Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The House was packed. A Conservative backbencher conveyed the mood. ‘We are meeting to-day at a time of danger, the gravest danger that our nation has ever faced, danger not only to our material prosperity, but to the spiritual things which we value even more highly.’8 The former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, judged the debate that followed to be ‘the most momentous in the history of Parliament’, and he would make a devastating contribution on the second afternoon.9 A future Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, also present, believed that the two-day debate ‘altered the history of Britain and the Empire, and perhaps of the world’.10

  Moore-Brabazon caught the debate at several key moments, in rapid, surreptitious shots – standing behind the Serjeant at Arms’s chair; at the Bar of the House; resting his camera on a rail.

  One close-up shows uniformed Members who had been summoned back from their regiments. Wedged in the half-gloom on dark green leather seats, they listen, arms folded, to a short, squat figure who addresses the House from the government benches.

  Moore-Brabazon stopped snapping only when one of the Doorkeepers seemed to get ‘a little suspicious’ of the movement of his left hand.11 Observing him approach, Moore-Brabazon pocketed the Minox, and produced a silver cigarette-lighter that resembled it. Casually, he rubbed the lighter down the side of his nose. The Doorkeeper withdrew.

  The negatives lay in their original Riga tin until 1992 when the Clerk of the Records had the prints made up. Blurred, underexposed, snatched in poor lighting, the images might have been photographed ‘sitting on a jelly in a strong draught’, as Moore-Brabazon described his first experience of flying.12

  ‘In vain we look for a glimmer of light.13 It is a perfect blackout.’ A private memorandum circulated a month earlier to opposition and rebel Conservative MPs reflected a growing despondency at the record of the Chamberlain administration.

  A comparable darkness prevails in Moore-Brabazon’s photographs. We see Barry’s gloomy, badly ventilated Chamber – the sandbagged windows and doors, the blacked-out rooms and corridors, giving the neo-Gothic hall, according to Chamberlain, who hated it, the appearance of the aquarium at London Zoo. It was in underwater terms that the National Labour MP Harold Nicolson described the Commons to one of the shapes craning forward on the upper level, the diminutive but politically agile Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky. Nicolson reminded Maisky how he used to look down from the Diplomatic Gallery with benevolent interest, ‘rather like a biologist examines the habits of newts in a tank’.14

  Packed in alongside Maisky, in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, the Peers’ Gallery, the Press Gallery and the Speaker’s personal Gallery, were diplomats, journalists, civil servants, plus friends and relatives of the MPs below. These included the Prime Minister’s wife, Anne, dressed in black and with a buttonhole of violets gathered that morning from the garden at No. 10. Also seated on the padded benches were Winston Churchill’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mary; and thirty-six-year-old Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe, whose father was Lord Curzon, a former Foreign Secretary.

  The dark-haired and sternly attractive Baba, separated from her husband, was acting as the eyes and ears of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, whose peerage barred him from sitting in the Commons. Were the Prime Minister to step down as the rebel faction demanded, Halifax, universally respected, would have been their outstanding favourite to succeed.

  But resignation was not on Chamberlain’s mind when he stood up at 3.48 p.m. to present the government’s case for what, in private, his War Cabinet considered to be a spectacular disaster largely of Churchill’s making.

  In an essay on Curzon, Churchill made this aside about the Commons: ‘It was then, as now, the most complete and comprehending judge of a man’ – a sentiment with which Halifax concurred, reflecting in the diary that he dictated to his secretary every morning: ‘Curious what a good judge of character the House of Commons generally is.’15, 16

  A fugitive from the same regime that three weeks earlier had occupied Norway, the future Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti had the Norway Debate in mind when he wrote in his notebook: ‘Whenever the English go through bad times, I am wonder-struck by their Parliament … There is a possibility here of attacking the rulers, a possibility that has no equal anywhere in the world.17 And they are no less rulers for it … Six hundred ambitious men watch one another with hawks’ eyes; weaknesses cannot remain concealed, strengths make a difference as long as they are strengths. Everything takes place out in the open.’ Canetti concluded: ‘There is nothing more remarkable than this nation doing its most important business in a ritual, sporting way, and not deviating even when the water is up to its neck.’

  And that, on the afternoon of 7 May, is where the level had risen.

  A surprised Rab Butler, shown Moore-Brabazon’s pictures three decades on, recognised himself in the second row, where he sat as Halifax’s spokesman in the Commons. After hesitating, Butler picked out other members of the War Cabinet:

  Sir John Simon, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Sir Samuel Hoare, Air Minister.

  Sir Kingsley Wood, Lord Privy Seal.

  Even though blurred from camera shake, Neville Chamberlain can be seen standing at the Despatch Box. And seated to the Prime Minister’s right, the First Lord of the Admiralty – in one of the only images that survive of Winston Churchill in this House of Commons. As the Minister most closely involved in the military expedition to Norway, Churchill had consented to wind up for the government.

  These figures, how familiar they are. Looking at them seated in the hot, dark Chamber, dressed in their formal clothes and uniforms, it all seems inevitable. We know what will happen, even if they do not. We know that Chamberlain is delivering his last statement as Prime Minister. We know that in three days’ time Germany will pounce again, in France. We know that Churchill will take over.

  The broad story still holds. Churchill is safe on his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great round about this time.18 In proposing a toast to Churchill’s health in Moscow four years later, Joseph Stalin was unable to cite any other instance in history where the future of the world had depended on the courage of one person. The historian Philip Ziegler says: ‘If ever there was a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time, it was Churchill.’19 Without Churchill in control, the future of our country would have taken a radically different path, believed Lord Halifax’s biographer Alan Campbell-Johnson, another watcher in the Chamber. ‘Six more weeks of the tentative technique of the Chamberlain Administration and the Allied cause might have been engulfed in total defeat.’20 Here, in Churchill’s phrase, lay the ‘hinge of fate’.

  But the weight of the Churchill legend has suppressed knowledge of other possibilities that were available and seemed more probable at the time. In the extremely unlikely event that Chamberlain were to step aside, Churchill was merely one among several contenders, on both sides of the House, who had spent their political careers jostling for such an opening.

  The Lord Privy Seal, Kingsley Wood, admitted that ‘the number of people who think they are the future Prime Minister of this country is quite amazing’.21 Wood was a long-standing confidant of Chamberlain, and a demon for preferment. From his position on the front bench, Wood had reason to believe that his moment was approaching – something confirmed by Rab Butler’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, who wrote in his diary: ‘I think that Kingsley Wood might easily become our next P.M., and that is now the P.M.’s intention … Halifax would only be a stop-gap.’22

  Even if this view of his prospects came from the realms of fantasy, Wood was not alone in considering himself stuffed with the material of leadership. Ranged behind the favourite, Lord Halifax, sat a pack of politicians straining to become premier should the office all of a sudden fall vacant, plus one candidate who had held the title. Four days earlier, Harold Nicolson had written in his diary: ‘People are saying that Lloyd Geor
ge should come in.’23 Memories of his victory in 1918 suddenly made the Father of the House an attractive proposition once more.

  Also in the frame at various moments during the months and weeks leading up to the debate, and in the febrile days following it, either touted by others or considering themselves ripe for the premiership: Samuel Hoare, John Simon, Anthony Eden, Max Beaverbrook, Roger Keyes, John Reith, Duff Cooper, Oliver Stanley, Walter Elliot, John Anderson, Stafford Cripps, Lord Woolton, Clement Attlee, Nancy Astor, Lady Rhondda and even Marie Stopes, who told Halifax that ‘in the light of her special knowledge of Germany, Japan, Norway, birth control and science, she ought to be in the Cabinet’.24 This was a time when, as one Labour frontbencher observed in his diary, ‘History goes past at the gallop.’

  There was also, fleetingly, the vision of Chamberlain’s fellow Member from Birmingham, Leo Amery, taking over as Prime Minister. It is likely that Amery is the squat figure, reduced by Moore-Brabazon’s distorting lens to a spiky circle of light, who speaks to a riveted House from the government benches. If correct, the image catches Amery in the act of delivering his tirade against Chamberlain, triggering the sequence of events that within seventy-two hours were to sweep him away.

  Corresponding with Amery after the war, another recent contender for the premiership was reminded of how unlikely a prospect Churchill’s accession appeared at this moment. Leslie Hore-Belisha was the former Minister unexpectedly moved from the War Office back in January. In October 1954, Hore-Belisha wrote to Amery: ‘What you tell me of your opinion that if it had come to a vote in the House of Commons it would have been Halifax is most interesting, and likewise what you tell me of Max [Beaverbrook]’s opinion that no debate in Parliament could possibly overthrow Neville.25 These statements show how difficult it is to predict the fate of men and how uncertain the outcome was at the time.’

  Observers do not share the same perspective as participants. There is a natural impatience, in reading about the momentous events of May 1940, to press forward to the evening of 10 May when Churchill was invited by a reluctant George VI to form an administration. In this dominant narrative, the Norway Debate marks but one step in an orderly, inevitable and unavoidable transfer, before the real fight.

  This interpretation assumes much and misses a lot.

  The overwhelming cataclysm of the next six weeks, which saw the fall of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, has tended to submerge the dramatic processes which brought Churchill into Downing Street. How Churchill landed there at the last moment, with much greater odds stacked against him than is commonly supposed, is every bit as interesting a story.

  In May 2015, Britain celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk. Lost in all the attention paid to Churchill’s speeches about fighting Germans on the beaches was his assumption of the premiership only a few days earlier – a handover which passed virtually unnoticed. Yet what we take for granted so nearly did not happen.

  Baba Metcalfe’s father knew from humiliating experience ‘upon what small vicissitudes great events may turn’.26 In May 1923, Lord Curzon had been prevented from becoming Prime Minister when an outsider (Stanley Baldwin) shot past. When the Norway Debate began on 7 May 1940, there was no realistic expectation that Churchill would step into Chamberlain’s shoes, and potent reasons why he should not. Speaking at Martin Gilbert’s memorial service in 2015, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled asking Gilbert to sum up what he had learned after writing his thirty-eight volumes on Churchill.

  ‘I learned,’ Gilbert said, ‘what a close thing it was.’

  Of course, to many afterwards it did seem like divine intervention. Interviewed on Desert Island Discs, Lord Hailsham (who participated in the Norway Debate as Quintin Hogg) spoke of his belief that ‘the one time in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill’s arrival at the precise moment of 1940’.27 Churchill famously convinced himself that he was walking with destiny. Dining with him a few months later, Lady Halifax confessed that she ‘got slightly confused as to his meaning when he said with some emotion: “That old man up there intended me to be where I am at this time.”’28 Was he alluding to her husband? Not so. Pointing a finger at the ceiling, he went on: ‘It’s all destiny.’29

  However, Neville Chamberlain was an obdurate believer in his own star no less than Churchill. Ambassador Maisky gained the impression after speaking with Chamberlain that ‘the P.M. considers himself a “man of destiny”.30 He was born into this world to perform a “sacred mission”.’

  If, when reading about the Norway Debate and its tumultuous aftermath, one gains an overriding sense that ‘things were “written”’ – as Churchill told the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, with whom he been a subaltern in the Boer War – then this may be because Churchill wrote them.31 Viscount Stuart’s version is as reliable as any. ‘I heard Churchill say in the House once, in reply to a questioner who was pressing for further details on some awkward point, “Only history can relate the full story”; and then he added, after exactly the right pause, “And I shall write the history.”’32

  Chamberlain’s biographer, David Dilks, believes that of all the books written in the twentieth century the one that has exercised most influence on the general view is The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, which was published in June 1948, selling an astronomical 530,000 hardback copies. ‘Churchill wrote of his experience with a persuasive power which no other leader of the twentieth century has matched.’33

  So persuasive was Churchill’s narrative that a more recent authority, David Reynolds, considers that this ‘extended essay in retrospective wisdom’ has guided the writing of history ever since. Yet as Reynolds, Dilks, Ziegler and others have shown, The Gathering Storm is a highly selective interpretation, and ‘something of a distortion’.34

  Leo Amery had known Churchill since school. A censor of Churchill’s earliest articles for the Harrovian, Amery detected the continuation of a boyhood tic after reading Churchill’s account of the First World War, The World Crisis. ‘It is a pity he should think it necessary to spoil so much good history in order to have the satisfaction of writing it up and vindicating himself afterwards.’35

  Few possessed sharper insights into Churchill’s vindications and distortions than Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, who sat long hours with him at the Admiralty Operational Intelligence Centre throughout the Norway Campaign. In an unpublished memoir, Godfrey wrote that ‘the public of our generation will never know the malignant influence he exerted on the early strategy of the war because he will probably be the first person to write a popular history which, like The World Crisis, will show that everything that went well was due to his inspiration and that when things went badly it was someone else’s fault.’36

  Supported by Churchill, a lot of legends risk passing out of history and memoir into unbudgeable myth. That is why it is worth pausing to re-examine the highly personal nature of Churchill’s relationship to the historic events of April and May 1940.

  Churchill was once walking through the Commons Lobby when he halted, ‘raising his hand rather like a policeman on night duty’, and declaimed to a fellow MP about Napoleon. ‘The great night of time descends, but the glow of the emperor’s personality remains. And those who were his friends are gilded by it and those who were his foes are clouded.’37

  Little in Churchill’s account of the war proves more clouded than his portrait of Chamberlain, whose death inspired one of Churchill’s most eloquent tributes, to a man whose conduct ‘ought to be a model for us all’ – though he told his secretary after he dictated it: ‘Of course, I could have done it the other way round.’38, 39 In The Gathering Storm he did exactly that. Having clashed with Chamberlain during eleven wilderness years when he was excluded from office, Churchill would freeze him out in posterity as ‘this narrow, obstinate man’.40

  It was an unfair contest. ‘I myself
can claim no literary gifts,’ Chamberlain admitted, in the only book he ever wrote – about his cousin Norman, machine-gunned to death on a French battlefield – and he died before he was able to provide an alternative version.41 It fell to Halifax to defend him, and to insist that Chamberlain, a reserved, complex man, had been ‘consistently misjudged’, and that Churchill did Chamberlain ‘less than justice in his War history’.42, 43

  David Dilks was the last person to interview Halifax, in December 1959. Dilks says: ‘For a long time, Halifax knew that a great deal written and said about Chamberlain was nonsense, and he took great pains to tell me.’44 Halifax’s discreet autobiography Fulness of Days, published two years earlier, had corrected a few of Churchill’s ‘unwittingly inaccurate’ perceptions and errors, but, says Ziegler: ‘Halifax felt it rather undignified to fight his own corner, argue his case’ – with the consequence that Halifax’s reputation has likewise suffered.45, 46 Fulness of Days, says Dilks, did little to overturn ‘the still-prevailing fashionable notions of Halifax as somebody who wished to sell out to the Nazis or grovel to everybody, which is how Churchill was sometimes inclined to regard him’.

  What this boils down to is that our picture of the disastrous Norway Campaign which led to the debate, and of Chamberlain and Halifax as well, is mainly thanks to Churchill, who wrote the history and who had all the best lines. For most readers, his is the received version, the last word on the subject; a closed book in which Chamberlain’s name has been passed down in ignominy, and the Norway Campaign dismissed as a pathetic prelude to what Churchill’s friend, Conservative MP Major General Sir Edward Louis Spears, called ‘the real thing’.47