Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  But it wasn’t just his perceived failings to defend Dundee that was turning the tide of opinion against him. It was the broader swing against the National Liberals along with the capture of Liberal votes by the Left. The man already chosen as its candidate in Dundee by the Labour Party was E. D. (Edwin Dene) Morel, a campaigning journalist made famous by his pre-war exposé of Belgian atrocities in the Congo and now Secretary of the Union of Democratic Control. Founded in 1914, this was a radical pressure group opposed to conscription that campaigned for greater democratic control of foreign policy. Morel had been briefly imprisoned during the war for his pacifism. Now he was focusing on raising working-class consciousness about foreign policy and its intimate links with domestic affairs. The previous year, when Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik rhetoric was at its peak, Morel had discovered that a large Russian purchase of jute bags had been stopped at Constantinople by the Royal Navy. He immediately made use of the news. ‘It is the literal truth to say,’ he thundered, ‘that the Dundee working man is now out of employment because the figure of Winston Churchill rises between them [sic] and the Russian people.’ Such charges easily stuck in the desperate city.19

  Yet it was a local man who offered the greatest threat. In every election since 1908 Churchill been opposed by Edwin Scrymgeour, the leader of the Scottish Prohibition Party. In a country notorious for its alcohol-induced violence, prohibition was a powerful political force and only the year before the Scottish Trade Union Congress had passed a resolution in support of it. Scrymgeour, who was also a socialist, found his combination of anti-drink and left-wing views gaining powerful traction. For him, too, the local MP personified the evils that damned the city and was ‘the man particularly associated with Imperialism and War’. Churchill later gave him some grudging respect and acknowledged that, unlike himself, Scrymgeour had regularly visited almost every household in the constituency. ‘He lived a life of extreme self-denial,’ he wrote. ‘He represented the poverty and misery of the poorer parts of the city.’ The charges of both Scrymgeour and Morel readily stuck to their target. Above all, Churchill’s regular claim that Labour was ‘unfit to rule’ had infuriated many of Dundee’s voters and convinced them that in truth the charge really applied to him.20

  A U T U M N

  FIFTEEN

  ‘THE COURAGE AND INSTINCT OF LEADERSHIP’

  By the autumn Dundee was in crisis. Thousands of the city’s army of unemployed had exhausted their benefits. While the city excitedly awaited the imminent arrival of the latest Charlie Chaplin movie The Kid, the city’s Lord Provost made the shock announcement that the Distress Relief Committee had run out of funds and that the city itself could find work for only 400 people. Three days of violence followed. A mass meeting of the unemployed culminated with dozens of windows being smashed at the Parish Council offices. Behind a large red banner and lustily singing ‘The Red Flag’, a crowd of thousands also besieged the home of the Lord Provost, and his daughter was injured by a stone hurled through the window of his car. Shop windows were indiscriminately targeted all across the city. There were baton-wielding charges by the police, and dozens of arrests were made. In all, the damage was estimated to be at least £10,000.1

  Churchill was at Inverness when the rioters took to the streets. There were outbreaks in other British cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, Sunderland and London, where unemployed workers had now also exhausted their benefits. With demands escalating for the government to do something, Lloyd George belatedly instructed a Cabinet committee to look into the problem. A delegation of Labour mayors from London boroughs even made the arduous journey to Gairloch, completing the final 80 miles of their trek north over rocky Highland roads in a motor coach.

  From the Duke of Westminster’s Lochmore Lodge, Churchill took his own steps to confront the crisis by contacting Sir George Ritchie with an offer to meet face to face with the City Council. To his new Liberal running mate D. J. Macdonald, the solution seemed obvious. As chairman of the Juvenile Employment Committee at the local Labour Exchange, he had been on the front line of the battle for a long time. ‘The period of Unemployment should be extended,’ he told Churchill. ‘The Financial outlay is a mere bagatelle.’ This was true, but not helpful. The period of unemployment benefit was fixed by Acts of Parliament. Only a change in legislation could alter that. Meanwhile, local authorities in Scotland struggled to help on their own; under Scottish law it was strictly illegal for them to pay relief to the able-bodied poor.2

  *

  Such was the position when Churchill finally checked into Dundee’s Royal Hotel. Hardly had he arrived than he was confronted by a delegation headed by John Sime demanding the immediate recall of Parliament to amend the unemployment laws. Unable to promise this, Churchill also had to refuse the petition of another delegation carrying a local grievance. As part of its post-war restructuring of the Territorial Army, the War Office had decided to merge the 4th and 5th Battalions of one of Scotland’s most famous regiments, the Black Watch. During the war, the 4th Battalion had recruited heavily from the city’s jute and jam factories and suffered grievously at the Battle of Loos – which by now, on the eve of its sixth anniversary, was being hailed as ‘Dundee’s Somme’. Many in the city were outraged, and Churchill struggled vainly to change War Office minds by forcefully telling his successor that the affair was a matter of fierce local patriotism. The Lord Provost took the decision badly as a serious slight on his city. ‘What is the meaning of this seemingly determined effort to ignore Dundee?’ he demanded. ‘Our trade is very bad [and] unemployment extremely prevalent.’ To the Black Watch petitioners, Churchill could only promise to do his best.3

  So when he met with the Council the next day the atmosphere was distinctly frosty. As a local MP he had his constituents’ interest to promote. But being a Cabinet member meant he had to defend government policy. It was a strenuous task to do both at once. It was made worse after one of the Council’s Labour members began by angrily accusing the Cabinet of a ‘brutal and callous’ response to the unemployed. Churchill hit back forcefully by pointing out how much the government had handed out in benefits since the war, by blaming the recent waves of strikes – and especially that of the miners – for weakening the economy, and by saying that it was really for the Scottish Office to find ways to help local authorities cope with the crisis. But the fractious and often emotional meeting left not just its audience dissatisfied. He himself was unhappy. What he had seen with his own eyes had clearly shocked him. Dozens of shops still had their windows boarded up. Many men were shoeless. Some of the children were clearly in what he described as ‘a savage and starving condition’. Immediately after the meeting he sat down and wrote a heartfelt personal letter to Lloyd George, confessing he had become convinced that there was ‘very great ground for complaint’ about the government’s unemployment policy.4

  *

  It was as a national rather than as a local actor, however, that Churchill turned his performance in Dundee into a success. On the following day, Saturday 24 September, he delivered the speech he had been carefully preparing at Dunrobin. The venue was the recently completed city hall, named after James Key Caird, a local jute baron and philanthropist who had also sponsored Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. With its neo-classical grandeur and acoustically top-rated auditorium, it held out the hope of a more prosperous future for the city on the Tay. To ensure a sympathetic audience, Ritchie had made the event an all-ticket affair. But this was Dundee. Hundreds of entry tickets were forged and only at the last minute were their holders prevented from entering. Outside, a crowd of several thousand sang socialist songs and an unsuccessful effort was made to rush the hall. There was a heavy police presence. Afterwards, Churchill had to exit by the back door with several police officers bundling him into his car as he hastily drove back to his hotel.

  Still, despite an occasional heckler, he found a responsive audience. More importantly, the national British press gave him widespread coverage
. It was a classic set-piece of the Churchillian rhetoric more generally associated with his Second World War speeches, but that he was already wielding as an effective political weapon. As a twenty-three-year-old subaltern in India during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year, he had spelled out his belief in the power of the spoken word. ‘Of all the talents bestowed upon men,’ he wrote in a short essay entitled ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’, ‘none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.’ In the light of what had befallen him since 1915, the sentence that followed seemed especially apt: ‘Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his office, whoever can command this power is still formidable.’ This was to prove true throughout his career. Lord Moran, his later-life personal physician, noted that ‘Few men have stuck so religiously to one craft, the handling of words. In peace, it made his political fortunes; in war it has won all men’s hearts.’

  This was exaggerated. But his close attention to words reaped him many rewards over his lifetime. ‘With his great speeches he has . . . erected his most enduring monument,’ said the Swedish author Sigfrid Siwertz in presenting him with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. A decade later when he conferred on him American citizenship, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that he had ‘mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’. Both had in mind his Second World War speeches. But for decades already Churchill had wielded the spoken word to powerful effect, deploying words, as he did his paint, to express not just facts and opinions but tone, mood, and shades of feeling.5

  His Caird Hall speech contained many of the elements he regarded as vital to the orator: the careful choice of short and common words; a rhythm of speech resembling blank verse rather than prose; a rapid succession of waves of sound and vivid pictures enabling the audience to anticipate the conclusion so that the final words fall ‘amid a thunder of assent’; striking metaphor; and extravagant language to raise the emotions and release the deepest feelings of the listener. But it was also its trajectory that demonstrated his skill. Consciously or not, his speech followed that of one of the most influential classics of British literature: John Bunyan’s great Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, a work almost certainly well familiar to his audience. In it, the everyman protagonist Christian makes an arduous journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, from darkness to light, from despair to hope.

  The hall was packed with between three and four thousand people. It was a grand civic event. The Lord Provost presided, and the platform included many local worthies including Sir George Ritchie as well as representatives of the Liberal and Conservative parties. As a significant straw in the political wind, the Lord Provost opened the evening by stressing that he was chairman only in an official capacity. Personally, along with many others present, he had strongly supported the government during the war. But since then, he admitted, many things had happened of which he did not approve.6

  Thus alerted – and possibly stimulated – by this provocation, Churchill opened his speech by accepting that the present post-war period was a time of great social distress and anxiety where everyone was still suffering from ‘the grievous wounds of the war’, the imprint of which they would all carry to their graves. From this dark opening he guided his audience step by step towards a brighter future that echoed familiar sentiments he had been expressing throughout the year. ‘I look forward confidently,’ he eventually concluded – amidst cheers – ‘to an ever closer association between the United States and the British Empire, for it is in the unity of the English-speaking peoples that the brightest hopes for the progress of mankind will be found to reside.’

  How was this future to be reached? His answer was by following the path of reconciliation. This was the time, he declared after moving on from his sombre opening scene, ‘for composing differences, for assisting each other, for leaving alone all quarrels and co-operating in the rebuilding as quickly as possible of the threatened prosperity of the country. Classes and nations must help each other.’ One way was to settle war debts and re-establish a healthy and prosperous system of tariff-free international trade. Another was for the Great Powers of Europe, as well as of the Pacific, to create a climate of peaceful co-operation. He looked ahead to the near future. ‘I have high hopes of this Washington Conference,’ he told his listeners. ‘It marks the re-entry of the United States into the responsibilities and difficulties of world politics’ – and, he added, made him confident of the Anglo-American future.

  Of course, perils awaited. Not surprisingly, he pronounced that the greatest of these was Bolshevism. Earlier that month the Dundee Advertiser had carried a full-page appeal requesting donations for famine relief in Russia where millions were starving in the aftermath of the Revolution and Civil War. Children especially were its victims, often abandoned and reduced to eating grass, roots, and rubbish. In total, some 35 million Russians were suffering. ‘One of the world’s greatest granaries,’ Churchill declared, ‘has been reduced through four years of Socialism and Bolshevism to absolute starvation.’ Worse, he added, Lenin and Trotsky had killed without mercy all those who opposed them and lived off the wealth of those they had dispossessed. This claim also rang true to his audience. In a dispatch from Helsinki, the local paper had recently reported that sixty-one people had been shot in Petrograd for being implicated in the latest ‘plot’ against the regime; most, it seemed, were ‘men of education, including two professors and a famous sculptor’. Churchill’s attack on the perils of Bolshevism concluded on a familiar note. Its British supporters had been doing their best to disrupt the economy through strikes and disputes and ‘to ruin us here in Britain’. Luckily, he added, in a typical aside that drew approving laughter, ‘we always seem to get these foreign diseases in a less acute form’.

  However, the more immediate threat lay in Ireland. This was the centrepiece of his talk, and the one his audience was most anxious to hear. Again, reconciliation was the central theme. Past quarrels now had to be put aside and this included, he stressed, differences between the Conservatives and Liberals themselves on how to deal with Ireland. But if the message was reconciliation, his tone was firm. In its offer of Dominion Home Rule to Sinn Fein, the government had gone ‘to the utmost limit possible’. De Valera’s response so far had been disappointing and puzzling. True, the Sinn Fein leader was ‘riding a nationalist tiger’, and allowance had to be made for that. Nonetheless Churchill was still uncertain where the Irish leaders stood. ‘I only know,’ he said, ‘where we stand. We have reached the end of our tether.’ This prompted cheers in the audience.

  But now he added a sobering note by raising the prospect of an independent Irish Republic and what it would mean. Deliberately deploying the extravagant language recommended in his youthful essay, he painted a dark and ominous picture of what could lie ahead: a fortified frontier between North and South with hostile armies on each side; constant fear that the Irish Republic was intriguing with other countries against Britain, possibly by giving them submarine bases – a not so subtle reminder of the wartime landing in County Kerry by German U-boat of Sir Roger Casement, who was subsequently hanged for treason; a tariff wall between the two nations; and hundreds of thousands of Irishmen living throughout the British Empire immediately being declared ‘aliens’ if war broke out between it and the Republic. ‘What a ludicrous and what an idiotic prospect is unfolded before our eyes,’ he declared. ‘What a crime [Sinn Fein] would commit if . . . they condemn themselves and their children to such misfortunes.’ To head off this dark future, a conference was clearly needed. It would be wise to be outspoken, and foolish to encourage false or dangerous hopes. It had to be a successful conference. ‘Squander it,’ he warned in words clearly designed for the ears of de Valera, ‘and peace is bankrupt.’7

  His final words linked Ireland’s fate to his broader vision for Britain:

  When in moments of d
oubt or hours of despondency we fear that the course of events we are pursuing towards the Irish Sinn Feiners is repugnant to some of our feelings . . . we must cheer ourselves by remembering that a lasting settlement with Ireland – a healing of the old quarrel, a reconciliation between two races – would not only be a blessing in itself inestimable, but with it would be removed the greatest obstacle which has ever existed to Anglo-American unity, and that far across the Atlantic Ocean we should reap a harvest sown in the Emerald Isle.8

  *

  As early as Churchill’s first and unsuccessful attempt to enter Parliament in 1899, one observer had noted that he was ‘always thinking of the impression which his speeches would make, not on his immediate audience, but on London’. His speech did little to alter Dundee minds about his suitability as a local MP. But nationally it marked another important step in his political rehabilitation since the dark days of 1915. The press, apart from the usual suspects in the socialist and Sinn Fein press, was positive. ‘The chorus of praise . . . must have astonished you yourself,’ purred the ever loyal Archie Sinclair. Churchill might also have been feeling flattered that month at finding himself portrayed alongside Disraeli, Gladstone, and Lloyd George himself in a book of pen portraits by Sir Henry Lucy. Having once compared Churchill unfavourably to his father, the journalist now described him as ‘The Lion Cub of the Lloyd George Cabinet’ in whom he saw subtle but striking reminders of Lord Randolph and ‘the brilliant comet that flashed through the House of Commons in the early eighties’.9

  More significant than such praise, however, was the emergence in the serious press of the words ‘statesmanship’ and ‘leadership’ about his performance. ‘The country does not only require assistance for its unemployed,’ declared The Times, ‘even more it needs the inspiration of great leadership. Its counsels are confused; it has experienced sufferings for which it is still largely unable to account; it regards the future either with uncertainty or apprehension. These are circumstances in which great men might even now awaken the people to a true understanding of the national position.’ Who such a man that might be was made explicit in an editorial. Under the heading ‘An Essay in Statesmanship’ it praised the breadth and lucidity of Churchill’s address and pronounced that it would restore confidence in the country. Its broad appeal raised it above the common level. ‘Discarding the debased coinage of party politics,’ it declared, ‘[Churchill] used the nobler currency that once used to pass, and will, we trust, pass again between British public men and the British public.’10