Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  An archetypical enemy was Nancy Dugdale, wife of a recent Conservative Deputy Whip. Churchill did not go down well in their part of Yorkshire, she revealed in a letter to Chamberlain. ‘The constant agitation in favour of Mr Churchill in the press in no way corresponds to the feeling of the people here who frankly distrust him & fundamentally dislike his boasting.’48 She wrote to her husband four days after the Norway Debate: ‘WC is really the counterpart of Goering in England, full of the desire for blood, “Blitz Krieg” and bloated with ego and over feeling, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.’49

  This is not to say that antipathy towards Churchill flowed all in one direction. After a disquieting scene in the House, when Conservative MPs had ‘howled and hooted him out’, Churchill walked from the Chamber with his head lowered, and only his faithful Brendan Bracken following.50 As Bracken reached the door, he turned and looked round at the Conservative majority ‘with hatred in his eyes and murder in his heart’, recalled a witness. ‘If someone at that moment had handed him a bren gun in working condition, the Tory majority would have been blasted out of the House of Commons.’

  Andrew Roberts interviewed up to twenty of those Conservative MPs. He says: ‘Not a single one once said or wrote that because of the fact that Winston Churchill was right about Adolf Hitler we should make him Prime Minister.’51 In the heated discussions in the Lobbies and Whips’ rooms after the division, there was a strong inclination to downgrade Churchill’s claims and to cite his reckless past rather than praise his foresight. Revisiting this period a month on, Clementine Churchill told Violet Bonham Carter ‘that a great section of the Tory Party were not behind Winston’, and that even his closest supporters ‘were cautious in promoting his interests’.52

  Inevitably, there was one name that did emerge as the natural compromise leader of a government of national unity, under whom all differences might resolve themselves, acceptable to the opposition, and whom the Conservative Party would have chosen in overwhelming numbers had MPs held a snap election that night.

  Lord Halifax was a politician of indisputable charm and integrity, who had capably administered an empire of 320 million people. The historian Robert Blake summed up the Foreign Secretary’s attraction: ‘He was widely respected across the whole party political spectrum.53 No breath of scandal ever touched his name.’

  If, as S. J. D. Green reminds us, ‘no “serious politician” during the 1930s had been “a Churchillian”,’ then almost the opposite was true of Halifax, who had long been touted as a premier.54 As far back as December 1926, at a lunch party given by Chamberlain, Viscount Mersey had asked two of those present, Victor Cazalet and Charles Cayzer, who would be the next Conservative leader after their host. ‘They both said “Edward Wood [Halifax], every time.”’55 In 1938, Beverley Baxter and several other MPs placed bets on the succession to Chamberlain, with Halifax emerging as 6-to-4 favourite and Churchill as 40-to-1 outsider. Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Harold Nicolson reported on a general feeling in the Commons ‘that Halifax should become Prime Minister’.56 Even Lloyd George, when casting round for a suitable premier other than himself, looked with a grudging glance at Halifax, telling A. J. Sylvester: ‘Well, there is always the pale young curate.’57

  The division’s sensational result fixed the searchlights on the Foreign Secretary. Those who feared Churchill as leader found the opposing qualities in Halifax. Coming downstairs into the Lobby after the debate, Joseph Kennedy met Hugh Dalton and Nancy Astor conferring. ‘Lady Astor immediately started for Lord Halifax for Prime Minister.’58

  The Foreign Secretary had been occupied all afternoon in the Lords, where he had spoken from 7.38 p.m. to 8.15 p.m. ‘On the whole it went better than I expected,’ Halifax wrote in his diary.59 ‘My speech contributed nothing new but did adequately.’ With viceregal detachment, he had organised for the debate in the Lords to be wrapped up in a single sitting, without a division, after persuading several speakers to drop out ‘in order that I might get finished before dinner’.

  His dinner date that evening was his hostess of the weekend.

  Baba Metcalfe was bursting to tell Halifax about the extraordinary scenes that she had witnessed in the Commons. Over a hurried meal, at which Dorothy Halifax was also present, Baba described how she had ‘popped backwards and forwards’ between the Commons and the Lords, to hear Lord Salisbury and then Halifax.60 To go from one House to the other was ‘like going from Twickenham to St Paul’s’. She described the scrummage in the former: Morrison’s unanticipated call for a confidence vote, Chamberlain’s misplaced appeal to his friends, Lloyd George’s scornful demand that the Prime Minister sacrifice himself, and the ‘very sharp exchanges between Labour people and the P.M.’ To Halifax, hearing this for the first time, it was clear that the position had ‘suddenly become acute’.61

  Some years before, a bomb had exploded under his train as it approached Delhi, wrecking the restaurant carriage. Then the Viceroy’s coach had leapt the gap. The challenge facing Halifax this evening was how to keep the government on the rails.

  After dinner, Halifax took Baba down to the Commons since he wanted to see Chamberlain and she wanted to hear Churchill. He wrote: ‘I didn’t see the P.M.’, but he had sat in the Peers’ Gallery and caught the final moments of the debate. ‘Winston was good, but got into a bit of a row at the end, and the Division was bad.’ Halifax was ‘amazed at the personal animosity to the P.M.’, he told Baba.62 ‘What the solution is I don’t pretend to know.’63

  In fact, a sizeable body of MPs had decided that Halifax was the solution, and not merely Conservative Members. In the opinion of the Labour frontbencher Hugh Dalton, there was ‘no other choice’ but Halifax.64

  The swell for him had been growing all day. At the very moment that Halifax dined with Baba, Dalton called on Rab Butler, Halifax’s representative in the Commons, with a radical proposal: provided that Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare and Kingsley Wood disappeared from the government, having ‘such long crime sheets’, then Labour would be prepared to discuss the question of entering a coalition.65 Dalton said: ‘If I was asked who should succeed Chamberlain as Prime Minister, my own view, which I thought was shared by a number of others, was that it should be Halifax … Some might think of Winston as P.M., but in my view he would be better occupied in winning the war.’66

  This was not merely Dalton’s opinion, but that of Attlee, who ‘agrees with my preference for Halifax over Churchill’, and of Morrison as well.67 Dalton asked Butler to pass their views on to the Foreign Secretary. Butler did so in a letter which he wrote to Halifax that night.

  Knowledge that Halifax had the support of the Labour leadership lay behind an earlier covert approach, this time from within No. 10. The previous day, Dunglass had contacted Butler and asked him ‘to talk to Halifax and persuade him to become Prime Minister’.68 Dunglass, too, had heard, most likely from Chamberlain, that Halifax ‘was the personal choice of Mr Attlee’.69

  Add now to the phalanx forming behind the Foreign Secretary, Lloyd George. He recently had told Stafford Cripps, somewhat to Cripps’s surprise, that ‘Winston could not be P.M. and that it would have to be Halifax’.70 If ever there was a shoo-in for Prime Minister, then it was Edward Halifax on the evening of 8 May 1940.

  Watching all this with a self-interested eye was Max Beaverbrook, who had once ‘stupefied’ Leo Amery ‘by saying that unfit as he was for the job, he might be compelled to be Prime Minister!’ Beaverbrook was suspected of supporting Lloyd George before the division, the politician he had backed in 1916 and forced to resign in 1922.71 Now having digested the result, he had embarked on his reluctant shift towards Churchill, even if, as Beaverbrook pointed out, the position was ‘very heavily loaded’ in favour of Halifax – as how could it not be? Chamberlain wished to recommend Halifax as his successor.72 The King wanted Halifax as his Prime Minister. And the government Chief Whip preferred Halifax – as did most Conservative
MPs, three of the Labour leaders and, apparently, Lloyd George. The only person supposedly not in favour of a Halifax premiership was Halifax himself.

  At some unclear point during 8 May, probably in his room behind the Speaker’s Chair, Chamberlain spoke to Halifax in what was to be the first of three meetings over the next twenty-four hours in all of which he tried to talk his Foreign Secretary into becoming Prime Minister of a coalition government. With no confidence in Churchill as his successor, and no faith that Labour would endorse Churchill following the rowdy scenes in the Chamber, Chamberlain had turned over in his methodical mind the fact that Halifax had the respect and support of the Labour leaders, under whom he had successfully served when Viceroy of India. This, on top of Chamberlain’s soundings that the Conservatives ‘would not accept Winston’ made Halifax not merely a natural choice on this seismic evening.73 It also made him the only one. Chamberlain now just had to convince Halifax.

  Stuart Hodgson was researching Halifax’s biography at this moment, and he recorded how Halifax once let slip ‘that he would rather be Master of Foxhounds than Prime Minister’.74 Halifax’s initial response to Chamberlain on 8 May was in this vein. ‘I told him … that if the Labour people said that they would only serve under me I should tell them that I was not prepared to do it.’75

  Later that evening, Halifax drove Baba Metcalfe home to 16 Wilton Place. Her London house had been kept under dust sheets since the start of the war, but she continued to spend the odd night there. It was where the Duke of Windsor had stayed in September when he went to visit his brother at Buckingham Palace, and a place where Baba and Halifax could talk without being observed or overheard.

  In his introduction to his father’s ghost stories, which he had read to her the previous Saturday at Little Compton, Halifax remarked that ‘mystery, romance, adventure, other-worldiness all played their part’.76 The same elements shadowed the relationship between the Foreign Secretary – with his ‘mystical, Christian character’, as Joseph Kennedy called it – and Lord Curzon’s worldly youngest daughter, whose ‘snapshot photograph’ Halifax never tired of gazing at: ‘It sits in a prayer book that I use every morning, and so cheers me each day!’77, 78

  Baba had acted as Halifax’s go-between-cum-confidante throughout the Norway Debate. She appreciated his reservations about accepting the premiership in a way that Halifax’s advisers could not. As Curzon’s daughter, she understood his predicament probably better even than his wife: Dorothy, Stuart Hodgson observed, was always ‘jealous for her husband’s fame’ – something borne out by an entry in Violet Bonham Carter’s diary following a talk with Clementine Churchill.79 ‘I can’t believe that Ed.80 Halifax wanted it. But Clemmie says she thinks Dorothy H. did.’

  More pertinently: did Baba Metcalfe want it for Halifax?

  For Baba, Halifax was the outstanding choice to succeed Chamberlain. She wrote in her diary: ‘He would have been more dependable and better than Winston, one can’t talk of them in the same breath, and England would have had a man at the helm of whom she could have been justly proud.’81 Baba flirted with Halifax that if he became Prime Minister it would make her more frightened of him. What further confessions she may have vouchsafed during this period are contained in letters which are missing or destroyed. But her regret at his refusal to step up to the mark is hinted at in a letter that Halifax wrote to her five days later regarding his decision. ‘I can’t share your feelings all together, I’m afraid – as the instinct of self defence is so strong in all the lower animals!’82

  Lower animals are notorious for possessing instincts other than self-defence. One among plenty of reasons why the Holy Fox might have desired Baba’s company was that he could air his concerns with her. She wrote about their conversation following the division that evening: ‘We discussed the chances of his having to take on that ghastly and thankless job.83 He thought it would never work, the difficulty of the Lords & Commons being impossible and having someone to deputise for you would always be unsuccessful. He dreaded the thought.’

  The enamoured Foreign Secretary may have dreaded something else besides. A degree of caution must be exercised when looking for motives to explain his obstinate and not always utterly convincing reluctance to take on Chamberlain’s mantle. The risk that the inevitable extra scrutiny and workload would expose and harm his affection for Baba Metcalfe involves an element of speculation. But if power is an aphrodisiac, then love is its antidote. It is not difficult to imagine a prudent calculation which would have dictated that Halifax remain where he was, revered, respected, untouched by any breath of scandal, yet able to go on sharing further precious hours and confidences with his ‘dearest Baba’.

  Back in the Commons, intense discussions continued into the early hours. Violet Bonham Carter talked in the Liberal Whips’ room till nearly 1 a.m. with Percy Harris and Archie Sinclair. ‘We all made our choice of P.M.’s – Winston, Halifax & Ll.G being the candidates – & all gave Winston our 1st vote tho’ some thought Halifax more probable.’84 Lloyd George, in conversation with Attlee, thought that the King might send for the Labour leader in order to consult him. ‘I told Attlee that I did not think he could be P.M. in this situation.85 Given the strength of Parties in the House, the P.M. must be a Conservative. He quite agreed.’ An ‘awestruck’ Baffy Dugdale completed her diary entry for 8 May: ‘I can write no more tonight but should probably put down now that I think when the King sends for Attlee he will probably advise sending for Halifax.’86

  By now, word of Chamberlain’s preference had reached Churchill – who was sanguine about it, according to an undated account left by Beaverbrook. ‘Churchill had earlier told his friends, including me, that if asked to serve under Halifax he would do so.87 He would lead the House of Commons and give Halifax sincere and continual support.’

  If this really was the case – and as David Dilks is careful to alert us: ‘It’s always a mistake to believe anything said or written by Beaverbrook unless there is independent corroboration’ – then it is noteworthy that one friend Churchill did not inform was a tall, burly thirty-nine-year-old Irishman with a crop of untidy flame-red hair ‘who always knows everything through Winston’.88, 89

  An unsatisfactory cluster of stories, all second-hand or hearsay, surround Brendan Bracken’s movements during these blurry hours. They emanate from Bracken’s strenuous freelance attempts to champion Churchill’s claims over Halifax’s. Afterwards, friends like Louis Spears were confident that Churchill was ‘completely unaware’ of what Bracken had been up to, but it is not impossible that Churchill was using Bracken, even before the division, to broadcast his lack of enthusiasm to play second fiddle to the Foreign Secretary.90

  The most arresting story was repeated by Bracken to Amery, in a conversation that took place fourteen years later. It begins on that febrile evening of 8 May when Bracken met Paul Emrys-Evans and Richard Law in Churchill’s room in the Commons and declared off his own bat that ‘it was unlikely that Winston would be prepared to serve under Halifax’.91 Bracken told Amery that he had made the same claim the night before – to the Labour leader. Even as Amery had been delivering his Cromwellian speech in the Chamber, Bracken, apparently, was dining with Attlee in an unscheduled meeting on 7 May. Bracken disclosed to Amery that Attlee had been unusually forthcoming during their dinner. ‘Discussing a possible coalition, Attlee said his people would accept one under Halifax with Winston as Defence Minister.92 He had never forgiven W. for Tonypandy. B.B., on his own authority, said Winston was not prepared to serve under Halifax. He would get all the blame without having the real power of decision. Attlee ended by at any rate acquiescing in W. as possible.’

  Yet when Amery contacted Attlee to confirm this story, Attlee denied it. ‘I do not believe that I met Brendan Bracken; certainly I did not dine with him and I did not talk with him on the evening of the [7th]’fn1 – an evening when Attlee had a lot else to do.93 ‘I certainly never discussed whether it should be Winston or Halifax with him.’


  Another anecdote that Bracken told Amery in January 1955 was how, when Bracken reported back to Churchill his conversation with Attlee, Bracken was initially ‘well scourged’ by Churchill who ‘blew up, said he had no business to say anything of the sort & that he was quite willing to serve under H.94, 95 All the same, what he now knew about Attlee no doubt confused him in hoping for himself.’

  A quite separate and also unverifiable story describes Bracken’s impulsive reaction upon learning that Churchill had already consented to a Halifax premiership. The source this time is Churchill’s doctor, Charles Moran, in a diary entry that Moran wrote seven years later: how, early on the evening of 8 May, ‘word reached Brendan that Winston had come to an agreement with Halifax that he would act as his second in command if Halifax became Prime Minister.96 Brendan thought this would be disastrous, that if it were carried out we should lose the war. He went about London searching for Winston. At one o’clock in the morning he found him. “You can’t agree to this,” Brendan spluttered, but Winston was obdurate; he said that he could not go back on his word.’

  Both stories filtered out a long time after the events that they describe, and deserve to be treated with the same caution as Bracken’s account of his dead brother in Narvik. His reputation as a fantasist by now preceded him, embodied in his reluctance to deny rumours – which he may have fanned – that it was he, Brendan Bracken, who was Churchill’s illegitimate son, and not Giles Romilly’s brother. As recently as 1 May, Beaverbrook had warned Robert Bruce Lockhart that ‘Brendan was unreliable in his information’.97

  What is not in doubt is that on the night of the ‘fatal division’, as Chips Channon now began to call it, a consensus was gathering in Parliament and Fleet Street about what the morning was likely to bring.98 The Times, edited by Halifax’s longstanding friend and reluctant advocate Geoffrey Dawson, went to press with a rousing leading letter from another Fellow of All Souls, A. L. Rowse, this time in his capacity as the Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth. ‘I believe the Labour movement would serve under Lord Halifax as Prime Minister who has defined the moral issues of the war as no one else has done and gives the nation the right moral leadership.’ Rowse’s letter accorded ‘with Dawson’s own sentiments’ and had the Labour Party’s approval, and it followed Cripps’s front-page letter in Monday’s Daily Mail also calling for a Halifax administration.99