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The serene and widely mourned death of Queen Victoria had occurred on the twenty-second of January 1901 without causing a political ripple. She had “received a crown that had been tarnished by ineptitude and vice” and had made it “the symbol of private virtue and public honor.” Her eldest son and successor, Edward VII, a chemistry expert, was a man of such wise and judicial qualities that even the Radical and Socialist parties voted to extend the royal prerogatives, and the country entered upon another governmental phase that exemplified the best of the monarchical system. In the main it was a period of calm, refinement, and poise, suitable to the development of skilled parliamentarians. Onto this tranquil scene strode the young Churchill, fired with change and reform. He was a Conservative but he had inherited an errant Liberalism. In the matter of his opening address, he got down to business with uncommon speed. As a rule, fledgling Members were expected to sit by with deference while their elders showed them the ropes. It was not considered seemly for a youngster to disclose too early that he had the gift of speech. Often as much as a year went by before a new Member came forward with opinions. Even Lord Randolph, a stormy petrel of exceptional intransigence, waited two months before entering his first demurrer, and he took almost no part in the debates for three years thereafter.
Within two days after his son had entered the chamber, it became painfully clear to everybody that a major oration was imminent. Bristling with activity, Churchill sat at a desk making notes on slips of paper and tossing them ostentatiously into an upturned hat. A certain nervousness ran through the House. His offhand remarks about the Church of England were recalled by some, and others remembered his unsuccessful attempt to start a war with France, at the Rotherhithe Town Hall. When he first came in, there had been a momentary confusion about where he should sit. The confusion was in the minds of the other Members only. Churchill stepped up to the seat formerly occupied by his father, made himself comfortable, and laid out quite a substantial array of equipment: scratch pads, loose-leaf notebooks, a variety of memoranda, and works of reference. He seemed as much at home, said one writer, “as if he were the oldest, not the youngest, man present.”
“Men who watch ‘the Boy’ detect many resemblances between him and his father,” wrote the English biographer C. E. B. Roberts in 1927. “He has the same large eyes and square forehead; the same habit of throwing up his head and laughing loudly at anything that amuses him; the same mannerisms — rubbing his hand over his coat as if his heart pained him, twisting order-papers endlessly into spills, bending forward to listen to conversations with strained attention and his hands folded, and walking at great speed through the lobby with a pronounced stoop and his hat swinging in his hand like a cane. Even his voice, resonant and with a touch of asperity, is curiously similar to Lord Randolph’s.”
On the third day after his seating, Churchill arose and teed off, in the golfing term. All did not go exactly as he had planned. There was in the House of Commons at this time another rising young man, a dissatisfied and bitterly eloquent Welshman named David Lloyd George, a Liberal, who popped up before Churchill and sailed into a full-dress impromptu speech. As Churchill wrote afterward, “he soon became animated and even violent. I constructed in succession sentence after sentence to hook on with after he should sit down. Each of these poor couplings became in turn obsolete. A sense of alarm and even despair crept over me.”
For a few minutes it seemed as though the veteran of the Chicago hecklings had met his match. The angry and unexpected grumblings (Lloyd George had planned only to move an amendment) had pulled the carpet from under Churchill’s pithiest phrases. He was groping for a well-turned mot when the Member on his left, Thomas Gibson Bowles, a Conservative of long experience in manufacturing spot witticisms, leaned over and suggested, “You might say ‘Instead of making his violent speech without moving his moderate amendment, he had better have moved his moderate amendment without making his violent speech.’ ” Churchill gratefully jumped up and broke in, and to his surprise heard Lloyd George say, “I will curtail my remarks as I am sure the House wishes to hear a new Member.”
Bowles’ offering had saved the day; everybody agreed that it was a very passable barb, and they gave Churchill all the credit. In the British Parliament considerable weight has always been attached to graceful rhetoric. Previous to the Socialist revolution, its Members were largely men of taste and classical education, and their utterances were important contributions to the world’s store of beautiful letters. This is in unfortunate contrast to the American Congress, in which most Members seek only to clothe their remarks in syntax palatable to constituencies nurtured by soap opera and vulgarisms exalting the improbable therapeutics of tobacco. It must be said that all too often the speakers fail to come up even to that dismal level. Besides the borrowed wisecrack, the body of Churchill’s first speech was regarded as commensurate to the House of Commons standard. The topic under discussion was the Boer War, and he got off many positive statements that he assured them were made from firsthand knowledge: “I have traveled a good deal about South Africa during the last ten months, and I should like to lay before the House some of the considerations which have been very forcibly borne in upon me during that period.” At the beginning of his remarks, he was heard to stutter rather badly, and he looked nervous. “Here and there he paused in his sentences as if searching for a word,” says one witness. “But the more he stumbled and halted, the more determined his expression grew, and there was no doubt in any listener’s mind that he would be heard through and often.”
As in Chicago, he drew his warmest responses from the Irish Nationalists, sometimes in favor, sometimes against. “The Boers,” he said, “may prefer to stand by their old cry, ‘Death or Independence.’ ” (Loud cheers from the Irish Members.) “I do not see anything to rejoice at in that prospect,” he added, “because, if it be so, the war will enter upon a very sad and gloomy phase.” (Fairly loud boos from the Irish Members.) “Besides, the Nationalists ought not to regard the war as they do, both because of the great achievements of the Irish commanders in South Africa and because there can be no hope of reforms in Ireland until the end of the conflict in South Africa leaves men free to deal with other questions.” (Quite loud but exceedingly puzzled boos and cheers, in about equal measure.)
It has been said of the speech that it was often difficult to tell which side Churchill was on. Some of the Conservatives finally concluded that he formed a kind of side of his own. Reaching one climactic part, he shouted, in connection with the high qualities of the enemy, “The Boers who are fighting in the field — and if I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field —” and Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, took advantage of a lull to remark to a neighbor, “That’s the way to throw away seats!” Nevertheless, he and the others applauded courteously when the young firebrand had finished, and they shook his hand warmly afterward in the lounge. According to Churchill’s own account, he was done up, in need of medication. “The usual restoratives were applied,” he wrote, “and I sat in a comfortable coma till I was strong enough to go home.”
The speech had interesting repercussions. Immediately after Churchill finished, Sir Robert Reid arose and said, “I am sure the House is glad to recognize that the honorable Member who has just sat down possesses the same courage which so distinguished Lord Randolph Churchill during his short and brilliant career in the House. I have listened with great pleasure to the honorable gentleman.” Joseph Chamberlain, despite his complaint about the possible loss of seats, described the address as “very admirable,” and Herbert Asquith, the Liberal leader, called it “interesting and eloquent.” The Secretary for War, Sir William Brodrick, a vague and myopic man, contributed a bizarre touch when he apparently got the notion that Winston Churchill was Lord Randolph. Brodrick enjoyed the speech, he said, just as he had always enjoyed Randolph’s speeches — more power to the “right honorable” Member. Unquestionably the most curious reaction of all was r
egistered by an Irish Member, who, plainly overstimulated, sprang to his feet and attempted to make an address in Erse, the Irish form of Gaelic. He was quelled, and the startled House adjourned. It had been a gala day.
Not long afterward, in a series in the Daily News called “Parliamentary Sketches,” the journalist H. W. Massingham said of Churchill’s effort: “Address, accent, appearance do not help him. But he has one quality — intellect. He has an eye — and he can judge and think for himself. Parts of the speech were faulty enough — there was clap-trap with the wisdom and insight. But such remarks as the impossibility of the country returning to prosperity under military government — the picture of the old Boers — more squires than peasants — ordered about by boy subalterns, the appeal for easy and honorable terms of surrender, showed that this young man has kept his critical faculty through the glamour of association with our arms. The tone was, on the whole, quiet, and through the speech ran, as I have said, the subdued but obvious plea for sympathy towards the foe.”
Churchill settled into his new position quickly. The truth is that he settled into it so fast as to cause a certain amount of embarrassment. Only a week after his first speech, he advised his colleagues not to embark on a full-dress inquiry into the conduct of the war; however, he sympathized with their anxiety, realizing as he did that satisfactory information was scarce. “I have in many cases myself supplied the only report given to the country on some of the most important matters. I feel keenly the responsibility which has thus been placed upon me, and I think it is time for the Government and the War Office to relieve me of some of it.” Asquith, a man of wry spirit, was unable to resist a comment on this self-conscious pronouncement. He hoped that “every possible step” would be taken to lighten “that burden of responsibility which at present weighs so heavily on the honorable Member’s shoulders.”
*
While Churchill started his parliamentary career with a solemn sense of his importance, he soon allowed his native humor a loose reign. Before very long he had acquired a reputation for wit that persists to the present hour. He also became noted for unorthodox and even impudent departures from the House of Commons ritual. In general, his witticisms have always been somewhat personal.
Once, when he was making an acidulous speech, a heckler jumped up and tried to expostulate but could produce only a few choked bubbles, like a defective drain. Churchill departed from his set remarks to observe to the House and to the gallery, “My right honorable friend should not develop more indignation than he can contain.”
Churchill himself is a heckler of unparalleled talent. His disagreements take a rich variety of forms. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, once defeated by Churchill, was making a speech before Commons and noticed him, on the front bench of the Opposition, shaking his head in such vigorous style that attention was distracted from the address. “I see my right honorable friend shaking his head,” cried Joynson-Hicks in exasperation. “I wish to remind him that I am only expressing my own opinion.”
“And I wish to remind the speaker that I am only shaking my own head,” replied Churchill.
Not long after he had been criticized for making literary capital out of his public life, he advised the House sternly: “Leave the Past to History, particularly since I intend to write the History myself.”
Addressing himself to the War Office, which had issued angry appeals for manpower but which had been guilty of husbanding all its own clerks, he shouted, “Physician, comb thyself.”
Churchill seldom misses a chance at a slapstick gesture. During one of his speeches, to a crowded House, a junior Socialist member wished to retrieve a paper from the broad desk that separates the front benches of the Government and the Opposition. To be inconspicuous, he dropped to all fours and crawled silently around the corner of the desk. On the other side, Churchill stopped talking, leaned over the desk, and, after an embarrassing silence, said, “Well, where did you come from?” The man sprang up, red as a beet, and retired from the Chamber.
Periodically Churchill has attacked the House of Lords, which he once described as “onesided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresented, irresponsible and absentee.” But he has been just as vitriolic about the other side. He called the Socialist regime a “government of the duds, by the duds, and for the duds,” and predicted that it would vanish “unwept, unhonoured, unsung and unhung.”
Churchill has always been more than ordinarily discourteous toward Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain’s tiny Fascist group. He listens to the counterfeit Hitler’s speeches with obvious impatience. On one occasion he arose, when Mosley had finished an address that was both empty and awkward, to say, “I can well understand the honorable Member’s wishing to speak for practice. He needs it badly.”
Once in a while Churchill will introduce a personal touch of a homely nature. When the elderly and well-known Glasgow Socialist, David Kirkwood, was bouncing and sputtering at one of his speeches, Churchill stopped and said, “Now, David, behave yourself.” To everybody’s surprise, Kirkwood subsided and made no further racket.
At every step in his development, Churchill has shown a brilliant and generous flair for eulogizing his contemporaries. Of Lord Charles Beresford, he said that “he can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and, when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.”
Of Trotsky he remarked to his colleagues that “He sits disconsolate — a skin of malice stranded for a time on the shores of the Black Sea and now washed up in the Gulf of Mexico.” Nearly everybody has some pet aversion, and Sir Stafford Cripps has long been Churchill’s. Several times he confusedly mentioned Cripps as Sir Stifford Crapps, and in the House, on December 12, 1946, he said that “None of his colleagues can compare with him in that acuteness and energy of mind with which he devotes himself to so many topics injurious to the strength and welfare of the State.”
Having once branded Ramsay MacDonald as a “boneless wonder,” Churchill could not resist amplifying the theme. “I remember, when I was a child,” he said, “being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
Regarding MacDonald’s mistakes and airy explanations, Churchill observed that he was “the greatest living master of falling without hurting himself.”
Churchill’s briefer descriptions have always been regarded as excellent. Aneurin Bevan, he said, had been a “squalid nuisance” all through the last war. It was seldom that he referred to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia as anything but “Prince Palsy,” and nobody has yet come up with a better thumbnail biography of Hitler than Churchill’s “bloodthirsty guttersnipe.” Mussolini took second rhetorical billing in his fascist catalogue as a “whipped jackal.” The pious followers of Gandhi were outraged to hear the Indian Mahatma depicted as “a seditious. Middle Temple lawyer.” On one occasion, having painted lurid pictures of several rogues, Churchill arrived at Pierre Laval, groped for a suitable phrase, and then said, “I am afraid I have rather exhausted the possibilities of the English language.”
Churchill’s friends and foes alike suffer from his barbs. After one of the members of his Nationalist Government had gone over to the Labour Party, he commented that it was the first time he had ever heard of a rat swimming toward a sinking ship.
When the new Conservative M.P., Alfred Bossom, was making a speech in the House, Churchill turned around to stare at him, and then asked in his hoarse, winged whisper, “Who is that man?” Upon hearing his name, he said, “Bossom? Bossom? Why, it’s neither the one thing nor the other.”
For many years the House of Commons has been richly entertained by Churchi
ll’s easy treatment of foreign affairs.
“We shall continue to operate on the Italian donkey at both ends,” he once said — “with a carrot and with a stick.”
“I have no hostility for the Arabs,” he told the Members in 1936. “The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordania, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.”
Quite a long time ago he summed up the Far Eastern situation by saying that “China, as the years pass, is being eaten by Japan like an artichoke, leaf by leaf.” Later, feeling that this needed clarification, he told the Members that Japan’s policy was “to make hell while the sun shines.”
“France,” he said, “though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core.”
Of his mother’s native land, he noted sarcastically in 1918 that America was making great strides in helping to settle international problems and had “proposed to send a detachment of the Young Men’s Christian Association to offer moral guidance to the Russian people.”
One of the qualities most admired about Churchill in Commons is his unique gift of impenitence. He has great resistance to embarrassment. Finding himself on the wrong side of a question, he can switch with the speedy grace of a ballet dancer, and explain it entertainingly. Of one prodigious leap to safety, he said, “I acted with great promptitude. In the nick of time, just as Mr. Snowden was rising with overwhelming fury, I got up and withdrew [the tax on kerosene]. Was I humiliated? Was I accused of running away? No! Everyone said: ‘How clever! How quick! How right!’ Pardon me referring to it. It was one of my best days.”
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 22
