Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  The new secretary of state for the colonies was the ninth Earl of Elgin, whose grandfather had been responsible for the controversial removal of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century. (“Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,” wrote Lord Byron, who denounced the seventh earl as a vandal.) Winston didn’t think he would have much trouble from his aristocratic chief, who was a capable administrator but had little interest in politics. Lord Elgin disliked giving speeches or taking part in Cabinet debates. Churchill thought he could run circles around him and get his way more often than not.

  At first, his decision to go to the Colonial Office may have mystified many in the party, but a few sharp-eyed observers were quick to understand his scheme. In fact, Punch gave the game away not long after Churchill joined the department. One of its brilliant cartoonists decided to portray Winston as a young Greek warrior charging into action on a galloping steed labeled “Colonial Office.” Behind him in robe and sandals stands a bearded Lord Elgin with staff in hand, trying to rein in Winston by grasping at his flowing cape. The whole thing is designed to look like a Parthenon frieze and was published over the caption “An Elgin Marble,” with a note jokingly attributing the design to Winston himself.

  Only Churchill could work for an earl and act as if he were the boss. As one popular journal said of him, “If he were only a deputy-assistant coatpeg, he would be the most prominent hook in the row.”2

  * * *

  The news that Churchill had succeeded in becoming part of the government brought congratulatory notes from many friends, including Hugh Cecil, who gave him a well-intentioned warning to avoid “gaseous” speechmaking and to focus on turning himself into a skilled administrator. Winston took the criticism in good humor and agreed to do his best as a junior minister.

  There was no sign that his new job had made Muriel Wilson think any better of him as a potential husband, but another old flame did come back into his life. It was Pamela, now Lady Lytton. She had been gradually renewing her ties to him, clearing away old animosities and misunderstandings. They had met at parties now and then, and she and her husband had entertained him at Knebworth House. Impressed by Winston’s accomplishments, she had a new appreciation for him and wanted his friendship. She was affectionate and kind, and—grateful for that—he reciprocated. They started writing to each other again, with Pamela addressing him warmly as “Winston Mine.” However much she may have disappointed him, he still had powerful memories of their earlier times together and wanted once again to know that she had a place in his life.3

  A few days after Churchill accepted the offer to serve in the Colonial Office, Pamela’s great friend Lady Granby gave a party in London to which Churchill was invited. Pamela was among the guests, and so was a young friend of hers—Edward Marsh—who had been an assistant private secretary to Chamberlain at the Colonial Office. Marsh was still employed by the department as a clerk in the West African section. It was Pamela’s idea that Lady Granby should invite him to the party. He was two years older than Winston, and so much in awe of him that he stumbled over his words when they met at the party, and treated him with great deference.

  Having met him once or twice before, Churchill was startled by his “exaggerated courtesy” and asked why he was being treated with such respect. “Because,” Marsh replied nervously, “you are coming to rule over me at the Colonial Office.”

  He had not been intimidated by Joe Chamberlain, but Winston was another matter. “I was a little afraid of him,” Marsh later acknowledged. High-strung and extraordinarily sensitive, Marsh looked as if he might run from his own shadow. He was a couple of inches taller than Winston, very slim, and darkly handsome, but curiously inattentive to his bushy eyebrows, which tended to twirl up at either end of his broad forehead. His voice was squeaky, his manner skittish. On a first encounter, it was easy to be underwhelmed by him.4

  The next day at the office, however, Marsh was surprised to hear that Churchill wanted him as his new private secretary. He didn’t believe it was true, and then when he realized the offer was serious, he began to panic. Having followed the stories in the press of Winston’s relentless attacks on Chamberlain, he worried that he would be the next victim—a mild-mannered civil servant browbeaten and worked to death by a merciless taskmaster. After leaving the office, he went immediately to seek advice from a trusted old friend—Edith, the Dowager Countess of Lytton, who was Pamela’s mother-in-law.

  Eddie, as all his friends called him, was almost an adopted member of the Lytton family. The only son of a distinguished doctor, he had become a close friend of Victor, Lord Lytton, when they were both students at Cambridge University. Later he shared a flat with Victor’s bohemian brother, Neville, who was a painter and had married Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s pretty daughter, Judith. When Pamela became part of the Lytton family, she also became Eddie’s friend. As he later wrote, Knebworth became “a second home to me.” Pamela thought that he should work for Winston. But she didn’t tell Eddie that until much later.5

  Desperate, Marsh begged the dowager countess for guidance. She had known Winston and Jennie for many years—not intimately, but socially. She had also been acquainted with Lord Randolph. So she understood Marsh’s concerns, but she gave him some good advice while they sat and discussed his future. “The first time you meet Winston, you see all his faults,” she said, “and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”6

  Encouraged, Marsh agreed to dine that evening with Churchill, who was not only charming but also reassuring, making the demands of the job sound reasonable. At the end of the evening Eddie accepted the offer. It must have pleased Winston to know that he would enter the new year ruling over Joe’s old fiefdom with one of the former assistants now serving him. At the end of the night Eddie wrote Pamela of his decision. “I expect I’ve told you how much I admire [Winston], so I shall do my best. Do pray for me.”7

  Within a few days he was working at Winston’s side, where he would remain a fixture for much of the next twenty-five years, following Churchill from office to office as his trusted assistant, confidant, and friend. He didn’t always find him easy to work for, but he soon learned how to weather Winston’s stormy outbursts of temper. “I myself never much minded having my head bitten off,” he wrote in his autobiography, “because I knew that instead of throwing it into the wastepaper basket, he would very soon be fitting it back on my neck with care and even with ceremony.”8

  Winston and Eddie would always seem an incongruous pair; but, like his boss, Marsh’s best qualities took time to discover. He loved poetry and art in general, and always lived modestly so that he could spend every spare penny on buying paintings or supporting writers whose work he admired. He was an early collector of the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant.

  He would become a great friend and champion of the poet Rupert Brooke and would serve as his literary executor after Brooke died in 1915. He would also help to write a popular song in partnership with his friend Ivor Novello. The melody of “The Land of Might Have Been” (1920) is Novello’s, but the lyrics are Eddie’s. The words give an idea of why Pamela thought her old suitor would like Marsh, for the song reveals the deep romantic heart beating inside the starchy breast of the timid civil servant. Dreaming of the “land of might have been,” Marsh wrote of a better world as a fleeting vision that haunts the common life below: “Sometimes on the rarest nights comes the vision calm and clear, / Gleaming with unearthly lights on our path of doubt and fear.”

  On a more practical level, Eddie was an avid student of English grammar, and loved nothing better than tracking down mistakes and correcting them in any text he was asked to check. His bosses—including Churchill—valued this talent, but so did friends, some of whom were successful authors seemingly beyond his help. Somerset Maugham was one friend and writer who, in later years, routinely submitted manuscripts to Eddie for close reading. They would argue over whether it was acceptable in formal English to shorten lunc
heon to the more common lunch. Eddie insisted that only luncheon would do. Maugham didn’t always agree with his advice, but wrote him, “I think you must know grammar better than anyone in England.”9

  Eddie also had discovered a secret to surviving the long working days of a tireless bureaucratic life. He was the original master of the power nap. When he was very young, he had taught himself to sleep “without jerks,” so that he could nap in church without drawing attention to his slumber. As a civil servant, he used this talent to take a nap every afternoon sitting straight up and seemingly deep in thought instead of sleep. If anyone interrupted him, he could promptly stir into action and appear fully alert until he was left alone again, at which time he would close his eyes again. He taught Winston this technique and called it the afternoon “coma.”10

  In the busy days ahead, however, the new junior minister and his assistant would get little sleep. As soon as the Cabinet was in place, Campbell-Bannerman sought the country’s approval by calling a general election for January. Winston had little time to become acquainted with his new duties. On January 3, 1906, he arrived in Manchester to do what Lord Elgin as a member of the upper chamber wasn’t required to do—stand for election.

  To help him, Eddie sprang into action and came along on the train ride to Manchester, where they took rooms near the central station at the Midland Hotel—“a brand-new mammoth” establishment, as Winston would recall it, “vaunting the wealth and power of the Lancashire of those days.” Balfour, whose constituency was also in the city, was staying nearby at the Queen’s Hotel. The hectic campaign would last only ten days, so the candidates were girding themselves for an intense fight in the damp gloom of winter.11

  * * *

  Churchill’s opponent was William Joynson-Hicks, a Tory lawyer with a special interest in religious and temperance issues, and also in efforts to stamp out vice, and to put more motor cars on the road. He was the author of a mind-numbing reference volume titled The Law of Heavy and Light Mechanical Traction on Highways of the United Kingdom. Joynson-Hicks had been defeated when he stood for election in 1900 and though some Liberals may have been tempted to dismiss him as a minor candidate, Churchill took him very seriously.

  Shortly after Winston arrived in Manchester, huge posters began appearing with the slogan “Vote for Winston Churchill and Free Trade.” His name was in letters five feet high, and the slogan was well suited to Manchester, the birthplace in the 1840s of the old free trade movement of Richard Cobden and John Bright. Not to be outdone, Joynson-Hicks ordered his own posters with his name five feet high, but the slogan was not quite as direct nor as euphonious: “Support Joynson-Hicks and Consistency.” It left many people scratching their heads. Churchill interpreted it as a veiled claim by his opponent “that he has not changed his opinions so much as I have done.” With self-deprecating wit, he turned the charge upside down. “I said a lot of stupid things when I worked with the Conservative Party,” he told a campaign gathering, “and I left it because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.”12

  The line produced both laughter and cheers. Winston was in high spirits during the campaign, and it showed. He never seemed to run out of energy. He was up early each day, and was still talking to supporters late at night. In between he would give as many as four speeches, addressing overflow crowds at halls and theaters, or standing on the edge of rickety platforms in the open air with banners waving overhead. At night, he planned out the next day and kept Eddie busy for two or three hours answering letters and telegrams. Wherever he went, he was mobbed by admirers who treated him the same way later generations would treat pop stars. On one occasion the crush of the crowd following him was so great that several people were trampled, and four were sent to the Royal Infirmary, including one man whose head was “pushed through a glass window.”

  When word spread that Churchill was staying at the Midland Hotel, crowds gathered in the lobby and in the surrounding streets to wait for a glimpse of him. “In passing through the hotel corridors,” wrote one reporter, “he is . . . beset by autograph-hunters and all sorts of hero-worshippers.” They hailed him affectionately as “Winston” and pressed his hand as if he were an old friend. As for Joynson-Hicks, he appeared with Balfour at a big rally, and was usually able to attract large crowds on his own, though he did have to dodge a few stones thrown at his carriage after one meeting. The newspapers said that no one could remember a time when an election “was so charged with electrical excitement.”13

  Everything seemed to break Churchill’s way. Besides the normal press coverage of his campaign, he was also receiving considerable attention for his biography of Lord Randolph, which appeared with great fanfare in the middle of the election battle. The reviews were mostly full of praise, and not a small amount of wonder that a politician so young could write so well. Some reviewers even understood and enjoyed the romance of the story without accepting the biographer’s exaggerated claims for Randolph’s political importance. The critic in the Spectator was especially evenhanded, pointing out that Randolph had been able “to dazzle but not to lead,” yet acknowledging that the political world had rarely “seen a more romantic career than that of the statesman who was famous at thirty, the virtual leader of his party at thirty-seven, and a broken and dying man at forty.”14

  Winston was taking a great risk bringing out his biography in the middle of a hard-fought campaign, with the possibility he might compare unfavorably to his father. But reviewers failed to see how cleverly the author had embedded his own views in the story of his father, and—with the big election still undecided—they didn’t dare speculate on the parallels between Winston and Randolph at the age of thirty. In many ways the dramatic rise of the son’s career was more striking than the father’s similar rise because Winston was doing a lot more with a lot less. He didn’t have the magical title, a beautiful wife, or a father with a ducal purse; but he was a braver, brighter, and stronger man than Lord Randolph. Yet all that wouldn’t have mattered much if he had gone down to an ignominious defeat in Manchester.

  * * *

  On polling day—Saturday, January 13—Churchill seemed confident of victory. His cause was popular, and he had been a dynamic campaigner, whereas the Tories were still struggling to explain their mistakes of the past few years and were still searching to find a strong message for the future. When the results were announced that night, Balfour lost his own seat, suffering a stunning rejection by the voters. Winston, on the other hand, won with a comfortable majority, as did six other Liberals in the Manchester area. It was a complete disaster for the Conservatives and a runaway triumph for the Liberals. A radiant Churchill was carried away by his supporters to enjoy a late-night victory supper at the Midland Hotel. The streets, he recalled, “were one solid mass of humanity.”15

  Overall, the Liberals won 377 seats, while the Tory Opposition was reduced to slightly more than a hundred and fifty MPs. It was every bit the disaster that Churchill and others had been predicting that Chamberlain and Balfour would create for their party.

  In his Birmingham constituency Chamberlain was safe from the electoral tide that devastated so many others of his party, but he wasn’t protected from the toll that the long battle for his imperial ambitions had taken on his body and mind. He couldn’t ignore the verdict of the voters and must have understood that his career was all but over. Yet he was determined to press ahead.

  He wouldn’t make it very far. His health was failing. For years he had boasted that he never took any exercise, and that the cigars he smoked incessantly had no effect on his health. But, six months after the general election, he collapsed in his bedroom one evening, having just attended a party for his seventieth birthday. His wife found him trying to drag himself across the floor. He had suffered a massive stroke, and his right side was paralyzed.

  He would make a partial recovery but would never see his full powers of speech or movement restored. Though his family pretended for months that he might still be able to return to an acti
ve life, he appeared infrequently in public, and then only as a shriveled figure in a wheelchair, his face twisted and pale. He lingered as a shadow of his former self until 1914, when he died just days before his seventy-eighth birthday. Balfour would win another seat and revive his political fortunes, but for Joseph Chamberlain the election of 1906 was the last hurrah. Churchill’s own view of Joe would mellow over the years and lead him to discount the ferocity of their old rivalry. Gradually, the bad memories faded, and what he preferred to keep in mind were their moments of shared pleasure in the political game.

  Before they left Manchester, Winston and Eddie went for a long walk and wandered by mistake into a slum area. They made a short tour, peering silently into dark lanes, and then suddenly Winston had a thought he couldn’t suppress. “Fancy,” he said, “living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever!” Many years later Marsh would quote these words in his autobiography, and afterward they would sometimes be used against Churchill as evidence of snobbery. But when such charges are made, what is often left out is Eddie’s remark just prior to the quotation. He wrote, “Winston looked about him, and his sympathetic imagination was stirred.”16

  Churchill wasn’t trying to look down on anyone. He was trying to understand what a life of such poverty would mean to him. Men like Balfour wouldn’t have paused long enough to wonder, if they had bothered to look in the first place. Winston couldn’t stop being Winston. He knew what he loved, and what made him happy. But he could be roused from his usual preoccupation with his own affairs to look around and grasp other points of view, and to ask questions. He had been doing a lot of that since switching from one party to another, and would do even more of it in the coming years as he experimented with new ideas in an age overflowing with them.

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