Clementine’s Caribbean cruise was not a great success: she was depressed by the poverty of the islanders and homesick – she missed Winston and Mary. Her tolerance was seriously challenged when one of her fellow diners attacked the anti-government faction – in other words, Churchill and his colleagues – though Winston was not actually named. Clementine immediately rose and left the table, apologised to Lord Moyne, packed and left the yacht, booking herself a passage on the next steamer home. Winston was ‘enchanted’ to learn of her early return.
In March, Hitler broke his promise to Chamberlain when German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia. A few weeks later Mussolini attacked and took possession of Albania. Winston, busy with his book a good deal of the time, watched from the back benches as the hapless British government debated what should be done. Sometimes he held court at Chartwell. His trusted confidants almost constituted a crisis Cabinet when it came to the international situation. They brought with them secret intelligence reports from a wide network of informants, which included senior Germans who risked their lives by visiting Churchill at Chartwell in an attempt to avert the war that they insisted was Hitler’s intention. Major Desmond Morton, a former Army officer and a senior civil servant, was especially instrumental in providing Churchill with intelligence about German rearmament, which the latter used as a basis for his parliamentary attacks. The government wondered where Winston was obtaining his information, but – fortunately for Morton – the leak was never discovered.
Other visitors to Chartwell included the American Ambassador Joe Kennedy, the French Prime Minister Léon Blum, General Ironside (soon to be Chief of the Imperial General Staff), Sir Robert Horne, Max Beaverbrook, Sir Austen Chamberlain, Sir Edward Grigg, Anthony Eden, Lord Winterton and Sir Henry Croft. Brendan Bracken and ‘the Prof’ were always around; to Churchill they were trusted friends. Clementine still disliked Bracken intensely, just as she did Beaverbrook. She felt he was coarse and a poor influence on Churchill, and that Bracken used the connection with Winston to bolster his own reputation.
Later that month, thirty dissident Conservative MPs proposed a motion in favour of setting up an all-party coalition government. Among those promoting this, apart from Winston himself, were the usual suspects: Anthony Eden, Duff Cooper, Brendan Bracken and Harold Macmillan who told his constituency that this was a necessary move, not only to try to avoid an almost inevitable war with Germany, but even more importantly ‘to avoid a defeat’. Winston demanded that a compulsory National Service register be set up – something that ought to have been done immediately after Munich, he thundered. He was starting to win points now. A Minister of Supply was appointed – something else that Winston had been advocating for several years – but still he could not sway the government from the policy of appeasement.
Bert and Mary Marlborough’s daughter, Lady Sarah, came of age in July 1939. No one who knew Churchill could have been in any doubt that war was inevitable, so it was decided by the usually careful Duke and Duchess that this was no time for economies. The result was one of the most spectacular parties Blenheim has seen in modern times, redolent of the splendour and extravagance of the house during Churchill’s Victorian and Edwardian youth. Lady Sarah’s young guests – her contemporaries from the debutante world, including the young Kennedys who made such a mark on London parties in 1938 and 1939 – dined at tables on the terrace overlooking the lake. Consuelo came over from France; she joined Winston, Clementine and Anthony Eden at the family dinner in the saloon. Later they repaired to the water terrace – Sunny and Gladys’s bequest to posterity – lit for the occasion by hundreds of Chinese lanterns and strings of coloured lights. They sat in the balmy summer night – the last summer of peace – with the strains of Viennese waltzes drifting through the open windows as they chatted over old times and the bad times that were coming. Consuelo now accepted that the war, about which Winston had been warning her for the last four years, was bound to happen, but even now she hoped for France’s deliverance. It was fortunate that they were too deep in conversation to witness the spectacle of Randolph behaving badly towards a woman who had just spurned his advances. He had had too much to drink, began a noisy argument with another guest in defence of his father, and was eventually carted off.
It was the last fling of the old Blenheim that Winston had known from birth and that Consuelo had known as a young bride: footmen in full livery with powdered hair, the best food and wines and a thousand beautifully dressed guests most of whom knew most of the others – at least those of their own generation. Diarist Chips Channon recorded: ‘I was loath to leave but did so about 4.30am and took one last look at the baroque terraces with the lake below, and the golden statues and the great palace. Shall we ever see the like again? Is such a function not out of date? Yet it was all of the England that is supposed to be dead and is not. There were literally rivers of champagne.’*
That month the political tide was swinging in Churchill’s favour as newspapers began a concerted campaign to get him into the Cabinet, a move supported within Parliament by a growing number of MPs from all parties. In August Churchill flew to France to visit the Maginot Line† at the invitation of one of France’s most senior generals. From there he could see that the Germans were massing on their side of the border. To the ageing warrior this spelled only one thing: looming attack.
On 17 August he returned to Paris, and after a night at the Ritz he was driven to Dreux for a painting holiday with Consuelo and Jacques at their chateau Saint Georges-Motel. Clementine and Mary joined him there. During the journey he told the chauffeur that he believed Britain and France would be at war before the harvest was gathered in. In such a climate of uncertainty he found it impossible to concentrate but he spent a few days painting the Moulin de Montreuil, a beautifully renovated house, one of two old watermills beside the River Avre in the grounds of the chateau, with the French artist Paul Maze. On 20 August Maze noted in his diary that Churchill had said to him gloomily: ‘This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.’14
It was not a restful holiday. Churchill was fretful – they all were. Consuelo was busy with the ‘countryside sanatorium’ she had set up some time earlier for eighty children convalescing from surgery and some from tuberculosis, looked after by thirty nursing staff. She took Clementine and Mary on her daily rounds of the sanatorium and the isolation wards in the woods, and gave Mary an expensive leather bag, the sort Mary could never afford to buy for herself.
Increasingly anxious at being away from the centre of events, Churchill left two days later to fly from Paris to London, leaving Clementine and Mary to make their way home a few days afterwards by train and ship. As they changed trains in Paris at the Gare du Nord, Mary remembered, the station ‘teemed with soldiers’ and they realised that the French Army was mobilising. As soon as he arrived home Churchill hired a private detective, one W.H. Thompson, at £5 a week. ‘I can look after myself during the daytime,’ he told Thompson who had worked for him previously when Sinn Fein had vowed to kill him during the height of the Irish troubles. ‘Will you protect me at night?’ He gave Thompson his own Colt automatic. Thompson said that Churchill was a first-class shot and had a personal armoury of firearms with which he practised regularly, but apparently the Colt was Churchill’s favourite gun.
On 26 August a state of emergency was declared and all reservists were called up. By the end of the month Churchill was at full stretch, attempting to complete the second volume of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He advised his publishers that he had completed 350,000 words* and was working every spare moment to try to complete it according to his contract. He knew that he would have no time for writing once war was declared. That same night, as he slept, the German Army invaded Poland. Thompson now became Churchill’s government-employed shadow, because it was recognised that he was the number one target for assassination by the Nazi regime.
Next morning Churchill drove to Downing Street and was offered a Cabinet sea
t, without a ministry. He accepted it – how else could he be involved at the heart of the fight he knew was forthcoming? Chamberlain promised to announce the appointment, but failed to do so for several days: he was still trying to negotiate peace, still offering to ignore the incursions, if the Germans would even now withdraw from Poland.
Churchill based himself at Morpeth Mansions during these anxious days. One of his first acts as a Cabinet member was to write to the Prime Minister pointing out that the average age of the War Cabinet Chamberlain had detailed to him was ‘over 64! Only one year short of the Old Age Pension! If however you included [Archibald] Sinclair (49) and Eden (42) the average comes down to 571/2.’15 Winston attended a parliamentary debate on 2 September, noting, ‘There was no doubt that the temper of the House was for war. I even deemed it more resolute and united than in the similar scene on August 3, 1914, in which I had also taken part.’16
The next evening Chamberlain was finally forced, by a group of MPs who burst into Downing Street (through the garden door backing on to Horse Guards Parade) where he was dining with Lord Halifax, to send an ultimatum to Berlin. It stated that unless Germany halted its attack on Poland within three hours, Britain would consider herself at war with Germany. Chamberlain famously broadcast soon afterwards that ‘No such undertaking has been received’, and Britain declared war on Germany forthwith, quickly followed by a similar declaration by France.
Within minutes Londoners had their first experience of an air-raid warning. Clementine remarked sourly that it was typical of the Germans to be so prompt and efficient, and Churchill fortified himself with cigars and brandy before the couple hurried into an air-raid shelter. It was a false alarm – and just as well, for the nearest shelter, Churchill noted, was an ordinary basement room that was not even sandbagged. The mood of those in the shelter was cheerful and jocular, but Thompson watched Winston prowling around ‘like a caged animal’.17
After the all-clear sounded Churchill rushed to Parliament, where he spoke eloquently, and it was exhilarating for him, after a decade of being the man to whom no one listened, once again to hold that institution in the palm of his hand. It was no longer, he told his rapt audience, a case of fighting for Danzig or Poland. Britain would now be fighting for herself, to save the world from Nazi tyranny ‘and in defence of all that is most sacred to man’.18 In short, it was a fight to establish on ‘impregnable rock’ the rights of the individual. More than a quarter of a century had passed, he reflected, and Britain was again threatened by the same enemy. There was no triumph for him in the fact that war had been declared, as he had so often forewarned, but he found some satisfaction in that all his warnings had turned out to be accurate.
Later that day, when Churchill was summoned to Downing Street again, he assumed and hoped that he was to be offered a ministerial post. Clementine went with him, waiting outside in the car during the short interview. Winston came hurrying back to her, delighted, saying as he got into the car, ‘It’s the Admiralty. That’s a lot better than I thought.’19 He did not wait for written confirmation (in fact he did not formally receive the Patent from the King until 5 September) but sent word to the Admiralty that he would take charge at once, and they might expect him at 6 p.m. As he entered the office of the First Lord – his old room – he recalled his ‘pain and sorrow’, almost a quarter of a century before, when he had been forced to quit it so ignominiously. There was his old chair and the wooden map case he had fitted up himself in 1911. In the following weeks he would find many of the furnishings he had formerly used, still in store, and he had them reinstated. According to his private detective, from that day onwards until the end of the war Churchill worked a regular 120-hour week.20
Immediately, the signal was flashed to all ships in the fleet – WINSTON IS BACK – and the words reverberated throughout the city on newspaper placards. It was a popular appointment among the professionals. And the Admiralty was reinvigorated, not least by Churchill’s confident approach which seemed to embody all the enthusiasm of his previous leadership. The lack of protection for ‘the finest Navy in the world’ made him angry, and when he visited Scapa Flow* he was horrified to note that it was almost undefended from air attack. But it was a German submarine, only a few weeks after war was declared, which penetrated Scapa and sank the battleship Royal Oak with the loss of 833 lives. This was – in his words – ‘like a body blow’ to Churchill.21 He then visited all naval bases and establishments, ‘prodding, goading, criticising and encouraging’.22 He seemed to know instinctively what needed to be done to remedy the years of neglect, and where the priorities lay. Memoranda flew from his desk, invariably politely couched: ‘Pray let me have the figures by tomorrow…’, ‘Pray let me know on a single sheet of paper the situation as it stands…’ The recipients knew that despite the old-fashioned phraseology these were not requests but demands. Soon he was back at Scapa to check the new defences. While inspecting some dummy warships moored near HMS Hood to fool the German U-boats he noticed that there were no seagulls hovering around them. He ordered food to be thrown to the birds every day from the dummies to make them more lifelike. No detail was too small to catch his attention.
The wilderness years were over. ‘Had the Prime Minister in the first instance given me the choice between the War Cabinet and the Admiralty,’ Churchill wrote in his memoirs, ‘I should of course have chosen the Admiralty. Now I was to have both.’23 He was sixty-four, but his star was back on track and moving confidently through the firmament. The destiny he had always believed was his, awaited him.
21
1939–40
‘But You Don’t Know Me’
The American journalist Virginia Cowles first met Randolph in New York in the early Thirties. She next ran into him after the Germans had occupied the Rhineland in 1936 when he was already attacking the policy of appeasement in his newspaper columns. She recalled:
I greatly admired the courage with which he launched his views; nevertheless, going out with him was like going out with a time bomb. Wherever he went an explosion seemed to follow. With a natural and brilliant gift of oratory, and a disregard for the opinions of his elders, he often held dinner parties pinned in a helpless and angry silence. I never knew a young man who had the ability to antagonise more easily.1
Randolph was very useful to Cowles, even, in February 1939, arranging a Russian visa so that she could travel there in order to report on the Soviet Union, something she had been trying to do for over two years. One day in the late 1930s he took her to Chartwell for tea where she found the family ‘at home’: Winston dressed in a torn linen coat and a battered hat, pottering in the grounds; Clementine, ‘tall and handsome’, presiding over all; Mary looking after a newborn lamb. Cowles thought the most endearing thing about the Churchill family was the affection they all showered on Winston. This was totally understandable, she thought, for he had ‘such a human touch’ that one was instinctively drawn to him. As they entered the house Winston told Randolph sotto voce that he must not tell Clemmie that he’d forgotten to wear his galoshes, ‘or she’ll scold me’. When he showed Cowles around his studio he said to her, ‘With all the fascinating things there are to do in the world, it’s odd to think that some people actually while away the time by playing Patience. Just fancy!’2
During a second visit to Chartwell, in July 1939, she found Winston working hard at volume three of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘But I’ll never be able to finish it off before the war begins,’ he told her ruefully. When that happened, he said, they planned to close Chartwell and move into the cottage he had built in the orchard, for which he had done much of the bricklaying and other work himself. ‘You won’t be living there,’ Randolph interrupted indignantly. ‘You’ll be at No. 10 Downing Street.’
His father smiled. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got the same fanciful ideas that you have,’ he said.
‘Well, at any rate, you’ll be in the Cabinet,’ Randolph retorted. Winston muttered that things would have
to get very bad before that happened. The next time Cowles saw Winston, just weeks later, he was the First Lord of the Admiralty.3
Although Winston had for years publicly deprecated the government’s lack of policy in developing and building aeroplanes and in building up munitions, he found the Navy, at least, in a good state to fight a war. This was mainly because Germany had been prevented from building ships for so many years and did not have the naval strength she had boasted in 1914, so Britain could still rule the seas. But Winston knew that the safety of Britain could no longer be wholly guaranteed by the Navy. Once Blériot had flown the Channel, the invulnerability that Britain had always enjoyed as an island was lost for ever. It was not only at sea but in the air that this coming war would be won, and Winston knew from his informants that, in numbers at least, the German Air Force was superior to Britain’s. Yet at first even he did not envisage quite how that Air Force would be used to support the German Navy, to Britain’s disadvantage at sea.
One of his first acts on assuming office was to summon Randolph to take part in a highly secret mission: to sail to Cherbourg aboard HMS Kelly, captained by Lord Louis Mountbatten, and bring back to England the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In August, Randolph had joined his father’s old regiment, the 4th Hussars; the old cavalry regiment had been officially mechanised but the promised tanks had not yet arrived, so there was no action. Kicking his heels in the boarding-school-like atmosphere of the camp, Randolph was thrilled to be given something important to do. Before going ashore in France to meet the former King, he made sure he was properly decked out in full dress uniform, right down to the spurs on his military boots. The Duke, who was eagle-eyed in matters of etiquette, had hardly stepped down from the train when he noticed that Randolph’s spurs were upside down. And to the young Churchill’s horror and embarrassment the former King insisted on stooping down to remove them and fit them correctly. Throughout the return voyage to Portsmouth Randolph was ragged mercilessly, until the Duke realised that he’d got all the mileage he could out of him. Turning to Mountbatten, he remarked that he was surprised that he hadn’t noticed the error. ‘Well Sir,’ said Mountbatten implacably, ‘of course I noticed it, but I didn’t want to spoil your fun.’4
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