rose as Baffy, 1973) begins, she was working at the headquarters of the Jewish Agency and Zionist Federation at 77 Great Russell Street, promoting the Jewish viewpoint and drafting articles and speeches with the historian Lewis Namier, also a dedicated Zionist. She became an effective speaker, especially to Jewish audiences.

Baffy thought of Palestine as her second country and often stayed with Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionists, and his wife, Vera, at Rehovoth, their house near Jerusalem. Weizmann, a charismatic figure whom she much admired, made her one of his team: the only gentile on the inner circle of his policy making group. He respected her political judgement, but perhaps for him her greatest asset was that she knew several members of the British government well and had friends in the cabinet, where the decisions about Israel were made. She could act on diplomatic missions trusted by both sides. She was, for instance, able to give Weizmann a synopsis of the contents of the Peel report concerning the partitioning of Palestine a fortnight before it was published in July 1937. Walter Elliot, minister of agriculture (1936–8) and then of health (1938–40), was her greatest friend in the government and the member of the cabinet who was most willing to give her information.

Baffy was a Conservative, but she was also a convinced non-appeaser, and she became so disillusioned by the government's attitude to Hitler that in 1937 she joined the National Labour Party and was adopted as its candidate for Central Southwark. However, when National Labour did not oppose the government on the issue of Czechoslovakia she resigned. The diary as it is edited is mainly a day-by-day account of her work for the Jews, but it includes brilliant snapshots of the great political events of the day as seen by someone on gossiping terms with those involved. The Mrs Simpson drama unfolds, and she and Walter Elliot and Colin Coote, then leader writer for The Times, and his wife settle down to a game of poker as the Munich crisis accelerates.

Blanche Dugdale loved the young and was devoted to her four grandchildren, and if one of her nieces was in London on leave during the Second World War she would sweep her off to a pub in William IV Street where Baffy and her friends met, all paying for their own lunches, and where conversation sparkled.

When war broke out Blanche Dugdale continued to work for the Jewish Agency, helping to persuade the British government to allow a Jewish fighting force but frustrated by how little could be done about the atrocities in occupied Europe. In 1942 she wrote of the Jews in Poland: 'It is an extermination policy now, but what can one do?' (Baffy, 198, 28 Nov 1942). She supported the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror led by Victor Cazalet and Victor Gollancz. She fought against the indifference of the Foreign Office, and she brought pressure to bear on the Colonial Office to allow Jews, particularly children, in the refugee ships to disembark in Palestine.

Blanche Dugdale hated the in-fighting that occurred between the Jewish leaders, and when Weizmann lost the leadership in 1946 she realized her work was done; her health also was declining. She died on 16 May 1948 (the day after she heard that the state of Israel had been established) at the house of her daughter and son-in-law Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran House, by Maybole, Ayrshire. She was buried on 22 May. Undoubtedly she would have considered her work for the Jews her most important achievement, and she is still honoured in Israel, but in Britain she is best remembered as an author.