Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Chapter 22

  THE FINANCIAL standing of Churchill and his family had undergone some improvement. After years of anxious economizing, they were able to vacation in leisure. Churchill’s fees for magazine and newspaper articles had grown to be among the highest paid, and his output was colossal. He had established a reputation for making advantageous contracts. To his eternal credit, he has always insisted on being paid in proportion to the quality and popularity of his work. His attention is judiciously divided between what he is going to say and how much he is apt to get for it. Even in the Great War, during a journey to visit Roosevelt, he summoned a New York editor in an effort to hike up one of his magazine rates. In 1921 he had also come into money by inheritance. The Lady Randolph had recently died, leaving him the equivalent of $150,000. Her passing was mourned not only by her family but by the most glittering personages of Europe. To the end, she remained a luminous attraction in the social maelstrom of her adopted land. Like her favorite son, she had been noted for an excess of constructive energy; her interests were nearly as diverse as his. The pet of her last few years was a publication called the Anglo-Saxon Review, of which she was both editor and publisher. To fill the pages of this well-bred journal, she gathered together, as contributors, the majority of the crowned heads of Europe and most of the uncrowned royal offshoots. It might be said that within the framework of its titular preference the Review was managed democratically. The aspect of its writers was often about as Anglo-Saxon as the average Eskimo’s. While the Maharajah of Mysore, in the July issue, might have some pretty warm things to say about Central European pheasant shooting, the King of Andorra would come back with a blistering rebuttal in December.

  Lady Randolph’s bequest to her older son included one item aside from the financial. When her first husband, the tempestuous Lord Randolph, resigned from the Exchequer, he had refused to surrender his robe of office. This had given rise to a federal gasp of dismay. The traditional course was plain; one resigned, bowed, made a few misleading comments, and turned in his suit. The courageous attitude of Lord Randolph, in taking the garment home, had always been admired by his wife, who willed it to Churchill with the hope that he would someday succeed to his father’s position. Her ambition would be realized posthumously. In the meantime, her bequest, and an unexpected one from a distant relative, Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest, had eased the burden of upper-class living for the Winston Churchill family. (Vane-Tempest had left him an annuity and a castle in Ireland, together with a number of thatched cottages. The Irish revolutionists soon destroyed the castle, in the course of a property-damaging spree, and Churchill gave away the cottages to the peasants of the area.) In the England of that day, before the Socialists had enforced the policy of universal drabness, it was considered graceful, and even nationally therapeutic, to entertain and live generally in a style commensurate with one’s abilities and enterprise. This was, at the time, believed to be a principal reward of democracy. The Churchills maintained a high standard, though often precariously. Their dinners were noted for lavish food and drink and for the stimulating qualities of the guests. As a rule, Churchill liked to combine business with relaxation. He invited men in public office, persons with political opinions, men upon whose wits he could sharpen his own.

  Shortly before Lady Randolph’s death, the Churchills had sold their large residence in Eccleston Square to the Labor Party, which was rich, and had moved into a rented house in Sussex Square. Not long afterward, with his earnings from writing, he bought a handsome estate, the present familiar establishment of Chartwell Manor, the family’s farm home in Kent. There Churchill settled down to write his history of the First World War, called The World Crisis, in four large volumes. For recreation, after the stint at the Casino, he pottered around his farm and took one brief whack at a neighboring golf course. The legend of his performance persists in the locality. With next to no preliminary instruction, he wound up on the first tee and drove his ball savagely into a sand trap on an adjoining fairway. After his ninth or tenth retrieving chop, with the ball moving ever farther into the soil, he climbed out of the bunker, voiced a number of immensely fitting remarks, and gave up the game for good.

  There were repeated rumors in these days that Churchill’s health was failing. His appearance had declined markedly. It was recalled that Lord Randolph had died young. By now son Winston was practically bald and his posture was the despair of physical culturists; he had a forward stoop and shambled as he walked. His head was thrust out and down, giving his jaw a truculent look. If he worked long hours, as he frequently did, he emerged with a pallor that was alarming to his family and friends and the concern of his physician, Lord Moran. Churchill has never taken kindly to medical advice. On the contrary, he prefers to brief his doctors, quoting memorized lore. In 1943, he was ill in Marrakech and was visited by General Eisenhower, who watched the doctors fussing around the sickbed. It seemed that they had no accurate way of ascertaining the patient’s temperature, since Churchill always snatched out the instrument when they approached and read it himself. When he saw Eisenhower laughing, he said, “Oh, I always do that, otherwise these fellows would try to keep me in bed for no reason.”

  In the early twenties Churchill did nothing for his appearance in the matter of dress. His eccentricities along this line were becoming a public joke, which had gained its first impetus by the story, right or wrong, that he was wearing brown shoes at his wedding. He had also been observed riding in London’s fashionable Rotten Row (whose curious appellation had devolved from its original name of Route du Roi) in a pair of patent-leather boots with suede tops. On several occasions while riding with his mother he had been taken for her groom. His hats had begun to be caricatured in Punch and other lighthearted British journals, and tailors’ house organs sniped at him steadily. The Guild of London Tailors was moved to go on record with an official and published protest against his “sartorial terrifies.” At length his clothing came to have a sort of museum value, greatly sought after by collectors. A man was arrested and hauled into police court on the complaint that he had broken into a secondhand store; but he was no ordinary thief. His explanation, mollifying everybody, was that he had spied a fur-lined overcoat which he had recognized as having belonged to Churchill. The proprietor refused to press the charge and doubled the price of the coat, which was full of holes. It had an early sale.

  The family was now complete. There were three girls — the third, Mary, having arrived in September of 1922 — and one son, Randolph. A fourth daughter, Marigold Frances, born in 1918, had died in her third year. It was a happy family; Mrs. Churchill, an excellent wife, geared the household and all of its activities, business and social, to her husband’s important work. Very quickly she recognized that the pivotal point of his day was dinner, at which time he ate a substantial amount, and she began the practice of serving him an outsized roast beef each evening. She continues to do so today. Her friends say that foremost among her instructions in the event her death precedes his is that “Winston must be given a good dinner — it is essential to his health and happiness.” Even during the war, when meat and other commodities were scarce, the members of the Government insisted that the Prime Minister be provided with the beef that was so important in maintaining his priceless energies at a high pitch.

  Extraordinary measures had been taken long before to safeguard Churchill’s health. At the time of the Irish rackets it was feared that he might be assassinated by terrorists, and Scotland Yard detailed a good man to watch over him. Churchill had been beaten by suffragettes, threatened by strikers, cursed by Irishmen, and made the target of a thrown volume in the House of Commons. He was obviously a mediocre risk. Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) W. H. Thompson came to Churchill’s house and, liking the work, remained on for fifteen years. His job was quietly to keep the impulsive minister in view. Perhaps no other member of the famous police force could have carried out this difficult assignment with such good-humored tact. In the morning, Thompson might
be crouched in the shade of a willow while the master sketched a country scene; in the afternoon he would be seated in the anteroom of Churchill’s parliamentary office; a week afterward he might be observed just out of the firing line at Cannes. Through some patriotic whim, Churchill insisted on paying not only Thompson’s official salary but an extra-duty fee as well. Curiously enough for a man religiously devoted to compensation, Churchill laid out money with the reckless haste of a sailor ashore. His attitude about it was and is unusual. His confidant and adviser, Brendan Bracken, feels that Churchill expends considerable thought on the moneys coming in but has no interest whatever in the sums going out. He could give away thatched cottages with never a thought for their value, while in the office of a publisher he could be as alert as a pawnbroker. Most of his friends believe that he regards himself, as a Marlborough, as entitled to the costly prerogatives of the privileged, and that he would buy them — houses, farms, rich furnishings, the best food and wines, domestics, secretaries, bodyguards — whether he could afford them or not. From the start of their marriage, his indifference to expense was such that Mrs. Churchill, the granddaughter of the Countess of Airlie, was compelled to develop a frugality sufficiently strong to keep the ship from foundering. She studied the bills, struck bargains with the help, and tried, without success, to curb the golden outflow at Cannes and elsewhere.

  In the social life of aristocratic London, the Churchills were popular. No better example of this can be found than the election at Westminster. Forgoing politics, Churchill had worked on his history of the war for two years when Stanley Baldwin succeeded Bonar Law as Prime Minister and declared in favor of Protectionism. This was a rallying cry to Churchill, who had made some of his liveliest speeches in favor of Free Trade. In the closing weeks of 1923, he had been offered a candidacy at West Leicester and had consented to put up his name, only to be defeated by F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, a veteran of several incarcerations in the cause of Women’s Suffrage. Churchill was caught between two fires, being against the old-line Conservatives and, of late, suspicious of the growing socialism in the Liberal and Labor parties. His latter feeling was shortly confirmed when Asquith combined forces with the Socialists to bring down the Conservative Government, install Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister, and institute the beginnings of English regimentation. Churchill promptly announced his severance from the Liberals and his emergence as a new party of one member — the “Constitutionalists.” It was at this critical point that his friends persuaded him to stand from the unique constituency of Westminster.

  In all of British history, there has never been an election quite like the one that followed. Westminster is a division lying in the heart of London and includes Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the buildings and offices of state, and a sprinkling of the slum quarters that are usually found huddled in juxtaposition to the important centers of most cities. The official Conservative endorsement, now in 1924, had gone to a Captain Otho Nicholson, not very extravagantly described by one writer as “an estimable young politician who would certainly be too modest to claim for himself rank among the great men of his day.” But he was a nephew of the late General Nicholson, who had been the traditional Conservative Member for the division since 1909. Traditional or not, a good many young Conservatives, social colleagues of the Churchills, were sick of mediocre representation from Westminster, which has been called “the Washington of England,” and they gathered in vivid support of their companion of the clubs and casinos.

  Churchill ran as the logical nominee of his one-man Constitutionalist Party. In addition to him and Captain Nicholson, there were two other hopefuls — Fenner Brockway, a Socialist, and Scott Duckers, a Radical. To get things started, the millionaire, James Rankin, lent Churchill his mansion in nearby North Street as a headquarters. Then the majority of Burke’s Peerage, studded with whatever jewels had escaped the loan shops, began arriving to be assigned duties. Nothing loath, Churchill’s backers dealt them out tasks both menial and large. Lady Wodehouse sallied into the slums and began knocking on doors. There are still available excellent witnesses to this memorable campaign, and they treasure the details which gave it such a wide and hearty press. Lady Wodehouse’s manner with the tired, suspicious slatterns of her list was friendly but baffling. “My deah!” she would cry, as she stood with one foot in the front room of some crumbling ruin, “you really must drop all this and run over to Jimmie Rankin’s for tea. We’re getting together to elect jolly old Churchill.”

  These tactics were duplicated by Lady Blandford, Lady Bessborough, Lady Harmsworth, and others of their company, and now and then some curiosity-ridden member of the depressed orders actually did snatch up a shawl and scuttle around to headquarters. The house was regarded as extraordinary even in an era of magnificence. It was hung with Romneys and Gainsboroughs and similar masters, and its bric-a-brac was priceless. No official computation was ever released on the total abstraction of this latter ware, but it is said to have been substantial. Churchill’s candidacy reshuffled the property of Westminster far better than the Socialists could have done.

  The scene at Rankin’s, aside from the pilfering, was one to warm the heart of a socially ambitious caller. The toffs were assembled in full war rig. The best-known names of London fashion were gathered in little knots beneath the frowning portraits, terribly serious, plotting their tempest in a teapot. Striking a visual note of even deeper interest, the busty chorus of Daly’s Theatre appeared, the girls, many of them fully clothed, saying that they had “always liked Churchill’s face.” Some shortsighted committee member put them to work addressing envelopes. Now and then various parts of the great room would burst into song — one of the committees had devised a tune for popular consumption. It focused on the candidate’s celebrity as fighter, orator, and diplomat.

  As could be expected in a congress of such lineage, things occasionally got out of hand. At one juncture, Churchill was obliged to clap on his hat and sprint into Victoria Street, where the Countess of Bottsley, with a brush and a bucket of paste, was plastering blown-up photographs of his children onto the public buildings. Over the cherubic faces was printed the appalling legend, “Vote for Daddy!” But it was not only the ladies who were busy. The Duke of Marlborough, who long ago had forgiven his relative for having liberal leanings, called from door to door in the state offices. He was said to have taken along a valet who did the actual knocking with a gold-headed stick. The duke’s uncringing address, when he entered, was always, “See here, now!” Most of the frightened office workers arose and either curtsied or touched their forelocks.

  The tactics of the Socialists were considered, even by the Radicals (as evidenced by one of Scott Duckers’ speeches, in which he advocated both that the Socialists be censured and that every existing social custom be scrapped, with a view to a new start), to be outside the bounds of decent electioneering. They organized small but sinewy roving bands, which waylaid and rushed the gilded gentry at work for Churchill. The dregs of Soho emptied into Westminster, and knives and brass knuckles assumed parliamentary importance. In the first few days, nearly all of Churchill’s meetings were routed. He would no sooner set up on a street corner than a flying wedge of share-the-wealth addicts would sweep over the stands like cattle, destroying his props and stampeding the crowd. At length, at the suggestion of General Seely, the M.P. from the Isle of Wight, who was in good physical shape, and Lord Darling, a noted croquet player, a volunteer bodyguard was formed to stand off the rowdies. Hearing the news, many of London’s prize fighters and jockeys reported in to Rankin’s to offer assistance. In the next brush, Sir Philip Sassoon got a black eye, and the shins of Commander Locker-Lampson were rudely barked, but the Socialists suffered worse casualties, and Churchill was able to unburden himself of his message.

  By and large, the city was thrown into a turmoil. A good many of its normal functions ceased, so as to allow their participants to become spectators in Westminster. A rather large number of incidents appeared on th
e police blotters of the district. The most regrettable of these involved an immigrating Italian family that debarked from a train at Victoria Station in the midst of a brisk fist fight between the Socialists and the Peers. The family, according to its later report to correspondents, thought that a revolution had broken out and actually got on a train and went back to Italy.

  Throughout the ebb and flow of these melees, Churchill remained calm. In spite of the blue blood running in the streets, he stuck to his main plea — the liquidation of Socialism and the liberalizing of ultra-Conservatism. At a delicate point in the campaign he was aided by two gestures from influential Tory Members. The Hon. Leo Amery, his old school pal from Harrow, wrote an unobtrusive bit in the Times stating his belief that the return of the Protectionist-minded Captain Nicholson would weaken the party. Then Lord Balfour, with the permission of Party Leader Baldwin, made public a letter pledging his support to Churchill. These almost did the trick. All of London was discussing the violent upheaval in the Conservative Party. “Families are split in twain,” said one writer. “If the parents support Captain Nicholson, as the official Conservative, the younger voters stand for Churchill.” At the start of the campaign, Churchill’s candidacy was regarded merely as a defiant token, not apt to have any tangible results. The monumental obstacle of Nicholson tradition in Westminster was thought to be decisive. It now appeared that the Conservative Party was in the throes of a real reformation. A significant part of England seemed to feel that Winston Churchill was the element needed to fuse this badly deteriorating compound. By 43 ballots out of more than 16,000 cast, he lost the election to Nicholson, but he won an immeasurable vote of confidence. It was the quality missing in his life for the past two years. He was triumphantly re-established in the public favor. “At no other time has he been so popular,” a correspondent wrote, and another spoke of his “giddy moral victory.”