Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  Yet the couple were nothing if not hardy and game. After breakfast Clementine went off to play tennis and Churchill attended a memorial service at the British Military Cemetery nearby on the Mount of Olives. In an emotional debate in the House of Commons barely twelve months before, he had supported the recommendation of the War Graves Commission which favoured the burial of fallen soldiers close to the foreign fields where they had died rather than the repatriation of their bodies home. Now, as he stood alongside Bishop MacInnes, he gazed over the graves of some 2,500 soldiers of the British Empire killed during the Palestine Campaign. As always on such occasions, he was deeply moved and fluent in his words that set the scene in historic perspective and gave meaning to the lives of the dead. ‘These veteran soldiers lie here where rests the dust of the Khalifs and Crusaders and the Maccabees,’ he said. ‘Peace to their ashes, honour to their memory and may we not fail to complete the work which they have begun.’6

  The next day was Easter Sunday, the holiest in the Christian calendar. After attending morning service at the Cathedral – which Coote ap-plauded as nice and ‘thoroughly English’ – Churchill was taken in hand by Sir Ronald Storrs, the civilian governor of the city. Something of an artistic connoisseur who favoured white suits and flamboyant buttonholes, he was a Cambridge-educated classicist and long-time friend of Lawrence with whom he had worked in the Arab Bureau in Cairo. The forty-year-old Storrs was intimately familiar with British policy towards the Arabs and especially Abdullah, and since arriving three years before in the wake of the British Army had thoroughly explored Palestine. Now, he was bent on putting a British stamp on Jerusalem. Determined to preserve and enhance its historic buildings and antiquities, and to prevent it from becoming ‘an inferior Manchester or Baltimore’, he had recently founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society. Funded by Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike along with many international banks and millionaires such as Mrs Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan Junior, its subscription list also included Sir Basil Zaharoff, the most notorious arms dealer of the day – and an important British intelligence asset. Storrs had visited him in his villa outside Paris during the Peace Conference to find him lying in the garden with one foot swathed for classic gout and an electric bell-push in a cedar tree for communicating with his secretary. After Storrs showed him his plans for Jerusalem, Zaharoff pushed the bell and immediately wrote out a generous cheque – ‘the millionaire of my dreams,’ recalled Storrs.7 Amongst the Society’s first acts were the restoration of the Dome of the Rock, the founding of a Chess Club and a School of Music for both sexes, and a Dramatic Society, whose first performance was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.8

  Storrs had briefly met Churchill in Paris two years previously and now showed him the sites of old Jerusalem that he had missed the day before, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount. Afterwards, he drove both the Churchills six miles south to Bethlehem. The Emperor Constantine had built the Church of the Nativity over the cave where Jesus Christ was believed to have been born and the town was a major site of pilgrimage for Christians around the world. Storrs knew it well. He had visited the town on his first Christmas Eve in Palestine to attend midnight mass and afterwards descended the steep stone steps into the Crypt of the Manger. Its walls and ceilings were hung with heavy satin brocade and Storrs had watched entranced as a baby doll on a little gold bed was lowered reverently into the recessed niche of the Manger. Despite the dozens of holy fakes being hawked on the streets, he found the town and its church to be of ‘surpassing merit’. So he was able to give his guests a thorough and genuinely enthusiastic guided tour through the church.9

  Churchill, however, seems to have been more moved by the fact that although he had taken along his easel and equipment, the weather was too cloudy and dull for him to make use of his brushes. Storrs singled out this obsession in his memoirs. After applauding how briskly and efficiently Churchill dealt with business, he noted that after appreciating the beauty of the Temple Mount by moonlight, the Colonial Secretary had seemed ‘thereafter to grudge every moment spent away from his easel’.10

  *

  Painting notwithstanding, the main order of the day was Churchill’s first face-to-face meeting with Abdullah. The day before, Lawrence had driven across the Jordan to the ancient trading city of Al-Salt high in the hills between Jerusalem and Amman to brief Abdullah on what he could expect Churchill to say. At dinner that night they both dined with Yusuf al-Sukhar, a wealthy Christian merchant, and in the morning were driven in a British military car to Jerusalem via Jericho. Arriving at Government House in the afternoon, Abdullah was ceremoniously greeted with flags, a Guard of Honour, and a band, and afterwards took tea with the Samuels.

  That night there was a large dinner in the grand hall. Here Churchill finally met Abdullah. Short and thickly-built with dark brown eyes and a heavy beard, the thirty-nine-year-old emir exuded intelligence, energy, and charm. A devout Muslim who had spent most of his youth in Istanbul, he possessed a good sense of humour and, an avid chess player, he was astute and ambitious. In moving from Mecca to Transjordan his eyes had been set on Damascus rather than Amman, and Churchill knew it. For the sake of Britain’s wider relations with France, he had to make it clear to Abdullah that Transjordan should not become a base for attacks on the French. Over dinner he promptly raised the issue by mentioning a recent attack by desert tribesmen on a French border patrol and said that the British government was blaming it on Abdullah’s influence. ‘But luckily,’ he laughed, ‘I have two broad shoulders to carry the Government’s protest for you.’ This made it easier for Abdullah, too, to distance himself from the dispute by pleading ignorance but, he added, he couldn’t prevent people from defending their own country. He then made a gesture of friendship. The dinner over, he took some snuff from a golden box enamelled green with the rays of the setting sun in red and offered it to Churchill. Seeing that the snuff was French, he took some, and then sneezed violently. They both took this as a great joke, laughed, and amiably set nine thirty the next morning for their first meeting. Churchill described Abdullah as ‘a very agreeable, intelligent, and civilized Arab prince’.11

  *

  Over the next three days he had three separate meetings with him, interspersed with several events designed to signal to all communities in Palestine that their future was assured under the new British mandate. From the start Churchill made it clear that the Balfour Declaration would stand and that there could be no question of having an Arab ruler for both Palestine and Transjordan – an idea that Abdullah initially tried floating but that he instantly squashed. Instead, Abdullah would continue to govern in Transjordan with the support of a British political agent and a handful of military officers to assist his local levies. In addition, he would receive a subsidy of £5,000 a month. Aware of Abdullah’s wider ambitions and to make it all more palatable, Churchill hinted that perhaps, in the not too distant future, he might eventually end up being installed by the French in Damascus. But, he quickly added, this was not something that the British could guarantee.12

  What he could promise, however, was a neighbouring military and air force presence to bolster Abdullah’s position and impress his opponents. To make the point, he took Abdullah to witness a grand military review at the barracks at Jaffa where they viewed a march past featuring units of the Indian mule corps and cavalry, infantry from the South Lancashire regiment, and light cars and armoured cars. As they stood together on the podium while the National Anthem played, Bristol fighters from No. 14 squadron swooped overhead. This was military theatre to warm his heart and he was delighted. For Abdullah, a realist, it showed where power lay. Transjordan was at least a stepping stone to something larger, or so he hoped. So he accepted the deal and promised he would stamp down on Syrian exiles in his country who were stirring up cross-border trouble with the French. For this, he was to pay a heavy price. It made him enemies amongst Arab nationalists who had pinned their wider hopes of Arab liberation on his shoulders, and i
t alienated his Palestinian allies by accepting that Britain was bound by the Balfour Declaration, even though Churchill promised that it would not apply to Transjordan itself. In the longer run too, there was to be yet a further price. Abdullah remained confined for a lifetime in Amman, a town of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, ruling over a territory of no more than 300,000 people – a ‘falcon trapped in a canary cage’, as one observer cruelly noted. Churchill was well aware of the risks Abdullah was taking. ‘I hope he won’t get his throat cut by his own followers,’ he told Curzon. Thirty years later the fears were to come true. On 20 July 1951, three years after the creation of Israel, Abdullah was assassinated by a young Palestinian on the steps of the Al-Aqsa mosque as he entered for Friday evening prayers.13

  Britain also paid a penalty in Churchill’s attempts to find a middle way between competing visions of the future. Throughout his talks in Jerusalem he received petitions from both Jews and Arabs about the future of Palestine. Following his second meeting with Abdullah at Government House, on Easter Monday, the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs presented him with a lengthy protest against Zionist activity and bluntly demanded he rescind the Balfour Declaration, put an end to Jewish immigration, and create a government elected by those in Palestine who had been there before the war. The protest was also rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes that could have been lifted verbatim from the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Churchill dealt with the protesters briskly, refused their demands, and urged the Arabs instead to work creatively with the Jews to create a prosperous Palestine.14

  Then it was the turn of the Jewish National Council to present him with its own lengthy statement, which stressed its acceptance of Arab rights, the hope of reaching an understanding with them, and the immense progress already made by the immigrants in trade, industry, and agriculture. In response, he expressed his strong support for the Zionist dream but asked that the pioneers should be ‘picked men, worthy in every way of the greatness of the idea and of the cause for which they are striving’ – a thinly disguised warning against socialists and revolutionaries. That same night he was a guest at a reception given in his honour by the leading Zionists in the city, and the next day he visited the still uncompleted Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Here he was greeted by a guard of honour of the Palestine Police and presented with a scroll of the Law by the Chief Rabbi. ‘Personally, my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism,’ he declared. But he repeated yet again that Britain’s promise included assurances to the non-Jewish inhabitants that they would not suffer as a result. If the Zionists worked for all Palestinians, he declared, the country would ‘turn into a Paradise and will become . . . a land flowing with milk and honey’. Then he was handed a tree to plant. But it broke off from its root as he tried to place it in the hole. No one had thought to provide a spare. He looked annoyed and Samuel was embarrassed. Finally, a small palm tree was substituted. But, as one disgruntled observer remarked, it would not even grow there. It was an ill omen for the smooth implantation of a new society.

  That same afternoon Samuel threw a huge reception in Government House for representatives of all religions in Palestine, taking care to personally greet them all. Lawrence was also present and introduced the wide-eyed young Maxwell Coote to two Christian sheiks from Al-Salt dressed in the full finery of their traditional robes. Alongside patriarchs of the Abyssinian Christian Church and other grandees it was all, in the young officer’s words, ‘far more interesting than any European or Egyptian show could be’.15 More useful, however, was a frank discussion Churchill was able to have with a French diplomat named Robert de Caix, a veteran advocate of France’s hereditary rights to Syria and Palestine as the original land of the Crusades and now Chief Secretary to General Henri Gouraud, the commander of French forces in Syria. Bluntly, Churchill charged him with being ‘extremely hostile’ to Britain, and complained that the French were causing great difficulties for Britain in the Middle East. De Caix’s denial, along with his strongly expressed fears that Transjordan could become a staging ground for anti-French action, was equally robust. But after Churchill explained that a ‘keystone’ of the deal with Abdullah was the prevention of such acts, and de Caix on his side outlined what the French were doing to soothe nationalist sentiment, both men calmed down and Churchill felt satisfied. ‘He seemed an honest man,’ he reported to the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, ‘and on the whole I got on with him.’16

  *

  Meantime, events in London were never far from his mind. There was still no news about whom Lloyd George would appoint as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This may explain why Coote became involved in some urgent reshuffling of Churchill’s travel plans, although it may simply have reflected his ward’s habitual impetuosity. Already by the time Churchill arrived in Jerusalem he had changed his initial plans to sail home from Alexandria on the Italian liner the Esperia and instead booked berths for a later sailing on the French ship the Lotus. But on the day of Abdullah’s arrival in Jerusalem he reverted to his original plan. Barely had Coote fired off telegrams to take care of this than Churchill announced yet another change of schedule, this time asking his young aide-de-camp to book a special train back to Alexandria that would leave in the evening rather than on the morning of his last day in Palestine, thus giving him an extra few hours to pack in more visits. This seemed settled. But the next day, from Cairo, Archie Sinclair sent a telegram saying that a 50 per cent penalty charge would have to be paid for cancellation of the Lotus reservations. At this Churchill flew into a fury and dictated an enraged reply. He then wondered whether they should after all cancel the arrangements for the special train, which by now had been painstakingly arranged. The issue was left hanging until just before dinner, when Coote was summoned yet again. This time he found Churchill wallowing in the bath. The conversation was somewhat intermittent while he submerged himself fully under the water on at least four occasions. But in the end it was agreed that he would stick with the ‘special’ night train after all and board the Esperia the next day.

  Coote took all this with amazing good humour. He was neither the first nor the last of those who worked for Churchill to find him both infuriating and endearing. ‘Winston is a wonderful man truly, to work with,’ he noted, ‘he always changes his plans literally every day and would drive one demented, I think, in time if one had the job of always fixing up his arrangements, but I like him for it and he can never receive “No” as an answer to anything he would like.’ Churchill in turn had taken a shine to Coote, jokingly calling him ‘Coûte que Coûte’ (‘Cost what may’) and always asking him if he was happy and having a good time. ‘I have grown quite fond of him on this trip,’ noted Coote on their final day together, ‘although I never expected I should during my first few days with him.’17

  *

  Churchill’s last day in Jerusalem was Wednesday 30 March. It was a packed schedule that began with an unprecedented early morning rise at 5.30 to drive to Jericho for breakfast with the local Arab Governor. Back in Jerusalem by ten o’clock, he visited a Muslim school with Samuel before witnessing a fly past at the Royal Air Force base at Ramleh – both a boost to the local squadron and a re-affirmation of his faith in British air power as an economical peacekeeper in the Middle East.

  Afterwards, he visited three of the most impressive new Jewish settlements in Palestine. The first was Tel-Aviv, where he was met by its mayor Meir Dizengoff who, like thousands of others, was an immigrant from the Russian Empire. As Churchill proudly explained, Tel-Aviv was only twelve years old and had been ‘conquered by us on sand dunes’. The next stop was the small pioneer settlement of Bir Yaakov, which was wholly settled by Russian Jews. ‘Were they Bolsheviks?’ enquired Churchill. ‘Certainly not’ came the reply, they believed in hard work and self-help. Duly impressed, he went on to his last stop: the small community of Rishon-le-Zion (First in Zion). Founded forty years before, again mostly by Jews from Russia, and sponsored by Baron Edmund de Rothschild, it had a population of some
2,000 inhabitants housed in modern red-roofed houses set amidst verdant vineyards and flourishing orange groves created by assiduous cultivation and irrigation. Churchill was especially impressed by the youth and vigour of its workers, both men and women, and lauded how the Jews had not just made their own land flourish but raised the standards around it. ‘I am talking of what I saw with my own eyes,’ he told the House of Commons later. ‘All around the Jewish colony, the Arab houses were tiled instead of being built with mud, so that the culture from this centre has spread out into the surrounding district.’ For Zionists, this was a sure sign that in Churchill they had a friend. For Palestinian Arabs, however, while his emphatic support for the Balfour Declaration persuaded some to abandon their opposition to it, to others it merely hardened their determination to resist it.18

  *

  Churchill’s train left Ludd station that evening bound for Alexandria. He was exhausted but cheerful, enjoyed his dinner, and stayed up talking for quite a while. He was up early next morning and watched intently in his bedroom slippers as the coach was ferried across the Suez Canal. Then, thanks to plentiful hot water from the engine, he enjoyed a hot bath, as did a grateful Clementine. In Alexandria he was reunited with Archie Sinclair, who was now recovered from his typhoid fever, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, with Royal Air Force planes circling overhead, he embarked on the Esperia bound for Genoa. The next morning it was announced in London that Lloyd George had appointed Sir Robert Horne as his new Chancellor of the Exchequer.19

  NINE

  TRAGEDY STRIKES

  On hearing about Sir Robert Horne’s promotion, Churchill delayed his return to London and after disembarking at Genoa rented a car and headed for the French Riviera, where he and Clementine checked into the luxurious Grand Hotel Eden at Cap d’Ail. Sandwiched between Monte Carlo and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, it was described by Bradshaw’s – the essential railway and hotel guide of the time for British visitors to the Continent – as ‘one of the most salubrious and picturesque spots of the Riviera’. Here they were joined by his mother, who took an adjoining room. No record of what they talked about survives, and indeed their reunion has escaped the attention of most biographers, some of whom have claimed that he rushed back to London to confront Lloyd George. Yet seeking out his mother’s company to soothe his bitter feelings about being denied the high position once enjoyed by his father was completely natural, and it is safe to assume that Lady Randolph sought to reassure him that this was not the end of his career, merely another bump along the road to his ultimate success. This was certainly her strong belief. Visiting an old friend in Italy soon afterwards she spoke fervently of her ‘unswerving faith’ in her elder son’s abilities, and pronounced that his shoulders were broad enough to bear any burden. Alice Keppel, the former mistress of King Edward VII, who also met her in Italy at this time, recalled that she spoke with pride and love about her son.1