Six Minutes in May
Page 61
7: The First Land Battle
fn1 No autopsy was performed when Pound died in October 1943. It was clear that he had died of a brain tumour, though how long he had been suffering from this is not known. Stories of him falling asleep at meetings went back several years, but his staff defended him, explaining that he was concentrating with his eyes closed. Godfrey wrote: ‘That he used to doze was common knowledge, but what I find hard to believe is that he was mentally awake the whole time.’
10: Evacuation
fn1 Some would blame this premature announcement for the sinking of the Afridi.
fn2 An indication of the utter lack of readiness was Walter Monckton’s suggestion at the Ministry of Information to decide ‘immediately on a pass-word, an English word with a “W” and an “R” in it preferably. But such a word that every German (with very rare exceptions) will be known to mispronounce.’ This password should be demanded of ‘any suspicious-looking people in various disguises who might be dropped from parachutes … these parachutists might find themselves in difficulties if they were unable to pronounce the pass-word to the satisfaction of the challenger. There seems to be quite a lot in this idea.’ Yet at least two of the War Cabinet, Halifax and Churchill, could not pronounce their ‘r’s or ‘s’s.
11: Monsieur J’aimeberlin
fn1 His pranks included challenging athletes to midnight races in the streets, and yelling out ‘Stop thief!’ when they were well ahead. Another involved him sharing a taxi up Piccadilly with a tailor’s dummy. As he passed a policeman, de Vere Cole halted the taxi, opened the door and started banging the dummy’s head on the pavement, shouting ‘Ungrateful hussy!’ For his most enduring hoax, he blackened the faces of a group of friends, including the young Virginia Woolf, and inspected the battleship HMS Dreadnought at Weymouth, having persuaded Admiral May, who greeted the party in full dress uniform, that the distinguished foreign visitors were Prince Makalen of Abyssinia and his suite. The incident became a moment of unsurpassed embarrassment for the Royal Navy, as painful in its way as the failure of Churchill’s fleet to prevent German destroyers from reaching Narvik. Little boys pursued the humiliated May in the street for months afterwards, calling out ‘Bonga Bonga’.
fn2 Anne Chamberlain wrote to Geoffrey Shakespeare in January 1950, after reading his account in Let Candles Be Brought In: ‘Nowhere have I seen so clear and convincing a statement published as to what you say about Neville’s policy at that time … I think you would be interested to know that Neville regretted immediately afterwards his words from Downing Street “Peace in our time” – uttered on the spur of the moment when he suddenly found himself in a time of great emotion called upon to make a speech from that window where Disraeli made his “Peace in our Time” speech. How doubtful Neville felt that Hitler would stick to his words can be proved by his action and speech almost immediately afterwards in pressing forward the increase in the Armed Forces and the preparations for Defence. Having myself listened to the criticisms in the House, I asked him whether he could not give some explanation of the doubt which I knew he held in regard to Hitler’s good faith, but he felt that to do this might well wreck any chance there might be of a better understanding with Germany.’
14: The Rebels
fn1 In another version, Amery was ‘fully-clothed’.
15: Tuesday 7 May
fn1 There was (and still is) a prohibition on wearing military uniform in the Chamber, but this was suspended from 1939 to 1945 for those on active service. Oddly, Keyes, as an Admiral of the Fleet, was on the active list but not on active service.
fn2 Even the whisper is debatable. ‘I have witnessed few scenes so dramatic and emotional as that when straight-hitting Amery cried “In God’s name Go!”, Alexander Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben.
16: Wednesday 8 May
fn1 During the 1935 General Election campaign, for example, after Herbert Morrison had made deprecatory remarks about Chamberlain’s death’s head appearance, Chamberlain replied that he would naturally not attempt to compete, in the matter of looks, with so magnificent a specimen of humanity as Mr Morrison.
fn2 It preyed on Chamberlain for the next forty-eight hours. He told Princess Olga of Yugoslavia over lunch at the Dorchester on his last day in office that ‘Lloyd George’s personal attack on him surpassed anything he had ever heard in Parliament’, and it was still on his mind when Margot Oxford called at No. 10 a few hours later, shortly after he had resigned. ‘The only person of whom he spoke with biting words was Lloyd George. “There are people in this world … who are frauds …”’
18: A Terrific Buzz
fn1 Attlee writes ‘9th May’; Spears has it in his diary as 8 May, but Amery corrects this to 7 May.
20: The Limpet
fn1 Margesson kept no diary, and records were destroyed in the incendiary bomb of 10 May 1941, so that the extent of the vote against Chamberlain is still unclear and often exaggerated. The figures vary widely, from 60 Conservative abstentions, to 36 (Rasmussen), to as low as 20 (Smart).
fn2 The limpet comparison was applied as well to Labour’s deputy leader Arthur Greenwood, who reminded Kingsley Wood of the Slipper Limpet. ‘It has a great capacity for repeated functional changes. When it becomes attached to a shell of a more mature and stabler species, it passes through the most robust and vigorous state of its existence. When it leaves the shell … it reverts and becomes one of the weaker and less dependable animals.’
21: A Great Tide Flowing
fn1 When one bundle failed to open, containing extracts from Chamberlain’s speeches, a German civilian whom it hit was reported killed, the first victim of British aerial bombardment.
22: The Silence
fn1 Butler nearly became leader in 1957 and 1963, the only serious alternative to the man chosen, in the first instance Macmillan, in the second Home.
fn2 Chamberlain’s account to Ida diverges from what he purportedly told Lord Camrose in their 6 p.m. conversation moments earlier. According to Camrose’s typed-up notes, but impossible to corroborate, Chamberlain confided that the Labour party had ‘swung against Halifax’ – and therefore he had decided to ‘advise the King to send for Winston’ if Labour refused to serve under him. To his sister, however, Chamberlain implied that only ‘later’ did he discover Attlee’s volte-face.
fn3 Chamberlain appears to have scribbled these down. Later that evening, Greenwood showed Clem Davies a sheet of paper – and ‘written in Neville’s hand the double-barrelled question’.