Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  The reply heralded the opening salvo in a barrage of letters between the two leaders that went on for weeks. Meanwhile, no arms were surrendered and violence continued. Ireland once more seemed poised for war. Lloyd George decided another Cabinet meeting was vital. But by late August, Parliament was in summer recess and many ministers had dispersed abroad or to the Highlands, including the prime minister himself. On doctor’s orders he was resting with his wife at Flowerdale House, outside the small village of Gairloch on the remote coast of Ross-shire.

  Besides tranquillity and a golf course, for the Welsh-speaking prime minister who relished playing the role of Celtic outsider it had at least one other draw. Soon after arriving, he attended a two-hour service conducted in Gaelic at the Free Church of Scotland. Although a keen singer of hymns, he struggled to find the psalms and Bible readings. Only the promptings of Sir Hamar Greenwood – assisted by the whisperings of a ‘Highland lass’ in a nearby pew – helped him through the service. The sermon, given in Gaelic, seemed interminable. Yet throughout, Lloyd George gallantly maintained an attitude of close attention.4

  For significant business, however, Flowerdale House proved impossible, even with help from the indefatigable Frances Stevenson. One small room had to serve as an office and the house had no telephone. The post office, a mile away, was equipped with just a single telegraph transmitter. There was only one car. The nearest railway station was thirty miles and a four-hour drive away. Instead, Lloyd George summoned an unprecedented meeting of the Cabinet to Inverness. This ‘gateway to the Highlands’ lay close to Culloden, scene of the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil. The doomed Bonnie Prince Charlie had held council in the town on the eve of his catastrophic final effort to overthrow the Hanoverians.5

  The day before the meeting, Churchill motored over to the nearby Brahan Castle in Dingwall. Historic seat of the chiefs of the Clan Mackenzie, it had been put by its owners, Lord and Lady Seaforth, at the disposal of Cabinet members for the duration of the discussions. One of the Seaforth ancestors had taken part in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion only to see his men cut to pieces at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. Yet battalion after battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders had subsequently fought for the British Crown in campaigns across Europe. In this remarkable history, wrote one hopeful journalist, English eyes might see how once irreconcilable hostility had given way to ‘peace, prosperity, and an intense and exuberant loyalty on the part of a race that has done probably as much as any other to build up and fortify our Empire’. The possible analogies with Ireland were obvious.6

  It is not clear whether Churchill, historian as he was, nurtured any similar hopes. In any case, he first had to make it safely to Inverness. Highland roads were still rough and ready, and his car broke an axle on the way. Ministers still in London had to endure the fifteen-hour sleeper train from Euston station. ‘This is outrageous, dragging us to Inverness,’ grumbled Austen Chamberlain, who had already refused a previous summons to travel to the Highlands. ‘Why did the PM not have the meeting in Edinburgh?’ But there were good reasons for the Inverness choice beyond Lloyd George’s personal convenience. From Dublin, the Commander of British forces Sir Neville Macready sailed directly to Gairloch on the British destroyer HMS Sterling, and two Sinn Fein couriers crossed the Irish Sea by ferry. Not least of the advantages of Inverness was that the King was staying at nearby Moy Hall, the historic seat of the chiefs of the Clan Mackintosh famed for its grouse-shooting. His June speech in Belfast had helped kick-start the talks, he was known to favour moderation, and his views carried considerable weight. High-level British officials well versed in Sinn Fein politics also arrived directly from Dublin. ‘The eyes of the nation, and indeed of the world, are on Inverness,’ headlined one Scottish newspaper that morning, ‘for . . . today a long-drawn and harrowing political drama may reach the closing stages which make for a happy ending, or open up a new act of a terrible tragedy.’ As ever in such staged events featuring Lloyd George, the reliable Lord Riddell stood poised to issue a press release as soon as the meeting was over.

  In bright sunshine, Churchill was the first Cabinet member to arrive at the Town Hall. Dressed in a light suit worn under a heavy overcoat, he was welcomed by the Lord Provost. A crowd several rows deep had gathered to witness the historic occasion. People leaned out of windows to watch the spectacle and a few brave souls balanced precariously on the slate roofs of the surrounding houses. Perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the occasion, they gazed on silently as the succession of ministers entered the building. Finally, at nearly eleven thirty, Lloyd George stepped out of his car. A light breeze gently ruffled his mane of white hair.7

  Discussions began shortly afterwards in the Council Chamber. It had already been agreed that talks with Sinn Fein should be given one last try. The main question now was whether they should be held with or without a prior commitment by Sinn Fein to accept continued membership of the British Empire under the Crown. Beneath a large stained-glass window featuring Queen Victoria flanked by Lord Salisbury, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and other of her prime ministers, the Cabinet embarked on an intense debate that lasted most of the day. From a large portrait on another wall Prince Albert, dressed in full Highland dress, looked down on the scene. Lloyd George went round the table asking everyone in turn whether they were for or against preconditions. He had started the day by having breakfast with the King. The monarch was ‘anxious’, he informed them, that the government’s position should not resemble an ultimatum or be likely to spark hostilities. In fact, the King had objected strongly to the draft statement put in front of him and deprecated anything that could be interpreted as ‘an attempt by a large country to bully a small one into submission’. This set the tone for the proceedings. The first two ministers to speak opted for unconditional talks.8

  But not Churchill. He had driven over from Brahan Castle with Macready, who bullishly believed that his forces had the IRA on the run and could, if necessary, finish them off quickly. Thus encouraged, Churchill assured his colleagues that Sinn Fein ‘had fear in their hearts’, and that a strong line insisting they should come to talks only if they accepted the integrity of the Empire would bring them to their senses. Thomas Jones, the Welsh-speaking deputy secretary of the Cabinet taking the minutes, described him as ‘breathing fire and slaughter’. His bellicose rhetoric prompted an abrupt response from Lloyd George. War could easily come again to Ireland, he warned. ‘I do not agree with the Colonial Secretary that it [defeating the IRA] is a small operation. It is a considerable operation.’ After lunch the talks continued, the large crowd outside still waiting patiently. But the tide was running strongly against Churchill and those who thought like him. By 3.45 p.m. a message for de Valera was hurriedly placed in the hands of the Sinn Fein couriers, who immediately rushed off to catch the ferry to Dublin.

  ‘This is the pen with which I signed the [Paris] Peace Treaty, and I hope to sign the Irish agreement with it.’ So Lloyd George had melodramatically told a messenger boy at Brahan Castle the previous day while flamboyantly signing the receipt for a box of cigars sent to him by a group of American well-wishers. It remained to be seen whether his confidence was justified. In a skilfully phrased letter, the Cabinet had asked for a definite reply as to whether Sinn Fein was ready to take part in a conference ‘to ascertain how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’. If the answer was ‘yes’, then talks could be resumed in Inverness two weeks later. Churchill later gave an account of the meeting in The World Crisis. Understandably, he omitted to mention that his harder-line approach was rejected. Annoyingly, after leaving the meeting, his car once again broke an axle. It was a rocky day all round.9

  However, the follow-up meeting in Inverness was not to be. Displeased at the tone of de Valera’s eventual reply, Lloyd George angrily cancelled it. But letters continued to flow between the two men. With even the strongly nationalist press in I
reland still in favour of talks, de Valera made conciliatory noises. Encouraged, Lloyd George once again summoned key Cabinet figures to the Highlands. This time it was to Gairloch. The prime minister was far from well. He had been suffering for days from a seriously abscessed tooth. This had finally been extracted just the day before under heavy anaesthetic and in the presence of the King’s own personal physician. When Lloyd George finally awoke, it was to the sound of ‘Men of Harlech’ being sung by a fellow Welshman.

  Still, when Churchill arrived after motoring over on the morning of Wednesday 21 September, the prime minister was well enough to take him for lunch on board a huge white yacht named the Liberty that was anchored offshore. Its owner was Sir Robert Houston, a Scottish-born shipping magnate whose fortune had come from carrying frozen beef from Argentina to fill hungry British stomachs. He was also a former Conservative Member of Parliament from Toxteth in Liverpool, where he was known as ‘the Robber Baron’ for his unscrupulous business dealings. He had also thrown a lot of his pre-war legal business – mostly litigation – to the chambers of the young and upcoming solicitor F. E. Smith, who had built his early fortune on this along with legal work for another Liverpool magnate, Lord Leverhulme. Birkenhead had actually sailed up to Gairloch with Houston. The yacht, originally built for the American publisher Joseph Pulitzer, was the largest of its kind in the world. The ever-present George Riddell called it ‘a small floating palace’. During the war it had served as a Royal Navy hospital ship.10

  Suitably entertained and refuelled by Houston, who had recently sold his company for £4 million, the two former ‘terrible twins’ of radical Liberalism headed back to Flowerdale House to meet their other colleagues. Churchill was now in a more conciliatory mood, but remained dead set against granting full independence and an Irish republic. Lloyd George had been copying him in on his correspondence, and he knew that the Sinn Fein leader was under pressure to compromise from within his own ranks. There was also, as always, a weighty American dimension to the issue. De Valera’s apparent rigidity was not playing well with many Americans. ‘Practical Patriotism’ was what was needed, stressed the New York Evening News, in a rebuke to his often rambling discursions into the mists of Irish history. ‘I still believe,’ Churchill wrote confidently to Clementine the day before the Gairloch meeting, ‘there will be a peaceful settlement.’ It was duly decided, after long-distance consultations with Cabinet ministers who had been unable to travel to Gairloch, to invite de Valera to a conference in London in October.

  Three days later Churchill arrived in Dundee for the long-planned visit to his Scottish constituency. Here, he was to make his stance on Ireland clear to the British people. Already, the press was naming him as one of the most likely negotiators that Lloyd George would pick for the crucial talks with Sinn Fein.11

  *

  Dundee lay on the River Tay on Scotland’s North Sea coast, ‘a dark mass of dirty grey sandstone tenements punctuated by high chimney stacks and church spires’. The country’s third-largest city with a population of some 190,000 people, it was an industrial and commercial centre renowned for the ‘three j’s’ of jute, jam, and journalism. D. C. Thomson was a publisher of newspapers, magazines, and children’s comics with sales across the whole of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for Churchill, the sixty-two-year-old owner David Coupar Thomson also detested him. ‘Mr. Churchill is a political controversialist like the three-legged symbol so favoured by the Isle of Man,’ he had thundered at the time of the Liberal government’s pre-war battle against the House of Lords, ‘he seems to point in all directions but really concentrates attention upon himself all the time.’ Thomson had never ceased pouring scorn on the city’s Liberal MP, denouncing him as greedy for glory and as a ‘loud-mouthed bullying place-seeker’. To make matters worse, Thomson owned both of the city’s main newspapers.

  The jam – mainly marmalade – was Keillor’s, a brand familiar to most breakfast tables across the nation. But it was the jute industry that dominated the city to give it the sobriquet ‘Juteopolis’. In some two hundred factories it employed 40 per cent of Dundee’s workforce, the largest domination by a single industry of any British city. Along with its associated businesses of engineering and shipping, almost half the population depended on transforming jute – a tropical plant imported mostly from India – into the sturdy sacking and rope used in countless industries. But even the good times meant hardship. The trade employed mainly women and boys, who were paid less than men. Male unemployment always ran high. Thousands of men left the city by way of the army recruiting office. Damp and miserable slums abounded. Soup kitchens fed the starving. Alcohol-induced violence was commonplace. Churchill once said he had never witnessed such drunkenness as in the streets of Dundee.12

  *

  He had held the constituency as a Liberal since 1908, when he was already in the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. It was ‘a seat for life’, he claimed, relieved to have won it after a defeat in North-West Manchester. Then, as now, the chairman of the city’s Liberal Association was Sir George Ritchie. A tall and dignified seventy-two-year-old sporting a white goatee beard, he was the owner of a chain of grocery stores and a former City Treasurer. ‘We must get that brilliant young man to represent the city and put Dundee on the map,’ he declared. Since then, he had served loyally through thick and thin as Churchill’s political guide and friend in the city, informing him about its political temperature, organizing his visits – usually once a year, and handling local Liberal Party affairs. Dundee was a two-member constituency. In the summer, amidst widespread press rumours of an impending election, Ritchie had found a running mate for Churchill in D. J. Macdonald, the owner of a local engineering and automobile company with an impressive record of charitable giving. Ritchie confessed frankly to Churchill how he had struggled hard to find a candidate acceptable to the two opposing wings of the party, the Asquithians and the Coalitionists. ‘We have had a long and merry fight to keep the unity of our Party,’ he wrote. ‘Had it not been out of personal loyalty to yourself I would have given it up.’ He also warned of a growing discontent in Dundee with the Coalition government over expenditure, the interference of London-based authorities, and the ‘arrogance of so many of the Public Officials all over’. Had there been a strong opposition with a policy of efficiency and economy, it would sweep the country. ‘The only thing in your favour,’ he told him, ‘is the fear of a Revolutionary party obtaining power.’13

  Ritchie’s frankness prompted Churchill to make an avowal of his own. Not for the first time this year he hinted that he, too, could turn his back on politics and that life held other attractions. ‘Personally,’ he told him two days after strenuously justifying his Middle East policy to the House of Commons, ‘I would far rather at this juncture and after all these years be free from the burden and obloquy of public office.’ But he firmly added a qualifier. This was only true if he could be sure that a different government – by which he meant Labour – would do better. Here, his views remained as trenchant as ever. On his visit to Dundee the year before he had castigated ‘the simpletons of the Socialist Party’ for worshipping the Bolshevik idol and being ‘more than ever unfitted for the tasks of responsible government’.14

  He now seized on Ritchie’s comments to reiterate the electoral message that together with Lloyd George and Freddie Guest he had been pushing since the spring. In an open letter to his constituency he had already spelled out the political threat posed by the vastly expanded electorate and especially the ‘ambitions of the Socialist Party to obtain control of municipal affairs’. Now, he told Ritchie, the way the Labour leaders mismanaged their own affairs proved how utterly unfit they were to undertake ‘the burden and responsibility of the Imperial Government’. Fighting socialism was rapidly heading to the top of his own political agenda. Shortly afterwards, he met with his fellow candidate Macdonald in London and suggested they should soon hold a joint meeting in Dundee, where together they could draw ‘a clear line of cleavage�
�� with the left.15

  *

  Churchill was right to be worried about the impact of Labour. ‘The great extensions of the franchise which were made during the War fundamentally altered the political character of Dundee,’ he wrote later.16 The trebling of the electorate to include 8 million women aged over thirty and 5 million more men was certainly significant, although it had roundly elected him in 1918. More important was its disillusioned rejection of Lloyd George and the policies of his Coalition government. But there was also a personal and local factor at work. To thousands of Dundonians, Churchill was by now an almost demonic figure. For one thing, his fervent support for the Black and Tans had alienated the city’s significant Irish population who had once been his great supporters for his Home Rule sympathies. While he was in Cairo, the city had been visited by Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne in Australia, a keen partisan of Irish nationalism. To a rapturous audience of Sinn Fein supporters, the senior Catholic cleric declared that Churchill was ‘an enemy of Ireland’ whose days were numbered. Simultaneously, the Dundee Catholic Herald started running a ‘Churchill must go’ campaign, insisting that it was time for the voters ‘to see that this dangerous, double-dealing, oily-tongued adventurer is not given the power to do further harm’.17

  The Secretary of the Jute and Flax Workers’ Union, John Sime, felt much the same, believing strongly that the jute workers had been badly let down during the post-war recession by Churchill, a man who was ‘born a Tory, is still a Tory, and always will be a Tory’. Just before Christmas, Sime had invited Churchill to Dundee to see conditions for himself but in reply had merely received an invitation to come to London. Since then, he had bombarded him with letters and telegrams. When Sime finally turned up at the House of Commons in August requesting to see his constituency MP, he was refused. ‘Here endeth the chapter so far as Mr. W. S. Churchill is concerned,’ he declared, infuriated, in the Union’s journal. ‘It will not be necessary to waste paper and postage on [him] in the future.’ Many other voters also thought that Churchill was treating the city as a mere pocket borough, out of town and out of touch.18