While Peter Fleming laid mines in Fleet Street, Martin Lindsay was having his memorandum typed out to show whose fault it was.
Not enough is known about the Lindsay Memorandum and its contribution to the Norway Debate. Although the conditions to remove Chamberlain were in place, Lindsay’s three-page manuscript acted as ‘the sudden loud exclamation’ which started the avalanche that carried the Prime Minister away. This was the argument advanced by Laurence Thompson, who in 1965 interviewed Lindsay for his book 1940. Martin Lindsay repeated the claim on Thames Television for the 1973 World At War series. Yet because his memorandum vanished in the hiatus that it had helped to create, historians have had only Lindsay’s word to go on. Without the hard text, it has remained one more mystery in a period full of them.
The day after delivering the first draft of this book to my publisher, I visited Hatfield House, home of the Salisburys, to read correspondence relating to the Watching Committee. I had lost hope of finding Lindsay’s missing document. My intention was to check quotes that I had taken from other accounts against their original sources, alert for omissions or errors of transcription which can creep into any text, as the experience of twenty-five years of working in archives has taught me. Then, in a folder of letters from Lord Salisbury to his son, I came upon an undated typescript. Underlined in red at the top of the first page were the words ‘Private & Confidential’.
The anonymous author was a British officer who had ‘just returned from the Southern front in Norway after serving in a very humble position on the Staff’.114 He was aware that to write as he did was against the regulations, ‘but I consider that the truth should be made known in the public interest and not buried’. In the interests of serving his country, he was bringing ‘the facts as observed by myself and my comrades … to the notice of responsible persons so that those responsible are not able to cover up their misdeeds next week in Parliament’.
Already, I had a premonition that this was Lindsay’s long-lost ‘memorandum’, which proceeded to outline in sombre detail ‘the whole story of muddle and incompetence which has resulted in one of the most complete disasters in our military history’. By the time I reached the excoriating conclusion, I was convinced. But how to prove it?
Although unsigned, the typed manuscript contained four handwritten words: no, known, subjected, continuous – corrections which the unknown author had inserted in blue ink using a thick-nibbed fountain pen. The only way to confirm my hunch was to determine if this handwriting was Lindsay’s. In the Bodleian Library in Oxford I juxtaposed the insertions against a letter that Lindsay had penned to Attlee in 1946. I next compared the words to a 1948 letter from Lindsay to Churchill, thanking him for signing The Gathering Storm. The script in both instances displayed the same ‘e’, ‘s’, ‘c’ and ‘t’. As a last resort, I scanned the four words to Lindsay’s daughter. She emailed back: ‘Yes, I’m 99.9 per cent sure it’s my father’s writing.’115
That being the case, then it is virtually certain that Peter Fleming looked over Martin Lindsay’s memorandum, as he had the Times leader, because Lindsay alludes to eyewitnesses who ‘have seen this letter and state that, in their opinion, it does not fully disclose the extent of the disorganisation and incompetence exhibited’.116
Lindsay was adamant that ‘if the lessons of this disaster are not learned, and the people responsible weeded out, the prospects of our winning this war are slender’. In short, he hoped that his exposé of the British military expedition to Norway, placed in the right hands, could be the dynamite with which Leland Stowe had sought ‘to rock 10 Downing Street’.
In a letter in the same folder, dated 2 May, Lord Salisbury wrote to his son that ‘the whole look’ of Chamberlain’s Cabinet was of a ‘tottering’ government.117 ‘My spot, however, is that Neville … will not survive fuller information.’
It was against this background that Lindsay now approached the Watching Committee. He needed the help of its ‘responsible’ Conservative critics to find the right hands. Shorthand notes on the back of his memorandum point to the Committee’s Honorary Secretary Paul Emrys-Evans as the member who effected the crucial introduction.
PART FOUR
THE DEBATE
15
TUESDAY 7 MAY
‘The dead columns of Hansard cannot reproduce it.1 They can only provide those who were present with the necessary aids to memory.’
ALFRED DUFF COOPER MP
‘The doped somnambulists have been jerked back to consciousness.’
Daily Mirror, 9 May 1940
No matter how often the story is told, nothing seems predestined about the upheaval that took place in the House of Commons on Tuesday 7 May 1940. As in the Dardanelles, hardly anyone behaved on that day as expected. When Giles Romilly’s fellow war correspondent on the Express, Alan Moorehead, looked back at Gallipoli, he felt in a curious way that the battle ‘might still lie before us in the future; that there is still time to make other plans and bring it to a different ending’.2 The same is true of the Norway Debate, with the Chamber on the opening afternoon packed to capacity, and Members jammed in at the Bar to watch a piece of parliamentary theatre that for dramatic tension vied with Gielgud’s performance in King Lear at the Old Vic.
The Commons assembled at 2.45 p.m. The Speaker and Chaplain walked up the Chamber, turned and knelt at the Table. The Members lining the green benches bowed their heads as the Chaplain prayed for them. ‘May they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals, but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’
The sources available to historians are punishingly similar, yet there is a contemporary account which has been overlooked, written by Harold Nicolson in the pressure of the moment, and cabled to the now defunct Montreal Standard. Not cited before, Nicolson’s words describe the scene as it unfolded, without the blemish of over-familiarity or hindsight, capturing the picture and the mood from the perspective of someone who was present throughout. This is how it begins: ‘The general opinion on that first day of the debate was that the Opposition would not press for a vote, but that the Commons would be able to indicate that the country as a whole, not content with the present administration, would expect an early strengthening of the Cabinet.3 No unusual dramatic developments were foreseen.’
At 3.45 p.m. the Serjeant at Arms advanced to the desk, bowed to the Speaker, and lifted the Mace from the top of the Table to the rack below. The House transformed itself for a few moments into a Committee of Supply. Nicolson informed his Canadian readers: ‘The House never allows procedure to be altered by historic events since that procedure is even more historic.’
A proposal was made that ‘a sum not exceeding £319,655’ should be granted His Majesty the King for salaries and expenses of the House of Commons, including a grant in aid of the Kitchen Committee.
The Speaker in charge of the Norway Debate was a tall, crusty cattle-farmer who had been wounded at Ypres. A taciturn ex-soldier, Captain Edward FitzRoy was famously ineffusive, though not always. Nancy Astor accosted him once during a garden party at Cliveden, saying in her Virginia twang: ‘Listening to the bores in the House you must often, Captain FitzRoy, wish you were dead.’4
‘On the contrary, I have often wished you were.’
FitzRoy was said to be as sharp a judge of a politician as of a shorthorn bull. He liked brief speeches, and to remind Ministers that a lot could be said in fifteen minutes. During long speeches, his leg, encased in its stockings and breeches, had the habit of moving up and down with rhythmic annoyance.
Overhead, the Galleries had filled almost to overflowing, with Ambassadors and High Commissioners stepping over each other to reach their reserved seats. Baffy Dugdale joined Dorothy Macmillan in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘I never saw the House so packed, even for the Munich debate.5 But what a change.’ Looking down, she was surprised to see Dorothy�
��s husband Harold sitting below the gangway on the opposition benches. These seats had been allocated to the Conservatives owing to the large turnout.
The Question on the Supply Motion was put and agreed to without debate.
The Serjeant at Arms advanced and lifted the Mace from the rack to its normal position on the Table.
The Chief Whip moved: ‘That this House do now adjourn.’
‘The Prime Minister,’ called the Speaker in a calm voice.
Chamberlain rose, to be greeted by loud cheers from some of his supporters, and on the opposition side by a few cries of: ‘Who missed the bus?’ and a shout directed at the Chief Whip: ‘Well staged, David, well staged!’6
‘I confess that the House of Commons depresses me,’ Chamberlain had written to Ida in January.7 Sensitive to heckling, it made him ‘sick to see such personal prejudice & such partisanship when I am doing my best to avoid any Party provocation in the national interest’.8 He shared Cadogan’s low opinion of MPs: ‘Silly bladders! Self-advertising, irresponsible nincompoops.9 How I hate Members of Parliament!’
Most speakers suffered from nerves. The Chancellor John Simon confessed to Geoffrey Shakespeare that before a speech: ‘I feel just like a man sentenced to death, who is to be hanged shortly.’10 The Prime Minister was more nervous this afternoon than he let on. After writing out his speech at Chequers, he had shown a draft to Halifax and Churchill. Whatever their input, it could do little to alter Chamberlain’s inescapable handicap: although an extremely accomplished debater, he tended to speak like the chairman of a Chamber of Commerce. In ‘a candid portrait’ that Duff Cooper had published four months earlier in the American Mercury, Cooper wrote: ‘He has no charm of manner or command of rhetoric.11 The unexpected epithet, the telling metaphor, the burst of eloquence – all those qualities that render the speeches of Winston Churchill an unending source of delight are utterly foreign to the oratory and the character of Chamberlain …’ His voice was thin, his prose unimaginative, his delivery uninspiring. ‘When he said the fine true thing,’ lamented the Independent MP A. P. Herbert, ‘it was like a faint air played on a pipe and lost on the wind at once.’12 His unofficial biographer Derek Walker-Smith cautiously accepted that ‘there is little or no poetry in Mr Chamberlain’.13 A Labour MP compared listening to a speech by Chamberlain to paying a visit to Woolworth’s – everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.
The motion before the House that afternoon was one for the adjournment – purely a vehicle for debate, without the possibility of an expression of substantive opinion or amendment – and so the Deputy Speaker, Sir Dennis Herbert, did not expect Labour to demand a vote. ‘No one anticipated that there would be any division.’14 Members waited in attentive silence to take their cue from Chamberlain’s opening statement. In common with Attlee, A. J. Sylvester believed that ‘if he rallies his supporters and satisfies them, the present political crisis may blow over …’15
Where the Prime Minister stood was once a stinking mud flat referred to as a ‘terrible place’ in early Saxon chronicles.16 A charged occasion like this returned him to a boiling evening in Andros when he stood behind the counter of his primitive store selling biscuits and rice and ‘everything mahn want’ to a demanding crowd of sisal planters.17 He rested a compact little sheaf of pages on the despatch box scarred by Gladstone’s signet ring, and started speaking in a composed, unemotional tone, glancing from time to time at his neatly written notes. Nicolson observed how Chamberlain emphasised his points ‘by allowing the back of his left hand to fall into the outstretched palm of his right hand, and at moments whipping off his pince-nez between his thumb and finger and turning around to his supporters below the gangway’.18
When he last addressed the House, Chamberlain began, he had been anxious to say nothing which might involve risk to the troops. To expressions of ‘Hear, hear’, he commended their magnificent gallantry. He then said that he proposed to examine the causes of the failure which had created profound shock in the House and country.
‘All over the world!’ came a Labour shout.
More shouts of ‘missed the bus’ forced Chamberlain to break off, sit down on the front bench and wait for an angry Speaker to restore quiet and order. Harold Macmillan was one of Chamberlain’s severest critics, but he felt that the Prime Minister was rudely and unfairly interrupted. Heckled again moments later, Chamberlain reacted with what Nicolson described as a ‘rather feminine’ gesture of irritation.19
‘A great many times some hon. Members have repeated the phrase “Hitler missed the bus”—’
‘You said it,’ voices shouted.
‘Yes, I said it, and I will now explain the circumstances in which I said it …’
But it was no good. The flop might have been heard in Birmingham, a lobby reporter told Leo Amery. Feeble, faltering, without his customary self-assurance, Chamberlain ‘looked a shattered man’, decided the Liberal MP Henry Morris-Jones.20
Chamberlain had hoped to narrow the scope of criticism to the actions taken by the government since the German invasion. In this scenario, evacuation was not only inevitable, it was sensible. He resisted any comparison to the withdrawal at Gallipoli. No large forces were involved. The Germans had suffered heavy losses. The ‘balance of advantage lay on our side’. The Liberal MP Dingle Foot could not believe what he was hearing. ‘No one listening to his speech would have supposed that Britain had suffered a major defeat.’21
A spoof of Chamberlain’s speech was printed in the New Statesman. ‘Germany has invaded Aberdeen.22 The Army is to be congratulated on a brilliant achievement in withdrawing from the Highlands under the very noses of the German aeroplanes. Not one man was lost in the evacuation … My impression is that on balance the Allies have gained … no one has ever got very much out of Aberdeen anyway … I am more confident than ever of Allied victory.’
It did not surprise Chips Channon, glancing up, to see the Egyptian Ambassador asleep.
Chamberlain’s most important announcement concerned the new powers that he had granted Churchill. Herbert Morrison leapt up from the Labour front bench to demand if this new arrangement covered the period of the Norwegian operations – or had it been made since they commenced?
Chamberlain admitted: ‘It has only been made recently.’
For the first time, Amery took heart. ‘That Churchill had not been responsible under this lop-sided arrangement was at any rate some relief to those of us who looked to him as a future leader.’23
The Prime Minister had spoken for fifty-seven minutes. He looked pale, sounded tired. At times fumbling his words, he closed with a call for unity, warning the House of further German attacks, even an attempt to invade, and sat down ‘thin and burning-eyed’.24
His statement had left the House bored, restive, and depressed at what Amery called ‘his obvious satisfaction with things as they stood’, but not mutinous.25 If Maisky felt that his speech ‘was simply rot,’ then Colville reflected the more positive mood from within the Chamberlain camp ‘that the Government was going “to get away with it”’.26, 27
Colville sustained his optimism through the next two speeches by the main opposition leaders.
Chamberlain was followed at 4.45 p.m. by Clement Attlee for Labour. Quiet, prim, schoolmasterly, bald-headed, Attlee tended to come across, in Hugh Dalton’s phrase, as ‘a little mouse’.28 In a low-key delivery, only rarely looking at his notes, Attlee blamed recent speeches by Chamberlain and Churchill for being ‘far too optimistic’. The government had made no provision for the inevitable German counter-stroke, and had not appreciated ‘the vital importance of protection from the air’. And what was to become a repeatedly gnawed bone of contention: the government was ‘too much fixed on Narvik’.
Lobby correspondents considered it significant that Attlee was not interrupted when he escalated his attack. Attlee’s statement – ‘Everywhere the story is “Too late”’ – was received by a rumble of Labour cheers, but no challenging shouts from the Co
nservative back bench. ‘The Prime Minister talked about missing buses. What about all the buses which he and his associates have missed since 1931? They missed all the peace buses but caught the war bus.’
The correspondent of the Daily Worker was among the first to register that Attlee’s uninterrupted censure had injected a fresh note. ‘When a Premier and a Party leader is attacked in Parliament and the attack is received in silence by his supporters the writing is already on the wall.’29
Clement Davies considered Attlee’s speech ‘direct’, Amery ‘pretty good’, and Nicolson ‘feeble’, while Reith thought it did ‘no damage’. Of more consequence than his criticisms was Attlee’s restraint in not calling for a division. This, believed Amery, ‘made it much easier for Conservatives to be influenced by the opening day’s debate’.30
Halifax had organised a ticket to the Peers’ Gallery for Baba Metcalfe. She missed the first two speeches, but arrived in time to hear Archie Sinclair. Baba was not impressed – ‘a bad speaker’.31 Colville, on the other hand, felt that the Liberal leader was ‘eloquent and venomous’, revealing ‘as usual, a remarkable store of inside information’.32 There were shocked noises as Sinclair itemised the shambolic state of the expedition. The men at Namsos had no snowshoes or white coats. The anti-aircraft guns were ‘utterly useless’. One transport had sailed without a chronometer, with no international code book and, therefore, no means of communicating with other vessels. Sinclair mocked John Simon’s recent claim that ‘the action decided on was wisely taken on the best advice’. The Chancellor reminded Sinclair of Lord Galway and his campaign of 1707. ‘He drew up his troops according to the methods prescribed by the best writers, and in a few hours lost 18,000 men, 120 standards, all his baggage and all his artillery.’ Sinclair, in concentrating his venom on Simon, a National Liberal, was targeting the most unpopular member of the War Cabinet, and not launching an all-out assault on the Conservatives. ‘Violent attacks always disconcert them,’ he had written to Salisbury’s brother, Lord Cecil, ‘but if we sing in a low key they are more likely to sing out.’33 Sinclair’s speech was good, thought Baffy Dugdale, ‘but not devastatingly so’.34
Six Minutes in May Page 30
