by Simon Schama
And he was yet more powerful in a speech made at Limehouse in London’s docklands where, mockingly, he compared the costs of a duke and a dreadnought, but then took his audience to a place that Churchill could not: down the mines.
We sank down into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain.… The earth seemed to be straining – around us and above us – to crush us in. You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered, their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. … and yet when the prime minister and I knock at the doors of these great landlords, and say to them: ‘Here, you know, these poor fellows have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old … they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’ They retort, ‘You thieves!’ And they turn their dogs on to us.… If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords … then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.
Churchill’s old friend Lord Hugh Cecil compared the Limehouse Lloyd George to a small boy deliberately getting his trousers dirty in a puddle. But that was to do the speech and its orator an injustice. However manipulative, it remains one of the greatest speeches in the whole of British political history: a complete one-act play. And it did exactly what the chancellor, Churchill and Asquith wanted it to do – it pushed the Lords to resist to the last ditch. They voted the budget down by 300 votes to 75. The government resigned and fought an election in January 1910, which, despite – or because of – the demagoguery, backfired badly, destroying their overall majority. The Liberals were now dependent on Irish Home Rulers and Labour members to help them see their programme of legislation through. The first order of the day was to make the Lords pay for their temerity. Asquith proposed a Parliament Bill threatening to abolish the Lords altogether and replace it with an elected upper house – but pending that doomsday would settle for a series of lesser resolutions: the Lords’ veto on money bills was to be abolished, and legislation that had passed the Commons in three consecutive sessions could be no longer obstructed in the upper house. The Lords could either swallow this medicine or be deluged with an instant mass creation of peers, perhaps 600 – enough, at any rate, to swamp their opposition. Edward VII had been queasy about having the royal prerogative to create new peers used in this way, but after his death in 1910, and much agonizing, his successor, George V, felt he had no alternative but to agree. Still the fight went on. Asquith was shouted down by serried ranks of screaming Tory backbenchers while Balfour stretched out languidly on the front bench and stared at his nails. In the Lords debate the more moderate ‘Hedgers’ like the Marquis of Lansdowne spoke against the ‘[last] Ditchers’ like Lord Willoughby de Broke and Lord Halsworth, who resolved to die with their armour on. On a division the Hedgers won, by a handful of votes; the Parliament Bill passed into law, and the Lords as an independent political power passed into British history.
This was the kind of battle that Winston Churchill, for one, really loved, and that he thought fitted well with the best traditions of British history: a war of principles, with the forces of progress triumphant and no blood spilled in the victory. But by the time the Parliament Act was going through the Lords, Churchill, as home secretary in the post-1910 election government, had two very different kinds of battle on his hands, both of them with the potential to turn not just ugly, but, as he thought, revolutionary. He had not, after all, become a Liberal to advance revolution, much less socialism, but on the contrary to pre-empt both of them with timely, humane, reasonable reform. And he believed the government had kept faith with the trade unions, steering through parliament the Trades Disputes Act that, in 1906, reversed the TaffVale decision and removed financial liability for strikes from the unions. And had the unions, especially in the most militant regions like south Wales and Lancashire, repaid the government by calming their rank and file? Not a bit of it. By the summer of 1910 the Rhondda, where D. A. Thomas, a friend of the government, was the leading mine-owner, was boiling over with industrial action. The causes were the same as they had been and would be all the way to the final showdown between Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The owners, faced with disappearing export demand, needed to retrench; the workers demanded a minimum wage and special pay for ‘abnormal work’. The very fact that Lloyd George had used their case so insistently when pushing the People’s Budget led the unions to believe that pressure would be put on the owners to yield, or, in default, that legislation would be passed. When neither happened, serious militants, and their publication The Pleb, began to make inroads on the more moderate unions. The situation became serious enough for the chief constable of Glamorgan to use police to guard some of the pits. When it threatened to tip over into rioting, he requested troops from Churchill. His cautious response was to send London policemen to Tonypandy. They were enough to cause further provocation, but not enough to restrain or repress it. On 8 November a serious riot broke out, in which a miner was killed and 60 shops looted.
It was only after the riot that Churchill decided to send troops to Tonypandy, thereby ensuring himself a place in the demonology of the labour movement. Although he got himself a reputation for being trigger-happy in tight situations, and although there is no doubt that patience was never his strong suit, the situation in the autumn of 1910 and into 1911 in the coalfields was in fact highly incendiary. A strong anarchist and revolutionary core led by Noah Ablett made no secret of its contempt for traditional union strategies, even more so for parliamentary lobbying, and was quite open about capitalizing on grievances about pay and conditions to further a radical revolution. In the baking summer of 1911 there were more riots at Cardiff and at Tredegar by railway workers, both of which took an ugly, racist turn. At Cardiff striking seamen attacked the Chinese community of shopkeepers and at Tredegar there was a virtual pogrom against the small Jewish community. It was at Llanelli, not Tonypandy, that troops fired on strikers (in this case railwaymen), killing two of them and triggering another riot that destroyed 96 trucks and ended up causing an explosion and four more deaths.
Handling this was not an enviable job for a home secretary. And the turn of the suffragette movement, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, towards militancy didn’t make it any easier. As with the miners, Churchill had been, on principle, tepidly sympathetic to the cause of votes for women, not least because his wife Clementine was a warm supporter. But as Asquith squirmed and procrastinated to the point of yielding a ‘Conciliation Bill’ intended to enfranchise women property owners, but then got the legislation snarled in procedural delays, the patience of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) not unreasonably ran out. Cabinet ministers who had been heavily lobbied in the House were now stalked and harassed. By July 1910, a year after he had been attacked by the suffragette Theresa Garnett wielding a whip, Churchill himself declared in parliament that he would not support the enfranchising of women.
Faced with mass demonstrations in Parliament Square, Churchill gave directives to the police not to arrest the demonstrators but, on the other hand, not to allow them access to parliament. Intended to be cautious, the guidelines for handling the crowds were in fact a guarantee of disaster. Thousands of women and their male sympathizers, extremely well marshalled, pushed hard against the police. Helmets were, of course, knocked off. Rude things were said. Crowds gathered to chuckle. This was not what policemen like. On 18 November 1910, ‘Bloody Friday’, the pushing and shoving turned into six hours of fighting, with the police manhandling and beating up as many suffragettes as they could get their hands on – and discovering, in their turn, the power and the pain of the raking scratch and the well-aimed kick. Instead of zero arrests there were, in the end, 280.
This only added fuel to the flames. Inside Holloway prison, fo
llowing the lead of Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, suffragette prisoners went on hunger strike and in response were brutally force-fed using metal clamps, rubber tubes and nauseous fluids that they usually vomited up again. Ice-cold water was hosed into some of their cells to a depth of 6 inches. Outside, the WSPU campaign was evidently targeting property especially associated with men’s stereotypical images of womanly behaviour. The little women loved shopping, did they? Stores such as Marshall & Snelgrove, Swears & Wells and Liberty had their big windows smashed in. The fancier streets of London – government offices in Whitehall, clubland in Pall Mall – became carpets of broken glass. Other sanctuaries of the British way of life were shockingly violated. ‘Votes for Women’ was spelled out by acid-burns on the greens of golf courses including the one at Balmoral.
One of the most militant of the suffragettes, Emily Wilding Davison was constantly coming up with new tactics to take the women’s guerrilla war into the heartland of the respectable classes. First she was caught standing by the Parliament Square postbox holding a paraffin-soaked piece of linen, about to light it. After a spell in prison she then organized an attack on Lloyd George’s new house at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey, which succeeded in destroying half of it, although she was not caught in the act. And, finally and most famously, Emily achieved her evident wish for martyrdom by throwing herself under the first horse to come into sight at the Epsom Derby in 1913. It just so happened that it was the king’s horse that was in the lead when she launched herself from the rails.
By 1913 the Liberal programme for the renewal of Britain, along with its own power base, seemed to be unravelling fast – so much so that the classic narrative of the period, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England (1936), sees it as a prolonged exercise in obtuse self-destruction. In particular, Dangerfield saw the Liberals’ willingness to hitch themselves to John Redmond’s bloc of Irish Home Rulers as a guarantee of future grief. But if this was a tactical obligation to stay in power, it was also, for the Liberals, a matter of principle. Churchill, who vividly remembered his father’s role in hardening Ulster resistance, somehow wanted to square it with his own equally impassioned desire to see an Irish parliament within the empire. If this goal proved ultimately impossible to realize, the gains of the great reforming administration were less ephemeral. Like many of Churchill’s policies in his early career, they have been discounted as facile in concept, insincere in commitment and short-sighted in outcome. But all these judgements have been made from the perspective of a socialist Britain that itself has all but disappeared along with the ‘Old’ Labour party that was committed to public ownership of the means of production. Paradoxically, it is just the liberalism – capitalism with a social conscience – that George Dangerfield, writing brilliantly from the eminence of a Vanity Fair desk in New York, assumed to be moribund that has stood the test of time better than the welfare-state orthodoxies of the late 1940s. A century on, New Labour looks very much like the grandchild of New Liberalism.
If Lloyd George had been to Germany to look at unemployment insurance, Churchill had been a guest of the kaiser and had seen military manoeuvres at first hand. He understood the deterrence game well enough to know that a show of force on the German side was meant to prevent war rather than hasten it, specifically by discouraging a close Anglo-French alliance and a Triple Entente between those powers and Russia, as had been signed in 1907. But the strategy had the opposite effect of pulling that alliance closer, not breaking it apart, especially after the summer of 1911 when the German government decided on a display of naval muscle. A warship, the Panther, was sent to the Atlantic port of Agadir in Morocco to serve notice that, should the French presume to impose a protectorate, they would have to reckon with German naval power. The Agadir incident also had the effect of speeding up the British government’s determination to maintain a healthy naval superiority over Germany. Churchill, in a characteristically tactless red-rag moment, had described the German fleet as a ‘luxury’ (meaning that, while Germany had a huge army as well, Britain had only its navy as an essential arm of imperial defence). This did nothing to slow down the rate of competitive armament.
So when Churchill became first lord of the admiralty in the autumn of 1911, he took a razor-scraper to the barnacles sticking to the organization of the Royal Navy. Theoretically, it could be seen as a demotion from the home office; but that was not the way either Asquith or Churchill himself thought of the job. The prime minister recognized that this was a perfect way for Churchill’s piston-driven energy, sometimes in overdrive in the home office, to be constructively used. And for Churchill, despite his prejudice that the navy was all ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’, it was the fulfilment of a strong sense of historical appointment. The new broom swept through the admiralty in short order. The dyspeptic visionary and former First Sea Lord, Sir John Jacky Fisher, though in his 70s, was recalled to advise the admiralty (somewhat to the amazement of the cabinet), and Churchill set about implementing some of Fisher’s most serious changes. Heavy guns were to be mounted on fast ships; and, most momentous of all, those ships would now be fuelled more cost effectively by oil, not coal. In retrospect this one decision, a commitment to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – so apparently innocent, or at least so purely logistical (and so lightly glossed over in most Churchill biographies) – was to have more profound effects on the fate of the British Empire, not to mention the history of the world, than almost anything else Churchill did until the May days of 1940. It made the survival of the British Empire conditional on a Middle East presence, a halfway link between India and Egypt. That in turn would make Churchill, as colonial secretary in 1921, a strong supporter of a British mandate in Palestine and a protective role in Iraq (the former Mesopotamia) and Jordan. That would beget Suez. And Suez begat Islamic fundamentalism. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which Churchill made sure to acquire a 51 per cent holding for the British government in 1914, would beget joint Anglo-American oil interests in Iran, which would beget the CIA overthrow of the Mossadeq democracy and the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty, which would beget the Ayatollah Khomeini. And all the while the coal mines of Britain were relegated to terminal redundancy. But on the eve of the First World War, the battle fleet was well tanked and ready for action.
The cabinet, however, was divided over when and whether the fleet would be needed. Churchill got a great deal of stick, especially from Lloyd George, for his spectacular naval estimates. Was he, Lloyd George wondered out loud, still really a Liberal at all? But though in a minority, Churchill, like the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, was convinced that, if a war should break out in the Balkans, Germany, allied with Austria and Hungary, was more likely than not to respond by sending its armies to the west to attack France, and in equal likelihood through Belgium. The best chance of deterring this scenario, he also believed, lay in a real, rather than paper, commitment to stand shoulder to shoulder with France, and in never hesitating to regard an attack on Belgium as a direct threat to Britain. Certainly he thought back to the similar stance taken by William Pitt the Younger in 1793. But lest he be accused of idle and anachronistic historicism he also believed, in his marrow, that apart from any ideological anti-republicanism Pitt and his colleague Henry Dundas had been right about the uncontrollable expansionism of revolutionary France. So, indeed, he felt about imperial Germany – without any knowledge of the Schlieffen Plan, which called for simultaneous war on two fronts, west and east, or of the still more aggressive German policy (made formal in 1916) to convert large parts of eastern Europe into slave colonies and regions of western Europe (the Netherlands, for example) into satellites of the greater Reich.
For most of the summer of 1914, war seemed more likely to break out in Ireland than in Bosnia. Ulster Unionists and nationalists were each forming armed camps; Churchill, who had gone to Belfast in 1912 to make an appeal for moderation, hoped against hope, and against probability, that the third attempt at a Home Rule Bill would be succ
essful. But faced with the threat of direct Protestant revolt against the plan in Ulster, it collapsed. The First World War itself would finish off the last possibility of Home Rule.
It was at these moments that history came to Winston Churchill. In early August 1914, it was giving the first lord mixed signals. On the very brink of hostilities he went to see the fleet steam past at Portland Bill. As the great steel towers emerged from the mist, Churchill’s romantic imagination sailed all the way back to ‘that far-off line of storm-beaten ships … which in their day had stood between Napoleon and his domination of the world’. But Churchill was already a good enough historian, and had seen enough carnage, for his up-and-at-’em euphoria to be qualified by deep foreboding. He was, after all, no longer the cavalier lancer. He had a wife and young children as well as a high office. On 28 July 1914 he had written to Clementine:
My darling one & beautiful,
Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I w[oul]d do my best for peace, & nothing w[oul]d induce me wrongfully to strike the blow. I cannot feel that we in this island are in any serious degree responsible for the wave of madness w[hic]h has swept the mind of Christendom. No-one can measure the consequences. I wondered whether those stupid Kings & Emperors c[oul]d not assemble together & revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was someone else’s operation!
The two black swans on St James’s Park Lake have a darling cygnet – grey, fluffy, precious & unique. … Kiss those kittens [their children] & be loved for ever by me. Your own W
