Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  During this election there had flown into Churchill’s life the screeching magpie of Woman’s Suffrage. From a distance of fifty years it is hard to determine why the movement selected him as its personal devil. Something about his face, something emphatically male in his attitude, acted on the ladies like catnip. The mention of his name once started a free-for-all in the dining saloon of a train, painfully injuring an elderly man reading a sporting journal, and a group of suffragettes were removed from the street of one northern city while pelting an enlarged picture of Churchill with dried apricots. The tocsin had been sounded by Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, a member of an old and distinguished family, who announced abruptly that “in Winston Churchill the Liberal Government will receive the weight of the women’s opposition.” Her campaign tactics, presented candidly, were to appear at his meetings and break them up, tearing down the stands if necessary. Accordingly, as Churchill, Sir Edward Grey, and Lord Durham mounted one platform in Manchester, a paralyzing uproar broke out in the rear of the crowd and a flying wedge of aroused females, wearing the bonnets and badges of their guild, came charging to the fore, where they wrought ingenious havoc. Sir Edward Grey was, as he afterward said, “jostled,” and Lord Durham was clapped over the head with an umbrella. Churchill got off scot-free, if some fairly bisexual epithets may be discounted.

  The meeting might easily have had melancholy results had it not been for the opportune arrival of the police, who had come with strong reinforcements, it being widely known that a suffragette in full cry can fight like a tiger. Miss Pankhurst and her chief of staff, a Miss Kenney, were lodged in the nearest lockup, whence they issued a formal statement, their first communique of the war. It affirmed their refusal to be bailed out by “anything in pants.” The next day, in communique No. 2, same sector, they declared that Churchill had visited the jail and offered money; they had hustled him on his way. The commanders were then fined but on principle they elected to sit it out rather than pay up. This was held by the press to be obtuse, in view of the fact that the Pankhurst family was extremely wealthy and could have bailed out all the women in Manchester, had the occasion arisen.

  After their release, Miss Pankhurst and Miss Kenney organized their battalions in a drive to plaster all the posters of Churchill with pictures of Miss Pankhurst and Miss Kenney, together with paragraphs on their credo. Churchill then issued a communique of his own, declaring that he was being “henpecked.” He was so miserably harassed that Joynson-Hicks, a man of ironclad character, made a public appeal for fair play. For his pains he was advised that the suffragettes’ actions “will be determined without reference to the words of yourself or of your opponent.” Soon afterward, at a meeting in a hall, Miss Pankhurst was invited to the platform to ask questions — it was the only way Churchill could contrive to prevent her from having hysterics in the audience. Once seated on the platform, however, Miss Pankhurst took him so literally that she jumped up with a question every time he opened his mouth. Also, she had a trick, possibly just a nervous habit, of going “yah, yah, yah” between questions. Churchill has never been the most patient man in the world, and he finally exploded. “You are bringing disgrace upon an honored name,” he told her, and then he shouted (nailing down his perfidy forever in the eyes of the suffragettes), “Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise. I am not going to be henpecked into a question of such importance.”

  What transpired has been described by Miss Pankhurst in her book, The Suffragette Movement, which compares favorably in spirit with Mein Kampf. “I would have gone then,” her account went, “but in a scuffle, during which all the men on the platform stood up to hide what was happening from the audience, I was pushed into a side room. I was left there, the door being locked on the outside, but not before I had opened the window and called to the people in the side street to witness the conduct of an enthusiastic Liberal who was jumping about like a madman and threatening to scratch my face. It appeared that I was a prisoner, for the windows were barred, but the people who had gathered outside called to me that a window at the other end of the room had a couple of bars missing. They helped me out and called for a speech. When the night’s talking was done, I gave my story to the press. It appeared with big headlines next day, producing innumerable jokes at the candidate’s expense. There was no more kidnapping.”

  The merry spat continued. Indeed it went on without any interruption except for the First World War until as late as 1928, when unlimited suffrage was belatedly passed by Parliament. The situation was not eased by the abrupt participation of Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a rather violent anti-women poem for the Evening Standard entitled, The Female of the Species. During this fretful period Churchill remained the leading scapegoat, harried and derided, but Asquith, who succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908, was the bitterest foe of the movement. Eventually Churchill came to profess a sort of unaggressive regard for the women’s vote, but the tragic fact is that nobody believed him. Wherever he went, the ladies followed. The gruff bark of his Pied Piper’s voice sent a queue of angry reformers dancing through the streets. They snapped and bayed at his public speeches. In Bristol he stepped off a train and was horsewhipped by one Theresa Garnett, a sublieutenant of the Order, whose demoniac cries indicated her belief that he had once said, “These ladies ought to be horsewhipped.” This was incorrect; it was another member of the Liberal Party who had made the remark. So Churchill took the trouncing for nothing. Struck once across the face, he warded off further blows by throwing up an arm, and jumped back into his car. The gentle Garnett was led off to the jail (already crowded with her sisters) and charged with being a public nuisance. When Churchill made inquiries about her health, she issued the usual statement saying she had no personal antagonism against him but had hit him in the face as a means of showing her general aptitude for politics. Churchill’s reply was, it is said, that he would never dream of taking the horsewhipping personally.

  He was not much hurt — only a rosy welt remained — and he proceeded to Colston Hall, where he dined on a terrace, while a friend of Miss Garnett’s threw stones at him from the roof of an adjoining building. The shots were wide. One waiter carrying a dish of soup was struck on the foot; otherwise the meal was normal. At a meeting in Bradford a male suffragette (a good many had joined the cause, most of them youths of goldfish-swallowing intellect from universities like Oxford and Cambridge) was so forcibly ejected from the hall that his leg was broken. There followed a noisy hue and cry. His female supporters claimed that his conduct had not been sufficiently eccentric for such punishment — he had only been shouting, “Honk! Honk!” and breaking eggs on his head. But the sting persisted until one of his fellows, an acne-ridden child suckled by Mid-Victorian poets, assaulted Churchill in a train corridor. “Take this, you dirty cur,” cried the suffragette, and lashed at the Minister with a dog whip. By this time Churchill was traveling with a corps of “detectives,” or bodyguards, and they caught the impassioned collegian in time. Later on, in police court, the defendant based his demand for release on an allegation that he had been misquoted. “I did not say ‘You dirty cur,’ ” he told the magistrate, stamping his foot, “I only said, ‘You cur.’ ” The ruling was that, adjective or no adjective, attention must be centered on the dog whip.

  At one political dinner party, attendants rushed in to Churchill with the news that suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings in the public square and would stay there until they received the vote. Churchill answered loudly, “A man might as well chain himself to the railings of St. Thomas Hospital and say he wouldn’t move until he has had a baby.” (His moderate conversion to suffrage came sometime after this.) Despite his witticism, the movement continued apace. In 1907 there occurred the well-known “Mud March” through London. The ladies had thought to conduct a large public demonstration in order to arouse sympathy over their voteless plight. They printed a great many placards, laid in a supply of chalk with which to scribble messages on sidewalks and
buildings, and got spruced up in suffrage finery, a kind of festive black with belligerently shaped bonnets. By misfortune, a whopper of a downpour started up two hours before the event, and the ladies ran into as much trouble as the Children of Israel had getting out of Egypt. Their path lay through many dirt lanes, paving being spotty in those days, and before long the demonstration had all the earmarks of a hog wallow. To their credit, it must be said that the suffragettes were not dismayed by the experience. In a sort of religious frenzy they took to the gumbo, whooping, splashing, and stumbling. A report that a number of them had been hitting things up in a pub was never proved, but several did make so free with the mud that three shopowners were compelled to summon the law. If the purpose of the march was to provoke interest, the event was successful, for people came forth to look who hadn’t been out in the rain for years. Their convulsed laughter rocked through the city.

  The ladies took these attentions as complimentary and organized several more demonstrations, which went off unremarked, the weather having refused to co-operate, turning fine. A gaudier scheme was then devised. It was announced from one headquarters, a corset works, that any suffragettes arrested would knock off eating. No more food until they were released. At first, the authorities were bored, and then worried. The ladies lounged about the prisons, very gaunt, declining nourishment with such martyred sighs that the turnkeys quit eating in sympathy. Parliament thereupon stepped into the crisis with the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act, popularly known as the “Cat and Mouse Act.” It provided that women released for hunger-striking could be rearrested when they had got their strength back. It was a curious law. Under it, the irrepressible Miss Pankhurst was collared and tossed into jail eight times. Her weight went up and down like a barometer. She would be arrested, say for throwing a brick through a plate-glass window, setting fire to a mailbox, and hitting a policeman with a wagon tongue, and would sit down and go foodless for five days, and then would be turned loose. A detective assigned to follow her would decide, perhaps on the following Tuesday, that she was back up to par and restore her to the lockup, where she would cut off the calories again. And so it went everywhere.

  The suffragettes actually defeated Churchill in 1908. Upon the death of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, who succeeded him, reappointed Churchill to the Cabinet but in a superior post, that of President of the Board of Trade. He followed Lloyd George, who was advanced to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. By an old ruling, it was necessary for such an appointee to go to his constituency again. Churchill found himself facing his former opponent, the pious Joynson-Hicks, in a by-election at Northwest Manchester. The suffragettes turned out by the hundreds, making his meetings a nightmare of confusion. Joynson-Hicks, on the other hand, was able to bawl on without interruption in favor of ecclesiastics and pink lemonade. When the returns were in, Churchill was out, by a score of 5517 to 4988. As he was leaving the Town Hall, a wildly celebrating suffragette seized his arm and yelled, “It’s the women who have done this — now you will understand that we must have our vote.” Churchill angrily wrenched his arm free and said, “Get away, woman.”

  His defeat had a silver lining: he received a telegram inviting him to stand from a constituency in Dundee, Scotland, where a vacancy had been caused by the raising of Edmund Robertson to the peerage. This was certainly a blow to the suffragettes after their exhausting crusade in Manchester, but they rallied with spirit. In fact, they assigned one of their ablest field workers, a specialist, to the zone. It should be explained that, in the movement, particular skills were encouraged. A few women were deadly accurate with rocks and empty bottles, others could outrun the speediest police. One worker, no more than a child, could “heehaw” like a jackass, and a representative from Bath was a virtuoso on the ticktack, or window-rattler. The emissary assigned to Dundee was a Miss Malony, with a very high rating. Her line was carrying a large brass bell around and clanging it during speeches. It was a neat contrivance and had earned her the sobriquet, amongst her fellows and the press, of “La Bell Malony.” At Dundee Miss Malony laid into her instrument with the selfless zeal that had seen Miss Pankhurst jailed eight times for irregular eating habits. However, according to newspaper advices of the region, the Dundeeites did not take kindly to the obbligato, but admonished her, in the local idiom, to “gang awa’ and mak’ your perritch.”

  La Bell Malony rang on, and Churchill, at one point deafened by the clamor, stopped his speech and sat down to smoke a cigarette. “I won’t attempt to compete with a young and pretty lady in a high state of excitement,” he told the crowd. “It’s no use your being cross,” returned Miss Malony sternly. Her severity was not unique in the campaign. Churchill’s opponent this time, destroying all the laws of probability, was a Mr. Scrymgeour, whose sole claim on the public was a wild compulsion to spread teetotalism. As if Joynson-Hicks and his temperance were not enough, along came Scrymgeour to babble about chopping down the distilleries and pouring all the alcohol into the sea. It was almost too much for Churchill, who rarely ascended a platform without having a few warming nips beforehand. Luckily for him, Dundee was about the least likely place in the world for Scrymgeour to get his desiccated start. The pleasant constituency had earned the name, through municipal pride and devoted effort, of being “the drunkenest city in Scotland.” The louder Scrymgeour brayed for abstinence, the more people flocked to gaze on the convivial countenance of Churchill. And as Malony futilely dingdonged, he carried the election, leaving Scrymgeour to ponder a more arid locality. Unquenched, in true suffrage style, La Bell accompanied the victor to the railroad station, clanging away beside his carriage. But she didn’t look happy. Churchill had evened his score with the ladies.

  Chapter 18

  AT THE HEIGHT of his bedevilment by suffragettes, Churchill got married. The event was the fashionable climax of an especially gay year in London. Several other Cabinet ministers, spurred on by the success of the Liberal Party, also took wives. Churchill’s was a distinguished beauty, Miss Clementine Hozier, whose father, Colonel Sir H. M. Hozier, had been an officer of the 3rd Dragoons and was for many years before his death secretary of Lloyd’s. The bride’s mother was Lady Blanche Ogilvy, daughter of the Countess of Airlie, of the principal family in Dundee. Churchill and Miss Hozier had first met at a house party and it was through her people’s influence that he was provided with his new constituency.

  The wedding took place in September of 1908 in the hyper-exclusive St. Margaret’s Church, the little church that sits in the yard of Westminster Abbey. For a pageant of such precise ritual, everything went off splendidly, with the exception that Churchill was reported to be wearing brown shoes. There was universal agreement on the handsome appearance of the bride; Churchill’s was described by one guest as being “powerful if ugly.” When the couple marched down the aisle, Lord Rosebery remarked. “There go two lively chips — the marriage won’t last six months.” The groom had gathered his intimates and drinking companions around him (Hugh Cecil was his best man), and in the words of one of his biographers, he seemed to have been in a “less solemn mood than anyone else.” Besides his close friends, one of the largest crowds that ever to this day has thronged the churchyard turned out to wish the couple well. Then as now the country was about equally divided between those who favored Churchill and those who opposed him, but everybody has always been proud to have him around.

  The wedding presents were piled high, including handsome ones from the King and Queen and from all the members of the Cabinet. A fractional breakdown showed 25 pairs of candlesticks, 21 inkstands, 15 vases, 20 bowls, 10 cigarette cases, 14 trays, and 8 salt and pepper sets. Churchill in this period had made a speech in which he spoke bitterly of the “vulgar and joyless luxuries” of the Tory rich, but he took his bride on a brief honeymoon to his ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, where they enjoyed many of its vulgar luxuries, and then they journeyed to Lake Maggiore, in Italy. Their first domicile was a small house in Queen Anne’s Gate, an establishment org
anized inexpensively, since neither the bride nor the groom had an independent income, although Churchill had added thirty thousand dollars to his savings as proceeds from the biography of Lord Randolph. They shortly moved to a slightly more pretentious home in Eccleston Square. From those first happy days of their marriage until recently, the Churchills have been hard-pressed to find sufficient funds with which to meet their standard of living.

  The groom’s departure from solemnity at his wedding was indeed unusual at this time. His habits had undergone changes of late. The carousing with his spirited comrades had given way to a solemn, if refreshment-fortified, perusal of his career. Before his marriage he had occupied a flat in Bruton Street with his brother, Major John Churchill, a bond salesman who had no particular ambition and was as festive as anybody around town, a prime figure at the dances and other entertainments. Brother Winston had given these up; he went mainly to functions that combined business with pleasure — club luncheons attended by politicians and quiet soirées of the policy-makers. On the rare occasions when he did attend a social event, he was the instant center of the group, almost certain to say something biting and memorable. A contemporary wrote, “When he emerges, however, he imposes his personality on the company. His is not the studied effectiveness of Mr. Bernard Shaw in earlier days, when the young dramatist-novelist-Fabian would visit a party to deliver a prepared epigram and then hasten elsewhere to repeat it. Churchill’s bon mots are spontaneous.”

  The years from 1907 to the First World War were ones of violent change for Churchill in several ways. As Under-Secretary for the Colonies he had embraced many liberal, and even socialistic, measures; as President of the Board of Trade he entered upon a course that then constituted dangerous radicalism. He became what one of his affectionate biographers has ruefully described as “the most hated politician in the country.” The phase represented, perhaps, a variation of his love for the adventurous and the new. After his years of literary barnstorming, Churchill was finding the life of a serious legislator a little stifling. And before his term as Under-Secretary had ended, he had been able to concoct a sort of good-will tour, during which he could survey a few of the lands of his charge, and have some fun. Ever alert for business opportunities, he also took the precaution of obtaining a commission from Strand magazine to do several articles on his travels, at fancy rates.