Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  21. Churchill in Dundee with Sir George Ritchie, his political guide and friend in the city, in September 1921 following severe riots. Famed for its jute industry, Dundee had been Churchill’s constituency since 1908 and was suffering from high unemployment and dismal poverty. Bodyguard Detective-Sergeant Walter Thompson can be spotted on the right staring at the camera.

  22. The wealthy and well-connected aesthete and Member of Parliament Sir Philip Sassoon, a frequent and generous host to Churchill during 1921, seen here on the steps of his home at Lympne on the Channel coast in Kent. Previously private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western front, he was now Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary. The prime minister’s mistress, Frances Stevenson, quipped that he was as ‘amusing and clever as a cartload of monkeys’.

  23. The ‘Big Three’ of the Coalition: Churchill seen here in 1921 with F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George. They were also the principal founders of The Other Club, a cross-party and exclusively male dining club founded before the First World War that in addition to politicians included artists, writers, entertainers, and members of the press. Its day-to-day running was largely left in the hands of Freddie Guest.

  24. Churchill playing his beloved polo in 1921. He described it as ‘the prince [and sometimes emperor] of games’ and he rarely missed an opportunity to indulge in it. He also enjoyed the danger and thrill of flying, but reluctantly gave that up after a crash and many entreaties by Clementine to think of the future of his family. Churchill’s love of risk was also evident in his gambling and finances.

  25. One of Britain’s most accomplished and celebrated portrait artists, the Belfast-born Sir John Lavery actively nurtured Churchill’s artistic ambitions and, along with the considerably younger Hazel, quietly supported the Irish nationalist cause. During 1921 he and Churchill painted together on the French Riviera, and in the catalogue for a show of Lavery’s landscapes in October Churchill highlighted the artist’s use of ‘brilliant and beautiful colour’. Here, Lavery captures Churchill at work with his canvas.

  Yet it wasn’t just across the Atlantic and in the Dominions that British ‘frightfulness’ was generating hostility. It was in Britain itself. No one was a more avid daily reader of newspapers than Churchill, and he knew full well that the major Liberal and Labour papers had opposed the war from the start. But the country’s distinguished newspaper of record, The Times, had also now come out strongly against reprisals and the ‘reign of terror’ being inflicted on the Irish. ‘If only the people of England knew . . . Why do these things happen?’ it asked. ‘Why are the servants of the Crown charged with pillage and arson and what amounts to lynch law, and even with drunkenness and murder? How can the reign of terror be stopped?’ Even as Clementine was penning her own plea to her husband, in the House of Commons the Liberal leader Herbert Henry Asquith called for a truce to end ‘the ghastly state of affairs’ in Ireland. The Archbishop of Canterbury joined him in the Lords by denouncing the government’s policy as ‘morally unjust’. Sir John Simon, a former Liberal Home Secretary, also described the reprisals as ‘politically disastrous and morally wrong . . . exposing us to the scorn of the world’. Even some Conservatives began to voice doubts. If nothing else, the relentless violence in Ireland was now threatening the coherence of Lloyd George’s Coalition.

  Churchill’s case for a truce was helped by the actions of Sir James Craig, the leader of the Irish Unionists, who now decided to meet secretly with Eamon de Valera to see what direct discussions between the two men could achieve. The answer was virtually nothing – except that the encounter raised the pertinent question: if Craig could meet with the Sinn Fein leader, why not Lloyd George?9 But when the issue of a truce again came to a vote in Cabinet, Churchill found himself once more in a minority against the prime minister. The violence and the burnings continued and spread to the British mainland. In mid-May several night-time attacks were launched against the homes of Royal Irish Constabulary men in London, Liverpool, and Scotland. The methods in each case were remarkably similar. Gangs of between three and sixteen men, all masked and carrying revolvers, broke into houses, soaked carpets, curtains, and furnishings with petrol or paraffin, and set them ablaze. No one was killed, but some of the occupants were shot and wounded. At one house, the ‘hands up’ order was met by a determined one-legged Royal Navy veteran who simply hurled a sewing machine at the raiders.10

  As Churchill predicted, the elections later that month produced a landslide victory for Sinn Fein in the south and a healthy majority for the Unionists in the north. The next day an IRA company of 120 men seized control of the Customs House in Dublin, set it on fire, and destroyed most of the Irish Local Government Board records that underpinned the British civil administration of the country. It was a propaganda coup for Sinn Fein. Yet in the subsequent battle with the police six of the attackers were killed, and over the following weeks a significant surge of British troops along with major intelligence swoops inflicted heavy damage on the rebels. More worryingly for the IRA, internal discipline was beginning to fray. This lent force to Churchill’s argument for a truce. At a Cabinet meeting in the first week of June he confidently claimed that his old friend and head of the Royal Irish Constabulary, General Tudor, was clearly ‘getting to the root of the matter’. He was not wrong. The intensification of IRA actions represented a degree of desperation. While it was clear they could continue guerrilla warfare for quite a while, it was also obvious that they could never prevail.11

  The conditions were ripe for a deal. Behind-the-scenes peace-feelers had never ceased. King George V had long expressed his dislike for the Black and Tans’ methods, and when he travelled to Belfast to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament he openly appealed for all Irishmen ‘to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill’. Two days later, Churchill strongly supported Lloyd George when he floated the idea of seizing the moment to send a letter to both de Valera and Craig inviting them to enter into negotiations. ‘I believe in striking while the iron is hot,’ he said. The next day, his uncle Moreton’s Irish home was torched – a clear sign that the campaign of official reprisals had simply encouraged the IRA to raise the stakes and intensified the deadly spiral of destruction.12

  With the ruins of Innishannon still smouldering, an American delegation from the state of Virginia arrived in England to present statues of George Washington to St Paul’s Cathedral and to Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral home of the United States’ first President that had recently been purchased by public subscription to mark a century of peace between Britain and the United States. Churchill was the guest speaker at a London lunch hosted by the English-Speaking Union. He used the occasion to celebrate the growing closeness and common sense of purpose between Britain and America as witnessed so recently on the Western Front, but coupled it with a warning that a ‘grave impediment’ to its future was the troubled Ireland. Happily, he pointed out, an opportunity had now arisen to place Anglo-Irish relations on an honourable, free, and enduring foundation. ‘It would be foolish to anticipate what the course of events may be,’ he said. ‘No one can tell. Once more, unreason may dash away the cup.’ It was important, therefore, for the British people to appreciate that their relations with Ireland and the Irish involved far more than the United Kingdom, but had a global impact. Ireland, he hoped, would soon no longer provide ‘a source of peril and of reproach to the British Empire’.13

  The momentum for peace was gathering force. Over the next few days, several Sinn Fein leaders were released from prison. When General Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, arrived in Britain for the Imperial Conference, he offered his services as an intermediary. Travelling to Dublin, he drew on his experience of fighting against the British in the Boer War to urge the Sinn Fein leaders to accept the olive b
ranch being offered. Their response was grudging, but encouraging enough that when Smuts reported it to the Cabinet Churchill warmly welcomed the news. ‘I would go a long way to humour them,’ he declared.

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  The week before the King’s speech in Belfast, Churchill addressed the House of Commons about his settlement for the Middle East. He had been preparing it for weeks, knowing full well that his performance could make or break his political future. One of his great skills as a speaker was to make complex issues comprehensible. But he only succeeded after laborious and lengthy preparation and practice. His speeches always went through several drafts, and he would frequently read them out loud to himself to gauge their rhythms and effect. Early in his parliamentary career he had once tried to speak to the Commons without notes, only to forget in mid-sentence what he was about to say and be forced to resume his seat to a shocked silence in the House. Traumatized, he rarely again tried to speak without carefully constructed notes.14

  Complex events in the Middle East required a simplifying narrative for Members of Parliament. For one thing, there had been continuous unrest in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Only about 10 per cent of its population of just over 600,000 was Jewish, and of these only a small minority were recently arrived Zionists. So the mark they left on the physical and demographic landscape of Palestine was minor. But even this was too much for local Arab nationalists. They complained about an increasing proportion of Jews taking jobs in Palestine’s civil administration and feared a future in which Jews might predominate. With Zionist immigration picking up again after the end of the war, they also took aim at even historic Jewish communities long established in the Holy Land. The first week of May saw an outbreak of violence in Jaffa between Arabs and Jews with shops looted, several people killed, and troops brought in to restore calm. The violence spread to recent Jewish settlements, and the Royal Air Force dropped bombs to scare away the attackers. In a radical effort to calm Arab fears, Sir Herbert Samuel ordered a temporary halt to all Jewish immigration, and even refused to allow two boatloads of Russian Jews to land at Jaffa. As a result, other groups of Jews already embarked for Palestine were held up in Europe.

  Samuel’s decision took Churchill by surprise. The Jews en route could hardly be left stranded in Vienna. But when the High Commissioner told him that Arab unrest had been prompted by the presence of some two hundred recently arrived Jewish Bolsheviks from Russia, Churchill threw his weight behind the decision and urged him ‘to purge the Jewish Colonies and newcomers of Communist elements and without delay have all those who are guilty of subversive agitation expelled from the country’. Samuel’s reference to ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ was guaranteed – and possibly deliberately designed – to spark Churchill off. In his many fiery rhetorical tirades against the Bolsheviks since Lenin’s seizure of power, Churchill had more than once equated Jews with Bolsheviks and dubbed the latter as ‘Semitic conspirators’ or as ‘Jew Commissars’. Bolsheviks apart, however, he saw Jews in a highly positive light. This made him a marked anomaly in being free of the the ingrained hostility to Jewry typical of the English upper class, and indeed of a number of his friends and social contacts. Duff Cooper, for example, had recently been forced to send a grovelling letter of apology to Philip Sassoon after denouncing him with an offensive anti-Semitic slur for not lending him and Diana his car after a party – despite the fact that thanks to his generosity the two had spent their honeymoon night at Lympne. ‘Bendor’, the Duke of Westminster, frequently a welcoming host to Churchill, was a deep-grained and unapologetic anti-Semite. ‘Sunny’ Marlborough, his cousin, was little better.15

  As for Zionism, Churchill had long advocated a Jewish homeland on the grounds that it rectified an historical injury and was a positive and civilizing force. It also, he argued, provided an antidote to Bolshevism. What he had seen with his own eyes at Rishon-le-Zion left a profound and permanent mark on his ideas about Palestine. ‘You have changed desolate places to smiling orchards,’ he told its pioneer inhabitants, ‘and initiated progress instead of stagnation.’ When he briefed the Cabinet before his Commons speech he went out of his way to emphasize that the Zionist colonies had created ‘a standard of living far superior to that of the indigenous Arabs’. His pro-Zionism was a sincere and lifelong commitment, although it was always tempered by his pragmatic views about British interests and his own political priorities.16

  This became dismayingly clear to his military advisor in the Middle East Department, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. A tall and imposing figure some four years younger than Churchill, and with a decorated career as a soldier and spy in Africa and the Middle East to his credit, he was an even greater myth-maker than Lawrence of Arabia. His real-life story was interesting enough. Yet he felt compelled to embellish it with dozens of tall tales, faked many of his diary entries, and indulged in some shameless fraud and theft. An enthusiastic ornithologist, he gifted his collection to London’s famed Natural History Museum, but years later it was discovered that he had stolen dozens of specimens from other museums, incorporated them into his own collection, and then claimed to have discovered them in new locations. He even took specimens from the Museum, re-labelled them, and presented them back to it.

  Such practised deception seems also to have applied to many of the stories he told about himself. One of the most celebrated was the so-called ‘Haversack Ruse’, a deception plan during Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in which a haversack containing false battle plans to fool the Turks was planted and led to British victory at the Battle of Beersheba. In reality, Meinertzhagen probably neither planned nor executed the operation. But his claim to have done so guaranteed him a formidable reputation at the Paris Peace Conference, where he served as a military advisor to the British delegation. ‘He struck me as being one of the ablest and most successful brains I had met in any army,’ enthused Lloyd George. Lawrence of Arabia, who got to know Meinertzhagen well in Paris and recognized something of a kindred soul, described him in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom as ‘a silent laughing masterful man . . . who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain, which chose the best way to its purpose unhampered by doubt or habit.’17

  Churchill was often drawn uncritically to charismatic men of action. So he was attracted to this wealthy and well-connected banker’s son who had once been dangled on the knees of the elderly Charles Darwin, and whose aunt was the formidable Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb. During the same week in January that Churchill recruited Lawrence as his advisor on Arab affairs, he and Freddie Guest met with Meinertzhagen at a London club and over lunch offered him the post of Military Advisor. By this time, the legendary Colonel’s pro-Zionist views and friendship with Chaim Weizmann had already produced clashes with his army superiors; he provided a much-needed balance to their strongly pro-Arab views. It took three months for the appointment to come through. When it did, Meinertzhagen was dismayed to discover what he viewed as Britain’s betrayal of its commitment in the Balfour Declaration.18 He also took strong exception to the decision by Sir Herbert Samuel to appoint the mild-mannered twenty-six-year-old Al Hajj Amin al-Hussayni, the scion of a distinguished Palestinian family, as the new Mufti (later Grand Mufti) of Jerusalem, a position of significant influence in the Muslim community. Only the year before, Hajj Amin had been convicted in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment for his part in stirring up anti-Jewish riots, and his family was well known for its hostility to Jews. But Samuel believed that Arab grievances had to be met and that Hajj Amin could be coaxed into enforcing a more peaceful line with the local Palestinian population.

  To Meinertzhagen, the decision was ‘pure madness’. He predicted that nothing but trouble would come of it – and indeed the Grand Mufti was eventually to be expelled from Palestine and ended up broadcasting anti-Semitic tirades from Hi
tler’s wartime Berlin. But Churchill’s response was simply to shrug and say he could do nothing about it. His reply to another complaint was equally infuriating to his pro-Zionist advisor. Meinertzhagen had not attended the Cairo Conference and believed that the decision to separate Transjordan from Palestine was a betrayal of Britain’s pledge to the Jews. His fury led to a stormy meeting in Churchill’s office. ‘I went foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation,’ noted Meinertzhagen in his (far from reliable) diary. ‘I told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews, that it was yet another promise broken, [and] that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by degrees . . .’ Churchill eventually calmed him down with some soothing comments.

  But his policy on the issue remained unaffected. He was not a minister to be easily swayed by any of his advisors, however passionate or like-minded. It was already becoming dismally clear that in Palestine he and his successors would be tested to – and beyond – the limit in finding a path acceptable to both Arabs and Jews. Meinertzhagen neither forgot nor forgave. In 1964, at age eighty-five, he wrote scathingly that ‘Churchill, encouraged by Lawrence, gave the whole of Transjordan to that miserable Abdullah . . . [In 1921] I remonstrated. He put on that ridiculous bull dog expression but nothing could be done to remedy Churchill’s stupidity.’ He then added bitterly, ‘I do not share the general admiration for Churchill. No living man has done so much harm to this country as Churchill, yet he is venerated as a God.’19

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