As the conflict dragged on, Winston continued to confide in Clementine as to his hopes, fears and frustrations. She became well versed in the machinations of the War Council as it struggled to come up with ways of ending or shortening the trench-bound stalemate on the Western Front. By the end of 1914, there had been 90,000 British casualties, all for no significant gain. Morale at home had also been hit by the naval shelling of coastal towns and the grim realisation that there was no end in sight. Often the only ‘doe’ (Asquith’s pejorative word for women) at high-level dinners when the most grisly news was discussed, Clementine observed just how many of Winston’s colleagues were lacking in energy or ideas. So when he decided to support a seemingly more hopeful plan to the east, she readily familiarised herself with the details.
It entailed capturing Constantinople (now Istanbul) by taking control of the Dardanelles Straits (between the Turkish mainland and the Gallipoli peninsula). The idea, approved by the entire War Council in January 1915, was to weaken Germany’s firepower by eliminating its new ally, Turkey, and creating a direct link to Britain’s struggling ally, Russia.
Clementine also took great interest in the personalities involved, spotting the danger in the appointment as Winston’s First Sea Lord in late October of the volatile Admiral Lord Fisher. An infatuated Winston saw in ‘my dear’ Jacky Fisher – who at seventy-three was being brought out of retirement – technical brilliance and devotion to the Navy. Clementine, though, registered truculence, a volcanic temper and a genius that was on the borderline of madness.
Fisher, a notorious womaniser, sensed her distrust of him and deeply resented her influence over his ‘beloved’ Winston. Two years previously, when Fisher had taken exception to Winston filling three naval positions with officers close to the King, he had savagely rounded on Clementine, accusing her of persuading her husband to behave like ‘a Royal pimp’. ‘I fear,’ he had continued in a letter to Winston, in April 1912, ‘this must be my last communication with you in any matter at all . . . I consider you have betrayed the Navy.’12 Incredibly, such was Churchill’s curious attraction to Fisher – described by Violet Asquith as ‘something like love’ – that he had ignored this unfounded slur on his wife and had brought him back into the fold.
No doubt the incident had taught Clementine to tread carefully, however, and to try to avoid prompting public suggestions that she was shaping any aspect of her husband’s work. For his part, Fisher remained in post as First Sea Lord despite no fewer than seven threats to resign, and a series of deranged rants in writing bestrewn with capital letters. No matter that Fisher vowed that anyone who disagreed with him would find their wives ‘widows, their children fatherless, their homes a dunghill’. Winston still kept him on – a purblind decision that led to speculation that he was as irrational as the old admiral himself.
Winston even asked Clementine to look after the ‘old boy’ for him when he had to travel overseas, such occasions including his journey to Paris early in May 1915 to take part in negotiations to bring Italy into the war. She had previously noticed how Fisher seemed to become agitated whenever he was left in charge in Winston’s absence, and so on this occasion she invited him to lunch with her at Admiralty House. The meal passed uneventfully, and Fisher appeared to depart in good spirits. Only when she emerged from the sitting room herself a while later did she realise that he was still lurking in the corridor. He then bluntly informed her that, far from negotiating with the Italians, Winston was actually in the arms of his Parisian mistress.
It says much about her new understanding of her husband that Clementine treated this intelligence with derision. ‘Be quiet, you silly old man,’ she retorted. ‘Get out!’ He went at last, but when Clementine informed Winston of this disturbing episode, he once again brushed away her fears about Fisher’s mental stability.
Fisher’s erratic changes of opinion about the viability of the Dardanelles plan (these might occur as often as four times in one day) served only to confirm Clementine’s doubts. His wavering also did nothing to improve the quality of the preparations for such an ambitious strategy, or to secure the appropriate number of men and ships. From the start, the forces were ill-equipped; on the eve of departure one key battalion lacked doctors and drugs. Here Clementine’s skill at organisation made an impact for the first time. Even her long-time critic Asquith noted that she had ‘showed a good deal of resource’ in arranging for the necessary ‘details’ to be picked up en route at Malta.13 So caught up was Clementine with every detail of the plan that five-year-old Diana sensed the general air of anxiety, and concluded her prayers every night with ‘God bless the Dardanelles’ without being entirely sure what the Dardanelles were.14
Naval bombardment started on 19 February 1915 and initial progress was good, but Winston quickly became convinced that the commanders on the spot were failing to press home their early advantage. Unaccountably, after the loss of a handful of Allied ships, the admirals ordered the fleet to withdraw, thereby providing the hard-pressed Turks with the chance to replenish their depleted stocks of ammunition. Thus, when the Army was sent in to launch amphibious landings in April it encountered ferocious fire, resulting in huge loss of life. Winston’s old friend and wedding guest, General Sir Ian Hamilton, had been appointed overall commander of the land operation – another choice that Clementine regretted. Winston was seduced by Hamilton’s dash and chivalry, but her more detached view had detected a worrying lack of staying power or initiative. Clementine’s fears were now borne out by a shocking strategic failure on the part of the Army command eventually leading to General Hamilton being recalled to London.
The whole exercise was fast descending into yet another bloody trench-bound ‘slogging match’. Even so, Fisher blocked Winston’s attempts to send further naval reinforcements. Then Kitchener, the initial advocate of the whole plan, effectively killed it by also refusing to send more troops. In April shocking news simultaneously came in from the Western Front: the Germans had launched their first poison gas attack and British forces had been left inexcusably exposed because of a dire shortage of effective shells to fire back.
As War Secretary, Kitchener bore the brunt of the ‘shell scandal’ but the whole government was tainted. Then on 15 May, at the peak of the crisis, Lord Fisher again decided to quit. His private secretary handed over the letter of resignation with the words ‘I think he means it this time.’ Winston remained unconvinced, believing for some time that it was yet another false alarm,15 and bizarrely continuing to insist that his relationship with Fisher was ‘deep and fiercely intimate’.16
Fisher’s resignation, though, was real and served to highlight the appalling mess of death and ineptitude evident throughout the Dardanelles campaign. In fairness, the tragedy was the work of many; but a single scapegoat would suffice. Winston was still seen as a traitor by the Tories, an insufferable ego by the Liberals, untrustworthy by the King and a blood-smeared hothead by voters: he was the obvious choice.
Some military analysts believe that with a combination of determination, boldness and more men the Dardanelles exercise would have succeeded, as Winston had constantly argued. In 1954 Clement Attlee (the Labour MP who beat Winston in the 1945 election to become post-war Prime Minister) was to describe the campaign, in which he had served, as ‘the only imaginative strategic idea of the war’.17 The concept of the assault – rather than the execution – would also later be defended by historians as eminent as Alan Moorehead. But Winston’s natural belligerence meant that he had failed to carry his colleagues with him and no one else, including Asquith, was willing or able to take on overall strategic control. Asquith knew it was his own skin or Winston’s, and for him that left no choice. In the event, Winston was held liable for one of the bloodiest British military failures of all time. The exact number of Allied fatalities is a matter of contention, but it is believed that Britain lost around 29,000 men, Australia 8500, New Zealand 2800, India 1800 and France 9800 (including deaths from sickness). Clementine would have
to endure the name ‘Gallipoli’, shouted at her husband as a term of abuse, for decades to come. Her instincts about Kitchener, Fisher and Hamilton had been proved right; but she had still been unable to save her husband from his own flaws.
Yet her loyalty never faltered, and nor did her sense of outrage. Hearing that Asquith was about to remove Winston from the Admiralty, on 20 May she wrote in high dudgeon to the Prime Minister himself: ‘If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness.’ Conceding that Winston might have faults in the eyes of some, she nevertheless blasted that he had ‘the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present Cabinet possess; the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany’. She concluded: ‘If you send him to another place he will no longer be fighting. If you waste this valuable war material you will be doing an injury to this country.’18 Whether Clementine’s eruption did Winston any good is another matter – he still lost the job that he had so loved. Asquith was also amazed that one of his ministers’ wives should dare to address him in such a manner. He could only assume that she had broken down under the strain, for hers was truly the letter of a ‘maniac’.19 His wife Margot, forgetting her growing admiration for Clementine, now declared that she had the ‘soul of a servant’; that she and Winston were a ‘shallow couple’ and were together guilty of ‘blackmail and insolence’, as well as ‘black ingratitude’.20 But what had Clementine to be grateful for?
Her blood was up. She declared to her cousin and friend Sylvia Henley that after writing to Asquith, her one remaining ambition was to dance on his grave. She thought the Prime Minister effete and complacent and above all out to save himself, leading him to block the release of documents that might have vindicated Winston and revealed his own failings. Kitchener’s responsibility for the fiasco, meanwhile, was simply overlooked. On 3 June he was even rewarded with the Order of the Garter.
Clementine’s sense of betrayal was profound, not least because the Churchills had regularly socialised with the Asquiths. Indeed, a fortnight after Winston was sacked from the Admiralty they were somewhat eccentrically invited to dine with them at Downing Street again. Margot, hearing that Clementine had been ‘behaving like a lunatic & crying daily over Winston being turned out of the Admiralty’, asked her to visit her in her private sitting room for afternoon tea beforehand. Clementine ‘answered pleasantly on the telephone’ and duly arrived ‘looking cool & handsome in a muslin dress’. Margot, with her beaked nose, grey corkscrew curls and hard, inquiring eyes, could not resist finding something to criticise. Noting in her diary that Clementine had ‘lost her looks since her last baby and she is fatter’, she also thought her weight gain had ‘taken away her refinements & given prominence to her Xpressionless protruding eyes’.
The Prime Minister’s wife assumed a friendly front, however, and put her arms round the younger woman, giving her ‘a little squeeze’ and saying (perhaps not with complete sincerity), ‘Darling I’ve been thinking & feeling a lot for you.’ Clementine, whose mood was far from conciliatory, firmly pushed her away. ‘I saw I was in for it,’ Margot wrote, deciding now that Clementine was ‘a very hard insolent young woman with little or no sense of humour . . . frivolous, bad-tempered, ungrateful & common au fond’.
The meeting became no more harmonious when the talk turned to the government and Asquith himself. Clementine got up to go but Margot implored her to ‘sit down’ and ‘calm’ herself. She claimed to have forgiven Clementine for sending Asquith that letter but urged her to give some thought to the damage done to ‘poor Henry’, as she called him. This was too much for Clementine, who in Margot’s words proceeded to ‘harangue’ her hostess on the Prime Minister’s ‘defects’ ‘in fish-wife style’. She ‘screamed on’ until ‘I stopped her & said: “go Clemmie – leave the room – you are off your head.”’ Clementine declared she had no desire to be ‘forgiven’ and stormed towards the door. Margot roared a retort as she was leaving that cut Clementine to the quick: ‘You are very very foolish as you will do Winston harm in his career.’21 Nothing Margot might have said could have been more wounding; Winston’s political ascent was Clementine’s vocation.
Despite this teatime confrontation, the planned dinner went ahead. Afterwards, the Prime Minister, perhaps anxious about making a lifelong enemy, led Clementine alone into the Cabinet Room and ‘spoke very faithfully to her’. He claimed afterwards to have ‘parted on good & even affectionate terms’, having quelled her ‘rather hysterical mutiny’.22
Although he held Winston in some esteem and enjoyed his company more than that of other Cabinet ministers, Asquith, in truth, never rated Clementine’s qualities. He sought unquestioning adoration, not criticism, from beautiful women, and went out of his way to repay her defiance with considerable spite, complaining when she was not ‘quite in [her] best looks’ and that her unbending moral code (and insistence on driving everywhere at a ‘snail’s pace’) made her a ‘thundering bore’.23 When in March 1915 Clementine refused a generous gift of a beautiful couture dress from Edward VII’s mistress Mrs Keppel (the same woman who had offered to procure her a rich lover), the lascivious Asquith sneered about her stuffiness and pride. He was particularly crushing as to her intelligence, describing it as ‘by no means a deep well’,24 and made a point of showing his preference for the gregarious Goonie – ‘worth (I think) 100 Clemmies’25 – and the more freewheeling Nellie, declaring the younger Hozier ‘much cleverer and more original’.26
There was, moreover, some truth in his view of Clementine: she was shy, critical, reserved and could certainly be prudish about more exotic lifestyles. So it was perhaps not surprising that people who deemed themselves brilliant sophisticates found her uncomfortable – at least at first. Conversely, Clementine had long been genuinely shocked that Old Squiffy was a premier who, even in wartime, appeared unwilling to put fun (or the sizing up of attractive females) on hold. His busy social round of golf, bridge, car rides and luncheon parties carried on, even as a generation of young men was being slaughtered in the Flanders mud or on the Gallipoli shores.
Nor was Clementine alone in her disapproval. Asquith had been warned by a senior colleague, Lord Chancellor Haldane, about his champagne habit, and Margot too had come under fire for wearing osprey plumes to a society wedding: since Germans had ‘the monopoly of the osprey plume trade’, her thoughtless choice suggested, albeit wrongly, that she might be ‘at heart pro-German’.27 To families receiving the dreaded War Office telegram, the whole impression was of lack of discipline, energy or even compassion.
A great peacetime social reformer, Asquith no longer seemed concerned for the poor, but nor did he change gear to deal headlong with the catastrophe befalling his country. Torpid and out of touch, he continued to regard ‘energy under the guise of lethargy’ as one of his greatest qualities.28 And all the while he indulged his obsession with Venetia Stanley, writing her billets-doux during Cabinet meetings, arranging assignations and generally making a fool of himself over a woman thirty-five years his junior. Such was his obsession that he disclosed state secrets to her, leading some historians, including Winston himself, to argue that she became, over time, Britain’s biggest ever security risk. When he fired Winston from the Admiralty, Asquith’s judgment may have been affected by his distress at the news that Venetia was to marry a junior minister Edwin Montagu. Interestingly, she had made up her mind to inform him that their affair was over while staying with Clementine, who may well have encouraged her. Venetia’s decision to marry was, for Asquith, the ‘most bitter memory’ of his life.
No wonder, then, that she railed at such a man throwing the focused – and warlike – Winston to the wolves. As he was to write later, nothing in his life caused him as much pain as his disgrace over the Dardanelles and his removal from the Admiralty. He maintained an admirable dignity in public; in private he was in agonies about his fall from grace. For all of Clementine’s ministrations – cosy fire, favourite food, traditional comforts – he would sit in an a
rmchair and scowl at the futility of having ‘nothing to do’. ‘None of us,’ he would say, ‘can do anything without power.’29 It was ‘odious’, he said, to watch from the sidelines Asquith’s ‘sloth and folly’.
On 30 June, despite the ignominy being heaped on the Churchill name, Clementine fulfilled a promise to her kindly old headmistress, Beatrice Harris, to return to Berkhamsted School to open a new wing. Upright and dignified, she planted a tree and, in a speech to the schoolgirls, paid tribute to the ‘stoic fortitude with which women bear the most agonising sorrows’.
*
Upon his removal from the Admiralty at the end of May, Winston had been made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the new Coalition government, a non-job often given to politicians to keep them quiet on their way out. Gone was the bustle of executive power and the elixir of being at the centre of events. For the devoted Eddie Marsh, who followed Winston from the Admiralty, the summer of 1915 was a melancholy time. To see Winston torn from his naval work, he said, was like watching Beethoven go deaf. When he left his Admiralty office, Eddie picked up a photograph of Lord Fisher inscribed ‘Yours till Hell freezes’, tore it into pieces and dropped them into a wastepaper basket.30
Now that the Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law had joined the government – in what Asquith hoped would be a post-Dardanelles display of national unity – Winston found himself ever more an outsider. Unable to see himself as anything other than indispensable, he had fatally misread others’ feelings, particularly those of members of his old party still bitter at his defection eleven years before. His removal from the Admiralty had, in fact, been part of Bonar Law’s price for shoring up the Asquith regime, although Clementine largely blamed the ‘Welsh Judas’ David Lloyd George, one of the architects of the cross-party arrangement, for what she saw as horse-trading Winston’s future for his own advantage.
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