Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  When Wood arrived at the Admiralty on 9 May he carried with him a speech that he was due to deliver that afternoon on the latest methods of preserving food. Wood’s keenness to safeguard his own position was evident from his self-invitation to lunch. Violet Bonham Carter wrote: ‘I can’t help suspecting that the old boy was feathering his future nest.’36

  Wood had seen the Prime Minister early that morning. He was in the act of passing on to Churchill everything that Chamberlain had told him in confidence when Anthony Eden arrived to join them for lunch.

  Eden was a little ‘surprised’ to see Wood there, knowing him to be in the Prime Minister’s camp, and when Eden was surprised, noted Maisky, he would make a startled comic gesture ‘as if he were fending off a ghost that had suddenly appeared before him’.37, 38 It further amazed Eden when Wood repeated what he had moments before told Churchill – ‘that Neville had decided to go’. The future was then discussed. Wood made it clear where his loyalties now lay: he thought that Churchill should take over rather than Halifax. However, Wood warned that this was not the Prime Minister’s intention. ‘Chamberlain would want Halifax to succeed him and would want Churchill to agree.’ His next remark betrayed that he might have conferred with Bracken. He advised Churchill in a conspiratorial falsetto: ‘Don’t agree, and don’t say anything.’ And something else. Churchill needed to ‘make plain his willingness’ to become Prime Minister.

  Up until this point, Eden had thought of Kingsley Wood as a genial Pickwickian loyalist, a nonentity who with modest success had run the Post Office and telephone exchange. He did not know if he was flabbergasted more by Wood’s betrayal, or by his pragmatism. ‘I was shocked that Wood should talk in this way, for he had been so much Chamberlain’s man, but it was good counsel and I seconded it.’39

  No story is more revealing of the machinations and rumours which punctuated Thursday 9 May than Wood’s later counter-claim that Chamberlain did not want Halifax to succeed him; rather, that Chamberlain had long preferred Churchill to be his heir, yet did not wish this to be broadcast. Wood made his fantastic assertion in an interview with Beaverbrook, the only authority for the story. Wood apparently said to Beaverbrook: ‘Quite soon after the start of the war, Chamberlain himself told me he would have to give way to Churchill.40 He never intended that Halifax should be Prime Minister, he always intended Churchill to be his successor … I started negotiations with Churchill which resulted in the change.’ Exactly what motivated Wood to say this is unclear, unless to recast himself in a less Iago-ish light following Chamberlain’s death. Historians have taken Wood’s words to suggest that Chamberlain contemplated the ‘possibility of another Premiership after the war’, as Chamberlain wrote in his diary on 9 September 1940. In this scenario, Churchill and not Halifax would have made the better stopgap in May, being older than Halifax and not popular with Conservative MPs. Such an interpretation defies the evidence of Chamberlain’s known preference for Halifax which he expressed to his sisters. It also contradicts Wood’s statement at lunch that Chamberlain wanted Halifax.

  Wood died in 1943. Interviewed in 1967, Horace Wilson pooh-poohed the idea that Wood had negotiated with Churchill on Chamberlain’s behalf. What Wilson did clearly recall, however, was that Chamberlain was ‘misled’ by Wood in the last months of his premiership.41 ‘I didn’t realise how far Kingsley Wood had gone in his association with the Opposition. He didn’t warn Chamberlain.’

  The division the night before had not marked the official end of the Norway Debate, which resumed at 12.17 p.m. on Thursday, but this time the vehicle was the motion that the House should adjourn that day until 21 May.

  Clement Davies, one of the architects of Wednesday’s rebellion, spoke first. He challenged the motion for the Whitsuntide adjournment, arguing that Parliament must reconvene the following Tuesday, 14 May. His amendment was supported by Bob Boothby, who said that the events of 8 May proved that the government as it was presently constituted did not possess the confidence of the House and country. But the amendment was not pressed after Margesson gave an undertaking that the House would be summoned earlier should the situation demand it.

  The last words that Neville Chamberlain spoke in the Commons as Prime Minister were in response to Attlee’s hope that when the House next met on 21 May there would be a debate on the economic war which Chamberlain had made his priority, and which the Norway Campaign had rendered vastly more difficult. Chamberlain’s equivocating answer reflected the uncertainty of his position. ‘We have no desire unduly to restrict the scope of the Debate, and I will consider the suggestion of my Hon Friend.’ With that, he left the Chamber.

  The speech of the afternoon was made by Richard Law who said that the lesson to be learned from the past three days was that if you sat on the safety valve long enough the boiler would blow up.

  At 3.49 p.m. the House adjourned till 21 May. Afterwards, the Liberal MP Henry Morris-Jones, who had spoken in support of Davies, had tea with Lloyd George and his daughter Megan. ‘General opinion that Neville will either have to go or drastically reorganise.’42

  The success of Chamberlain’s attempts to reorganise his government can be measured by the alterations in his mood through the day.

  The Prime Minister had entered the Chamber ‘calmly’, wrote Chips Channon, who had a talk with him behind the Speaker’s Chair.43 ‘He was geniality itself and did not even look tired.’ Encouraging news had come from one of his feelers to the opposition, Sir Patrick Hannon, about the proposal to drop Simon and Hoare. ‘So far as I can gather from Attlee, Greenwood and Sinclair they are prepared to serve under you if the two statesmen … will be eliminated.’44

  By mid-morning, though, the opposition leaders were changing tack.

  Despatched by Dunglass to sound out Labour’s attitude, Chips Channon approached Colonel Nathan, Labour MP for Wandsworth. ‘At first he thought something might be arranged, but after several conferences he reported the position was hopeless … Sadly I passed this information on.’45

  Shortly after noon, Chamberlain walked down the corridor to his room in the Commons, late, to join the War Cabinet. This time, noticed Cadogan, he looked ‘v tired and “effarouché”’.46 By 3 p.m., when Herbert Williams and three prominent Chamberlain loyalists were ushered into his presence, they had ‘a pathetic interview’ with a ‘terribly shaken’ Prime Minister.47 ‘It was as if he had been struck a severe blow, because as we were walking into his room he seemed unable to get out of his chair.’ Williams never forgot Chamberlain’s harrowed expression. ‘Some day I suppose somebody will write the history of the intrigue which pushed out of the premiership one of the ablest administrators who has ever held that office.’

  Williams agreed to continue his support if Simon, Hoare and Wood were discarded. Immediately after Williams left, Chamberlain summoned his Chancellor.

  Sir John Simon was a shy and awkward man who has been damned time and again, like Hoare, for reasons which do not always stand scrutiny. A lawyer with the face of a worldly prelate, he was known for possessing ‘a Rolls Royce mind, without a driver’. Among his weaknesses were: an overfondness for quoting the Classics; a reluctance to declare his mind (he had sat on the fence so long, said Lloyd George in one of several memorable put-downs which Simon inspired, that the iron had entered his soul); and his longing to be liked. David Dilks says: ‘He did not wish to be called “Johnnie”, but did enourage friends to address him as “Jack’’’ – which some of them did, like Uncle Geoffrey. His friendliness alienated because it seemed awkwardly married to his ambition; for example, in his habit of slapping colleagues on the back and calling them by the wrong Christian name, and in possibly suggesting to Chamberlain the line: ‘I have friends in this House.’ In the lethal phrase of A. L. Rowse, a colleague of Simon’s at All Souls along with Amery, Halifax and Dawson: ‘Nobody loved him.48 The more he tried, the less they loved him.’ He had recently ranked bottom in a poll as the people’s choice for the next leader. Yet not very long before, Maisky had ob
served how Simon, who was much better liked than this suggests, ‘is obsessed with the quite fantastic idea of becoming prime minister’.49

  Simon arrived eleven minutes after the House adjourned, at 4 p.m. As he wrote in his diary, he was another MP who believed that ‘the one indispensable thing was the Prime Minister should remain Prime Minister’.50 Intuiting that Chamberlain intended to carry out the promise that he had been making all day – i.e. to sack him – Simon got there first. With a smile on his long narrow face that his enemies likened to a brass plate on a coffin, he proposed that Chamberlain should at once get rid of him and Hoare. ‘If that would stop the rot nobody would cheer more loudly than I should. The P.M. said: “That is just like you, John,” and I was glad to feel that he was really moved.’

  In a grateful outpouring of relief, Chamberlain let go the emotions that had accumulated since the division. He admitted that ‘this sort of change’ was probably too late anyway and ‘that someone else should be Prime Minister’, and that he was going to resign and recommend Halifax to the King.

  Simon left at 4.15 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, Chamberlain was back in Downing Street to receive Halifax and Churchill.

  Clementine Churchill sat beside her sister in the uncomfortable black oak pew. At 4.30 p.m. the funeral of Nellie’s husband was drawing to its close. Bertram Romilly had died in his bed at Huntington Park following ‘a serious illness borne with great fortitude’.51 He had been hastened to his grave by the capture of his favourite son in Norway on the opening day of the campaign that Churchill had made his own.

  Neither of Romilly’s sons attended the service, which had begun at 3 p.m. Esmond was in America. No one knew where Giles was. His absence was noted by a journalist from the Hereford Times. ‘Mr Giles Romilly, a member of the staff of a London newspaper, is reported as having been taken prisoner by the Germans at Narvik.’ Lady Lettice Cotterell, chairman of the local Red Cross, had sent Giles a food parcel, following a piano concert that raised £42 for prisoners of war.

  Romilly’s coffin, covered with a Union flag and surmounted by his colonel’s sword, medals and military cap, had been borne into St Thomas à Becket church by his tenant farmers. His regiment, the Scots Guards, had sent a wreath as well as two pipers who ‘played the coffin’ from the churchyard gate to the church. A choral service followed. Clementine listened to the former vicar of Kington extol Bertram’s skills with a shotgun and rod, and pay tribute to his gallantry.

  In a strange mirror, Colonel Romilly had fought in the same arenas as Churchill – the Boer War; Sudan, where he had commanded the Camel Corps against the Nuba tribes; and in France, where he was ‘grievously wounded’, when a shrapnel shell burst above his head and he received the full force, requiring a metal plate to be inserted into his skull.

  His grandson says: ‘Thereafter, soldiers and other people, if passing by, would tap the thing for luck!’52

  Churchill might have borrowed his tight-fitting uniform to go and fight the Germans, but Bertram Romilly had not been so lucky as his brother-in-law, who was another conspicuous absentee from the funeral. Unlike the case for Giles, everyone seated in the small thirteenth-century church knew where Winston Churchill was at that moment.

  Even as Prebendary Greene motioned for the bearers to lift up Bertram’s coffin and carry it outside to his grave, the First Lord was walking from the Admiralty to the back garden gate at No. 10 to attend a meeting that would alter the war.

  22

  THE SILENCE

  ‘Winston’s account on Pages 522, 523 and 524 is inaccurate.’1

  LORD HALIFAX to LEO AMERY, 1954

  ‘I won’t ask whether you would have been willing to undertake the Prime Ministership if Winston as well as Neville had pressed you.’2

  LEO AMERY to LORD HALIFAX, 1954

  It required the votes of 199 Conservative MPs for Theresa May to become Prime Minister in July 2016. Only three MPs and a peer decided who was to be this country’s next leader during a discussion on 9 May 1940 at which no minutes were taken. Few meetings in British political history can have had consequences more far-reaching.

  Halifax, the favourite of both Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, Downing Street, Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace, had come from lunch with Baba Metcalfe, at which he told her about his morning’s interview with Chamberlain, and how he had put ‘all the arguments I could think of against myself’.3 Afterwards, Baba dropped him off at the Foreign Office for an appointment with Charles Corbin, to reassure the French Ambassador of Admiral Cork’s undimmed determination to seize Narvik. Halifax then walked the short distance from his office to No. 10.

  Rab Butler was in the Cabinet Room when Halifax entered with Chamberlain, Churchill and the Chief Whip. Churchill banished Butler with a good-humoured and, as it turned out, prescient remark. ‘There is no place for you here.4 Your turn will come later.fn1 You had better go.’

  The two outer doors, padded with green baize to exclude noise, had closed behind them when Hardinge arrived on the King’s behalf soon after 4.30 p.m., keen to learn what was going on. He was told by Chamberlain’s Principal Private Secretary, the ‘sound and sensible’ Arthur Rucker, that the four men on the other side were working out what approach should be made to Labour.5 ‘The idea then was that in the event of the Labour Party refusing to serve under Mr Chamberlain, the latter would resign, and, on the King asking his advice, he would recommend Lord Halifax.’6 The strong expectation of Rucker and the Downing Street staff waiting in the adjacent rooms was that when the double doors opened the Foreign Secretary would emerge as the Prime Minister designate.

  What went on inside the Cabinet Room during the afternoon of Thursday 9 May has been debated from the moment that the meeting broke up. When Amery (in 1954/55) and Beaverbrook (in 1960) tried to reassemble the narrative, they discovered that not one of the subsequent accounts of what had happened aligned with another. It drove Amery to conclude ‘that diaries are by no means accurate evidence of fact’.7

  Many questions are still unanswered. Did the Prime Minister urge Halifax to take his place (Peake, Cadogan), and suggest that Churchill would not have Labour’s support (Churchill); or did Chamberlain make no distinction as to which of the two men he was prepared to serve under (Halifax)? Did Margesson say that the House of Commons was in favour of Halifax (Beaverbrook, Cadogan) or of Churchill (Peake); or did Margesson make no pronouncement (Halifax)? Was Churchill’s historic silence long (Churchill, Peake), short (Killearn), or was there no silence at all (Halifax, Cadogan)? Did the four men sit for the meeting (Halifax, Churchill)? Did they stand (Colville)? Or were there three and not four people present (Churchill)? Was their discussion polite (Halifax, Channon, Cadogan) or was it heated (R. Churchill, Macdonald, Killearn)? Did the crucial part of the conversation occur before the Labour leaders Attlee and Greenwood arrived at 6.15 p.m. (Halifax, Churchill, Peake), or after they had left (Cadogan, Gilbert, Manchester)? When in actual fact did the meeting take place? Churchill puts it a whole day later, at 11 a.m. on Friday 10 May, but no one else agrees with his time (Andrew Roberts opts embracingly for Friday 9 May).8 Halifax told Amery tersely: ‘Winston’s chronology is inaccurate.’9 Churchill’s timing was not the only detail awry. Dictated eight years later, his self-dramatising account of the interview is, wrote David Reynolds, ‘one of the most misleading passages in The Gathering Storm … about an event so personal that his Syndicate [of researchers] could not check’.10

  So familiar is Churchill’s version that it pays to begin with an unpublished account. In a private conversation in Washington on 5 June 1941, Halifax gave the following resumé to his Boswell, Charles Peake, who instantly wrote it down. This entry in Peake’s diary has never been quoted in full before:

  ‘Neville began by saying that it was clear that the House of Commons & the country wanted a change.11 He had therefore decided to resign and the question arose, whom should he advise the King to send for. He had thought it out very carefully, had searched his mind, and he had come
to the conclusion that the man to succeed him was Edward. Edward had remarkable qualities. The whole country (emphasis on the whole) trusted him, and he hoped that Edward would respond and take over these duties etc etc.

  ‘Edward said a silence then fell wh: he did nothing to break. Then finally David Margesson spoke up and said he was a great admirer of Edward, yes, he thought he could say that no-one admired Edward more than he. Edward had wonderful qualities. Wonderful qualities, & he had so much respect and admiration from so many people. But he felt bound to say that much as he admired Edward he rather thought that at the moment Winston was more the kind of man they were looking for. This meant no disrespect for Edward, but was just an honest opinion etc etc etc.

  ‘Edward then said he joined in at this point to say he could not see why they were having a discussion at all. There could, he thought, be no two opinions, there were certainly not two in the country, that Winston was the only possible successor to Neville. No other choice was possible. From every point of view Winston had fitted himself by his talents, his character, his long experience and his genius to be the chosen leader of a united country. He greatly hoped therefore that the discussion might quickly terminate in order that Winston might receive the seals of office as speedily as possible.