Amery in the meantime made his way downstairs to the Chamber to join the throng that was assembling to hear Churchill.
All through these tense and fluctuating discussions, Harold Macmillan claimed to have been consumed by two desires. 1. The government had to fall. 2. Churchill had to emerge as Prime Minister. As the moment approached for the First Lord to speak, Macmillan’s chief anxiety concerned Churchill. ‘We knew that he had determined to stand loyally by his colleagues and would close the debate as the spokesman of the Government … but how could Churchill be disentangled from the ruins?’ Louis Spears no longer felt confident that it was possible ‘to save him from the wreck’.99, 100 Churchill was going to have to follow his own instructions to his admirals, and steer his way with skilful care up an exposed and narrowing fjord.
Churchill shared Chamberlain’s nerves in the countdown to a speech. Bernays described how Churchill wandered in and out, and stirred uneasily in his seat, in a fever of impatience to be up. ‘He is like a pugilist waiting for the command “seconds out” in the ring.’101
Habitually in the moments before he was due to speak, Churchill was to be found in the Smoking Room, at the centre of a group, talking in a rapid voice, breaking matchsticks into little pieces and throwing them about him on the floor.
This was how Macmillan, after leaving Amery’s meeting, discovered the First Lord late on Wednesday evening.
Churchill beckoned him over, and Macmillan wished him luck, but added that he hoped his speech would not be too convincing.
‘Why not?’
Macmillan regarded him over his pince-nez.102 ‘Because we must have a new Prime Minister, and it must be you.’
According to Macmillan, Churchill answered gruffly ‘that he had signed on for the voyage and would stick to the ship. But I don’t think he was angry with me’.
Churchill’s daughter Mary had come to support him in Clementine’s absence. She watched her father make his way into the stifling Chamber. The unrest in the House ‘was aggravated by Papa arriving rather late’ for the opposition’s winding-up speech by Labour’s A. V. Alexander.103
On the crowded front bench, Churchill appeared very white in the queer light of the Gothic hall which seemed to Spears ‘to trail a veil of last winter’s fog across the beams of its ceiling’.104 Members had settled down in their seats with anticipatory grins or set jaws. The question on everyone’s mind: Would Winston be loyal?
At 10.11 p.m. the Speaker called his name. Mary Churchill peered over the edge of the Gallery. ‘Papa rose to wind up the debate.105 It was the first time in 11 years that he had wound up for the Govt.’
Down in the Chamber, Nicolson watched the First Lord assemble his notes and pat his waistcoat pockets for his two pairs of reading glasses. ‘The House was tense, almost awestruck.106 It was felt that Winston Churchill was faced by the most difficult speech of his career. He had to defend a reverse: he had to be loyal not only to the Naval Staff but to his Prime Minister. Would he diminish his own prestige? He rose, gay and determined: pugnacious and kind.’
Mary Churchill understood at once that the House ‘was in a most uncertain, unpleasant & sensitive restless mood.107 There were frequent interruptions – also quite a lot of cheering. Papa’s handling of the actual matter and of the House was nothing short of SUPERB. I listened breathless with pride [and] apprehension.’
Quintin Hogg also watched in admiration. Earlier, he had decided to vote against the government. Yet in common with several other potential dissidents, he found himself veering back in support after listening to Churchill. ‘I can see him now scowling, crouching and snarling at the despatch box as the tremendous voice rolled forth its terrific sentences in defence of the Government whose imminent fall was to bring him immortal glory and a State funeral in St Paul’s.108 As he rose to his peroration each word slammed home like a bullet in my stomach.’
Churchill was jeered and heckled, but his mind did not go blank, he did not dry up. As usual, his performance divided his audience. For Hogg, it was ‘one of his greatest and most passionate speeches’; for Dingle Foot, ‘the least impressive speech of his career’.109, 110 A consummate actor playing an impossible part was the general verdict. Members admired Churchill’s virtuosity, but they shared Chips Channon’s doubt that he had thrown every ounce of his weight into it. ‘How much of the fire was real, how much ersatz, we shall never know.’111
No one could dispute Churchill’s loyalty, though. It impressed Nicolson that Churchill accepted full responsibility – prompting shouts of ‘Not you, not you!’ – and then denounced Labour for forcing the division and for wilfully misrepresenting the Prime Minister’s use of the accepted parliamentary term ‘friends’. Nicolson wrote: ‘He said not one word which could be interpreted as disassociating himself from his colleagues in the Cabinet.112 Not one word – yet by his manner of speech, by the prestige of his brilliance, he rose so far above them that he was no longer of them.’
Churchill devoted the first part of his speech to a ‘general account’ of the campaign. But after promising to tell ‘the story of what happened, and why’, his statement was notable for its omissions. He never alluded to his part in pressing the War Cabinet for seven months to block off Narvik with a minefield. He made no reference to his decision to disembark troops at Rosyth or to the destructive chaos that this action had caused. He revealed nothing of his reluctance to switch operations from Narvik to Trondheim, of his continuous changes of mind, of his menacing threats to Chamberlain. Instead, Churchill was as careful to defend the government – which, he insisted, was ‘at every stage united … without the slightest difference of opinion’ – as Chamberlain had been to implicate him in its disasters.
Labour MPs were not persuaded, thought Maisky. ‘Defending Chamberlain is a difficult task, and it brought Churchill no laurels.’113 The opposition front bench interrupted him, first Morrison, then Greenwood, to insinuate that Churchill had personally ‘overruled’ his admirals and generals on the spot. Not only that, but he had recommended to the War Cabinet and the Prime Minister other actions than they had taken.
These serious accusations were not too wide of the truth, and provoked Churchill into an impassioned denial. They formed, he said, a ‘cataract of unworthy suggestions and of actual falsehoods’. There were fierce exchanges, wrote Joseph Kennedy, and ‘a couple of times when he lost his temper’.114
It looked at one point as though the Deputy Serjeant at Arms might have to eject Labour MP Emanuel Shinwell, who heckled Churchill from the shadows of the furthest seat on the top back bench. Shinwell wrote: ‘My interjection caused him to pause in the argument and indulge in a slashing attack on the Member “skulking” and afraid to show himself.’115 There was uproar as another Labour MP, ‘rather the worse for drink’, appealed to the Speaker to ask whether ‘skulk’ was a word allowed in Parliament.116 Violet Bonham Carter was horrified by this ‘unfortunate brawl’, yet Shinwell was unrepentant.117 ‘It was enough that I had ruffled him, upsetting his discourse; it was his own method – why not use it?’118
There was laughter, but the tension increased. Dalton wrote that ‘a good deal of riot, some of it rather stupid, developed on our benches towards the close of Churchill’s final speech’, with the Opposition ‘baying like hounds’ and Churchill shouting angrily at the Labour benches: ‘All day long we have had abuse, and now hon.119, 120 Members opposite will not even listen.’
Mary Churchill sat transfixed. ‘A storm of interruptions arose making Papa sit down & the speech ended amid catcalls from both sides of the House.’121
To Chips Channon, it was ‘like bedlam’.122
17
THE DIVISION
‘Something very extraordinary happened in Parliament last week … No shots, nobody put in prison, but revolution occurred.’
ELLEN WILKINSON MP, Labour Party Conference, 13 May 1940
‘The scene in the House was a disgrace.’1
PATRICK DONNER MP
Churchi
ll’s speech concluded the two-day debate. At 11.00 p.m. the Speaker stood up and procedure took over. ‘The Question is, That this House do now adjourn. As many as are of that opinion say, Aye.’
Some Members shouted aye.
‘To the contrary, No.’
Some Members shouted no.
‘Division – clear the Lobby!’
The Clerk at the table turned over the sandglass to time six minutes to the division. The Bar Doorkeeper opened the Chamber’s inner doors and shouted ‘Division!’ to alert the Principal Doorkeeper, who activated the bell by a lever in the arm of his chair. Bells rang throughout the Commons, and the cry of ‘Division!’ was taken up by police officers and other staff.
The bells rang for fifty-five seconds, paused for ten seconds, and rang again for fifty-five seconds. During this time each side of the argument provided Tellers for the division. After two minutes, the Speaker again put the question, and announced the names of the Tellers: Captain Margesson and Lieutenant Colonel Kerr for the government ayes, Sir Charles Edwards and Mr Paling for the opposition noes.
Members had four more minutes to get into one division Lobby or the other. Harold Nicolson noted the ‘great tensity in the air’ as they began to rise from their seats.2
In Andros on very hot days Chamberlain sometimes observed a waterspout forming half a mile away, rising inky black from the water and tilting inland in a tall column of dust. Inside the store, all the shutters were at once closed, plunging the storekeeper and his assistant into darkness.
It is hard to say at what point the government grasped the nature of this maelstrom. Earlier in the afternoon, Ministers had felt that the Labour decision to divide the House was a mistake, and had freely predicted that no more than a dozen Conservatives would defy their Whips. David Margesson later claimed that it dawned on him only in the winding-up speeches that the large government majority was likely to collapse. Out of the blue, a routine adjournment motion for the Whitsun holiday, which the government had expected comfortably to win, had been hijacked, using a procedural vote to expose the fragility of the Chamberlain administration. As the division bell sounded with the piercing shrill of a fire alarm, panic spread along the front bench. Euan Wallace wrote in his diary how ‘at one moment the Whips were apprehensive of an actual defeat on the vote for the adjournment’.3
Seated next to Mary Churchill, John Colville had gauged the mood of Chamberlain’s inner circle – Alec Dunglass, Kingsley Wood, Arthur Rucker: ‘All seemed to think the P.M. would have to resign unless he could get a majority of a hundred votes.’4 Everything depended on the dissidents, and whether Conservative waverers could be persuaded by Amery, Macmillan, Emrys-Evans, Spears, Cooper, Boothby and Nancy Astor to summon the courage to go into the opposition Lobby.
Simon, the aloof Chancellor, was one of the first Ministers to feel nervous about the government’s chances. This followed an encounter in the Commons dining room with two Conservative MPs in uniform: Somerset de Chair and Stuart Russell, the latter soon to be killed in action.
Simon paused at their table. ‘May I ask which way you young people are going to vote?’
‘Against you,’ said de Chair.5
The Chancellor sat down as if punched, and pointed out the constitutional implications. ‘If you succeed in bringing down the Government, as you very well may do, the King cannot send for Mr Churchill or Lord Halifax. He would have to send for Mr Attlee or Mr Greenwood. Is that what you want?’ Nor would that be the only consequence. Simon prophesied that if there was a bad result in the division, ‘Germany would invade Holland within 48 hours.’
Undeterred, de Chair openly expressed his feelings in the final moments of the debate as he watched Churchill shout back at the opposition. De Chair stood at the rear of the Chamber with a group of Whips and Junior Ministers, who asked him: ‘How can you vote for a rabble like that against a man like that?’
‘I am not voting against him. I am voting against you and you and you,’ and he pointed at three of them in turn.
There was no indication of how the vote would go as Members began to move into the division Lobbies. Chips Channon found the whispering unbearable. He watched Nancy Astor rush about, ‘intriguing and enjoying the fray and the smell of blood’ – causing one French journalist to remark in Colville’s earshot: ‘Dieu! Que les femmes deputées sont laides!!’
Active until the sixth minute when the Doorkeepers turned their keys in the locks, government Whips and Ministers were still putting pressure on the dissidents.6, 7 Brendan Bracken, Private Secretary to Churchill, and Jim Thomas, Private Secretary to Anthony Eden, were drawn aside and cautioned that if they voted against the government it would be taken as an indication of their Ministers’ sympathies. With expressionless faces, they entered the government Lobby. But John Profumo, elected a month earlier as a pro-Chamberlain MP, had already decided against. ‘It was not easy to walk into the opposition Lobby.8 I remember Walter Elliot, who was a Minister, spitting on my shoes as we were waiting in line. In the House.’
The tension had made everyone a punter. ‘Ham’ Kerr, Conservative MP for Oldham, bet that one hundred government supporters would vote against the regime, while Percy Harris reckoned that only thirteen Tories would. Up in the Diplomatic Gallery, Joseph Kennedy sat squeezed between Maisky and the Belgian Ambassador, who predicted that the Government majority would be 130, ‘and everybody felt that was quite likely’.9 In the summer of 1939, similar votes had been won by 164 and 116.
Almost the last group to make up their minds were the Conservative dissidents in uniform. Fourteen of them sat in a group on the government back benches below the gangway. Nancy Astor overheard them discussing their dilemma, which, as Louis Spears rendered it, compelled them ‘to show courage in the safety of that building when so much was being freely offered elsewhere on land, on the sea, and in the air.10 It was our contribution to the war, our way of fighting …’ The lead was given by William Anstruther-Gray in the uniform of a Coldstream Guards officer. With one minute remaining, he pronounced his verdict, and led his group towards the No Lobby. They marched in, Dingle Foot recalled, ‘as if they were marching four abreast’, all in uniform.11 ‘The effect was tremendous.’
This left Quintin Hogg still sitting. ‘What should I do?’ he agonised.12 ‘Vote for the Government as the majority would do? Abstain as many subsequently did? Vote against and perhaps bring my country as well as the Government down? I was never more lonely in my life.’
On the Clerk’s table, the grey sand in the Victorian glass trickled to a halt. The Speaker rose a second time, and called out: ‘Lock the doors.’ No one not already in the division Lobbies would from now on be able to vote. Next morning, Hogg wrote to Chamberlain: ‘I wish I could have voted with you, or even abstained … but you know what I thought and I took the difficult, and less pleasant course.’13 Mind made up, Hogg rushed past the Doorkeeper – in one version forcing him aside – and got into the No Lobby ‘as the door closed behind’.
Dingle Foot described the scene in the No Lobby as unique, a fitting culmination to what had been ‘unquestionably the most important debate in Parliamentary history’.14 Clement Attlee saw – much to his ‘pleasure and surprise’ – something that he had long hoped for, but never expected to witness: Conservative MP after Conservative MP, many in khaki, navy blue and air-force blue uniforms, crowded with Labour and Liberal MPs into the same Lobby.15 In Ronald Blythe’s phrase: ‘Shifty eyes and blushes met the Labour and Liberal grins.’16
At the Labour Party’s meeting that morning, Dalton had forecast that the opposition would attract no more than fifteen government supporters. In fact, more than forty milled inside, including Duff Cooper who in a speech earlier had announced his intention to vote against the government, and was moved to witness ‘a young officer in uniform, who had been for long a fervent admirer of Chamberlain, walking through the Opposition Lobby with the tears streaming down his face’.17 Dalton’s eyes filled with tears as well. ‘How many of the
se young men, I wondered, were giving the last Parliamentary vote that they would ever give – for their Country and against their Whips?’ Admiral Keyes was there with them, saying in a loud voice: ‘They wouldn’t let me lead an expedition into Trondheim, so I’m leading an expedition into this Lobby instead.’18 Roy Wise, Conservative MP for Smethwick and a lieutenant colonel in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, had fought in Norway with Fleming and Lindsay. He explained to Dalton: ‘I came straight back from Namsos to vote against the Government.’19 Disgusted that his artillery had not fired a shot due to the lack of ammunition, and that his wounded had not been treated due to the lack of medical supplies, he was voting on behalf of his men, and he repeated what Lindsay had told Attlee. ‘We were bombed by German aeroplanes and had nothing with which to reply, not even a machine gun.’
In contrast, the Aye Lobby seemed to Chips Channon thin for a three-line whip. Two covert dissidents, Anthony Eden and Jim Thomas, ‘looked triumphant’.20 But most Members appeared worried. ‘Everyone wondered how many had dared to vote against us: so many threaten to do, and funk it at the last moment.’ After casting his vote, Channon returned to his seat behind Chamberlain – who had sat with ‘patience and courtesy’ throughout the closing speeches – ‘and we watched the insurgents file out of the Opposition Lobby’. The mood still was that the government could survive with a majority of one hundred or more.
Meanwhile, the dense pack inside the No Lobby had divided into two columns according to the first letter of the voting MP’s surname, A–L in one column, M–Z in another. Spears shuffled towards the Division Clerk, who ticked off his name as he called it out. ‘A quick look by the official, a line drawn with a soft pencil against that name, and you were facing the half-closed double doors through which you must pass in single file.’21
Six Minutes in May Page 35
