Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Nanny Hyslop reported the sisters’ terrible row to their teenage nephew, Nicholas Mosley, who was still able to recall the conversation seven decades on. ‘Irene said to Baba: “You really must stop this business with Lord Halifax because everyone’s going yackety yak.”126 Baba said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Lord Halifax and I are very good friends and I’m very good friends with Dorothy.” Irene said: “I’ve never heard such rubbish, of course you’re carrying on” – which was the term – “with Lord Halifax.” Baba said: “I’ve just got a very good friendship,” and then they didn’t speak. As a sixteen-year-old, I thought this was very interesting.’

  Violet Bonham Carter was the daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who in 1914 at a time of national peril had formed an intense attachment to Violet’s best friend, Venetia Stanley. The mystery of that romance remains unresolved – most of Asquith’s letters from Venetia are missing, as are Baba’s to Halifax – but when the riddle of sex came up in later life, recalls her daughter-in-law Leslie Bonham Carter, and speculation was invited, Violet would put a hand to her throat and enquire, ‘My dear, was it thorough-going?’127

  Even as the Germans were driving our troops out of Norway, this question was being asked of the Foreign Secretary and his relationship with the estranged wife of Major Metcalfe. Forty years on, the question was still being posed. On 18 December 1991, James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary after meeting Halifax’s biographer, Andrew Roberts: ‘Asked me if I thought Lord Halifax went to bed with Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.’128

  On the night that the French Chasseurs came ashore in Namsos, Baba had gone with Irene to the opening of Gone with the Wind. Mass Observation reported a new fashion among young couples of having ‘intercourse in shop doorways on the fringe of passing crowds’.129 Baba’s friend Nancy Astor wanted ‘a girl curfew’ to counteract immorality in parks, with the banning of make-up and short skirts.130 Thoroughgoing love was in the air that spring. But between Halifax and Baba?

  Lees-Milne was doubtful, telling Roberts: ‘I shouldn’t think so somehow.’ David Cecil also thought not. ‘Edward was purely Edwardian in his love of purely decorous flirtations in which he played the part of instructor and adviser.’131 Yet Churchill had believed that the romance between the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson was ‘psychical rather than sexual’ and a most ‘natural’ companionship completely free ‘from impropriety or grossness’ – even if the King’s Private Secretary found it as easy to believe in the innocence of that relationship as in ‘a herd of unicorns grazing in Hyde Park’, where since November Halifax and Baba had taken to strolling.132, 133

  ‘They seem to be walking in Hyde Park.134 Then she sleeps in the next bunk at the Dorchester. It must have been perfectly maddening for Dorothy that he had this crush on Baba.’ Seventy-five years on, Baba’s daughter Davina continues to be puzzled by ‘this extraordinary relationship’, which had made her father so jealous – Irene’s diary records how Fruity, whom Irene likened to ‘some large wounded animal hitting its head against granite or an iceberg (Baba)’ gave ‘a v ugly diatribe on Baba’s selfishness … spending all her time with Ld H.’135, 136

  Davina did not muster the courage to question her mother. She says of Baba: ‘She was part of a generation who never showed feeling, ever. If I’d asked her about Edward, I’ll tell you exactly what she always said: “I really can’t go into that now.”’

  Diana Holderness was married to Halifax’s son Richard. ‘Was the relationship sexual? We argued, all in this small circle, Richard and his sister, and Charles Peake, who had been his PPS, and his wife Catherine.137 We argued ad infinitum. Most of us said no. My own thought is yes. I just do believe it. Roman Catholics sleep with everyone. I don’t think religion stops one. Let’s be honest, people can say their prayers, but they still have sex.’

  On meeting Halifax that summer, the journalist George Ward Price could not help noticing Halifax’s deprecating smile ‘almost as if he had a guilty secret’.138 Valentine Lawford wrote that out of all the political leaders for whom he worked, Halifax ‘was perhaps the most susceptible to the charm of clever women’.139 Roy Jenkins definitely formed the impression that Halifax was ‘a bit of a “gwoper”’.140 If so, it ran in the family. Halifax told Charles Peake how his great-great-grandfather had fallen madly in love with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, who had had a daughter by him.

  In his diary, Halifax noted how the French Minister Georges Mandel had asked whether he could come to London, for a Supreme War Council meeting, with ‘des bagages’, which the British Ambassador interpreted as his mistress. That Daladier and Reynaud had mistresses was widely known, to the extent that Madame de Portes sent messages to Reynaud even while the War Council was in session. Baba may or may not have achieved ‘bagages’ status with Halifax, but she had form. Lord Curzon had sinned on a tiger-skin with Elinor Glyn, and Baba was her father’s daughter.

  A previous lover was a friend of Halifax, the Italian Ambassador Count Dino Grandi. ‘Naldera, darling, my sweet friend, I am yours,’ Grandi had written from Rome the previous May.141

  Then there was her brother-in-law, Tom Mosley. Baba had gone to bed with Mosley two months after his wife, her sister Cimmie, died in May 1933. After the war, Baba went to Mosley and suggested this arrangement should continue as before, says Nicholas Mosley. ‘My father told me he had felt obliged to say no.’142 Instead, Baba took up with Sim Feversham, who, though married to Halifax’s daughter Anne, went on to build Baba a cottage at Pennyholme three miles across the moor from where he had his home in Yorkshire. ‘Baba never left anyone alone,’ says someone who knew both her and Halifax reasonably well. ‘If you sleep with your brother-in-law, why wouldn’t you like to sleep with the Foreign Secretary? After all, she went on to sleep with his son-in-law.’

  The last word on this subject must go to Halifax’s biographer Andrew Roberts, who believes that even if their relationship was not thoroughgoing ‘then it was as good as’.143 Roberts says: ‘They were emotionally bound in a way that contrasts with the public image.’

  Whatever the nature of their relationship, it was of consuming importance to Halifax. Possibly, it was even more important to him at this critical moment than being Prime Minister. If that was the case, then his weekend with Baba Metcalfe at Little Compton served to confirm what he already knew.

  Everyone praised how Baba had spruced up the house. She had brought a walnut wing-chair and table lamps from Kedleston; from another Curzon country house, Montacute, pieces of lacquered furniture. She had mingled Regency and Victorian with Oriental, and pinned up a Bedouin-style tent over her bed in the main bedroom. Wallis Simpson wrote to Baba from the South of France: ‘Everyone tells me that your house is a dream and that you have done it all too beautifully.’144 Wallis was ‘still struggling with the butler question – we have an ape at present’. At Little Compton, Baba had a butler called Simpson, May the parlourmaid, two housemaids, and a chef.

  The guest room looked over the back garden. Halifax wrote to Baba: ‘I can’t conceive how you ever tear yourself away from such a concentration of tranquillity.’145 It could have been a weekend at Naldera, eating cherries from the trees after a long walk through the deodar woods, only in this case through Baba’s small deer park. And in the evening, playing charades (‘Baba doing the Immaculate Conception was a scream,’ Irene wrote on another occasion) and reading aloud from his father’s ghost book, A Collection of Stories of Haunted Houses, Apparitions, and Supernatural Occurrences which Halifax had published in October, with an introduction by him.146

  The reluctance of Bishop Juxon’s phantom to materialise did nothing to dent Halifax’s enjoyment. Afterwards, as though ‘still living in the “sun” of that pleasant weekend’, Halifax came to stay often, sometimes on his own, sometimes with Dorothy.147 ‘We could count upon a standing welcome from Alexandra Metcalfe at her home in Little Compton,’ he wrote in one of two spare references to Baba in his memoirs.148 ‘It was always agreeable
and stimulating so that the weekend never failed to send us back to work refreshed in body and soul.’

  After yet another ‘rare weekend’, Charles Peake wrote to Baba that ‘it was lovely to see Edward so blissfully happy and to feel he deserved to be happy – for he has been hard hit and has never thought of himself.’149 Dorothy expressed her gratitude in similar ecstatic terms. She had not seen her husband ‘so light-hearted since the war, no indeed, not since 1938 when he took over the FO! & it was very good to see him giggling!’150

  Halifax’s levity on that first weekend masked the fear that he shared with the nation. ‘There was no shadow of doubt about the fact of the public expectation of invasion.’151 An Intelligence report from Prague indicated that the Germans had completed their preparations, and had divided London into several administrative districts. Even the King was taking precautions, telling Halifax that he was going to carry a rifle in his car, and intended to do rifle practice in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Churchill informed Halifax that if the Germans came to London, ‘I shall take a rifle (I’m not a bad shot with a rifle) and put myself in the pillbox at the bottom of Downing Street and shoot till I’ve no more ammunition, and then they can damned well shoot me.’152

  At 8.30 on Sunday morning Halifax walked with Baba to the local church. The bells still rang out – not until 13 June were church bells silenced, ‘to ring only in case of invasion alarm’.153 Even so, the atmosphere inside St Denys’s church reinforced the nervous expectation felt in congregations up and down the country. ‘Is it possible that the Prussian jackboot will force its way into this countryside to tread and trample it at will?’ The idea outraged Halifax, ‘much as if anyone were to be condemned to watch his mother, wife, or daughter being raped’.154

  Over breakfast outside in the sun, Halifax discussed the Norwegian Campaign with Baba. She wrote in her diary: ‘Edward is absolutely sure the Government did right in going to the aid of Norway and also in withdrawing when we did.’155

  There is no evidence for this, but Halifax may also have told her about Peter Fleming’s escape from Namsos under Louis Mountbatten’s protection. In the light of Halifax’s other disclosures, there was little reason for him to keep this secret – given, also, the fond references to Fleming in his letters to Baba (Halifax wrote to her concerning the Viceroyalty of India: ‘If I were dictator I might try someone like Peter Fleming’) and that Mountbatten had been best man at her wedding.156

  What is known is that Halifax revealed to Baba classified information about the Norway Campaign which otherwise remained secret to all but the War Cabinet. Among the details she learned was that its failure had been due to ‘a series of unexpected happenings’ of which the gravest was Churchill’s intervention at the outset on 8 April. ‘There were troops actually on board one of the battleships ready to sail at the time of our mine-laying, but when it was heard that Germany had sent 2 of her biggest ships, the troops had to be disembarked in order for the ship to go after the German battleships. This caused delay.’ In Chips Channon’s reckoning, ‘the delay in sending the fleet on that fatal 9 April may well cost us the War’.157

  Yet none of Churchill’s interventions or gaffes might be mentioned in the Norway Debate, said Halifax. ‘It is very difficult having public debates, and risking revealing to the Germans how our minds are working.158 That we obviously cannot do.’

  Breakfast over, Halifax sprawled in a garden chair, hat on, left hand hanging limp and black out of his sleeve, and ‘tried to make up a speech for Wednesday’.159 This he found ‘very ticklish’ to compose, but he finished it in time for lunch.

  ‘A most perfect day,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and after a comparatively idle afternoon we motored back to London, where I found piles of boxes, which I knew was the price of having to be away.’ When thanking Baba for this heavenly weekend, he wrote that he was pulling strings for her to watch the debate in both Houses. ‘The world is foul, isn’t it! And I shall think it fouler on Wednesday in the H/L.160 Not that that matters tuppence. I will cast a glance in yr direction. Hope to get you seat in H/C tomorrow.’ His mood was positive. Neither he nor Chamberlain would be ascending any scaffold. ‘There is considerable political clamour but I doubt whether this, at present at all events, will amount to much.’161 He told Baba that he was sure the Prime Minister ‘will remain in power for a long time’.162

  13

  THE WILD MAN

  ‘I don’t know what to make of him.’1 Conservative MP to LADY ASTOR

  ‘How about a nice rug?’

  ‘I wonder whether any historian of the future will ever be able to paint Winston in his true colours.’2

  FIELD MARSHAL LORD ALANBROOKE

  ‘He was still playing a solitary game, and with the cards stacked against him, in those spring days of 1940.’3

  EMANUEL SHINWELL MP

  A strange peace had descended on Namsos following the departure of the Allied ships early on 3 May. With no one to put out the flames, the long line of vehicles continued to burn away on the quay.

  Singly at first, then in stumbling groups, the town’s starved inhabitants who had taken refuge in the Namdal valley flocked back through the ruins of their homes to help themselves to the food and drink that the Chasseurs Alpins had left behind. All codes of behaviour disappeared as famished men and women tore open the boxes and sated themselves on corned beef, biscuits and rum, and afterwards, groggily, on each other. This period of debauchery before the arrival of the Germans became known as the Rum Weekend.

  On Sunday 5 May, the local Norwegian commander Colonel Getz, recognising that the Allies had abandoned him, was forced to sign a ceasefire with Oberst Krätzner of 181st Infantry Division. A tall column of dark smoke pointed the way to Namsos. Wary of the booby traps which Fleming and Lindsay had concealed under bridges, German troops advanced with care through a chill white landscape of narrow lanes choked with overturned milk-carts and broken-down cars. In the outlying streets, they found a dazed population meandering between the bomb-blasted trees.

  In London, the obliteration of Namsos portended the destruction of Churchill’s political career: this too, it was felt, had been ‘Namsosed’. Supportive MPs like Louis Spears voiced concern that ‘the Norwegian fiasco had diminished his chances of assuming the leadership’.4 The Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood feared that the evacuation ‘would only reflect injuriously on Churchill … word passed round everywhere in the House – “Churchill is to blame.”’5

  On 26 April, captured British troops from 148th Infantry Brigade had been flown to Berlin and paraded before Hitler, who made a vain attempt to crush their anti-tank ammunition between his fingers. ‘This war was not necessary.6 You can thank your Government for it,’ Hitler told the British POWs, and left.

  Churchill’s nephew was not among the prisoners. A German float-plane had removed him from Narvik, and Churchill was trying to find out where he was being held. An unconfirmed report from Amsterdam stated that Romilly had been interned on the Danish island of Bogø. Beaverbrook, his employer, had written to Nellie about Giles, whom she had always regarded as ‘her heart’s delight’, and he implied that ‘American sources have been tapped to help him’, yet the family had heard ‘no whisper of news’.7, 8

  In Herefordshire, Nellie was at Huntington Park looking after Giles’s critically ill father, and ‘in a terrible state’.9 Bertram Romilly’s condition had been exacerbated by his son’s arrest, then imminent rescue, and now disappearance. The colonel’s cancer had spread over his lungs, and on 23 April the doctor began to give him morphine. ‘He had reached the highest peak of human suffering,’ a stricken Nellie wrote to Churchill, who had sent a cheque – which Bertram resisted cashing, telling Nellie: ‘I am only struggling to live as I don’t want to waste Winston’s 100 guineas for my operation.’10, 11

  Inevitably, Giles Romilly’s uncertain fate cast Churchill back forty years to his own experiences as a captive young war correspondent. Churchill admitted to Leo Amery that he had never felt so
lonely as the morning after he escaped his prison building in Pretoria – climbing over a paling at the back of the lavatory – and found himself on his own in the veld. Much the same sense of isolation took hold as report after report of successive defeats streamed in from across the North Sea.

  ‘The beaten general is disqualified …’ Churchill the military historian was familiar with Marshal Foch’s quotation which the Paris newspaper Le Journal printed that week, calling it ‘a profound true remark which holds good for all defeats and for all in authority’. In the opinion of a correspondent to The Times, the military expedition to Norway was ‘a disaster as great as that of Gallipoli.’ In Westminster, its failure rebounded hardest on the Minister most identified with the campaign. Clementine later told her husband that had it not been for his repeated warnings about Germany, ‘Norway might have ruined you.’12

  Outside the Commons and Downing Street, Churchill was still popularly regarded as a man of action and courage who had stood up to Hitler. Yet his ‘unassailable’ position in the country, as John Colville described it without huge conviction, was not replicated in Cabinet.13 On 1 May, Colville had watched Churchill gaze out of the window and say, as if looking at the sudden blight which had descended on the face of the earth, ‘If I were the first of May, I should be ashamed of myself.’14 Colville was unsympathetic. ‘Personally I think he ought to be ashamed of himself in any case.’ A beaten general was how Colville and the No. 10 staff viewed Churchill.

  Withheld from the public was Churchill’s part in the messes of Narvik, Namsos and Åndalsnes. A majority in the War Cabinet shared the perception of Chancellor John Simon that Churchill ‘is more directly responsible for recent defeats and strategy in Norway than any of his colleagues’.15 In 1914, Simon had written to Asquith urging him to sack Churchill as First Lord. Were Chamberlain to have canvassed Simon’s opinion in May 1940, there is no reason to suppose that Simon would not have urged the same course. If any commander deserved to be disqualified, it was the First Lord.