The Allies

by Winston Groom

  With T. E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, as his adviser, Winston Churchill was intimately involved in redrawing the map of the entire region, creating Iran and carving out Iraq and Jordan as separate principalities and establishing relations (for the purpose of controlling British oil interests) with Saudi Arabia and its ruling families. Also within his bailiwick was overseeing enforcement of the 1917 Balfour Declaration—so named after the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, which guaranteed Jews land along the river Jordan. In fact, it can be safely said that—except for Iran and Iraq, which in the late 1970s were overthrown by radical Islamists and a strongman dictator, respectively—Churchill had an indelible and lasting hand in creating the Middle East as we know it today.

  * * *

  DURING THIS PERIOD, Churchill’s life was buffeted by good fortune in finances and tragedy from deaths in the family. He had further increased his income by contracting to write a book on the war, The World Crisis, which ultimately stretched to three large volumes that earned him more than a million dollars in today’s money. Not only that, but a small fortune fell into his hands by way of a bequest of his deceased great-grandmother: all told, nearly £57,000.*4 This prompted Clementine to gush that the windfall felt “like floating in a bath of cream,” and to inquire whether she should pay off the substantial household bills that had piled up. For his part, Churchill purchased a Rolls-Royce and went on a gambling spree in Monte Carlo.

  Historically, Churchill’s finances had always been a burden and a mess. Whenever he received any substantial sum of money he tended to use it as security to borrow a larger sum. This process was repeated until his financial situation was a tangled web of debts that constantly had to be paid off—often robbing Peter to pay Paul—after which he would spend the living daylights out of the proceeds.

  Amid these fluctuations of monetary fortunes, personal tragedy struck Churchill on June 29, 1921, when Jennie Jerome Churchill died at the age of sixty-seven. She had fallen down some stairs and broken her ankle, which became infected and was amputated above the knee. A sudden hemorrhage killed her. Churchill for a while was inconsolable; not only was he devoted to her as a mother, but over the course of his life she had used all her connections (and personal charms) to bestow upon him social, political, and professional cachet.

  On her death, Churchill inherited both Jennie’s trust fund from his father’s estate and her family’s trust in the United States. Together they totaled £54,000 ($2.7 million today). However, these were what are now known in the United States as a “pass-through,” meaning that Churchill could use the yearly income they produced during his lifetime but not the principal, which would go to his children. Nevertheless, it was a windfall, bringing in about $100,000 a year in today’s money.

  Now, for the first time in his life, Churchill could relax to some extent, knowing that he had a meaningful amount of capital investments that—even if they wouldn’t bring in enough to support his extravagant lifestyle—would ensure a steady income that could be supplemented by his writing and government salary.

  In the summer of 1921 another tragedy occurred. Churchill received an urgent message from Clementine to come immediately to Kent, where he had rented the family a home by the seaside. Two-and-a-half-year-old Marigold had tonsillitis and an alarmingly high fever—this was a half decade before the development in 1928 of penicillin and other antibiotic drugs. He arrived just in time to watch his daughter die.

  “She said, ‘so tired, so tired,’ and closed her eyes,” Churchill recalled, worried that Clementine herself “would die in the violence of her grief.”8

  Although Churchill never allowed personal sorrows to stand in the way of service to his country, we can only imagine that the loss of his beloved mother and young daughter in such a short span of time must have wounded him deeply—perhaps, for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  WITH THE END OF THE GREAT WAR, the political winds in England began to shift, and Churchill’s political prospects shifted with them. In fact, a great social upheaval was under way; many of the men who had fought were no longer content with the stern, class-driven society of the prewar days, from which they had been hurled into the bloody trenches of France and Belgium. This also was true of the millions of British servants—male and female—and other menial workers who had joined the war effort. One anecdotal sign of it lay in a bit of doggerel in a song often chanted in the streets following the Armistice of 1918:

  What shall we be…

  When we aren’t what we are?

  The two traditional parties, Tory and Liberal, were now joined by a third entity: the Labour Party. Composed initially of members elected by the working class and the labor unions, it soon became loosely associated with the same Socialist movement that had overthrown the Russian government. By the early 1920s, the Labourites had forced the Liberal Party into a coalition government and, by the election of 1922, had eclipsed it by some 142 votes to 62. The Liberal Party was, in fact, dying, and would be gone as a political force before the decade was done.

  Overshadowing both of these parties by a sizable majority of 345 votes were the Tories, who were now squarely back in power. This was bad news for Churchill in more ways than one—not only was he out of government but he had lost his seat in Parliament. Shortly before election day Churchill became ill and had to enter the hospital, causing his race to lose momentum. “In the twinkling of an eye,” he said, “I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.” It was beginning to look as though the promising political career of Winston Churchill had at last come to an inevitable and inelegant end.9

  Over the next two years he ran three times in three different districts, and he lost every race. Part of the problem was his implacable hatred of Socialism, which he ridiculed as “government of the duds, by the duds, and for the duds.” Whenever Churchill gave speeches to regain his office, the Socialists made sure he was greeted with jeers, obscenities, spittle, and rock throwing. All of this, of course, was reported in the newspapers. Thus reviled by both the Tories and the workingmen, Churchill had to hire a private detective to accompany him on campaign trips.

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  OVER THE YEARS, Winston and Clementine had often discussed acquiring a country estate as so many of their aristocratic friends had. Now, in the fall of 1922, they decided to take the plunge. Chartwell was an eighty-acre property in Kent, about thirty miles from London. Featuring a redbrick manor house dating to the time of the Crusades, it was set on a magnificent high rise of ground that looked over the district’s celebrated Great Weald.

  During the previous century, the owners had added garish Victorian features ill-suited to its original, simple architecture. Churchill first described it as “dreary,” overshadowed by giant trees with bricks that were “slimed in green.” He complimented the old part of the manor as “floored and raftered with solid oak” but condemned the newer, which, he said, “was weary of its own ugliness so that the walls ran with moisture, and creeping fungus ran down the cracks and crevices.” But Winston had a vision of how the property could be remade, and he purchased it for £5,000 against the wishes of his wife, who took a disliking to the property immediately upon seeing it. It was the one disagreement in their marriage about which Clementine felt Winston had simply been dishonest with her.10

  During his time out of office, Churchill devoted himself to Chartwell and began building an impressive series of ponds that fell off in the distance from the high ground of the manor house. These he populated with black swans. He hired an architect to modernize the place, rearranging the house around a marvelous library and writer’s study. The grand dining room saw a “dazzling succession of lunches and dinners” with parliamentary and world leaders, as well as the greatest intellectual minds of the day. There was a vast wine cellar and a special room for Churchill’s prized Cuban cigars.

  Over years of week
ends Churchill learned to work with his hands, and he became a more than adequate brick mason and carpenter. He collected a variety of farm animals, as well as butterflies that he netted himself and placed in a special mesh wire house. He raised fruit, vegetables, and flowers. He lived well, but nearly always on the edge: in the distance, the world of politics always beckoned.11

  Churchill began to realize that the Liberal Party was doomed. He looked at Labour, and even on a lark applied for membership in the bricklayers’ union but was blackballed. In time it became clear that his future lay with the Tories, where he remained hated—so that, too, seemed an impossible contradiction. Churchill’s problem was that as a young minister he often had overplayed his hand to the consternation of his peers, and he had done so repeatedly during the coalition government when many of his counterparts were Tories.

  Just as it seemed that he had shut himself out entirely, he went on a forgiveness campaign with those conservatives with whom he remained on friendly terms, including F. E. Smith, the Earl of Birkenhead, and a mysterious young Irishman, Brendan Bracken, who was building a British newspaper empire. Churchill began making conservative speeches in various political districts to test the waters. In 1924, two years after losing his seat in Dundee, he won a solid majority of the vote in the Epping district of Essex. He returned to Parliament to become, in the future, the greatest Tory of them all.

  Not only was he back in office, but the new Tory prime minister, Stanley Baldwin—like Churchill, a Harrow graduate—made Churchill chancellor of the Exchequer, an office that corresponds roughly to the U.S. secretary of the treasury. He “lit up like a gigantic lightbulb” and grasped Baldwin’s hand. “I still have my father’s robes as Chancellor,” Churchill cried. “I shall be delighted to serve you in this splendid office!”12

  One of his first new rituals in office was having an early morning chat with the prime minister, who lived at Number 10 Downing Street, right next door to the chancellor’s residence. For the next five years, there was never a quarrel or harshly spoken word between them. Churchill’s yearly budgets were introduced with a majestic lucidity—the best of them, according to the biographer Paul Johnson, “since Gladstone’s golden age and never equaled since.”

  His first budget, in 1925, however, was far from his best. Churchill astonished almost everyone by recommending that the nation go back to the gold standard with the high, prewar parity. It had been pointed out to him that this would make the pound sterling so strong that Britain’s exports—mainly raw materials such as coal, or second-tier raw materials such as cotton cloth and steel—would suffer from being too expensive. But supporters argued it would make London the world’s financial center once more and spawn a host of highly technical industries in electronics, airplanes, and automobiles that would create more employment.

  The plan was soon met with more skepticism when coal company owners tried to cut wages for the nation’s 1.2 million miners, because the gold parity had caused a downturn in exports. A mine strike ensued, followed in 1926 by a much dreaded general strike, in which all labor unions refused to come to work. This caused vast disruptions to British commerce and daily life. No buses ran, no newspapers were printed. Truckers refused to haul, and strikers from steelworkers to bricklayers shut down most of Britain’s economy.

  A general strike had been a topic of much apprehension since the turn of the century. It had been threatened but never called—and now that it was upon them, the English people seethed and spread their fury between the strikers and Winston Churchill.

  Churchill for his part admirably shouldered the blame and as chancellor of the Exchequer took charge of the situation. He served as strike mediator, organized food trucking convoys escorted by armored cars from the military, sent police and troops to put down violence in trouble spots, and with unrestrained relish even published a government newspaper to provide information about the strike and other issues.

  In the end, the miners trudged back to work under a settlement negotiated by Churchill, who had threatened mine owners with a government-mandated minimum wage. Other labor unions followed suit, prompting the writer Evelyn Waugh to declare, “It was as though a beast long favored for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, then slunk back into its lair.” Churchill was once more the smiling hero of the government.

  Economist John Maynard Keynes savagely condemned Churchill, as did the owners of low-production industries. But history seems to have vindicated him for putting the nation back on the gold standard—not least because it generated a spurt of high-tech industries in the 1930s. As historian Johnson points out, on the eve of World War II this development spurred the production of the Spitfire fighter plane, as well as the Lancaster bomber, radar, television, and high-compression Rolls-Royce aircraft engines: all achievements that would give Britain the edge when it was most critical.

  Beginning right after the First World War, Lenin, and later Stalin, had begun exporting Marxist provocateurs to England and other nations, often in the form of secret agents that pandered to workingmen with a mind toward the overthrow of governments. Churchill was among the first to recognize this and sound the alarm. “Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst,” Churchill said. Communist revolution in Great Britain, he said, would “mean the extinction of English civilization.”

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  IN THE 1929 GENERAL ELECTION the Tories were overwhelmed by the Labour Party. Churchill retained his seat in the House of Commons but he no longer held a cabinet position. In spite of his foresight regarding the fate of the Liberal Party, Churchill found himself out of power once more. He used the occasion to embark on a tour of the United States by railcar. By then he had amassed a small fortune from his writings that he’d invested with the Wall Street firm E.F. Hutton & Co. Along the way he gave speeches, one of them ominously warning that Germany, which was becoming unsettled, angry, and unstable, had twice as many youths of military age as France. In California he met and became friends with such movie stars as Charlie Chaplin and Victor McLaglen, fished off of Catalina Island (he caught a 188-pound swordfish), and visited the press lord William Randolph Hearst at his $30 million castle at San Simeon.

  Crossing the continent once more, Churchill listened to a radio in his private car that carried news and hourly stock market updates. In Washington he visited President Herbert Hoover, and he toured the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam. He was in New York’s Plaza Hotel on October 24, 1929 (“Black Thursday”), when the stock market crashed and began its low, long slide to fractions. Churchill, who was now fifty-four, had believed his investments would leave him financially stable for the remainder of his life. But even though he was not completely wiped out, any hope of that kind of monetary independence was gone. On the night of the crash, Churchill attended a formal dinner at the Fifth Avenue mansion of the financier Bernard Baruch, along with a host of bankers and Wall Street investors. One of them rose and lifted his glass to Churchill, addressing the other guests as “friends and former millionaires.”13

  The next week Churchill sailed for home, only to be greeted there by what for him was appalling news. The British viceroy of India, Lord Irwin (later to become Lord Halifax), had recommended self-rule for India. And Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Tories, had agreed. To Churchill, this was one of the great heresies of a lifetime.

  For three hundred and fifty years, English colonization had amassed a British Empire that governed more than 400 million people and nearly a quarter of the earth’s land surface, including colonies, dominions, commonwealths, mandates, protectorates, and so forth. It had made Great Britain fabulously wealthy until the First World War came along and wiped out the treasury surplus. It had also created many great personal fortunes for men of trade, and produced a vast foreign service system to govern these far-flung reaches. The crown jewel, of course, was India; its teeming millions kept the cotton mills of Manchester and other indus
trial towns humming and furnished the tea that was the foundation of that peculiarly British custom.

  Of late, however, there had been unrest and violence among the Indian people, a majority of whom were Hindu but about 30 percent of whom were Muslim. The Raj came under heavy fire. It had educated the higher caste of Indians, who now demanded freedom to form their own government and make their own laws.*5

  Mohandas Gandhi was an Indian Hindu lawyer and activist who had begun a movement of civil disobedience and boycott of British goods in India that threatened to disrupt the smoothly running Raj. In the face of these continuing problems, the viceroy reluctantly concluded that the situation was not going to get better, and the wisest course was to give the subcontinent dominion status within the empire, meaning that it would become self-governing.

  Churchill, who had served in India as a young army officer, was vehemently opposed to this proposition and attacked it with a fury “that was almost demented.” It was another of his tangents that seemed bound to cause him trouble, going against the leader of his party in such a fashion. His first salvo was an article in the Daily Mail in which Churchill described the Indian Raj as “upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.”14

  The Indian continent, he continued, was “rescued from ages of barbarism, internecine war, and tyranny” and “prey to fierce racial and religious dissentions and the withdrawal of British protection would mean the resumption of medieval ways.” Branding the very notion of home rule for India as “fantastic,” Churchill went on to remind his readers that England “had a responsibility” for the welfare of the country’s 350 million—60 million of whom were Untouchables who lived in the utmost squalor.15