Robert Hudson, 1st Viscount Hudson

He was the eldest son of Robert William Hudson, who had inherited and then sold the substantial family soap business, and Gerda Frances Marion Bushell.

[4] Besides for the coalition National government, Hudson resented the dominance of the "provincial" lawyers and businessmen who made up the majority of the Conservative backbenchers who he felt lacked the necessary vision for Britain's future.

[8] Carol's visit led to an extended debate in the House of Commons, during which Hudson broke with the government and spoke in favour of closer economic ties with Romania.

[9] Halifax-who tended to favor a tougher line with Germany than Chamberlain-told the Cabinet that he "did not want to lose any opportunity of establishing closer relations with Russia".

[11] Halifax spoke of "warming up to Russia" and stated that he high hopes that sending the Russian-speaking Hudson to Moscow to negotiate a trade treaty as the best way of effecting that aim.

[9] Hudson in his account of his meeting wrote that Maisky had told him that he was "quite convinced that we, the British empire, were unable to stand up against German aggression, even with the assistance of France, unless we had the collaboration and help of Russia".

[15] Hudson spoke frankly with Sefton Delmer, the foreign correspondent with the Daily Express newspaper about his ambitions to achieve some sort of an agreement in Moscow that would improve his chances of being promoted into the cabinet proper.

[16] Hudson also talked with Vladimir Potemkin, the deputy foreign commissar, where he spoke in general about a wish for an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance meant to deter Germany from choosing war.

[23] Potemkin wrote that just as Khlestakov was a vain, lightweight man who persuaded people in a provincial Russian town that he was really the dreaded inspector-general of the Emperor Nicholas I whose task was to root all corruption and inefficiency in the Russian empire, only to be finally exposed at the end as the unimportant man that he really was, that likewise Hudson was just a hack politician who had no real authority to say anything important or even interesting on behalf of London who pretended to be someone important.

[25] Hudson criticised the plans for better Anglo-Soviet relations to create a counterweight to Germany as unfeasible, which led him to argue that appeasement of the Reich was the only realistic solution to the present problems in Europe.

[26] On 17 July 1939, Helmuth Wohlthat, Hermann Göring's right-hand man in the Four Year Plan organisation, visited London to attend the meeting of the International Whaling Conference as part of the German delegation.

[27] The next day, he and the German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen met Sir Horace Wilson, the Chief Industrial Adviser to the Government and one of the closest friends of Neville Chamberlain to discuss the Danzig crisis.

[27] Wohlthat's presence in London as part of the International Whaling Conference was merely a cover to meet Wilson, a civil servant widely acknowledged to have the power to discuss confidential matters on behalf of Chamberlain.

[28] Hudson asked the journalists not to publish this story yet, saying more time was needed for his plan to work as Wohlthat had to return to Germany to report on his offer to Göring, who presumably would convince Hitler to accept it.

[28] Hudson who was described by another Conservative MP as "looks as through he just inherited a fortune and has been celebrating in a hot bath" boasted much about what he just done at a dinner party, speaking very loudly about his "peace-saving" plan.

[30] On 22 July 1939, The Daily Telegraph and the News Chronicle both broke the story on their front-pages that Britain just had offered Germany a loan worth hundreds of millions of pound sterling in exchange for not attacking Poland.

[28] Chamberlain labelled Hudson in a letter to his sister a "conceited" junior minister "with a very bad reputation as a disloyal colleague who is always trying to advance his own interests".

[33] Gladwyn Jebb, the private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, wrote in a furious memo that Hudson's loan offer was "super-appeasement" as he declared that the publication of the plan: "would arose all the suspicions of the Bolsheviks, dishearten the Poles, and encourage the Germans into thinking that we are prepared to buy peace...I must say I doubt whatever such folly could be pushed to a further extreme".

[35] The feeling that the United Kingdom was not to be trusted led Joseph Stalin to place more interest in the alternative diplomatic strategy of seeking an understanding with Germany at the expense of Poland.

[36] Despite the humiliation, Hudson remained convinced that "another Munich" to save the peace was still possible under which the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk) would "go home to the Reich" in exchange for Germany not invading Poland.

[38] Watt argued that Hudson along with the other amateur diplomats in the Danzig crisis such as the Australian pilot and MI6 spy, Sidney Cotton; the professional pacifist Corder Catchpool; the German Rhodes scholar and diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz; the "press lord" Lord Kemsley; Helmut Wohlthat; the civil servant Sir Joseph Ball; and the Kordt brothers, Erich and Theo, all "...combined to create and confuse the efforts made by Chamberlain and Halifax to convince Britain's potential allies and enemies alike that Munich would not be repeated; that this time they and their country were resolved.

In the opinion of Edward Turnour, 6th Earl Winterton, Hudson "was by far the best of Ministers of Agriculture in either war...he was determined to see that farmers and landowners alike utilised every acre of soil to help keep the nation from starvation".

[43] On 28 June 1940, a Scientific Committee appointed by Hudson recommended "a basal diet" as the "foundation of food policy" in view of the possibility of an U-boat-caused famine.

[45] In a controversial move, Hudson established in June 1940 a private corporation, Fyfield Estates Limited, of which he and his wife were the leading shareholders, which purchased a number of farms across Britain.

[46] Besides for the "Land Girls", Hudson had German and Italian POWs; Jewish refugees; serviceman on furlough who had been farmers before the war; conscientious objectors; and volunteers from the cities all put to work on British farms.

[55] Along with Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of aircraft production and Leo Amery, the India secretary, Hudson was one the principle advocates in the Churchill cabinet who favoured the continuation of the sterling area and the Imperial preference tariffs after the war as being necessary for the economic "survival" of the United Kingdom as a great power.

[56] The protectionist, sterling area approach favoured by Hudson, Beaverbrook and Amery who argued that bilateral trade agreements would be "self-righting" met with much criticism from the economist John Maynard Keynes who serving as a senior civil servant with the Treasury.

[45] Odlum, a leading Canadian agricultural expert had played a key role in developing the tobacco industry in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) for the British South Africa Company, and then worked in Honduras and Kenya as a plantation manager.

[59] Odlum at first threatened to sue for libel unless the offending statement about the farm being "in a very poor condition" at the time that Hudson brought it, which appeared in a number of British newspapers, was withdrawn.

[59] The Hudson-Odlum libel trial attracted much media attention, and the verdict in favour of Odlum is generally believed to have effectively finished Hudson's political career.