Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  After the Jaffa riots and Samuel’s restrictions on immigration, a temporary calm descended on Palestine. After spending a weekend with Clementine at Philip Sassoon’s Trent Park home in company with the Curzons, Ettie Desborough, and others, on Tuesday 14 June Churchill returned to Westminster to paint a relatively bright picture of the Middle East to the House of Commons. Skilfully, he began by stressing that Mesopotamia and Palestine were obligations inherited from the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. Whatever the challenges, they could not be abandoned. ‘We cannot,’ he said, ‘leave the Jews in Palestine to be maltreated by the Arabs . . . nor can we leave the great and historic city of Baghdad and other cities and towns in Mesopotamia to be pillaged by the wild Bedouin of the desert.’ It was Britain’s duty to succeed, and the key to that was to reduce expenditures to within reasonable and practicable limits. This solemn overture was followed by a lengthy account of the impressive troop and budgetary reductions he had been able to force through, thanks largely to decisions at Cairo. Even as he spoke, he told the House, Faisal was on his way from Mecca to Baghdad, and although popular opinion would have to be taken into account, he was clearly the most suitable candidate for the throne.

  Then Churchill turned to Palestine. Here, he admitted, the problem was ‘more acute’, and he made no effort to disguise the contentious issue of Jewish immigration and the Arab response. But he strongly defended the principles of the Balfour Declaration, again painted a glowing picture of what he had witnessed at Rishon-le-Zion, and reiterated his strong belief that Jewish immigration would benefit all the inhabitants of Palestine. In Transjordan, he said, the arrangements he had made personally with Abdullah in Jerusalem had all been successful. Finally, like the masterful orator he was, he concluded by returning to where he had begun – the collapse of Ottoman rule and the chaotic legacy this had left. ‘All [our] efforts will be frustrated and brought to naught,’ he pronounced, ‘unless we can combine them with a peaceful and lasting settlement with Turkey.’20

  It was a tour de force. It presented him as the man who had brought order out of chaos, saved millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and established the foundations of a solid peace in the Middle East. Simultaneously, however, he distanced himself sufficiently far from events to ensure that any failures could plausibly be blamed on a situation that he had inherited, not created. More importantly, it offered him a get-out clause. Only a few days before, he and other Cabinet ministers had met at Chequers for a brainstorming session on the Middle East where Lloyd George had suggested offering both Palestine and Mesopotamia to the United States. Over lunch, Churchill had discussed this idea privately with Curzon. Afterwards, he told Lloyd George that he was ‘much taken’ with the idea and would like to announce it in his forthcoming speech. But Lloyd George dropped the idea almost as quickly as he had floated it, and that was the end of it. Clearly, Churchill did not consider either Palestine or Iraq as vital to Britain’s security, nor was he personally committed to the settlement he had overseen. Two weeks beforehand, he had unburdened himself over the issue during lunch with Thomas Marlowe, the editor of the Daily Mail. ‘So far as he is concerned they are inheritances,’ Marlowe noted. ‘He did not initiate any of the liabilities there . . . Mesopotamia and Palestine are twin babies in his care but he is not the father.’ Churchill also told Lloyd George privately that in Mesopotamia ‘We live on a precarious basis in this wild land filled with a proud and impecunious chief [sic] & extremely peppery well armed politicians.’21

  More significant in the long term was the problem he turned to in his concluding words – Turkey. Here, the nationalist government of Kemal Ataturk was engaged in a bitter war with the Greeks and had yet to sign a peace treaty with the Allies. It was also the issue on which he was at constant loggerheads with the prime minister, a fervent supporter of the Greeks. The entire Middle East settlement, Churchill told the House, depended in the last resort on a peaceful and lasting settlement with Turkey, which, if it chose, could stir up Arab unrest throughout the region.

  The speech proved a personal triumph. The Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain believed that it had changed the whole atmosphere of the House of Commons on the Middle East question. Curzon commented on its ‘brilliancy [sic] and success’. Even Lloyd George, the target of Churchill’s concluding comments, felt bound to congratulate him. ‘Your Mesopotamian performance was one of your very best. Hearty congratulations on its conspicuous success,’ he wrote. Predictably, Churchill’s old nemesis, the Daily Herald, poured scorn on what it scathingly denounced as his ‘oriental visions of squandermania’. But The Times applauded his speech as the most interesting of the parliamentary session. ‘He has lost none of his old skill,’ it commented. The veteran journalist Herbert Sidebotham, a long-time observer and commentator on his parliamentary performances, wrote that he had never known the House more interested in any speech, ‘or a speaker more easy and confident in his power’.

  Yet the most fulsome praise came from a Conservative backbencher who had entered the House just three years previously. Neville Chamberlain shared the ambivalent view of Churchill held by many of his fellow MPs. ‘I never quite know whether most to admire his great gifts,’ he confessed privately, ‘or to be alarmed at his impulsiveness and hasty judgement.’ But after listening to his panoramic survey of the Middle East, the later architect of appeasement dethroned by Churchill as prime minister in 1940, lauded him with unstinting praise. ‘Winston’s speech on Mesopotamia was a brilliant performance,’ he told his sister. ‘He kept the House amused and interested for 90 minutes interspersing arguments and policy with anecdote and description and exercising great art in delivery.’ And, he added, ‘his speeches are worth ten of [Lloyd George’s] as he takes so much more trouble on them’.22

  S U M M E R

  ELEVEN

  ‘WHERE ARE WE GOING IN EUROPE?’

  Ireland was burning, the miners were striking, and the dole queues lengthening. But the annual rituals of Ascot, Wimbledon, and Test Match cricket against Australia were played out as usual. With the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, the ‘great silence’ of collective grief was finally ending. Churchill had already experienced the Riviera’s return to its usual pleasure-seeking routine. Now it was London’s turn to embrace renewal. Nothing better symbolized this celebration than the first Anglo-American Polo Test Match to take place since before the war. Held at Hurlingham Park, the ‘spiritual home’ of polo in Fulham in south-west London, it was another symbol of the intensifying sense of transatlantic friendship so firmly embraced by Churchill in his address to the English-Speaking Union. The captain of the American team was an Oxford Blue.

  On a Saturday afternoon shortly after his Commons speech on the Middle East, he and Clementine joined hundreds of enthusiastic spectators including a generous sprinkling of dukes, duchesses and other ranks of the nobility to enjoy the first of the two matches. It was also a grand royal occasion. The first of the Windsors to arrive was the Prince of Wales, followed shortly afterwards by Queen Alexandra, his grandmother and widow of King Edward VII, as well as several of the royal princesses. Then at three o’clock, in blazing sunshine and greeted by the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards, the King and Queen arrived in their luxurious open carriage drawn by two bay horses. The King wore a silk hat and dark frock coat, while the Queen was dressed in a gown of hyacinth blue satin covered by a heavily beaded black and silver cloak and sporting a double necklace of pearls. Joining them in the Royal Box were the Duke of York – the future King George VI – and the Duke of Connaught, the elderly third son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who as a young army officer based in Montreal had helped repel a Fenian raid from across the border with Vermont. Making it clear that such hostile episodes were firmly interred in the past, that Anglo-American friendship was now the name of the game, and that the Canadian-American border was friendly and open, the American ambassador and his wife sat comfortably next to royalty in the Royal Box.1

  Accompan
ying the Churchills were Philip Sassoon as well as the ubiquitous Freddie Guest, who regularly helped organize the annual Commons versus Lords polo match. Since his Sandhurst days, horses had engaged some of Churchill’s deepest passions. He had emptied his pockets hiring horses from nearby livery stables for point-to-point races and steeplechases. Gazetted at age twenty to the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment, he had spent hours in the riding school and stables. He loved the glittering jingle of the cavalry squadron manoeuvring at the trot. Famously, he had taken part in the 400-horse cavalry charge of British troops at the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898 and seen more than twenty of his comrades killed.

  ‘Never, never, give up’ was one of life’s lessons he had learned on the barracks square. ‘Many a time,’ he writes in My Early Life, ‘did I pick myself up shaken and sore from the riding school tan [track] . . . and with what appearance of dignity I could command, while twenty recruits grinned furtively but delightedly to see their Officer suffering the same misfortunes which it was their lot so frequently to undergo’.2 It is hard here not see a metaphor for his entire political career – and perhaps it consciously was, as he wrote these words well after his misfortune and recovery from the Dardanelles.

  Risk and danger were his aphrodisiacs. Only the year before, when he was not busy painting, he had spent hours breathlessly chasing wild boar on horseback through the vast estate in south-west France belonging to his friend Bendor. But it was polo that really captivated him. Since leaving the army he had been a regular player, including at Hurlingham. In India, so he recalled with self-mocking irony, this was the only serious purpose of being a subaltern. On arrival at Bangalore, he and his fellow junior officers had purchased ponies to form a regimental team; a mere six weeks later it broke records by winning one of India’s most prestigious tournaments. In his memoir he describes a typical day under the blistering sun at the garrison. On parade at six in the morning, an hour and a half practising manoeuvres, then breakfast, cleaning out the stables, and long before eleven the officers retire to their bungalows to sleep until emerging at five o’clock as the shadows began to lengthen. ‘Now,’ he writes, ‘the station begins to live again. It is the hour of Polo. It is the hour for which we have been living all day long.’ But his own playing days were almost over; he was to enjoy his last match six years later at age fifty-two. Yet his youthful passion remained alive and well. To share it, for the second match against the Americans he brought along his friends General Smuts, Hazel Lavery, and Lady Diana Cooper. England lost both matches. But the game was the thing. ‘Polo,’ he later pronounced, ‘is the prince of games.’

  After the first match at Hurlingham there was tea on the lawn. But the Churchills couldn’t linger over the cucumber sandwiches. That evening, they drove into Kent to spend the weekend with Winston’s wartime friend, Edward Spears.3

  *

  By now, the acerbic Spears had made a sufficient number of enemies in high places to have been forced to resign his position in Paris and settle in England. But Churchill still considered him a first-rate source of intelligence about Russian and Bolshevik affairs and remained convinced that Lenin could still be toppled. Just as he had arrived in Cairo, the Bolsheviks had gathered for their Tenth Party Congress in Moscow. It should have been a cause of celebration. Instead, the economy was stricken by famine, strikes, and peasant revolts. 25 million people were close to starvation. Well over a million – possibly two – had fled abroad. In the region of Tambov 300 miles south-east of Moscow, a 70,000-strong peasant army was in open rebellion. In Petrograd, workers went on strike and demanded free elections and the end of Bolshevik dictatorship. Eddie Marsh, who was taking care of ‘Archie’s work’ during his absence in Cairo, cabled Churchill with even more dramatic news. Sailors at the huge Russian naval base on the fortress island of Kronstadt that guarded the entrance to Petrograd had once formed the shock troops of the Revolution. But now they had joined the strikers, burned their Party membership cards, and denounced the ‘Communist usurpers’ and the Cheka. Lenin ordered Trotsky to crush the revolt. After twenty-four hours of bloody fighting, Red Army troops captured the fortress at the cost of nearly 10,000 men. Many of the rebels escaped across the ice to Finland. But some 15,000 were captured, to face either immediate execution or a lifetime in the prison camps now multiplying across the Soviet utopia.4

  To Churchill, this justified all his fierce loathing for Lenin’s regime and confirmed his long-aired predictions about the tyrannical path the Bolsheviks would inevitably take. But it also gave him some hope that dissent might still be ignited against the Reds. So he was making sure to keep in touch with the plotting of anti-Soviet forces. Here, the role of Spears was crucial. From Paris, Boris Savinkov was pushing grandiose plans to open up Poland, the Ukraine, and Rumania to Western capital. Spears was ambitious, keen to enter the world of business, and eager to make a fortune. So he had strenuously cultivated his links with Savinkov and was collaborating in a number of his schemes. Churchill was also in touch with another shadowy player in the anti-Soviet game: Sidney Reilly, the legendary and unpredictable ‘Ace of Spies’, who had only just escaped with his life after spying for the SIS in Moscow. Since then he had been travelling constantly between Moscow and Paris reporting on the plans of Savinkov and other White Russian activists, as well as campaigning for more positive action against the Bolshevik regime, which he denounced as ‘the worst form of autocratic tyranny in history’. After meeting him in Paris, Churchill recognized a kindred soul and they had kept in regular touch by letter or phone, using Archie Sinclair as a go-between. Both Spears and Reilly were valuable as links to Savinkov’s plans for an anti-Bolshevik uprising, and each was in touch with Sir Mansfield Cumming, the SIS boss.5

  The Spears were renting Ightham Mote, a half-timbered fourteenth-century moated manor house hidden deep in the Kentish countryside. Spears’ wife was the American novelist Mary (‘May’) Borden, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and a former lover of the avant-garde artist and poet, Percy Wyndham Lewis. Quick-witted and intelligent, and with large and expressive grey-green eyes, she was a divorcee and former suffragette who had spent time in a police cell after smashing windows during a demonstration in Parliament Square. Clementine disliked many of her husband’s male friends, and at first Spears found her difficult. But the ice was broken by a hearty game of tennis and the hosts’ customary charm and hospitality. For Churchill, who was godfather to the Spears’ young son, there was the typical pleasure of painting. The canvas he produced shows the ancient lattice-windowed house with its shimmering reflections in the surrounding water.

  Spears also knew Churchill well enough to have invited a guest for Sunday lunch as lively conversational foil. The local clergyman proved well up to the challenge as Churchill peppered him good-naturedly with questions such as ‘Should the clergy be patriotic?’ and by provocative declarations like ‘Jesus Christ would not have taken sides in this war.’ When he tired of the verbal sparring, Mary Borden, who was herself a lively and accomplished conversationalist, fascinated him with stories about her mobile field hospital in wartime France. All in all, the weekend was a success in cementing further the personal bond linking Churchill to the leading conspirators against Lenin’s regime.6

  *

  The weekend with Spears may well have stimulated a more domestic project. Churchill was still yearning for his own home in the country, and he and Clementine had been searching for properties ever since his Garron Towers inheritance came through. Shortly after visiting Ightham Mote, he went to view ‘Peelings’, a seventeenth-century house with an adjoining estate on the East Sussex coast owned by the Duke of Devonshire. But Clementine worried about her husband’s grandiose visions of running a farm as well as a large family home. Why risk their new-found fortune on a venture where they had no experience? she asked in exasperation. What with his political career, painting for leisure, and polo for excitement and danger, what need did he have for more? She, too, longed for a country house. But she want
ed it to be a rest and a joy, not a fresh preoccupation. ‘I want to lie in the sun & blink & wake up now & then to eat a mouse caught by someone else & drink a little cream & doze off again,’ wrote ‘the Cat’.7

  In fact, she was already doing plenty of dozing and eating, enjoying the lazy days of early summer. With the older children still at school, she and Goonie were guests of the Horners at ‘Menabilly’, a large old house on the Cornish coast that her friends had rented for the summer. Neglected but endowed with lush sub-tropical gardens and a huge kitchen garden with buttressed walls, its lethargic atmosphere entranced her as a place that time seemed to have forgotten. A decade later it was to be fictionalized by the novelist Daphne du Maurier as ‘Manderley,’ the home of the villainous Maxim de Winter and his sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in her best-selling novel, Rebecca.

  Clementine’s appeal to her husband may have had some effect. Within days ‘Peelings’ was forgotten and he was enthusing about another property he had just seen. This one was in Kent; perhaps he had been drawn to the attractions of the county by his stay with Spears. It was called Chartwell Manor and lay about twenty-five miles south-east of London. It enjoyed commanding views over the Weald of Kent and on its southern side featured a small lake fed by a natural spring – the Chart Well. By this time Clementine had left Cornwall to join a tennis party at nearby ‘Fairlawne’, another country house owned by an old friend and future Member of Parliament, Victor Cazalet. At Winston’s urging, she went over to view Chartwell herself. She was enthusiastic. ‘I can think of nothing but that heavenly tree-crowned Hill – It is like a view from an aeroplane being up there,’ she told him. ‘I do hope we shall get it – If we do I feel we shall live there a great deal & be very, very, happy.’ This would be especially so if they could immediately build a new wing for Jack, Goonie, and their children. However, on second thoughts and after a further viewing she turned against it as requiring extensive modernizations and additions beyond their financial means. But her husband had set his heart on it. A year later, without consulting her, he bought it.8