Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  “Was there ever a more awful spectacle in the whole history of the world than is unfolded by the agony of Russia? This vast country, this mighty branch of the human family, not only produced enough food for itself but, before the War, was one of the great granaries of the world, from which food was exported to every country. It is now reduced to famine of the most terrible kind — not because there is no food — there is plenty of food — but because the theories of Lenin and Trotsky have fatally and, it may be, finally ruptured the means of intercourse between man and man, between workman and peasant, between town and country; because they have shattered the system of scientific communication by rail and river on which the life of great countries depends; because they have raised class against class and race against race in fratricidal war; because they have given vast regions where a little time ago were smiling villages or prosperous townships back to the wolves and the bears; because they have driven man from the civilization of the twentieth century into a condition of barbarism worse than the Stone Age, and left him the most awful and pitiable spectacle in human experience, devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence, and deprived of hope.”

  This address was received with calmness by the long-range planners in Moscow. They held an elaborate ceremony in which was conferred on Churchill (in absentia) the Order of the Red Flag, in mock appreciation of his devoted contributions to the Cause.

  Notwithstanding the War Secretary’s clairvoyant efforts, Lloyd George (who had also been exercised by the plight of the Dartmoor Shepherd) went ahead and recognized the Bolshevists as the government of Russia, and granted them fine trade privileges.

  Six years later, Churchill would be vindicated and England would kick the plotters out.

  *

  Toward the end of 1920 the Government decided that the Cabinet post most needful of an aggressive spirit was the Colonial Office. A number of vexing predicaments, in the Far East and elsewhere, were costing England enormous sums of money. Through appeals to his patriotism, Churchill was persuaded to lay aside the doublet of Mars and don the toga of conciliation. He became Colonial Secretary, a ministerhood in which he had begun his Cabinet career, in 1906, as Undersecretary. His immediate problem was Iraq, so explosive that a large army of occupation had to be maintained in the desert country at all times. The cost of this one military commitment alone ran to about $200,000,000 annually.

  Churchill first created a Middle East Department to deal with the diverse interests represented in the area and then stunned everybody by announcing that he was calling in Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the mysterious, nomadic “Lawrence of Arabia,” to act as adviser to the Government. In the England of the period, this was regarded as beyond the pale. Lawrence had proved himself to be a renegade from his race, a man who had disappeared into the shifting dunes of a dark and inscrutable land to take up life with a heathen people. His appearances in the world of stilted speech and tea sets were both brief and inconclusive. During the peace conference after the war, he had turned up in Paris on behalf of his Arab brothers. His visit did nothing to endear him to his fellow Englishmen. He strode the boulevards of the French capital garbed in an Arabian burnous and hood and with a formidable dagger thrust into a wide red belt. Once offered the order of Commander of the Bath and the Distinguished Service Order (for his unifying work in Arabia in the war), he turned the honors aside casually. At the peace conference he had been snubbed socially by everybody except Churchill, who invited him to lunch and then dressed him down for being so offhand with the King.

  In spite of the general snub, or perhaps because of the lunch, Lawrence now presented himself in Cairo at Churchill’s request and plunged into the work of ironing out the Iraqi difficulties with easy, unobtrusive co-operation. Churchill was delighted and, at the conclusion of a meeting with him, said, “Now we must secure for you some commensurately high office in His Majesty’s service.”

  “All you will see of me,” replied Lawrence, “is a small cloud of dust on the horizon.” He was swallowed up forthwith by the blazing sands that he had chosen for his home. Later on, in his monumental memoirs, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (of which the first manuscript was lost, requiring him to spend several years writing another), Lawrence said of his sessions with the new Colonial Secretary, “Churchill in a few weeks made straight all the tangle, finding solutions, fulfilling, I think, our promises in letter and spirit, where humanly possible, without sacrificing any interests of our Empire or of the peoples concerned.”

  It might be noted of the strange and unpredictable Lawrence that he finally tired of the desert, and, for some reason changing his name to Shaw, enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a lowly mechanic. He was killed in a motorcycle accident, in England, in 1935.

  As a result of Churchill’s bizarre Middle East Department, he was able to inform Commons that the army of occupation would be withdrawn, to be replaced only by a patrolling air force, at a yearly saving of $165,000,000. There was some discussion whether an air force was competent to keep order, but the Secretary was permitted to continue, and he proved to be right.

  It was during his tenure in the Colonial Office, and largely because of his efforts, that the Anglo-Irish Treaty was passed, giving Ireland Dominion status and leaving the Protestant counties of Ulster in an alliance with England. Churchill’s soothing ways with the fiery revolutionists prevailed where touchier diplomats had failed. One evening in Churchill’s home, Michael Collins, the leader of the Sinn Fein, blew up and began to rant about the fact of Britain’s having once placed a price of $50,000 on his head. He abused Churchill with variety and fervor. The Colonial Secretary listened throughout with respectful attention, then, during an unexpected lull, stepped into his study and brought out a framed sample of the Boers’ £25 reward after his escape from Pretoria. “If you were offended at the price on your head, imagine how I must feel,” he told Collins, who relaxed, started to laugh, and kept it up most of the evening. Speaking of the newly created Irish Free State, or Eire, Collins afterward said, “Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him.” Two days later he was struck down and killed by the gunfire of Dublin extremists.

  As Colonial Secretary, Churchill did important work to make Palestine a national home for Jews. He was often bitterly opposed by anti-Zionists, who accused him of all manner of perfidy. At one point their ire was centered on his granting of an irrigation concession to a Phineas Rutenberg, described by the press and in Parliament as a “Jewish Bolshevist.” The opposition died down when documents were produced in which it was revealed that Rutenberg had spent a considerable portion of 1917 trying to get the Russian authorities to hang both Lenin and Trotsky. Speaking in Commons, Churchill complained, “It is hard enough in all conscience to make a new Zion, but if, over the portals of the new Jerusalem you are going to inscribe the legend, ‘No Israelite need apply,’ I hope the House will permit me in future to confine my attention exclusively to Irish matters.”

  Due indirectly to his role in the Zionist movement, Churchill became involved in the Crown’s criminal libel action against Lord Alfred Douglas, a retired poet. It was a bang-up trial, the pre-eminent entertainment of that year. Everybody concerned (and the defense in particular) agreed that Churchill made one of the most impudent witnesses on record. Douglas had first emerged on the public scene as the inseparable companion of Oscar Wilde, the noted flower fancier. The two had walked together, both night and day, and while it was felt that Douglas’ gait was easily as mincing as Wilde’s, his verses were regarded as second-rate. Subordination of this kind might alter the mood of an extrovert, and it proved disastrous to a chum of Oscar Wilde’s. Douglas lapsed into brooding and biting his nails. His works declined in proportion. Whereas he had formerly dashed off neat but unaggressive little couplets dealing with petunias and the higher aesthetics, he now took to writing against things. To make his plight more desperate professionally, these essays were mostly in prose, a medium in which his technique had a distinctly meat-ax cast. In none of his later
pieces was this style more evident than the brochure which he produced and circulated, entitled, The Murder of Lord Kitchener and the Truth about the Battle of Jutland and the Jews.

  The booklet was mostly about Churchill — charging that he and his father’s friend, Sir Ernest Cassel, had got out a false communiqué after Jutland in order to drive down the price of some shares and make a lot of money.

  Churchill took the stand to answer questions.

  “I suppose you know that the cause of the Serajevo assassination is unknown,” said the counsel for His Lordship.

  “I can assure you that I had nothing to do with it,” replied Churchill.

  “Then perhaps you know that Sir Ernest Cassel started in the City of London as a clerk at two pounds a week?”

  “Is that very much against him?” Churchill inquired.

  After a whispered conversation with Douglas, whose face gave away that he had hit on a significant point, the counsel wanted to know if Churchill was aware that the word “I” had occurred thirteen times within thirteen lines of one of his books.

  “If that is so it is a great pity,” Churchill said. “If you will show me the passage, I will endeavor to cut out a few from the next edition.”

  He explained that he had not written any of the Admiralty communiqués in the war and then outlined in detail the financial relationship between him and Sir Ernest, who had invested various sums for the Churchill family for years. All in all, Douglas’ brochure shaped up as being so feebly rooted that it was plain he must be given time to think it over. The judge thereupon gave him six months, and the case was concluded. There was a story, possibly invented, that Churchill sent him round a copy of his old pal Oscar’s well-known prison doggerel, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he was said to have read in a very ambiguous humor.

  *

  Churchill’s star, having risen so brilliantly after the war, was due to set for a space. All unexpectedly he suffered a series of personal and professional setbacks, a recurring theme in the long and sturdy fabric of his life. As he had done before, and has done since, he endured it all stoically and only awaited his time for a successful coup d’état. In late 1921 Lloyd George regrouped his Cabinet in the face of growing Tory opposition to the Coalition. In the minds of the public, there was only one logical choice for the coveted post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, which carries with it leadership of the House and traditionally augurs early succession to the premiership. Churchill’s speeches in the recent session had been so powerful and persuasive that he was already considered to be Parliament’s de facto leader. But the Conservative machine, which he had belabored mercilessly, threatened to end the Coalition in the event of his appointment. Lloyd George passed him over.

  So profound was England’s astonishment that an anonymous author (later revealed as Harold Begbie) sought to explain Churchill and his mishaps, in a behind-the-scenes political volume called The Mirrors of Downing Street.

  “With the exception of Lloyd George, Mr. Churchill is the most interesting figure in the House,” wrote Begbie. “From the start of his career he was an element of great promise. Sometimes he disappointed his admirers, but he never destroyed their hopes. His intellectual gifts, his unique fighting qualities, also in politics, his boundless personal courage are singular. No man is more difficult to shout down. From his youth he fiercely loved England, war and politics. Politics, to him, are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

  “He has many qualities of real greatness — but has he the unifying spirit of character? He has truly brilliant gifts, but you cannot quite depend on them. His love for danger runs away with his discretion. His passion for adventure makes him forget the importance of the goal. Mr. Churchill carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain. His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not of character. Men watch him, but do not follow him. He beguiles their reason, but never warms their emotions. You may see in him the wonderful and lightning movements of the brain, but never the beating of a steadfast heart. His inconsistencies have brought him too often into inferior company ...

  “All Mr. Churchill needs is the direction in his life of a great idea. He is a Saul on the way to Damascus. Let him swing clean away from that road of destruction, and he might well become Paul on his way to immortality. This is to say that to be saved from himself Mr. Churchill must be carried away by enthusiasm for some great ideal, an ideal so much greater than his own place in politics that he is willing to face death for its triumph, even the many deaths of political life. At present he is but playing with politics. Even in his most earnest moments he is ‘in politics’ as a man is ‘in business.’ But politics for Mr. Churchill, if they are to make him, if they are to fulfil his promise, must be a religion. They must have nothing to do with Mr. Churchill. They must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind. It is high time he hitched his waggon to a star.”

  This frank estimate is important, if it is important at all, only in that it represented the view of a good many members of the Tory Party. They respected Churchill’s gifts but distrusted his ambition.

  As events shaped up, Lloyd George could have appointed anybody he chose to head the Exchequer, since the Coalition came crashing down notwithstanding his omission of Churchill. As is not uncommon after the pressures of war, the national psychology was ready for change. The identity of the Administration was of little moment; the voters, having lived under duress and restriction, were happy to seize any chance to reaffirm their freedom of thought. Churchill has found himself caught by this illogical reaction on several occasions. The Conservative Party disavowed the Coalition and took office under Bonar Law. There followed a calamitous general election. Churchill’s participation was handicapped by an accident of health. Preparing for a journey to Bristol to make a major speech, he fell ill and was operated on for acute appendicitis. The popular account was that, when his doctors informed him of his danger, he nodded vacantly and said he hoped to look into the matter the minute he returned from Bristol. Whereupon one of them, summoning enough courage to beard the lion, stepped forward and declared himself in exceedingly positive terms. “I do not imagine that anyone had spoken so sharply to Winston for twenty years,” says one of his friends. The burden of the physician’s message, stripped of references to “mulishness” and “stupidity,” was that unless an operation were performed immediately, Churchill would probably come back from Bristol in a hearse.

  Nevertheless, the candidate arose from his bed of pain dangerously soon after the surgery and summoned a quartet of stretcher-bearers. “Let us proceed to Dundee,” he told them. “I have some electioneering to do.” He was transported by stretcher and train to his Scottish constituency and carried in a chair onto a platform at the Town Hall. Never deviating from character, he made no mention of his peculiar appearance but addressed a large gathering from his seated position. His effectiveness was perhaps curtailed. Mr. Scrymgeour, on the other hand, was in a rollicking mood. Having been beaten regularly by Churchill since 1906 on the subject of teetotalism, he had wisely switched his emphasis. Scrymgeour was now in favor of the workingman. But a study of his remarks shows that, if he were elected, it would probably be a workingman without a bottle. Promiscuous and disconnected references were made to Scrymgeour’s companion of the years. “And I can certainly tell you,” his advice went, “that the deplorable condition in the Aberdeen mines is a subject toward which I intend to devote my considerable energies. Wine is a mocker. Neither can the Coalition escape the inevitable consequences of the present high cost of living. Strong drink is a curse. And in conclusion ... and so on.

  The twin phantoms of Antwerp and the Dardanelles arose to haunt Churchill again. The people had veered away from a triumphant review of the war and were concerned only with its disasters. When the returns were in, the gibbering Scrymgeour was elected at last to Parliament. The reason
s are hard to assess, but it is established that Dundee was powerfully grateful that he’d let up, even slightly, on teetotalism. And to the surprise of practically no one, Scrymgeour arose in the storied and well-nourished House and hurled his opening remarks in a frothing assault on booze. His explosion was so intemperate that another Member showed up the next day with a glass of beer, which he sipped at intervals while presenting some statistics on hops.

  Churchill was out. For the first time since 1900 his warning voice was absent from the nation’s forum. In the words of a contemporary, it was “a high price to pay for the exaltation of a whiskey-hating fanatic.” The time was 1922; Churchill was forty-seven years old, a man of resounding successes and failures. Lincoln was a penniless and disappointed lawyer at fifty-one. At forty-seven, Churchill appeared to have ended a career in public service. He was quoted as saying to a friend, “Sitting in armchairs in front of the fire and going to sleep — that’s what I am getting used to. It’s an unhealthy life, but what is to be done? You can’t do anything in this world of ours without power.” Acquaintances thought that he aged badly in the weeks after his rude dismissal. But the fighting heart, the buoyant constitution, the unexampled self-confidence, were in no way affected by the outward physical change. In Cannes, where he took his family for a six-month vacation, he was soon seen studiously attending the international problems of the Casino. “He drank ample brandy and soda and smoked his big black cigars,” says a man who was there, “but he appeared unquestionably to be waiting for the political call that would follow.” Despite Churchill’s prescience in other matters, he found no short cut to eminence at roulette. He lost a very considerable sum of money. During a trip he made a few years ago to the United States, a reporter asked him, “If you had it all to do over, would you change anything, Mr. Churchill?” Before replying, the great man weighed the question with a nostalgic and hungry expression. “Yes,” he said finally, “I wish I had played the black instead of the red at Cannes and Monte Carlo.”