Churchill

by Paul Johnson

  A month later all had gone with the wind as the great Wall Street crash reverberated through the skyscraper canyons. He was present to hear a dinner host address a table full of top businessmen with the words “Friends and former millionaires.” He added: “Under my window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces.” McGowan had been investing his funds “on margin” (something Churchill did not understand), so he not only lost all his money but had to buy himself out of the mess. He considered selling Chartwell, but it was “a bad time.” Instead he redoubled his writing output, negotiating fresh contracts and lecture tours. His earnings rose to over £40,000 a year, an immense income in those days. But his confidence had been shaken, and in his bruised condition he began to make political mistakes again.

  First he resigned his seat on the Conservative front bench. The issue was India. True, both the new Labour government, plus Baldwin and most of his colleagues, supported by the report of the Simon Commission and the liberal viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), were united in backing a gradual progression to self-rule. Churchill rejected this totally and got himself into a die-hard position. He fought a campaign, making speeches all over the country, associating with the extreme right-wing of the Tories, and moving closer than ever before to the press barons, especially Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who controlled the Daily Mail group. Churchill had not been back to India since 1899. He had only met Gandhi, who now led the resistance movement, once, when undersecretary to the colonies, and mistaking his significance dismissed him as “a half-naked fakir,” a phrase which stuck, to his own discredit. His speeches were notably less impressive than those he made as chancellor. Worse, his activities were seen as part of a move to replace Baldwin, in which the press barons enthusiastically joined. This was a huge mistake, for the drive to get rid of him gave “the old turnip lanthorn,” as Churchill called him, a new lease on life, and he made some of the best speeches in his career, slaughtering the press lords and putting Churchill right out into the cold. In August 1931 the Labour government collapsed and MacDonald formed a national coalition with Baldwin as number two but the real power, as most of its huge majority were his Tory followers. Churchill was away and does not seem to have been even considered for office. The coalition went to the country and was returned with a vast majority, Labour being reduced to a mere fifty-two seats. Churchill found his majority doubled but he seems, for the moment, to have been without direction in politics, obsessed with the need to make money. So he returned to America to lecture and write.

  On December 13, 1931, crossing Fifth Avenue in the dark, he looked the wrong way, as in England, and a fast car, coming from the opposite direction, knocked him down. He was badly damaged on the head, thigh, and ribs, and in terrible pain. But he remained conscious and when a policeman asked what had happened insisted it was entirely his own fault. He was in fact lucky to be alive. A taxi took him to hospital, and he was a long time recovering. He was very down. He told Clemmie: “I have now in the last two years had three very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the Crash. Then the loss of my political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible physical injury.” He was afraid he would never recover from these blows. In fact he began the process while still in hospital by dictating a moving and thoughtful article about his accident:I certainly suffered every pang, mental and physical, that a street accident or, I suppose, a shell wound, can produce. None is unendurable. There is neither the time nor the strength for self-pity. There is no room for remorse or fears. If at any moment in this long series of sensations a grey veil deepening into blackness had descended upon the sanctum, I should have felt or feared nothing additional.

  Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only when the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest, live dangerously, take things as they come. Fear naught, all will be well.

  He got for this article £600 for world rights, the largest sum he had ever received for a single piece. It was printed everywhere. Then he went back to the fray, shaken but calm, to live more dangerously than ever before, but to fear even less.

  Chapter Five

  The Unregarded Prophet

  Now began the hardest, harshest period of Churchill’s life. He was lucky to have a safe seat where he was active, was much loved, and had many faithful friends. Otherwise he might have been extinguished as a politician and become instead a professional writer, for which he had reliable talents. He was lucky to have an adoring (but wise and sometimes critical) wife and a growing family of children who were his warmest supporters. Lucky to have Chartwell, a burgeoning personal paradise where he could lick his many, and often serious, wounds. Lucky to have his art, doing more paintings in this decade (250 out of the 500 that have survived) than in any other. Lucky, above all, that events suddenly gave him a clear vision of what was happening in the world, and what would happen unless he prevented it by his amazing gifts and energies.

  The picture cleared early in 1933, when Adolf Hitler captured power in Germany and immediately set about his own plan to destroy Versailles and make Germany the strongest power in Europe, and eventually the world. Churchill had read Mein Kampf and believed it represented Hitler’s plain intentions. So did Hitler. “My programme from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles . . . I have written it thousands of times. No human being has ever declared or recorded what he wanted more often than me.” There was no British response to Hitler’s arrival in power. Churchill had already pointed out that the Germans had been breaking the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, which forbade the creation of a large army, for some time, by buying heavy weapons from the Soviet Union. Hitler merely accelerated the process. Few people had read Mein Kampf; fewer still believed it. In government circles Hitler was seen as a deluded adventurer who would soon be discarded. The mood of the country was highlighted by a provocative debate at the Oxford Union, in which the undergraduates voted 275-153 for the motion “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.” Churchill called “that abject, squalid, shameless avowal . . . a very disquieting and disgusting symptom.” His son, Randolph, now grown up, noisy and attention seeking, often in ways which caused his father acute embarrassment, made a much-publicized attempt to tear the record of the debate out of the Union’s book of minutes. Later, Churchill himself calmed down and said, “When it comes to the crunch [a word he invented in this sense] those young men will fight just as their fathers did”—as indeed happened in 1939-45. The future Lord Longford, then a young man, provided a vignette of Churchill in autumn 1935, entertaining young people to lunch at Chartwell. He had spent the morning writing and laying bricks (he told Baldwin he could do two hundred bricks and two thousand words in a day) and was grumpy at first. “But as the wine flowed his eloquence expanded and for three hours the small company were treated to a harangue I have never heard equalled.” The theme was German rearmament, and “somewhere around four o’clock, whiskey and sodas were called for and . . . I was emboldened to ask him, ‘If the Germans are already as strong as you say, what could we do if they landed here?’ ‘That should not prove an insoluble conundrum. We are here five able-bodied men. The armoury at our disposal is not perhaps very modern, but none of us would be without a weapon. We should sally forth. I should venture to assume the responsibilities of command. If the worst came to the worst, we should sell our lives dearly. Whatever the outcome, I feel confident we should render a good account of ourselves.’ ”

  Meanwhile, the odds were stacked against his policy: a strong, rearmed Britain, ready and able to oppose a strong, rearmed—and vengeful—Germany. He was deeply depressed about India. He did not see himself as a reactionary longing for a past that was gone, but as the prophet of a dangerous future. The world, he said, was “entering a period when the struggle for self-preservation is going to present itself with great intenseness to thickly populated industrial countries.”
Britain would soon be “fighting for its life,” and the wealth derived from India, the prestige, self-respect, and confidence provided by the Raj, were essential for survival. But India was already going; like China it faced a future of internal chaos, warlord-ism, and disintegration: “Greedy appetites have already been excited. Many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire.”

  But Churchill, pulling out all the stops of his ceaseless rhetoric, failed to rouse the nation, Parliament, or his own party to fight for India. The debate was over giving India an autonomous central government, as well as provincial governments, versus self-government for the provinces only (which Churchill supported). He called the 1935 India Bill, which in effect gave it Home Rule, “a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies,” and he fought it clause by clause. But he never persuaded more than 89 to vote against it, and it passed by the enormous majority of 264. Nor did he have any success, as yet, in alerting public opinion to the dangers of Germany. Keynes had convinced most opinion formers that Versailles was an unjust, destructive, and vicious treaty, “a Carthaginian peace.” So Hitler was quite right to seek to undo it. Clifford Allen called it “that wicked treaty” and applauded Hitler: “I am convinced he genuinely desires peace.” Archbishop Temple of York said Hitler had made “a great contribution to the secure establishment of peace.” Lord Lothian even used the treaty to justify Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, which was “largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war.”

  It was the only period in British history when pacifism became not merely fashionable but the creed of the majority. In June 1933, at the East Fulham by-election, the Labour candidate received a message from the party leader, George Lansbury: “I would close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world, ‘Do your worst.’ ” This was one of six by-elections fought in 1933-34 which registered huge swings in favor of the pacifist candidates. The dominant pacifist wing of the clergy founded a Peace Pledge Union to collect “signatures for peace.” A “peace ballot” asked the nation to sign up for a motion repudiating national rearmament and instead to leave everything to the League of Nations. It was adopted by 87 percent of the 10 million votes cast.

  At the government level there was no pacifism as such, but folly. One thing Churchill believed in was the French army. He went to its maneuvers and tried to encourage its generals to stand firm against Hitler. But they pointed out that British official policy held the French army was too big. Sir John Simon, the foreign secretary, told the House that nothing was more likely to provoke a future war than “a well-armed France” facing a disarmed Germany. The same afternoon Hitler’s Enabling Bill passed, giving him absolute power to do anything he pleased for an indefinite future. Anthony Eden, for the government, said it was British policy to get the French army cut from 694,000 to 400,000. Churchill protested strongly. Eden rebuked him for opposing measures “to secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed.” The Daily Telegraph noted: “The House was enraged and in an ugly mood—towards Mr Churchill.” This was the first sign that he had sacrificed the position of popularity he had so painfully acquired in the twenties by good behavior and was now regarded as a nuisance and a troublemaker. The mood was partly one of disgust with war and horror of a “return to the trenches,” and partly fear, especially of war in the air.

  Here, Churchill did not help his own cause. In his anxiety to alert people to the danger of Hitler, he voiced the expert consensus that aerial warfare would be devastating. He was well informed, too. In addition to Professor Lindemann, the government allowed him to consult Major Desmond Morton, a specialist in military and economic intelligence. Churchill told the House on November 28, 1934, that up to forty thousand Londoners alone would be killed or injured in the first week of war. Baldwin echoed him: “The man in the street ought to realise there is no power on earth to prevent him [in war] being bombed. The bomber will always get through.” General Fuller, the leading expert writer on war, warned that London would become “one vast raving Bedlam,” with “the government swept away in an avalanche of terror.” Left-wing intellectuals like Bertrand Russell stepped up the tale of horror: “Fifty gas-bombers, using Lewisite, can poison all London.”

  To add to Churchill’s difficulties, the one issue on which public opinion was roused—the Italian conquest of Abyssinia—had the effect of working against British interests by driving Italy into Hitler’s arms. Churchill did not care much about the Abyssinian issue, though he opposed the act of aggression in principle, nor did he see Italy (as Anthony Eden did) as a major threat to peace, more dangerous than Hitler. It was one of Churchill’s skills that he could distinguish between levels of power and threat, at any rate in Europe. He thought it was important to keep Italy on Britain’s side, as it had been in the Great War, and so keep the Mediterranean firmly under the control of the Royal Navy and the imperial lifeline to India safe. The fuss the government made over Abyssinia, getting the League to impose sanctions (which, of course, did not work), had no effect other than to turn Mussolini into a bitter enemy. He and Hitler signed “the Pact of Steel” and began to coordinate war plans. The Italians had a large fleet and air force, and Churchill realized it would now be necessary to keep half the British fleet in the Mediterranean. He also noted, “The Germans and Italians have 800 bombers between them. We have 47.”

  On top of it all came the abdication crisis. By 1935 Churchill’s campaign to alert the nation was making progress. His speeches were growing more passionate and telling as the danger increased, and more and more influential people were saying to him in public, or more likely in private, that they agreed with him. After a speech on April 23, 1936, giving details of German arms expenditure and Britain’s inadequate response, even his old enemy Margot Asquith wrote to him: “I must congratulate you on your wonderful speech.” She had been lunching with Duff Cooper, soon to become first lord of the Admiralty, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, and other notables: “All were full of praise. It relieved the general depression of all of us, and is terribly true. We are at the parting of the ways between war and peace.” Churchill was also building up a little group of able MPs in the Commons, such as Harold Macmillan and his old parliamentary private secretary, Robert Boothby. Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden, both in the government, were now with him.

  Then the abdication came out of the blue to mesmerize and inflame the nation, to direct attention totally from the external threat, and to show Churchill at his worst. Baldwin said of Churchill, privately, at this time: “When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.”

  This verdict was certainly borne out by Churchill’s quixotic support for the worthless Edward VIII in his bid to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and still keep his crown. Churchill had, as it were, fallen for Edward, a handsome, slim, fragile figure, when he had helped, as home secretary, to install the future king as Prince of Wales at Carnarvon Castle and read out, in a resonant voice, all his many titles of chivalry. He brought out Churchill’s childish sense of loyalty and toy-soldier mentality. He went to the support of Edward in the dubious company of Lord Beaverbrook, and much to Clemmie’s disgust. As usual he was profuse in offering ingenious solutions for the crisis. But Baldwin, who thought Edward would make a bad constitutional monarch anyway and preferred his brother the Duke of York (the future George VI), outmaneuvered Churchill on every point. In any case, the king preferred abdication to a real battle. As Beaverbrook said to Churchill, “Our cock won’t fight, so it’s no dice.” But when the abdication was more or less inevita
ble, and MPs were anxious to get it over with and turn to other, pressing matters, Churchill made the error of judgment of a speech urging delay. To his obvious dismay, the House reacted with almost unanimous fury. There were cries of “Drop it” and “Twister,” and he was first shouted down by MPs, then ruled out of order by the Speaker. He shouted in fury at Baldwin, “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve broken him, will you,” then marched out of the chamber. A few minutes later, almost in tears, he said to another MP: “My political career is finished.” Boothby, whom Churchill had not warned of what he intended to do, believed he was drunk after a heavy embassy lunch—the only time when he addressed the House intoxicated—and wrote him a furious letter: “You have reduced the number of your personal supporters to the minimum possible . . . about seven, in all. What happened this afternoon makes me feel that it is almost impossible for those who are more devoted to you personally, to follow you blindly (as they would like to do) in politics. Because they cannot be sure where the Hell they will be landed next.” The scene, Lord Winterton wrote, was “one of the angriest manifestations I have ever heard directed against any man in the House of Commons.” The Spectator summed up the prevailing opinion: “The reputation which he was beginning to shake off of a wayward genius unserviceable in council has settled firmly on his shoulders again.”