Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Churchill could have become a useful ally to the suffrage cause, but its militant wing showed little interest in working with him. Because older leaders of the Liberal Party—especially Asquith—were unsympathetic to the cause, the suffragettes decided to send a message to the leadership by making an example of Winston. And they did it in a way that cut him to the quick—they ruined his speeches. They would wait until he was on the verge of delivering one of his cherished phrases and then shout out, “Votes for women!” or would create a racket by swinging a hand bell.

  Based in Manchester, Emmeline Pankhurst, the preeminent leader of the suffragettes, cheerfully admitted that Churchill was harassed simply because he made a convenient target. He had been the subject of sporadic protests in the 1906 election, but in 1908 the demonstrations were relentless. “Not that we had any animus against Mr. Churchill,” Pankhurst would recall. “We chose him simply because he was the only important candidate standing for constituencies within reach of our headquarters. We attended every meeting addressed by Mr. Churchill. We heckled him unmercifully; we spoiled his best points by flinging back such obvious retorts that the crowds roared with laughter.”3

  It was the ringing of bells in the middle of his meetings that nearly drove him over the edge. It rattled his nerves and undermined his confidence just when he needed it most. He would rise to one of his well-rehearsed rhetorical heights, and then somewhere in the crowd a bell would sound, laughter would erupt, and Churchill would stamp his foot in frustration. In a rare understatement he later wrote of the disruptions, “It became extremely difficult to pursue connected arguments.” As Lloyd George later joked, “Winston is bitter against the suffragettes because they spoil his perorations.”4

  These annoying tactics would take a violent turn in the coming years, and with each assault Churchill would become less willing to back a movement that he initially favored. The worst came in 1909 when, without warning, a woman at the train station in Bristol struck Winston over the head with a dog whip. A second blow slashed his face. A detective sergeant who witnessed the attack testified that if the whip had hit Churchill in the eye “it might have blinded him.” More alarming at the time was his dangerous position on the platform. The woman drove him so far backward that he nearly fell under a train waiting to depart.

  “The two struggled on the edge of the platform just in front of the space between two carriages,” said a contemporary report. “It was a very exciting half minute. The woman was shouting frantically, being evidently beside herself with fury. She made another vigorous attempt at assault, but Mr. Churchill had her by the wrist, and this time the lash did no more than touch his face. She was shouting, ‘Take that, you brute, you brute!’ ”

  The two were saved from a fall at the last second when policemen grabbed the woman and hustled her away. After her conviction, she demanded the return of her whip, saying that it now had “historical interest” and promising not to use it again to “assault Cabinet ministers.” The demand was refused.5

  A short time later a woman threw a heavy iron bolt at Churchill’s car and almost hit him. The next year three women rushed him and tried to strike him in the face but managed merely to knock his hat off. A few years after that, a male supporter of the movement did succeed in punching him in the mouth after lunging at him in a crowd and knocking him to the ground. Countless threats were made against Churchill and his family. Though the windows of his house were smashed, he was spared the kind of deadly attack directed at Lloyd George, whose weekend retreat was bombed. The explosion tore apart an upper floor and rattled windows hundreds of yards away. Fortunately, Lloyd George wasn’t there at the time.6

  * * *

  In the brief by-election campaign Churchill worked feverishly to overcome the tactics of his foes. Jennie showed up to help, but her remarks on the platform were less than electrifying. She tried out a slogan of her own making, with a bad pun about the high cost of sugar and beer, and it didn’t go over well. “They talk a lot about dear sugar and dear beer in this election,” she said, “but all I can say is ‘Vote for dear Winston.’ ”

  The Churchill name seemed to have lost some of its magic. When the results were announced on the evening of April 24 Winston went down to defeat by 429 votes. The Conservatives were overjoyed and sang “Goodbye, Winston” as he left the Manchester Town Hall looking dejected. He told his supporters that the defeat was a terrible blow, “heavy, bitter and crushing.” It was difficult to accept that the people of Manchester who had treated him like a hero only two years earlier were now casting him aside in favor of the mediocre Joynson-Hicks, whom H. G. Wells—a Churchill booster in the election—called “an obscure and ineffectual nobody.”7

  Emmeline Pankhurst was sure that she and her followers were responsible for Winston’s fall, later claiming that all the newspapers said “it was the Suffragettes who defeated Mr. Churchill.” Her claim was exaggerated, but great damage had been done, and she was determined to inflict more. On election night he was offered the chance to stand for a supposedly safe Liberal seat in the Scottish city of Dundee, where the previous MP had stepped down after being given a peerage. Already exhausted from one campaign, he had no choice but to throw himself into another by-election in May. Pankhurst vowed to follow him to Dundee and take “personal charge of the [suffragette] campaign” against him. She wanted to prove that no Liberal was safe if she could drive out of office a Cabinet minister as famous as Churchill.8

  For many weeks after his defeat Churchill was ridiculed for it. Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador, spread the story later in the spring that Winston was humbled by a joke made at his expense involving Manchester. Churchill was often accused of ignoring one of his dinner companions while he talked to another, and on this occasion Reid said that he ignored Maud Allan, the provocative Canadian-born entertainer known for her “Dance of the Seven Veils,” and for revealing costumes that caused some cities to ban her performances.

  “Well, Mr. Churchill,” said Maud Allan as she and the other dinner guests left the table, “we don’t seem to have had much in common tonight. In fact, I think there is in the whole world but one thing we do have in common. We were both kicked out of Manchester.”9

  * * *

  A week after his election defeat Churchill was busy touring the streets of Dundee in search of votes when his car stopped at the gates of a large factory. It was the lunch hour and the workers came pouring out to greet him. He stood up in the back of his open car and started to make a short speech. His voice was slightly hoarse as he braved the damp air on this cool spring afternoon in Scotland. He didn’t bother to wear his hat, and he was just getting fired up when he saw a carriage appear with two strong horses, a driver in livery, and a smiling young woman in a flowery hat standing up with a very large brass bell in her hand. A placard across the front of the carriage said, “Votes for Women.”

  The Irish suffragette Mary Maloney wasn’t associated with Emmeline Pankhurst, but as a one-woman army she posed the greatest challenge to Churchill in Dundee. With her hired carriage she followed him everywhere for a week, and the railway bell she carried was deafening. On this occasion at the factory entrance she didn’t wait for any particular moment to interrupt him. Every time he spoke she set the bell going, drowning him out. As the newspapers reported, Maloney’s bell was one of the most effective weapons Churchill had ever faced.

  “When, to avoid the horrible clangour, he moved away,” observed a reporter, “she followed him up. He could not make himself heard; he could not speak or think with that dreadful bell ringing in his ears. . . . The worst of it was that the crowd of workmen laughed at his discomfiture more than they resented Miss Maloney’s interference with their hearing. Eventually the President of the Board of Trade had to give up the contest. He drove away amid laughter and jeers.”

  Churchill showed extraordinary patience in the face of this ordeal, even tipping his hat to Maloney on one occasion as he walked past her to speak at a meeting that he knew she wo
uld disrupt. As soon as her bell sounded, he would shout, “If this lady thinks these are good arguments to use in Dundee let her use them. I wish you, ‘Good afternoon.’ ” With that he would raise his hat and drive away, hoping that she wouldn’t catch up before he finished the next event.10

  By the end of the campaign the bell-ringing began to get on everyone’s nerves and the tide of public sympathy shifted to Churchill. Mary Maloney may have inadvertently done him more good than harm. But he was worried right up to the last moment. On May 9, while the votes were being counted, he was seen standing by himself in a corner of the Court House seemingly lost in thought while nervously “twisting little rubber bands around his fingers.” In the final count he received less than half the votes, but because he was competing against three other candidates, he came out on top and was well ahead of his rivals.11

  He made a victory speech from the balcony of the Court House, but when he emerged to get into his car, the jubilant crowd surrounding it was so large—at least ten thousand—that scores of police had to make a path for the vehicle while other policemen pushed it at a walking pace all the way to Churchill’s hotel. He stood up in the back and waved, immensely relieved to be the winner this time. In his victory speech his gratitude showed in his new enthusiasm for everything Scottish. “Dundee for ever, Scotland to the fore,” he shouted to loud cheers.12

  What had caused him the greatest concern in the election wasn’t his Conservative opponent, but the candidate standing for the Labour Party, which was then beginning its rise to prominence in the House of Commons. The party’s leader—Scottish socialist Keir Hardie—campaigned vigorously for the Labour candidate, George Stuart, whose share of the votes was almost the same as the Tory candidate’s. The challenge for Winston was to explain to his working-class voters why they shouldn’t be tempted to abandon liberalism for socialism.

  Blissfully bell-free, his campaign speech in Dundee on May 4 was one of his better efforts to set forth a general political philosophy. He spoke at night to a packed crowd of twenty-five hundred at Kinnaird Hall. It was a long and detailed speech composed at short notice in the heat of the campaign, but Churchill had been trying for the last year to formulate his objections to socialism. In the autumn, when he had been packing for his trip to Africa, a friendly journalist had noticed that he was taking along some serious reading material. “What are all those books on Socialism?” asked the journalist. “They are going to be my reading on the voyage,” Churchill had replied. “I am going to see what the Socialist case really is.”13

  Because Winston cared more about results than theory, he concentrated in his speech at Kinnaird Hall on the flaws in socialism. The basic problem, he argued, was that socialism sounded coherent in theory, but was a mass of contradictions when applied to reality. Its followers, he said, “tell us that we should dwell together in unity and comradeship. They are themselves split into twenty obscure factions, who hate and abuse each other more than they hate and abuse us. They wish to reconstruct the world. They begin by leaving out human nature. . . . I have never been able to imagine the mechanical heart in the Socialist world which is to replace the ordinary human heart that palpitates in our breasts. What motive is to induce the men, not for a day, or an hour, or a year, but for all their lives, to make a supreme sacrifice of their individuality?”

  The choice between serving society or the individual was a false one, he said, because it was possible to do both. “For certain of our affairs we must have our arrangements in common. Others we must have sacredly individual and to ourselves. We have many good things in common. You have the police, the army, the navy, and officials—why, a President of the Board of Trade you have in common. But we don’t eat in common; we eat individually. And we don’t ask the ladies to marry us in common.”

  Instead of rigid rules, he wanted adaptable guides. Instead of adherence to the dictates of theory, he advised allegiance to common sense, the lessons of history, and the examples of tradition. “You will find the truth lies in these matters,” he said, “as it always lies in difficult matters, midway between extreme formulae.”

  In liberalism he believed that he had found “a house of many mansions” large enough to hold even the oversized individuality of Winston Churchill, giving him the chance to belong to a party that he could define as he chose. His thinking was benevolent, broad-minded, individualistic, uplifting, practical, progressive, and therefore impossible to contain within the limits of any strict theory. But complex arguments and elaborate rules weren’t necessary if the great aims of government were as simple as those he gave his audience—“to encourage the weak, to fortify the strong, to uplift the generous, to correct the proud.”14

  * * *

  If Churchill had lost his second by-election in a row, Asquith might have had second thoughts about risking his prestige and the party’s by giving his new minister a third chance. In April, when he had offered Winston a place in the Cabinet, he had reminded him of a remark attributed to Gladstone, “The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.” As Churchill stood twisting those rubber bands in Dundee, he must have been imagining his own head on the chopping block.

  He knew that Asquith had a ruthless side. His old chief at the Colonial Office could testify to that. When Churchill had been promoted, Lord Elgin had been let go abruptly and resented it. “Even a housemaid gets a better warning,” complained Elgin. It is little wonder, then, that Violet was worried as she followed news of Winston’s contest. Writing on May 5 to Eddie Marsh, who was in Dundee helping Winston, Violet said that a second defeat “would be beyond bearing,” and ended her letter with a plaintive, “Oh do win.”15

  Finally allowed to return home from the Continent, Violet was still upset at missing out on the exciting change of administration, but she wasn’t looking forward to moving into 10 Downing Street. She disliked the look of the place and felt that an air of death still hovered over it. Campbell-Bannerman had died in his bed there on April 22, and just two weeks later the Asquiths moved in. Margot wasn’t impressed by the place, either. She called it “an inconvenient house with three poor staircases,” and described the exterior as “liver-coloured and squalid.”

  One thing that Violet did enjoy about her new home was its proximity to Winston at the Board of Trade. As soon as he returned from Dundee, she came at his invitation to see his new office in Whitehall Gardens and to have tea. For the next two months they saw each other often. As Violet would recall decades later, whenever he conferred with the prime minister at Number 10 he would come down “to talk to me in my little sitting room in the garden on his way out.”16

  There was speculation in the press that spring on the subject of Winston and marriage. The only reason that he remained unmarried, suggested the society magazines, was that his mother had supposedly decreed, “Winston must marry money.” This was nonsense, of course, but the pressure was mounting for Churchill to crown his political success with a big wedding. One of his fellow Cabinet ministers, Reginald McKenna, had recently announced that he would marry in June, which was a great surprise because Reggie was unusually homely and, at forty-four, not the most appealing bachelor. Yet his bride was a pretty young woman who had just turned nineteen, Pamela Jekyll, and Violet was one of her friends.

  “What [Pamela] was waiting and longing for,” Violet learned from a mutual friend, “was someone to write and say she was the only person he wanted to marry.” It didn’t seem important to the new bride that Reggie was so much older and, in Violet’s estimation, repulsive—with his “spots, spats, speckles & tricot tights.”17

  After Winston and Violet attended the McKenna wedding on June 2, Violet must have wondered why her great friend and hero couldn’t manage to follow Reggie’s lead and ask someone to marry him. She had done enough to make it clear that she was available, and he knew she adored him and would do anything for him. Though she wasn’t rich, she was, after all, the prime minister’s daughter.

  She didn’t know at this
point, however, that Winston was interested in Clementine Hozier. Violet did have other young men to turn to, but there was no one like Winston. Everyone else was second best in her estimation. As she later wrote of him, “He generated his own light—intense, direct and concentrated as a beam.”18

  Margot planned for the whole family to spend much of August and September at a remote castle they had rented on the Scottish coast above Aberdeen. There was a golf course nearby to keep the prime minister busy during the day, and friends were asked to come and stay. Violet invited Winston, among others, perhaps hoping that the romantic location would stir him to action. He agreed to come on August 17 and to remain for a few days.

  By the end of July, Winston seems to have given Violet encouraging signals. All his hopes and passion were aroused by Clemmie, but he was still unsure of their future together, and was wary of having another proposal rejected. On the other hand, he knew that he could count on Violet to say yes. She became his alternative in case Clemmie let him down. It wasn’t fair to lead one woman on while secretly hoping to win another, and he knew it. “I behaved badly to Violet,” he later admitted to his friend Harry Primrose, Lord Rosebery’s heir, “because I was practically engaged to her.”19

  XVI

  THE CASTLE

  At the beginning of August 1908, as his date with the Asquiths in Scotland grew closer, Churchill was beginning to worry that Clemmie’s interest in him was fading. She was enjoying a holiday on the Isle of Wight, and he had not heard from her for a while. But then something happened to him that brought a quick response from her. He was almost killed in a house fire.

  It happened while he was staying with cousins at a large rented mansion—Burley-on-the-Hill, in Rutland. At one in the morning on August 6 a fire broke out in the kitchen and spread quickly. Guests and servants escaped without delay, wearing only their nightclothes and carrying a few valuables with them to the lawn, where they watched the blaze in horror. Eddie was one of the guests and lost everything, including Cabinet papers he was carrying for Winston. Everyone except Churchill remained on the lawn out of harm’s way. He insisted on dashing back into the burning house to retrieve some of its valuable artworks and rare books.