Talk:Eastern Committee

India Office
The relation between Erle Richards and the India Office/War Cabinet is unclear. In any case, the memo's are put in the India Office Records archive. Wickey (talk) 15:25, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
 * One can frequently find the same papers in more than one place and some versions are not that easily accessible; another possibility (more likely imo) is that the Peace Conference was rather disorganized, Balfour was heading a delegation in Paris while Lloyd George either did or did not pay much attention to him while doing whatever he felt like and Curzon was minding the ship back in London complaining all the while about the state of communications between London and Paris. Montagu led the India Office delegation at the Peace Conference as well as being on the Eastern Committee and was always trying to wrest control over ME affairs from Curzon who was having none of it. That also might have something to do with what papers ended up where. I'm pretty sure there is no direct India Office involvement as such, other than that I think Erle Richards was attached to the India Office at the relevant time but was assigned to Smuts as an assistant in Paris. In any case, as you can see from the records, essentially the same information was frequently being rearranged (some would as well say massaged) into a different format.Selfstudier (talk) 10:22, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Indeed, one document mentiones that there were so many employees in Paris that ministries were asked to call as many back as possible, because they threatened to become undermanned.
 * I do not cast doubt on your studies regarding the India Office. The article about Richards is of pretty poor quality. While his professorship was not necessarily a fulltime job, it is not statet how long he worked for the India Office. Wickey (talk) 13:31, 7 July 2018 (UTC)