When the time came for Winston to speak, he had the opportunity simply to affirm all the talk of unity and to show appropriate gratitude to his leaders for addressing the rally. He started off well, thanking the crowd for attending the event, and explaining in a lighthearted way that he was chosen to speak “partly because he was a relative of the Duke, and had first seen the light at Blenheim.” Then he decided to do something risky. He said little of Balfour but heaped praise on Chamberlain.
In the bad old days of Liberal rule, he said, the Colonial Office was a dull place whose ministers were often “lame ducks” sent there to mark time. Joe Chamberlain, he declared, had revolutionized the department, and he wanted everyone to know his delight in sharing “the same platform with a man whose administration at the Colonial Office . . . would be regarded in future days as perhaps the most remarkable page in English history for the last 50 years.”14
As Churchill was well aware, the surface image of unity at the rally hid an intense rivalry between Balfour and Chamberlain, both of whom wanted to direct the alliance. Churchill decided to exploit that tension. By putting aside any concerns about the lessons of the Boer War, and shamelessly flattering Chamberlain—whom many blamed for mismanaging the conflict from the start—Churchill was playing one leader against the other. If Balfour wouldn’t show him favor, perhaps Chamberlain would. Better yet, both men might decide it was in their interests to find him a useful position, and soon.
This sort of ploy could easily backfire, but Churchill was so anxious to get ahead, and so willing to do the unexpected, that he seemed to relish the dangers. It was the kind of attitude that had served his famous ancestor well on the battlefields of Europe.
Indeed, as Consuelo sat on the platform listening to all the speechmaking, she let her gaze drift above the heads of the crowd to the tall column on a grassy slope in the distance where a twenty-five-foot statue of the warrior duke stood majestically. “I could almost detect,” she later wrote, “a satisfied smile on [the] Duke’s countenance.” She thought the old nobleman would have been pleased by Sunny’s success with the rally. But if the spirit of the first Duke of Marlborough was smiling down on anyone that day, it was on the young firebrand who was such a keen admirer, and who was now eagerly employing his own maneuvers in the great game of politics.15
V
EMPIRE DREAMS
Joseph Chamberlain didn’t need family connections or an inherited income to sustain his political career. He had an entire city devoted to him. In Birmingham he could do no wrong. He was a Victorian success story—a self-made man who amassed a tidy fortune as an industrialist, mass-producing the humble screw so cheaply that he dominated the market. He became one of Birmingham’s largest employers, then moved into politics and transformed the city as its reforming mayor, and later as its constant champion in Parliament. Slums were cleared, the water supply was improved, and impressive civic buildings were erected. For more than thirty years he dominated the political life of the city. He was its uncrowned municipal king. But to the common man he was always just “good old Joe.”
During the 1900 election he campaigned for Churchill, using his popularity in the industrial regions to boost the young man’s chances of winning votes among the workingmen of Oldham. They had arrived together at a public hall in an open carriage and were surprised at the entrance by a large crowd opposed to the Boer War. Suddenly surrounded by angry demonstrators “booing at the tops of their voices,” the pair had difficulty getting inside, but Churchill was impressed at how calmly Chamberlain—who was in his sixties—worked his way through the crowd. When they were greeted on the platform by the raucous cheers of their supporters, Chamberlain glowed with satisfaction. Turning to Churchill, he said with unself-conscious pride, “The first time I came here was to sell them screws.”
After the election was won, Chamberlain invited his new colleague to spend a couple of days at Highbury, his mansion in Birmingham. Though he liked to portray himself as a devoted friend of the ordinary workingman, Joe had developed expensive tastes over the years and seemed to enjoy showing off when he entertained this son of Blenheim. “He received me at supper in his most gleaming mood with a bottle of ’34 port,” Winston recalled. Far more impressive than his sixty-six-year-old liquor were his twelve greenhouses full of orchids, and twelve more full of less exotic flowers. A staff of twenty-five tended to the plants, and thus Chamberlain always had fresh orchids to adorn his buttonhole, an affectation that became one of his trademarks, along with his ever-present monocle, which a journalist once described as “a round glass in a frame of gold, thin as a grandmother’s wedding ring.”1
In parliamentary debates he would use that monocle to great effect, peering through it like a scientist with a microscope to fix an opponent with a cold stare or removing it to polish the glass with his handkerchief while he held the House in suspense with a dramatic pause. “When he was interrupted,” an MP recalled, “he fixed his monocle very deliberately in his eye, leaned forward intently with finger outstretched in the direction of his opponent, purred out his pungent repartee, then sprang back to the upright.” Even in repose on the green leather benches he looked intimidating as he surveyed opponents through his gold eyeglass while fingering his lapel with its bright orchid as big as a fist. He was always immaculately dressed and—unlike many men of his generation—he kept his face clean-shaven.
But orchids, monocles, and expensive port were not enough to make Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour forget that Joe was still a middle-class manufacturer whose career owed everything to screws. It was useful to have him as a political ally and an able Cabinet minister, but the Cecils and their circle never accepted him as their social equal. In his best condescending manner Balfour wrote a friend, “Joe, though we all love him, does not absolutely and completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us. Why? I cannot tell, but so I think it is.” Other aristocrats were less circumspect in expressing their reservations. “Chamberlain’s faults all come from his upbringing,” said the influential courtier Lord Esher. “Clever as he is, he has never learnt the self-restraint which everyone learns at a great public school or at a university. I mean everyone with his immense capacity.”2
Churchill didn’t share these snobbish doubts. He admired Joe’s “sparkling, insurgent” energy and knew that even though Balfour led the House, Chamberlain “was the one who made the weather. He was the man the masses knew.” The problem, as one political commentator put it, was that with Chamberlain, “the barometer . . . always stood at stormy.” Like Churchill, he was impulsive and full of large ambitions. He had begun his parliamentary career on the Radical left of the Liberal Party and was once considered so extreme politically that Queen Victoria had urged Gladstone to exert more control over his “wild colleague.” Now that he was allied with the Conservatives, there was always the worry that he would alter his course again. For the time being, Churchill sought to stay in Joe’s favor in case a change at the top created opportunities for advancement.
He was friendly toward him in the same way that he was to Lord Rosebery, treating him like a father figure and engaging him in late-night talks, one of which lasted until 2 A.M. Looking back on this period many years later, he confessed, “I must have had a great many more real talks with him than I ever had with my own father.” Chamberlain enjoyed giving him advice and encouragement and might have taken more of a fatherly interest in him if he had wanted to assume that part. But he already had two grown sons to keep him busy. The older son, Austen, was such a great admirer of his father that he seemed determined to turn himself into a carbon copy, wearing a monocle and orchid to match Joe’s and pursuing a political career.3
In those days neither Austen nor his younger sibling Neville seemed headed for distinction. One day in 1902, when Winston and Austen were staying as guests of Millicent Sutherland at her home in Scotland, they fell into conversation about their political ambitions. “What do you want to become?” Winston asked bluntly. With great
care Austen replied that he “had always thought the Admiralty one of the pleasantest offices and the post of First Lord one of the proudest positions that any Englishman could occupy.” Winston was openly disdainful. For him there was only one goal in politics—the top—and everything else, no matter how pleasant, was just a stepping-stone. Austen never forgot his reaction. “Winston,” he recalled, “pooh-poohed it as ‘poor ambition.’ ”
As for Neville, in 1902 he was struggling to prove that he could duplicate his father’s success in business. He wasn’t making much progress. Sent by his father in the 1890s to manage a sisal plantation in the Bahamas, he worked conscientiously to turn a profit, but experienced one setback after another and was forced after several years of failure to admit defeat. The losses were spectacular, amounting to £50,000 of his father’s capital. Joe did his best to absorb the blow, but it hampered the family for years. Neville’s inheritance was substantially reduced in order to meet commitments to other family members. He would receive only £3,000 from his father’s estate.4
* * *
Chamberlain’s early success as an industrialist owed a great deal to ruthless cost-cutting and a sharp focus on the bottom line, but now this hard, competitive streak was mostly hidden under the carefully constructed exterior of the well-mannered statesman. On occasion Churchill caught a glimpse in him of the old cutthroat “King of the Screw Trade,” and he was always unsettled to find “how deadly were the hatreds” lurking inside “my agreeable, courteous, vivacious companion.” A harrowing incident at the end of 1901 vividly brought home how deep those hatreds went, and how rough were Joe’s Birmingham roots.5
For much of the Boer War, one of its fiercest critics was a Liberal MP from Wales with a bushy mustache and a sharp, impudent stare—David Lloyd George. He had launched a series of increasingly personal attacks on Chamberlain, claiming that the sale of arms and other war supplies manufactured in Birmingham benefited Joe and his friends. Aiming straight for the heart of his adversary, he portrayed him as an aloof dandy who “strolled among his orchids” while “six thousand miles away” soldiers were slaughtered in his cause. “Few care to ‘stand up to Joe,’ ” wrote a political reporter in 1901. “Only one man does so, and does it persistently. That is Mr. Lloyd George, an excitable, gleaming-eyed little Welshman, who finds joy in baiting Mr. Chamberlain.”6
Lloyd George’s passionate oratory helped to establish him as a national figure. But it also nearly caused his violent death on a cold December night in Birmingham, when he addressed a Liberal gathering at the Town Hall and a mob estimated in the tens of thousands surrounded the building.
While Lloyd George was speaking inside the hall, the crowd attacked the doors with a battering ram and broke in. The handsome neoclassical building was turned into a battlefield as the rival camps fought. Stones and bottles were thrown, windows were shattered, and glass rained down on everyone. When an angry wave of protestors surged toward the stage crying “traitor,” the small army of policemen guarding it retreated with Lloyd George to another part of the hall and tried to fight back.
Fearing that the mob had the upper hand, the chief constable—the resourceful Charles Rafter, a local legend—disguised Lloyd George in a policeman’s uniform and managed to escort him from the building using a back way. The politician made a clean escape, but not before dozens of rioters and constables suffered serious injuries. One young man was killed. “A good many broken heads were reported,” said the Times. To their dismay, the local Liberal Association was ordered to pay for all the damages to the hall.7
When the news reached Churchill in London, he shook his head in disbelief and took up his pen right away to express his feelings to a prominent Tory acquaintance in Birmingham. “I am disgusted to read today’s papers upon the riots,” he wrote. “I hope the Conservative Party have kept their hands clean.” The whole thing, he said, reminded him of “a much older story.” He was referring to a time in 1884 when some of Chamberlain’s supporters had rioted at one of Lord Randolph Churchill’s rallies in Birmingham. Joe had loudly denied playing any part in that affair, though he and Randolph were then at odds and routinely hurling insults at each other. Winston now worried that Chamberlain was up to his old tricks again, but with a nastier twist that seemed uncharacteristically extreme.8
Chamberlain didn’t help matters when he said afterward that although he “deplored the damage,” he “could not blame the Birmingham citizens for protesting against Mr. Lloyd George’s presence.” Asked by an MP why the crowd had allowed Lloyd George to escape, Chamberlain dismissed the question, saying merely, “What’s everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” But the city had made its point. Criticizing Joe could be deadly. In a “good party fight,” Chamberlain said a few weeks later, “when I am struck, I try to strike back again.”9
It was an unsettling business, and Churchill was troubled by the idea that Chamberlain’s agents might have planned the whole thing. The Times suggested such a sinister connection when it published a telegram sent to Joe at Highbury by one of his supporters, a prominent local politician named Joseph Pentland, who was vice chairman of the school board. It was sent shortly after the Liberal MP’s narrow escape. “Lloyd George, the traitor, was not allowed to say a word,” Pentland announced proudly. “Two hundred thousand citizens and others passed a unanimous vote of confidence in the Government and admiration for your unique and fearless services for King and country.”10
The more Churchill thought about the riot, the more it bothered him. He was not well acquainted with Lloyd George at the time, but he didn’t have a good opinion of him, privately describing him as “a vulgar, chattering little cad.” He was outraged, however, to think that the game of politics could disintegrate so easily into mob violence. Though he enjoyed comparing it to war, politics in a democracy was fought with words and ideas, not weapons. (“Quit murdering and start arguing” was his advice for the leaders of the Irish Republican party, Sinn Fein, in 1920.) To get things done, he understood that hard choices had to be made, and that the process was often unattractive. He was happy to trade insults with his opponents, to plot and scheme against them for political advantage, and to shift allegiances when necessary; but there were limits, and Chamberlain had crossed the line. It was another sobering moment in Winston’s education, another glimpse into Edwardian darkness.
The methods used against Lloyd George were not only “disgraceful,” he told his Tory contact in Birmingham, but also self-destructive. “I shudder to think of the harm that would have been done to the Imperial cause in South Africa if Mr. Lloyd George had been mauled or massacred by the mob.”11
* * *
After the Birmingham riot, Churchill took care to distance himself from Chamberlain. At a Conservative meeting in early January 1902 he made no excuses for Joe and his supporters. Yes, he admitted, Lloyd George had made inflammatory remarks, but there was no need for either side to overreact. “It ought to be possible,” he said, “to shed the fullest light on political questions without breaking the windows.”
The episode had opened his eyes to a growing discontent among party regulars, whose general attitude seemed to have turned in recent months from smug satisfaction to bitter resentment of their Liberal critics. The mistakes and losses of the war effort had revealed too many weaknesses in the government, and all the stinging criticisms from Lloyd George and others had undermined the party’s confidence in its own powers. Churchill could feel the mood turning sour up and down the ranks. A few weeks after the riot, he told Lord Rosebery, “The Tory Party are in a very brutal and bloody frame of mind.”12
Suddenly Churchill’s political prospects looked grim. He had given Balfour too much trouble and now recognized that in Chamberlain’s camp there was more trouble than he wanted. His little band of Hooligans looked more isolated than ever. They had not found a big issue to make their own, and their independent spirit was increasingly at odds with a party that was feeling embattled. Frustrated, Churchill worried that he h
ad painted himself into a corner. In March, when he was well into his second year as an MP, he joked halfheartedly that he was “a politician who has the malady of youth and who has been wickedly independent.”13
The very next month Chamberlain scolded Churchill and the Hooligans for persisting in their ineffective—and, to him, juvenile—displays of independence. It happened on a Thursday evening near the end of April, and the Hooligans had just voted against the government on an issue involving a newspaper editor in South Africa recently released from jail. Albert Cartwright had been convicted of libel for claiming that Lord Kitchener had ordered his troops to shoot prisoners. Now Cartwright wanted to come home to Britain so that he could tell his story, but the British authorities in South Africa were preventing his return. They had no right, Churchill thundered in the debates, “to proceed against a man who has already served all that the law has a right to require of him. If there is no right, there is no reason. What reason has the Government to be afraid of Mr. Cartwright?”14
The issue was resolved in the government’s favor, but passions were still running high when the Hooligans left the chamber at about eight o’clock and soon found themselves joined at dinner by Chamberlain himself.
“That was a fine skirmish of yours in the House this afternoon,” Chamberlain said when he arrived. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
Churchill remembered Joe’s first words as “I am dining in very bad company.”
As was his habit when he was angry, Chamberlain spoke softly. The effect could be unnerving. “Smooth and sibilant,” a journalist once remarked of Joe’s voice, “it is . . . most silky when its matter is most deadly.”15
“What is the use of supporting your own government only when it is right?” Chamberlain asked. “It is just when it is in this sort of pickle that you ought to have come to our aid.”
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