The following day, undeterred in his search for economies, Churchill insisted that before too long Mesopotamia should start making a financial contribution to the cost of maintaining British troops in the country. Afterwards, he motored out to an old Dervish monastery carved out of sandstone hills. Coote watched intently as he worked his magic on the canvas and marvelled at how Churchill would slap on paint and then, if he wasn’t happy, simply scrape it off. ‘He is very clever,’ he observed, ‘and has a great eye for colour.’24
The urgent need for budget cuts continued to dominate Churchill’s mind, not least because it affected the future of the Coalition at home – and hence his own political career. With his eyes set on following his father to the Exchequer, he had to demonstrate that he was a responsible guardian of the nation’s finances. Britain’s presence in the Middle East was to be decidedly ‘Empire-Lite’. So was his own, and he made much of the fact that rather than bringing out cipher clerks from London at great expense he was relying on Allenby’s staff in the Residency. He kept them exceptionally busy. To Lloyd George alone during the conference he sent at least a dozen telegrams. Most of them were lengthy accounts of the proceedings. But sometimes he asked for help in clearing administrative roadblocks in London, such as mobilizing shipping to get more troops back to Britain sooner. He also kept in constant touch with other colleagues. No one could claim that Churchill did not keep them informed or that the Cairo decisions were anything other than collective. The most sensitive question for Lloyd George was how they would affect Anglo-French relations, which he was eager to improve. The French considered Faisal ‘treacherous’, had thrown him out of Syria, and were strongly opposed to placing him on the throne in Mesopotamia from where they feared he would undermine their control of Syria. So how could this be managed without causing a break with Paris? The answer would be to present him as the free and spontaneous choice of the local population, which would make it difficult for the French to resist. Accordingly, Churchill assured Lloyd George that between them he, Cox, Bell and Faisal himself could ensure the creation of a ‘spontaneous’ movement that would produce the desired result. In the meantime, it was agreed that nothing should be announced to the French and that Faisal should return secretly to Mecca and gain his father’s and brothers’ consent to the deal.25
*
Suddenly, in the midst of all this, Churchill’s future was dramatically thrown into high relief by unexpected news: Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader and lynchpin of the Coalition – effectively deputy prime minister to Lloyd George – had abruptly resigned for reasons of ill health and his most likely successor was Austen Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If this happened, who would take over charge of the nation’s finances? Churchill immediately telegraphed Eddie Marsh to find out what was happening. His ambition to follow in his father’s footsteps to the Chancellorship was no secret, and he even kept his father’s robes of office clean and ready to wear.
For the next ten days Lloyd George pondered the decision. Churchill, stranded in the Middle East, could only wait and wonder about his fate. The British press was quick to pounce. ‘To have given immortality to the Pyramids on his canvas,’ noted one drily, ‘must seem a poor consolation for such an inopportune occasion.’ But that great things could emerge for him out of the Coalition crisis was clear to at least one perceptive observer, who firmly saw him as his father’s son with a Tory allegiance. ‘Mr. Churchill must not be forgotten in these times because he is away painting the Pyramids,’ observed ‘Scrutator’ of The Sunday Times:
One can imagine circumstances in which he would have made a bold bid for the leadership of the Tory party, but not now. His time will come later, when the reshaping of parties begins, and in these times he will be found working with Lord Birkenhead: for the dominant motive of Churchill’s life is his attachment to his father’s memory. Sooner or later, he will appear in the role of second founder of the Tory Democratic party.26
*
Sunday 20 March marked the grand finale of the conference. At 9.45 a.m., seated in the last of a convoy of cars alongside Clementine and Captain Coote, Churchill was driven to the Mena House Hotel. Surrounded by luxurious gardens and almost literally standing in the shadows of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the hotel was a favourite destination of European royalty and celebrities. Here he was greeted by the Sheik of Mena dressed in purple and gold and mounted on a horse bearing the same coloured trappings. Recently the hotel had served as a makeshift hospital for Australian troops wounded at Gallipoli – yet another reminder of the shadow that still clouded Churchill’s reputation.
But it was camels that now required his urgent attention. Several were waiting for his party, although some of the guests cried off at the last minute, perhaps afraid of losing their dignity. Camels are notoriously difficult to mount, and even the youthful Coote struggled with the task. But Churchill managed gallantly, as did Clementine, and there was time for him to pose for the camera with Bell and Lawrence in front of the Sphinx before they set off for Sakkara and the ruins of the ancient city of Memphis with its famous stepped pyramid a few miles to the south. Along the way the saddle on his camel slipped, and he fell off. Unharmed, he took it as a great joke. Clementine, meanwhile, seemed entirely comfortable on her mount. After lunch at Sakkara, the chief archaeologist showed them around the tombs. But Churchill declined the offer and wandered off with his easel and paints. Later, after the others had returned to the Mena House Hotel, he and Lawrence made their own way back, riding their camels through the desert at full trot all the way as if warriors together flush with victory.
The next morning began with a formal photograph of all the participants and concluded with a grand dinner that, at his own insistence, included the wives of all the participants. The following day saw him pay a visit with Allenby to the Sultan at the Abdin Palace and have lunch with the Egyptian prime minister, after which he sent Coote off to buy gifts for the detectives who had been protecting him, including cigarette cases, a silver wrist watch, and a travelling clock. Finally, before leaving the Egyptian capital, he and Clementine were driven out to the Nile Barrage (or Great Dam) where he set up his easel once again and began painting. On the way back their car collided with another and the front ends of both cars were damaged. But no one was injured and Churchill’s main concern was the state of his canvas which, fortunately, was also undamaged. With a series of successful paintings behind him, and a conference that had gone happily to plan, he left Egypt a contented man knowing that the Cabinet back in London was satisfied with what he had achieved. He had, he informed a reporter, enjoyed every minute of his stay.27
Both Bell and Lawrence felt the same way. ‘We’re a very happy family [and] agreed upon everything important,’ wrote the latter to his brother from the Semiramis Hotel. As Bell journeyed back to Baghdad, she took time to report to an old friend. ‘It has been wonderful,’ she wrote.
We covered more work in a fortnight than has ever been got through in a year. Mr. Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone half way and masterly alike in guiding big meetings and in conducting the small committees into which we broke up . . . The general line adopted is, I am sure, the only right one, the only line which gives us a real hope of success.28
EIGHT
THE SMILING ORCHARDS
Churchill and his party left Cairo by train shortly before midnight on Wednesday 23 March, headed for Jerusalem. At the last minute Archie Sinclair decided he was still too ill to travel, so Maxwell Coote continued to stand in for him and shared a sleeper compartment with T. E. Lawrence. Gertrude Bell was making her own way back to Baghdad. Her elderly father, who had accompanied her to Cairo, joined the Churchill group to travel back home. Coote thought him a cheery old man with a keen sense of humour.
The young air force officer by now was feeling relaxed around his ward. At first he had been apprehensive. But after two weeks together he had got used to Churchill’s demanding habits and developed skills to m
anage him. They were badly needed at dawn the next day when the train had to cross the Suez Canal. There was no fixed bridge. So the carriages were uncoupled two at a time from the train and shunted onto a ferry that took them to the other side, where they were attached to an onward waiting train. Coote was all too aware that Churchill was a notoriously late riser and constitutionally incapable of arriving anywhere on time. Because of this, the train was late in leaving and there was now a serious risk they would miss the connection to Palestine. So before departing Cairo, Coote arranged that breakfast would not be served until they were safely across the Canal and installed in the carriage that would take them on to the Holy City. The stratagem worked brilliantly. Churchill sat himself down with three minutes to spare and was soon tucking contentedly into his food.
The train’s only restaurant car was used by other, carefully vetted, travellers. One was the society hostess Mrs ‘Ronnie’ Greville, widow of the Honourable Ronald Greville, a horse-racing chum of ‘Bertie’ (King Edward VII), and a Tory MP for whom Churchill had once campaigned. The illegitimate daughter of the Scottish millionaire brewer William McEwan and a ferocious gossip, she was also a notorious social climber and friend of Queen Mary. As a couple the Grevilles had been privately mocked as ‘the Grovels’, and it was once said of Mrs Greville that she had to be ‘fed royalty like sea lions fish’. Maxwell Coote, observing her at work in the restaurant car, decided that she was definitely a ‘tuft hunter’ – meaning a snob – who liked to sprinkle her conversation with remarks such as ‘the nicest king I have ever met’. Also sharing the carriage was the Baroness de la Grange, a Frenchwoman who had made her château a centre of hospitality for the British Army during the war. Both Allenby and Jack Churchill had been visitors there and the press had dubbed her the ‘Mother of the British Army’. Lawrence, however, was convinced that she was working as a French spy. He disliked the French for having expelled Faisal from Syria and was determined, as were Churchill and Lloyd George, to keep their current negotiations and plotting with Faisal about the throne of Mesopotamia secret from their allies in Paris for as long as possible.
One of the more distinguished of the passengers, however, was not to be seen mingling with this pseudo-house party on the train as it chugged eastwards through the Sinai. He and his small party remained in their own special carriage. It was only after lunch, when the train crossed the border and stopped at Gaza, that he linked up with Churchill.1
*
Sir Herbert Samuel was the British High Commissioner for Palestine. Four years older than Churchill, he had also been a radical member of the reforming pre-war Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, and had served as a wartime Home Secretary. He was the first British minister to promote the idea of a Jewish state and enjoyed the reputation of being a resourceful and resilient administrator. He had arrived in Cairo shortly before midnight on the night of Allenby’s grand ball and Churchill had immediately quit the dance floor to confer with him. Samuel’s appearance marked a new and more contentious phase of the discussions.2
Palestine was a League of Nations mandate under British control. By the terms of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, Britain had also pledged it as the site of ‘a Jewish National Home’ – provided that this did not impinge on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities there. Fleeing pogroms and discrimination in Europe, Jews had begun arriving in large numbers since the 1880s and violence between them and Arabs had been increasing. Churchill was sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, but not uncritically so. Samuel was one of the few Jews in the top reaches of British politics. Churchill hoped that he would be able to play tough with the most vociferous Zionists.
One of the other issues to be discussed was that of Transjordan – the territory east of the River Jordan that was technically part of Palestine but mostly desert and almost exclusively Arab. In preparation for Cairo, Churchill’s advisors had concluded that Transjordan should be separated from the rest of Palestine and set up as an Arab state. The Balfour Declaration promise was to be confined to the lands west of the Jordan. Lawrence strongly supported this view, and Churchill accepted it. Transjordan, they both agreed, should be an Arab state with Abdullah as its most likely monarch.
When Churchill officially announced this on the sixth day of the conference, Samuel had been dismayed. But he was outmanoeuvred and outnumbered. Abdullah had already set himself up in Transjordan, Britain’s ‘Sharifian’ policy was in play, and he could not be removed without bringing down the entire edifice of indirect British rule in the Middle East so carefully constructed over the previous five days. As a sop to Samuel, however, both Churchill and Lawrence promised that everything would be done to ensure that Abdullah stamped down on any anti-Zionist agitation. The next day at the conference Samuel also lost out over the maintenance of law and order in Palestine, an increasingly troublesome issue. He wanted a Jewish military force rather than a simple gendarmerie to defend Jewish settlements. This time Churchill was on his side. But both were thwarted by the local military authorities, who opposed any separate Jewish army.
*
The main purpose of the visit to Jerusalem was to meet with Abdullah and get him firmly committed to the British grand plan. When the train stopped in Gaza, Churchill and Samuel were met by a police guard of honour and driven into the town. It had been badly shelled during the war and many of its buildings lay in ruins. The population consisted of some 15,000 Arabs and fewer than a hundred Jews. As they toured the streets, the two were greeted by enthusiastic crowds shouting in Arabic, ‘Cheers for the Minister’, and also cheers for Great Britain. But as neither understood the language they remained happily unaware that mingled with these greetings were cries of ‘Down with the Jews’ and ‘Cut their throats’. Lawrence, who understood perfectly, remained silent. If the British nurtured any illusions that settling differences between the Arabs and the Jews was going to be easy, this made it abundantly clear that Arab hostility ran deep.
Churchill arrived in Jerusalem after dark. There was a full moon, and on the drive up the Mount of Olives to Government House he caught glimpses of the distant Dead Sea shining in the moonlight. The next day was Good Friday and Maxwell Coote escorted Clementine to St George’s Anglican Cathedral for the midday service. Dedicated barely twenty years before as the focal point of worship for Anglican Christians in the Holy Land, the Victorian Gothic edifice had been shut down during the war and its adjacent Bishop’s Residence used as the home and headquarters of the notoriously brutal commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army. Jemal Pasha had terrorized the city by ruthlessly deporting or hanging opponents he suspected of treachery or nationalist leanings. It was here, too, that the surrender of the city had been signed in December 1917. The Anglican Bishop, the Harrow-educated Rt Reverend Rennie MacInnes, was well known as a supporter of the Palestinian Arabs – especially Christians – against the Zionists, whose demands he denounced in a pastoral letter that year as ‘unjust and intolerable’.3 Afterwards Clementine visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built in the fourth century to enclose both the site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb where his body was laid. From this most holy of Christian sites she proceeded to the Temple Mount to see the massive Western (or ‘Wailing’) Wall, a remnant of Herod the Great’s Second Jewish Temple and the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray. She followed this by visiting the gleaming white marble of the Islamic shrine of the Dome of the Rock, one of the world’s most potent symbols of Islamic power.
Churchill decided against joining this whistle-stop tour of the holy highlights of Jerusalem. Instead, he opted to pursue his own very personal source of spiritual solace. Setting up his easel in the gardens of Government House, he spent the afternoon happily painting a view over the Jordan Valley. Maxwell Coote liked the result, but thought that the oils failed to capture the soft and subtle colouring of the Palestinian landscape. The political landscape, however, was far from serene. That same day in Haifa demonstrators masse
d to protest against continuing Jewish immigration and police shot and killed two Arabs, a woman and a thirteen-year-old boy. In the anti-Jewish riots which followed, ten Jews and five policemen were wounded. Over the next few days Churchill would have plenty to ponder on as he tried to capture the troubled topography of the Holy Land.4
That night, true to form, he kept the Samuels waiting for dinner. Their official residence on the Mount of Olives was based in a vast church-hospital complex originally named after Augusta Viktoria, the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II who had visited Jerusalem some twenty years before, nursing dreams of establishing a German empire in the East. Built to resemble a Hohenzollern Castle, it was notoriously cold and uncomfortable – an ‘icebox’ thought Coote. This perhaps suited Samuel, an austere and buttoned-up figure once described ‘as free from passion as an oyster’. But after the heat of Cairo and the luxurious comforts of the Semiramis Hotel, the Churchills suffered. Feeling distinctly chilled when she went to bed, Clementine lit the oil stove. Within minutes it was belching out thick black smoke and soot rapidly covered the bedcovers. Churchill managed to clear enough of it off for them to clamber between the sheets. But it was a wretched night and when Clementine’s maid arrived in the morning she described the Colonial Secretary and his wife as looking like a couple of ‘coal heavers’.5
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