To swallow pride and crawl thus must have been excruciating for both Winston and Clementine. And it was all for nothing. Asquith wrote Venetia that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine. Bonar Law—who said privately that Winston “seems to have an entirely unbalanced mind”—replied to Churchill that his removal as first lord was “inevitable.” Asquith wrote Winston: “You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” There could be no appeal from that. Winston, who like other critics of Asquith had taken to calling him “The Block” in private, replied: “All right, I accept your decision. I shall not look back…. I must wait for the march of events at the Dlles.” On the next Saturday, May 22, Winston saw the prime minister briefly. Asquith called it “a most painful interview to me: but he was good & in his best mood. And it ended all right.” Yet there was still no place for him in the new cabinet. Two days later Margot wrote in her diary: “What a satire if the coming Coalition Government of which Winston has gassed so much should not contain him! I know Henry [Asquith] too well to suppose this but there is no doubt if Henry wanted to make himself supremely popular with every party ours and the others he would exclude Winston. I would not wish this, there is something lovable in Winston and he is a real pal but I should not be surprised if he wrecked the new Government.”127
How unpopular was Churchill in the spring of 1915? He was controversial, of course; he always had been. But he himself believed he was now friendless. Asquith’s daughter, who loved him as her father loved Venetia, came to him in tears. They “slipped away” together, she wrote, and he “took me into his room,” whereupon he collapsed in a chair, “silent, despairing—as I had never seen him. He seemed to have no rebellion or even anger left. He did not even abuse Fisher, but simply said, ‘I’m finished.’ ” She protested; he said, “No—I’m done.” Yet the day after his final dismissal Italy had entered the war, and he more than anyone else had been responsible for England’s new ally. His most loyal supporters remained steadfast. Virtually all the younger flag officers went on record as supporting him. At Gallipoli, Hamilton discovered “in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get in touch with Winston Churchill, all would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense, touching.”128
But Englishmen demanded a whipping boy. If they couldn’t beat the Germans, they could turn on one of their own, and Churchill, the ostentatious poseur, was the obvious choice. Sir Henry Wilson wrote Bonar Law: “A man who can plot the Ulster Pogrom, plan Antwerp, & carry out the Dardanelles fiasco is worth watching.” In some vague way Winston was held accountable for everything that had gone wrong, from the shell crisis to the hopeless seesaw in the trenches. He had lost ships. He had frequently been away from his desk—on urgent missions, though they didn’t know that. He had ignored expert advice—even the counsel of Fisher, England’s greatest admiral. He was a reckless adventurer, a man loyal only to his own ambition. The Dundee Advertiser reported that many of his Liberal constituents believed that he “should be excluded altogether from the Cabinet on the ground, as they contend, that he is in a large measure responsible for precipitating the present state of affairs.” Admiralty diehards, impotent during his early naval reforms, now struck out savagely. Captain Richmond called him “ignorant.” Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, who was appointed first sea lord when Balfour replaced Churchill, described the attempt to force the Dardanelles as “a mad thing to do.” The naval correspondent of The Times reported: “The news that Mr Churchill is leaving the Admiralty has been received with a feeling of relief in the Service, both afloat and ashore,” and commented that while he had brought a “breezy atmosphere” with him, he had also created “a sense of uneasiness lest those very qualities of his which might be of advantage to the State in other circumstances, should lead him into making some false step, which, in the case of the Fleet, upon which our all depends, would be irretrievable.” On May 24 Frances Stevenson wrote in her diary: “There is no section of the country, so far as I can see, that wishes him to stay at the Admiralty.” According to her, Winston’s private naval secretary had advised the prime minister “that on no account ought Churchill to be allowed to remain at the Admiralty—he was most dangerous there.” Even Asquith, whose punishment Winston was taking, joined the posse. Churchill, he complained, “is impulsive & borne along on the flood of his all too copious tongue,” and, further, “it is a pity that Winston has not got a better sense of proportion. I am really fond of him, but I regard his future with many misgivings. I do not think he will ever get to the top in English politics with all his wonderful gifts.” In war, losers, even more than winners, need to create martyrs. Churchill was England’s Armenian.129
He suffered. His Black Dog had never been so bad; he was in the pit of the worst depression of his life. After he had said his goodbyes at the Admiralty on Saturday and sent a farewell telegram to the Royal Naval Division, Eddie Marsh wrote Violet Asquith: “I am miserably sorry for Winston. You can imagine what a horrible wound and mutilation it is for him to be torn away from his work there… it’s like Beethoven deaf.” Sir George Riddell called on him and wrote in his War Diary: “He looked very worn out and harassed. He greeted me… and said, ‘I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!’ ” Lloyd George later said that it was “the brutality of the fall” that “stunned” Winston, and Churchill himself wrote afterward: “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure…. At a moment when every fibre of my being was inflamed to action, I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.” Clementine later told Martin Gilbert: “The Dardanelles haunted him for the rest of his life. He always believed in it. When he left the Admiralty he thought he was finished…. I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.”130
At the time she, too, was distraught. After calling at Admiralty House, Edwin Montagu wrote Venetia, now his fiancée: “I went by request to see poor Mrs Winston. She was so sweet but so miserable and crying all the time. I was very inarticulate, but how I feel for her and him.” Back in his Treasury office he wrote Clementine that “Winston is far too great to be more than pulled up for a period…. Have no misgivings as to the future; I have none, I’m sure he has none.” But Winston had many, and what cut deepest were the lost chances which had gone up in the smoke rising from British ineptitude in Turkey. One of his dinner guests at this time was Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a war correspondent who had just returned from Gallipoli. Unlike young Churchill in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, journalists covering this campaign had been heavily censored—a full month had passed before the Illustrated London News had been permitted to publish photographs of the fighting—and an uninformed public, susceptible to rumor, had contributed to Churchill’s ruin. Ashmead-Bartlett wanted to talk to him about that. But his host wouldn’t listen to anyone. Ashmead-Bartlett noted in his diary: “I am much surprised at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty…. At dinner the conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so.” Jennie wrote Leonie: “If they had made the Dardanelles policy a certainty, Constantinople would have been in our hands ages ago. In confidence, it is astounding how Winston foresaw it all.”131
His obsessio
n with what might have been kept him in civilian clothes for six months. Asquith promised him a seat on the War Council, now renamed the Dardanelles Committee, if he would accept the lowest of cabinet posts, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. “Where is Lancaster?” jeered the Bystander. “And what is a Duchy?” The position was a sinecure, which, as Lloyd George put it, was “generally reserved either for beginners in the Cabinet or for distinguished politicians who had reached the final stages of unmistakable decrepitude.” The chancellor’s only duty was to appoint county magistrates. In false cheeriness Winston wrote Jack Seely: “The Duchy of Lancaster has been mobilized. A strong flotilla of magistrates for the 1915 programme will shortly be laid down.” His salary was immediately cut from £4,500 to £2,000 a year. Asquith offered to let the Churchills stay on in Admiralty House, but Clementine refused to accept charity from the man who, as she saw it, had sacrificed her husband to save his own office. Ivor Guest gave his cousin the temporary use of his house at 21 Arlington Street, behind the Ritz; then they would move in with Goonie in Jack Churchill’s South Kensington house at 41 Cromwell Road, opposite the Natural History Museum. On May 23, eight days after the crisis over Fisher’s resignation had erupted, Winston turned the Admiralty over to Balfour. One of the new first lord’s first decisions was to scrap the tank project. According to Captain D’Eyncourt’s memoirs, A Shipbuilder’s Yarn, the new first lord called him in and asked: “Have not you and your department enough to do looking after the design and construction of ships without concerning yourself about material for the Army?” Appropriations already in the pipeline produced a small number of tanks in 1916. To Churchill’s dismay, Lloyd George told him that the army planned to use them immediately. Winston went to Asquith, pleading against untimely use of the trench weapon which, he believed, could be decisive. He was ignored. On September 15 a handful of tanks went into action on the Somme. The British infantry was unprepared to consolidate their quick gains, and the element of surprise was squandered. “My poor ‘land battleships,’ ” Churchill wrote, “have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale. In that idea resided one real victory.” Here he, too, was premature. The tank’s time would come again, and yet again.132
In the weeks after he cleared out his Admiralty desk his depression deepened. “It is odious to me,” he wrote Seely, “to remain here watching sloth and folly with full knowledge & no occupation.” To Jack on Gallipoli he wrote: “The war is terrible: the carnage grows apace, & the certainty that no result will be reached this year fills my mind with melancholy thoughts. The youth of Europe—almost a whole generation—will be shorn away. I find it vy painful to be deprived of any direct means of action.” Beginning in late May, he took his and his brother’s families to a rental property in Surrey each weekend. “I am off to Hoe Farm,” he wrote Jack on June 19. “How I wish you cd be there. It really is a delightful valley and the garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.” Yet even here he drew apart from the others and paced endlessly between the garden and a small wooden summerhouse. He tried golf again and again and hated it; it was, he said, “like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.” Then, in a flash of inspiration, his sister-in-law introduced him to painting. Goonie painted herself; she set up her easel in the garden one Sunday, and when she noticed Winston watching her with interest, she suggested he try it, using some of the children’s watercolors. There was plenty to paint, she pointed out: the garden, the woods, the house, a nearby pond. He tried, liked it, and did it well. He had a natural visual eye, and knew it; during the Boer War he had supplemented his dispatches with sketches drawn in the field; touched up by newspaper illustrators, they had been published. Obviously, he could be good if he applied himself. It struck him that in this dark hour of life the “Muse of Painting” might have come to his rescue—“out of charity and out of chivalry, because after all she had nothing to do with me—and said, ‘Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.’ ”133
But watercolors would not do. Being Churchill, whatever he did had to be done for the ages. He told Clementine: “La peinture à l’huile est bien difficile, mais c’est beaucoup plus beau que la peinture à l’eau.” She needed only that hint; she was off and running, and when she returned she brought a palette, canvases, an easel, a smock, and tubes. Unfortunately she had neglected to bring turpentine, and that aborted his first venture. Finally he was ready. Later he described his sensations on the threshold of that first attempt. With everything assembled, “the next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto. But after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. There could be no doubt that blue paint mixed with white should be put on the top of the canvas. One really does not need to have had an artist’s training to see that. It is a starting-point open to all. So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint on the palette with a very small brush, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a pea upon the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response.”134
At that most appropriate moment an automobile was heard in the drive, and out stepped Hazel Lavery, a neighbor, the wife of an artist, and a gifted painter herself. Her appearance was not a coincidence. Clementine was making up for the turpentine. Hazel strode up and said: “What are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush—the big one.” She splashed it into turpentine, socked it into the blue and white, thrashed it about on the palette, and delivered several huge, savage strokes on what Winston called “the absolutely cowering canvas.” Anyone could see, he wrote, “that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken.” He was delighted. This was his style; this was how he lived. It was inevitable that he should become an audacious painter, and a gaudy one; nothing that he ever touched was done by halves. “I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours,” he wrote. “I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.” When he reached heaven he would “require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”135
Eddie Marsh, who watched his first efforts, thought that “the new enthusiasm… was a distraction and a sedative that brought a measure of ease to his frustrated spirit.” In fact, it would be a solace to him for the next fifty years. He had, he believed, discovered the solution to anxiety and tension. Exercise, travel, retreat, solitude, forced gaiety—he had tried these and none had worked. “Change,” he now wrote, “is the master key. A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it… the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts…. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”136
He painted landscapes and still lifes; never people. For one of his studies of bottles he coined a word: bottlescape. The dazzling hues were always there, a kind of signature. He knew desperation, but never a gray day. Once, painting in a drab, monochrome countryside, he introduced a dramatic range of mountains which were not there. A puzzled companion asked if he had seen a mirage. No, said Churchill; he just “couldn’t leave it quite as dull as that.” In time he became very good. An art critic scrutinized his work at a Royal Academy exhibition and wrote: “I was bound to recognize that their creator is a real artist. His canvases bear the mark of the spontaneity of a sincere and exuberant, but undisciplined vocation. His landscapes are vigorous and
sometimes sensitive. His use of colour is often happy…. I think his fame as a statesman has prejudiced his reputation as an artist.”137
At Hoe Farm he also rejoiced in the company of small children. Sarah was still an infant, but Diana was six and Randolph four, and his two nephews, Johnny and Peregrine, were also there. Long afterward Johnny would recall how, when he and his brother were given a box of Meccano—a kind of Erector Set—they started building a cantilever crane in the farmhouse dining room. Their uncle appeared, puffing on a cigar. He watched thoughtfully for a while, and then murmured: “Hm. A bascule bridge would be better, you know.” Johnny explained that they hadn’t enough pieces. Churchill waved his hand impatiently, summoned a servant, and sent her out to buy several Meccano boxes. Then, Johnny remembers, he “took off his coat and began preparing the largest model bascule bridge ever…. The final construction was a gigantic piece of engineering some fifteen feet long and eight feet high, with a roadway which could be lifted by means of wheels, pulleys and yards of string.” It was so big that the dining room became unusable. The family had to eat elsewhere.138
He also played “gorilla” with the children. Donning his oldest clothes, he would lurk behind shrubbery, waiting for one of them to appear. When one did, he would leap out roaring “Grr! Grr!” and advance menacingly, his arms swinging limply at his sides. “The realism was alarming,” Johnny recalls, “but we squealed with delight and enjoyed this exclusive performance hugely. Few people can say that they have seen an ex–First Lord of the Admiralty crouching in the branches of an oak, baring his teeth and pounding his chest with his fists.” Winston’s son remembered that when his father dropped from a limb, “we would all scatter in various directions. He would pursue us and the one he caught would be the loser.”139
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