Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The streets and parks were unnaturally empty, and no one crowded the railings. Posters advertised news that was already history. ‘Brussels bombed, Paris bombed, Lyons bombed, Swiss railways bombed.’ The population had remained indoors, listening to the wireless. Figures showed that cinema and theatre attendance dropped on this evening by 50 per cent. The drama was going on elsewhere.

  Whatever his private misgivings, the King received Churchill ‘most graciously’.134 In The Gathering Storm, Churchill wrote that George VI looked at him searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said: ‘I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?’

  Churchill replied: ‘Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.’

  The King laughed and said: ‘I want to ask you to form a Government.’

  Frank Longford had raised a laugh in 1923 at the Eton Political Society when he asked the question: ‘Do you think that Mr Winston Churchill has any future?’ Less than a year later, when Baldwin invited Churchill back into the Conservative fold as Chancellor, after Chamberlain had turned down the position, Churchill wanted nothing more than to answer: ‘Will the bloody duck swim?’135

  On this more sombre occasion, he told the King: ‘I will certainly do so.’136, 137

  The ride back from the Palace was made ‘in complete silence’, according to his bodyguard.138 Only when he stepped out of the Humber did Churchill speak.

  ‘You know why I have been to Buckingham Palace, Thompson?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Walter Thompson answered, and congratulated him.

  Churchill looked tense and strained. ‘All I hope is that it is not too late. I am afraid it is, but we can only do our best.’

  Thompson recalled that tears came into Churchill’s eyes. As he turned away, he muttered something to himself. ‘Then he set his jaw, and with a look of determination, mastering all emotions, he entered the side door of the Admiralty and began to climb the stairs.’

  Those waiting to listen to the news at 9 p.m. were puzzled when the pips sounded and the announcer began: ‘This is the Home Service. Here is the Right Honourable Neville Chamberlain MP who will make a statement.’ Why had the speaker not announced him as ‘the Prime Minister’?

  Chamberlain had scribbled it off on his return to Downing Street. It was short, simple, dignified, and ‘came quite spontaneously from what was in my mind’.139 The Queen told Halifax that Princess Elizabeth burst into tears when she heard it. Harold Nicolson thought it ‘magnificent’, and felt all his hatred for Chamberlain at once subside ‘as if a piece of bread were dropped into a glass of champagne’.140 Ida wrote to her brother after hearing his broadcast: ‘You have acted nobly, like yourself & like a Chamberlain.’141

  ‘I am not now going to make any comments on the debate in the House of Commons which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday, but when it was over I had no doubt in my mind that some new and drastic action must be taken if confidence was to be restored to the House of Commons and the war carried on with the energy and vigour essential to victory …’

  Chamberlain stated that he believed unanimity of all parties was essential at this stage to present a united front to the enemy, and that it could not be obtained under him. ‘His Majesty has now entrusted to my right honourable colleague …’ The journalist Virginia Cowles was certain that he was about to say ‘Lord Halifax’. Nicolson would not have been surprised to hear the name ‘Lloyd George’. Even ardent Churchill supporters like General Ismay had not anticipated the next half of the sentence. Ismay had been appointed Churchill’s Chief of Staff on 1 May. ‘The idea is prevalent that backroom boys know everything that is going on behind the scenes.142 I can only say that, although I was in almost constant attendance on Mr Churchill during these days, my first intimation that he was to be Prime Minister was his summons to Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘ … Mr Winston Churchill the task of forming a new Administration.’

  Another person listening was Baba Metcalfe. ‘My relief when at last he said Winston was going to be P.M. evoked a “Thank God” from me.143 I was so intensely glad that Edward was not going to have to carry out that ghastly responsibility. Those are purely personal grounds.’

  In the early hours of the next morning, Sir Edward Bridges, the self-effacing Cabinet Secretary, went into the Admiralty to see Churchill who was still at his desk composing his War Cabinet, and said in a cautious voice: ‘May I wish you every possible good fortune?’

  Churchill grunted.144 ‘Hum. “Every good fortune!” I like that! These other people have all been congratulating me. Every good fortune!’

  Britain’s new Prime Minister was quite right to be sceptical. There had been no Providential intervention. Events and individuals had decided the outcome.

  For John Colville, it had been an exceptionally long day at No. 10. ‘I went home to a solitary dinner and read War and Peace.’145 Colville’s last boss had been, as he said of himself, ‘a man of peace to the depths of my soul’.146 Chamberlain had had a lust for peace, said Churchill. Now was needed a man of war.

  Even so, the imminent arrival of Churchill – whom Butler only hours earlier had described as ‘the greatest adventurer of modern political history’ – seemed to pose ‘a terrible risk’, Colville thought.147, 148 ‘It involves the danger of rash and spectacular exploits, and I cannot help fearing that this country may be manoeuvred into the most dangerous position it has ever been in … everybody is in despair here at the prospect.’ Colville wrote this under the influence of Chips Channon’s lukewarm champagne, a bottle produced from a filing cabinet and shared between Colville, Channon, Butler and Dunglass after the four of them lugubriously clinked glasses in a Jacobean toast to their ‘King over the Water’, Neville Chamberlain. ‘Well, we had better drink together,’ Butler is reported to have said, ‘because this is the end.’149

  The drama of 10 May touched few people more personally than Margot Oxford. Her late husband, Herbert Asquith, had been ousted by Lloyd George in the First World War in similar circumstances. ‘I remember what I felt when Ll G turned us out after 10 years of Downing Street.’150

  On Friday night, she was at her house in 44 Bedford Square. ‘I felt very sad & lonely & was alone here, so after dinner, I thought I would take a taxi & say Goodbye to the Chamberlains.’151 Dressed from head to toe in black satin, she approached the door of her former home, rapped the lion-headed knocker, and ‘sent my card up’.

  A familiar manservant came down the ill-lit, red-carpeted corridor ‘which I know so well!’ and to her surprise said that the Chamberlains would be ‘delighted to see me’.152, 153 With some emotion Margot kissed Anne, and shook hands with Neville. ‘They were both rather moved.154 He said that no one could have been nicer than Winston … that nothing just now mattered in any way about him or about any individual; all that mattered was that they should be United.’

  In that instant, she felt that Chamberlain had less self-pity and self-love than any man she knew. ‘I looked at his spare figure and keen eye and could not help comparing it with Winston’s self-indulgent rotundity.’

  But she knew how much Churchill loved making war and how he relished being on the bridge of a fighting frigate in the middle of a gale.

  Margot’s impromptu return to No. 10 carried her back twenty-six years to another fateful evening. The night of 4 August 1914, moments after her husband had declared war on Germany. She was passing the foot of the same staircase on her way to bed when she glanced down the corridor and saw Winston Churchill ‘with a happy face’ striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet Room.155

  EPILOGUES

  ‘So it is to be Winston! The one thing I thought he could never be is P.M.’1

  BAFFY DUGDALE, 10 May 1940

  ‘The substitution of Churchill for Chamberlain is received here with absolute indifference; by the Duce with irony.’2

  COUNT GALEAZZO CIANO, 10 May 1940

  CHURCHILL’S WAR CABINET was announced on 11 May and, to start with, satisfied nobody – full of �
��symbolic sexagenarians’ who failed, wrote Violet Bonham Carter, to present a surface ‘on which a mind could strike’.3 Chamberlain loyalists referred to it as the ‘Treachery Bench’. Even a natural supporter like Geoffrey Shakespeare felt it a pity that Churchill’s new team ‘should have been launched on a wave of pettiness and spite’.4 In fact, Churchill’s Administration included twenty-one out of thirty-four Ministers who had served under Chamberlain. Clement Attlee became Lord Privy Seal. Arthur Greenwood replaced Hankey as Minister without Portfolio. No appointment raised eyebrows higher than the promotion of that ‘indispensable Judas’ Kingsley Wood, who, ‘incredibile dicta’, marvelled Reith, took over from John Simon at the Exchequer.5, 6 Like most others, Violet Bonham Carter perceived Wood’s new job as a reward for his sudden shift of allegiance: ‘According to Clemmie it was largely Kingsley Wood who persuaded Chamberlain to recommend the King to send for W.’7 John Simon was elevated out of the way and made Lord Chancellor, ‘and so,’ observed Cuthbert Headlam, ‘he has definitely given up the hope of becoming P.M.’8 Another Minister who had harboured leadership ambitions was Samuel Hoare, replaced by Archie Sinclair as Secretary of State for Air. Hoare had set his heart on a viceroyalty (‘will take nothing short of India!’ Cadogan reported), but, blamed by Churchill even now for the 1935 Government of India Act, on top of other well-nursed grievances, he was sent as Ambassador to Madrid.9 Times journalist Leo Kennedy was walking past Buckingham Palace when he saw ‘poor old Sam Hoare being driven away in his car, looking like nothing on earth’.10 Upset, Hoare wrote to Chamberlain on 14 May: ‘No one has said a word in my defence … I, alone of the four of us who went through Munich, am left isolated to stand this unjust criticism.’11 Anthony Eden replaced Oliver Stanley as Secretary of State for War, the first news Stanley receiving of this being a call from Buckingham Palace ‘asking if 10.30 tomorrow would suit him to deliver up his Seals!’ Churchill’s small team of supporters – those whom Nancy Dugdale dubbed his ‘reptile satellites’, J. C. C. Davidson ‘the jackals’, and Geoffrey Dawson the ‘Thugs’ – were recompensed with junior Ministries.12 At the Ministry of Information, Duff Cooper replaced John Reith (who ‘within ten minutes’ had collected all his gear and left the building).13 Lord Beaverbrook was made Minister of Aircraft Production; Bob Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary (Food); Harold Macmillan, Parliamentary Secretary (Supply); Harold Nicolson, Parliamentary Secretary (Information). The only Churchill recommendation which placed the King ‘in a difficulty’ was for Brendan Bracken to be created a Privy Counsellor.14 George VI felt that it was ‘most important to maintain the high standard of qualification for membership’ – and in this respect, it was implied, Bracken fell short. (A journalist later told Bracken when he became Minister of Information: ‘Everything about you, Minister is phoney, even your hair which looks like a wig, is really your own!’15) The King hoped that the appointment could be postponed for the time being, but Churchill dug in his heels, insisting: ‘He has sometimes been almost my sole supporter in the years when I have been striving to get this country properly defended …’

  CLEMENT DAVIES WAS lauded on 12 May in Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express as ‘the man who pulled down Chamberlain to set up Churchill’.16 He entered the Chamber next day to cries of ‘Warwick!’ Amery had pressed Churchill to give him a Ministry. ‘I do hope you will not forget Clem Davies, whose indefatigable and well-directed energy contributed so much to the bringing about of a National Government …’17 Instead, Churchill offered Davies a viscountcy, which he turned down. He became leader of the Liberal Party in 1945 after Sinclair lost his seat. He died in 1962.

  LEO AMERY WAS not offered the Supply Ministry, nor a place in the War Cabinet, but he was made Secretary of State for India, the country of his birth. He continued to spar with Churchill. On 28 July, Halifax reported that Churchill came to see him at the Dorchester and ‘poured out his soul on India and Leo Amery.18 I think I persuaded him that Leo was more fool than knave.’ He died in 1955.

  PAUL EMRYS-EVANS, HONORARY Secretary of the Watching Committee and, with Amery and Davies, a principal player in Chamberlain’s overthrow, was likewise overlooked. ‘As I was leaving the House [on 13 May], Brendan Bracken told me that although my name had been considered for an appointment, it was decided not to give me one.’19

  HORACE WILSON – ACCORDING to Maisky, ‘now referred to by all and sundry as Sir Horace Quisling’ – was shifted from No. 10 back to the Civil Service, of which he had been head since 1939, with a warning that if he ever again visited Downing Street he would be made ‘Governor of Greenland’.20 Right up to the end, Chamberlain maintained that Wilson had been unjustly criticised, and that he, Wilson, had a strong political sense, telling Halifax in their last conversation that ‘nobody had served him more loyally’.21 When the vergers came to close Westminster Abbey on the day of Chamberlain’s funeral, at nightfall, ‘they found Horace Wilson there, still praying’.22 Churchill continued to demonise him, and refused to sign a formal letter of thanks for Wilson’s services when the latter retired at the normal age of sixty, in the summer of 1942. He died in 1972.

  LLOYD GEORGE WENT on flirting with a return to government. ‘Many people want to see Lloyd George in office,’ the New Yorker reported on 12 May. He told Maisky that he saw himself as ‘general commissioner for food production with special powers’.23 Yet he refused to accept a position while Chamberlain remained in the War Cabinet, writing to Churchill: ‘After deep and very anxious reflection I have come to the conclusion that I will be more useful to you outside rather than inside the WC as it is at present constructed.’24 On 3 October, Lloyd George confided to Sylvester: ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust.’25 Churchill and Chamberlain discussed whether he wished to be the British Pétain, and Chamberlain offered his resignation if Churchill believed it essential to get Lloyd George into the government; Churchill brushed this suggestion aside on the grounds that Chamberlain was giving him far more help than Lloyd George ever could. Meanwhile, Sylvester noted, Lloyd George put his energies into digging an air-raid shelter at Churt, ‘sixty feet below the earth’s crust … like Piccadilly underground station.26 It has certainly not cost less than £6,000 [£350,000 in today’s prices] and it is the talk of the place.’ Before approaching Halifax, Churchill offered Lloyd George the Embassy in Washington, but he refused. By Christmas 1940, even Sylvester was ‘completely tired of Lloyd George’s mucking about.27 The man is doing nothing for his country, and is just living amongst the clouds, quarrelling with everybody.’ He died in 1945.

  LORD HALIFAX GAVE no indication that he regretted turning down the premiership, though he looked with distaste at Churchill’s appointments. ‘The gangsters will shortly be in complete control.’28 He had used a similar phrase when describing Hitler’s invasion of Norway (‘a well-executed piece of brigandage’).29 Much against his will, in January 1941 he was sent as Ambassador to Washington, following the death of Lord Lothian, who had been responsible for calling Halifax a ‘saint’. He had seen Baba Metcalfe more or less every day until his departure on 14 January, when he hurriedly wrote to her: ‘In the train.30 I have just opened your note, Baba darling. It has made it seem a little less beastly in one way wishing you goodbye this morning and in another infinitely worse. You need not be afraid that I will forget you or stop loving you – for I don’t think that would be possible – and the memory of you, & knowing that you are remembering me in your thoughts and your prayers, will be of quite untold help.’ When in 1943 Churchill offered him the India Office, Halifax declined, explaining that he had ‘no political ambitions, and that when he, or anybody else, thought that I had ceased to be useful in Washington I had plenty of my own things to do’.31 After retiring in 1946, he was made Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, ‘which I have always thought an intensely agreeable order’.32 He never achieved his ambition to become a Duke. He died in 1959.

  BABA METCALFE LEFT instructions for her diaries to be destroyed (‘They are of great interest’), but an edited type
script survived, as did Lord Halifax’s letters to her – now lodged in the Borthwick Institute.33 So far, only one letter from Baba to Halifax has been traced. Halifax’s son Richard wrote to her: ‘There are none at Garrowby.34 It is a mystery.’ After the war, she shifted her emotional interest to Halifax’s son-in-law, Lord Feversham. She divorced Fruity in 1955. In 1962, she returned to Simla to open a refuge for Tibetan children. She died in 1995, never having disclosed the nature of her relationship to ‘Edouard’. ‘But she enjoyed hinting at it,’ says Philip Ziegler. ‘She knew it was the gossip of the day, and rather relished the fact.’

  PETER FLEMING DIED in 1971 with a Norwegian flag brought back from Namsos beside his bed. He had revisited the town only the year before, when he was reunited with Fanny Fahsing and the harbourmaster. In The Sett, an unfinished novel that he wrote on his return from Norway in 1940, he imagined what would have happened if Hitler had invaded Britain with Chamberlain still in power. Ju-52s at RAF Benson; the BBC transformed into the New Nordic Broadcasting Station; Buckingham Palace now the Brown House, residence of the Nazi Governor-General, Rudolf Hess; and the British government and the King evacuated to Ottawa.

  MARTIN LINDSAY WAS mentioned in despatches for his service in Norway. In June 1945, he became Conservative MP for Solihull, defeating his Labour opponent, Roy Jenkins, by 5,049 votes. In 1947 he published his history of the House of Commons. His Norway Memorandum was not the only instance when he contacted Attlee over an issue of national importance. In October 1946, after Attlee had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, Lindsay ventured to send him ‘some confidential information which I think you may not be in possession of’.35 Five years later, in an envelope marked ‘secret’, Lindsay communicated with Attlee again: ‘Dear Prime Minister, I have hesitated a good deal before sending you the following information … the fact that British prestige abroad is involved has caused me to write’.36 He died in 1981.