Darkest Hour
Page 3
Churchill’s account of events is perhaps the least reliable of all. He incorrectly identified the meeting as occurring on the following day, 10 May, in his memoir The Gathering Storm. With true Churchillian verve, he wrote of the moments following Chamberlain’s charged question – ‘Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a Peer should not be prime minister?’ – after which Winston ‘remained silent [and] a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day.’ What he wished history to record was that it was a silence so uncomfortable that it prompted Lord Halifax to break it and, with his nerves shredded, speak at length about why he could not become Prime Minister. According to David Margesson, the silence was broken almost immediately by Halifax urging Churchill’s greater fitness for leadership in war.
Silence or no, they had come to an agreement. Sir Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary that by this stage ‘Chief Whip [Margesson] and others think feeling in the House has been veering towards him [Churchill]. If N.C. [Chamberlain] remains [in the Cabinet] – as he is ready to do – his advice and judgement would steady Winston.’ And, with that, they were ready to let the lion out of his cage. When the talks ended, Chamberlain met Labour’s Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood at 6.15 p.m. The two men confirmed that they were willing to enter into a National Government but suspected the Labour Party would not serve under Chamberlain, and so would have to consult the Executive when they reached the party conference in Bournemouth the following day.
Meanwhile, Halifax and Churchill retired to the garden of No. 10 Downing Street for tea. Churchill recalled in his memoirs that they talked about ‘nothing in particular’ before he returned to the Admiralty to prepare for the task ahead. He dined with Anthony Eden again that evening, recounting to him the drama of the day’s events. Churchill said he ‘hoped NC [Chamberlain] would stay, would lead House of Commons and continue as leader of [the] party’. It was expected that Chamberlain would tender his resignation to the King the following afternoon and advise him to send for Churchill. What was more interesting was that Winston would become not only Prime Minister but also give himself the newly created role of Minister of Defence.
Whatever the outcome of these long and intense meetings on 9 May might yet be, one thing was certain: Winston Churchill would be running the war. And Churchill’s hour was coming not a moment too soon. Even then Hitler was quietly lining up his tanks on the borders of Holland, Belgium and France, ready to execute a Blitzkrieg or lightning war so terrifying that talk in the corridors of power would soon turn to the potential surrender of the entirety of Europe to the brutal Nazi hordes.
Churchill later recalled, ‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial . . . I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.’ The fate of the nation was now in his hands, and what he did with it was nothing short of extraordinary.
2. The Social Wastrel
So who was this man about to lead Britain into one of the greatest conflicts in her history?
Trying to ‘nutshell’ Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is a task so elusive, we have seen more ink expended on him than on any other figure in history. Books on him dwarf in number those about Washington, Caesar or Napoleon, and render insipid the collective attempts to describe his great enemy Adolf Hitler. This is for the simple reason that seldom in history has a figure done so much, both good and bad, and made such a difference in the course of a long and packed lifetime, let alone the sixty-five years before this story begins in the House of Commons on those tense May days in 1940.
Titanic orator. Drunk. Wit. Patriot. Imperialist. Visionary. Tank designer. Blunderer. Swashbuckler. Aristocrat. Prisoner. War hero. War criminal. Conqueror. Laughing stock. Bricklayer. Racehorse-owner. Soldier. Painter. Politician. Journalist. Nobel Prize-winning author. The list goes on and on, but each label, when taken alone, fails to do him justice; when taken together, they offer a challenge on a par with tossing twenty jigsaw puzzles together and expecting a single unified picture.
So where can we begin if we are to see him whole, view him cleanly, free of myth, from a modern perspective and employing today’s familiar psychological language?
Imagine the following: Winston sitting in a chair before a modern psychiatrist. What category of person would he be deemed? Would he, after speaking of his mood swings, emerge with a diagnosis of being bi-polar, of manic depression, and find himself gulping lithium? Or would he, after confessing all his oddities, his eccentric non-conformism, his impulsiveness and risk-taking and love of red or green velvet one-piece romper suits, be told he’s repressing childhood trauma and abandonment issues? What shrink would be brave enough to tell Winston Churchill that he had a serious yet manageable narcissistic personality with a histrionic accentuation? A simple list of what the man drank each day would most likely see him written up as a self-medicating alcoholic under today’s definitions.
So let us begin on the outside, and work our way inwards: looking first at the forces that shaped him, during those early years that hint at the man he most certainly became – one as capable of fear as confidence, of self-doubt as much as conviction, of self-shame as much as self-esteem, of bulldog pugnacity as much as harrowing indecision.
Winston was foremost a Victorian. He spent the first twenty-seven years of his life under the Queen’s reign, when the empire was at flood tide; his world view was sculpted by the supposed dominance of British superiority across the globe.
He was also an aristocrat. Born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, on 30 November 1874, he was the first child of Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, and his wife, Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie Jerome) – supposedly two months premature but most likely conceived out of wedlock.
Randolph and Jennie had been introduced by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, at the Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight in August 1873. Winston writes in his book My Early Life how Randolph ‘fell in love with her at first sight’, and, impetuously, the pair became engaged just three days later. They were married in a small ceremony in the British Embassy in Paris on 15 April 1874, two months after the groom had won his first seat in the House of Commons for the Conservative Party at just twenty-five years of age.
Jennie was twenty when Winston was born. She adopted the typical upper-class-Victorian approach to childcare, and left her son and his younger brother, Jack, to be largely raised by their devoted nanny, Mrs Elizabeth Everest, whom Winston affectionately nicknamed ‘Old Woom’; she called him ‘Winny’. Jennie was a glamorous young society woman and the daughter of a wealthy American tycoon from New York known as ‘The King of Wall Street’. Interrupting a life of parties, travel and love affairs to look after her children was not Jennie’s style. Winston later wrote, ‘My mother made the same brilliant impression upon my childhood’s eye. She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’
It was an even worse situation with his father. Winston idolized him, but Lord Randolph’s life was consumed by his political career. Recognized as a great orator, Randolph was a champion of progressive Conservatism and a respected Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. However, this meteoric rise as a shining new light in the Tory party did not last long. His star faded, and after less than a year in Cabinet he resigned on 20 December 1886 over problems with the unpopular Budget he had submitted. Randolph remained an MP but the health problems that had plagued him for years advanced rapidly.
The condition from which he was reportedly suffering was syphilis. Speculation remains about when and how exactly he contracted it, but it was possibly as early as 1875. Over the twenty years until his early death, at just forty-five, he suffered an aggressive deterioration of his mental capacities caused by the disease’s ‘dementia paralytica’ – a general paralysis of the insane. This left no opportunity for fat
her and son to grow close and understand each other – a loss which weighed heavily on Winston for the rest of his life. In My Early Life he wrote:
My father died on January 24 in the early morning. Summoned from a neighbouring house where I was sleeping, I ran in the darkness across Grosvenor Square, then lapped in snow. His end was quite painless. Indeed, he had long been in stupor. All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.
Winston, like many boys of his class at this time, had been packed off to boarding school at the age of seven and found the experience utterly miserable: ‘After all . . . I had been so happy in my nursery with all my toys . . . Now it was to be all lessons.’ Flogging of pupils was commonplace, and this precocious young boy, reading Treasure Island and other books far beyond his years, was a frequent recipient of the switch. After attending preparatory schools around the country, Winston eventually started at the prestigious Harrow in April 1888. Since the eighteenth century, Churchills had attended the rival leading boys’ school, Eton College, but Harrow, sited on a hill and enjoying a superior air quality, was judged better for Winston’s somewhat sickly constitution.
Winston was not an academic pupil and was consequently placed in the bottom class. He loathed Classics but discovered an affinity for English and History, subjects which would serve him well. He described his teacher, Mr Somervell, as ‘a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great’. This passionate master was ‘charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing – namely, to write mere English’. Words, sentences, structure and grammar got ‘into [his] bones’ and never left him.
At Harrow, Winston discovered other pursuits that he both enjoyed and was successful at. He joined the Cadets, took part in fencing championships, won prizes for learning great swathes of poetry by heart, and had several articles published in the Harrovian.
When Winston was coming towards the end of his time at Harrow, he set upon a career in the military and so began preparing to take the entrance exam for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His first attempt in July 1892 did not go well: he achieved only 5,100 of the minimum 6,457 marks required. He needed a further two attempts before he eventually gained a place in August 1893. The deterioration of Randolph Churchill’s mental state, however, meant that the eighteen-year-old Winston, perhaps expecting a letter of warm congratulation from his father, received a shattering rebuke instead. It is worth quoting, to show how his father’s great gifts with prose were employed brutally to cut his son down – and to cut him down for good:
9 August 1893
My dear Winston,
I am rather surprised at your tone of exultation over your inclusion in the Sandhurst list. There are two ways of winning in an examination, one creditable the other the reverse. You have unfortunately chosen the latter method, and appear to be much pleased with your success . . .
With all the advantages you had, with all the abilities which you foolishly think yourself to possess & which some of your relations claim for you, with all the efforts that have been made to make your life easy & agreeable & your work neither oppressive or distasteful, this is the grand result that you come up among the 2nd rate & 3rd rate class who are only good for commissions in a cavalry regiment . . . Now it is a good thing to put this business vy plainly before you. Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing to you long letters after every folly & failure you commit & undergo. I shall not write again on these matters & you need not trouble to write any answer to this part of my of my letter [sic], because I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own acquirements & exploits. Make this position indelibly impressed on your mind, that if your conduct and action at Sandhurst is similar to what it has been in the other establishments . . . slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum . . . then my responsibility for you is over. I shall leave you to depend on yourself giving you merely such assistance as may be necessary to permit of a respectable life. Because I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence. If that is so you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself. Your own conscience will enable you to recall and enumerate all the efforts that have been made to give you the best of chances which you were entitled to by your position & how you have practically neglected them all.
I hope you will be the better for your trip. You must apply to Capt James for advice for us to your Sandhurst equipment. Your mother sends her love.
Your affte father
Randolph S.C.
The devastating effect of such a letter on a young man desperate for his father’s approval can only be imagined. Nonetheless, this ‘social wastrel’ performed well during his time at Sandhurst, and a month before Lord Randolph died, Winston graduated, placing a distinguished eighth out of 150. After what many considered to be a rather shaky beginning in school, this was a highly respectable end to his education. Churchill later wrote, ‘I am all for the Public Schools but I do not want to go there again.’
In March 1895 he joined the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars cavalry regiment as a Second Lieutenant. The six-month training course for new recruits was intensive, and Churchill wrote that it ‘exceeded in severity anything I had previously experienced in military equitation’. Despite this he took to it quickly and embraced his new-found freedom. He joined a London gentlemen’s club, kept abreast of political goings-on, mixed with high society at parties and balls, played polo and raced horses in the Cavalry Brigade steeplechase, but still took his training seriously.
After the death of his father in 1895, life seemed to be looking up for Winston until a telegram arrived on 2 July bringing more shattering news. His former nanny, Mrs Everest, was gravely ill. He raced to North London to be by her side, arriving at the house soaked through after getting caught in a rainstorm. In My Early Life he recalled:
She still knew me, but she gradually became unconscious. Death came very easily to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith that she had no fears at all . . . She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole twenty years I had lived.
Mrs Everest had no children of her own, but she died peacefully with a young man as devoted as a child by her side. Throughout his life, Winston was known to be a highly emotional man and expressed his feelings publicly. Countless stories of him weeping openly are told not just by close friends but also by politicians and soldiers he served with. For a sensitive child, the emotional strain of parents such as his should not be underestimated; had it not been for the love he’d received from the steadfast Mrs Everest, he would have been an altogether different man with perhaps an altogether different future.
Winston felt increasingly restless in his career, and while continuing his military duties he noted that in:
the closing decade of the Victorian era the Empire had enjoyed so long a spell of almost unbroken peace, that medals and all they represented in experience and adventure were becoming extremely scarce in the British Army . . . The want of a sufficient supply of active service was therefore acutely felt by my contemporaries in the circles in which I was now called upon to live my life.
This desire for combat would be answered all too soon and all too brutally, but until that terrifying war was laid at their mud-drenched feet in the trenches of Europe, Winston and his fellow officers yearned for action.
Scouring the globe for conflict, he stumbled upon the Cuban War of Independence against the Spanish, which had begun in the early months of 1895.
In late October, a few weeks before Winston’s twenty-first birthday, his ship approached its final destination. Winston’s excitement was palpable: ‘W
hen first in the dim light of early morning I saw the shores of Cuba rise and define themselves from dark-blue horizons, I felt as if I had sailed with Long John Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island.’ He sent five despatches back to the Daily Graphic in London. In these he honed the skills Mr Somervell had taught him at Harrow, and naturally mixed in a good dose of boys’ own tales about dodging bullets and the thrill of guerrilla warfare. After just over a month in Cuba, having offered his services to the Spanish, Winston departed for home with a new-found taste for front-line journalism . . . and as many Cuban cigars as he could possibly carry.
In England, Churchill moved back in with his mother, untill, on 11 September, he and 1,200 other men of the 4th Hussars set sail for India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire, arriving in Bombay at the beginning of October.
Their regiment was based in the southern city of Bangalore. Winston quickly settled into his new life, enjoying Bangalore’s congenial climate, marvelling at the country’s beauty and taking pride in the ‘keenest realization of the great work which England was doing in India and of her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own’. These opinions would stay with him throughout his political career, pitting him against his future Conservative colleagues when it came to the topic of independence for this prized colony.