Personal Relations during Treaty Negotiations
According to Curran, Griffith and Chamberlain hit it off and Llyod George and Churchill also liked Griffith. In addition, while, at first, Griffith did not trust Llyod George, he came to have confidence in him. With regards to Collins, Curran says that Collins felt Chamberlain was aloof and patronising and also, initially, he did not like Churchill. He never trusted Llyod George. The only one to win Collins’s confidence was Birkenhead. Again, according to Curran, Churchill was fascinated by Collins but was repelled by his association with ‘terrible deeds’. (This is somewhat odd given the much more ‘terrible deeds’ that Churchill was soon to responsible for in the Middle East – see pgs 186-187 of Churchill’s Folly by Christopher Catherwood.) Llyod George considered Duffy and Duggan as “pigeons for the plucking” and soon formed an unflattering opinion of Barton. They reserved a particular antipathy for Childers (and, it would seem, they was soon joined in this by Griffith).