Lives had been endangered in the search, so the family tried to downplay the story, anxious that the press not discover that Violet’s supposed “peril” was simply an unhappy young woman’s cry for attention. She had wanted sympathy after Winston left but didn’t get it because she had tried so hard to pretend that his marriage didn’t matter to her. There were other young men now whose sympathy she may have wanted, and in letters to them after the event she exaggerated the danger, telling one young man in October, “I’m drearily normal again. . . . I escaped death narrowly in about 5 different ways—such as drowning, smashing into smithereens, brain fever, ‘exposure’(!) etc etc.”16
Margot tried to persuade her to keep quiet about the event. As she noted in her diary, “I wanted her just to thank the fishermen & poor people who found her & to say nothing more about it: poor Violet! Nothing was further from her ideas & she felt hurt I cd see by my attitude.” In an effort to put the whole episode behind them, Margot decided that the family should spend the rest of their holiday somewhere less isolated, so she moved the family from Slains to a house near Edinburgh owned by her brother. It was a timely decision, for the stark beauty of the castle had a dark appeal that wasn’t helpful to someone in Violet’s frame of mind. Indeed, there was such a mysterious, forbidding air to the place that in the 1890s it had become an object of great fascination to Bram Stoker, who visited it often, staying at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel in Cruden Bay. Many believe that Slains was the inspiration for the castle in Stoker’s novel of 1897, Dracula. He wrote the last pages of the book at the village hotel.17
A close watch was kept on Violet, who seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown after what she called her “rock-affair.” She continued to show signs of manic behavior, especially in any matter connected to Winston. In October the prime minister himself had to intervene when she wanted to race off to meet Winston after he returned from his honeymoon. Hearing that he was in Dundee for the annual Scottish Liberal Congress, and was giving speeches, she suddenly decided that she needed to appear on the same platform with him and speak on his behalf. A wire from her father instructed her to say nothing.
“I was sorry,” she wrote Venetia afterward, “as I had thought of one or two things I quite wanted to say!” Her father told her that she needed to stay silent for “political” reasons, but both he and Margot must have dreaded that she would attract more publicity—and generate more gossip—if she said anything about Winston in public.18
This manic phase soon faded, especially when Margot began to speak of sending her troubled stepdaughter to Switzerland for her health. Margot didn’t know all the details behind Violet’s emotional upheaval, but she was sure of one thing. “This summer,” she wrote, “it seemed as if she changed suddenly.” Another long winter abroad was the last thing Violet wanted. Desperate to immerse herself in the political scene, she was willing to do anything to avoid being sent away again. Over the next few months she would settle into a less intense friendship with Winston, though it would take time for her to accept Clemmie as his wife. As it happened, she did accompany Margot to the Continent for six weeks at the end of the winter, but she endured it well and came home feeling grateful at having escaped a longer exile.19
Churchill wanted Violet and Clemmie to like each other and tried to smooth away any hurt feelings. Two months after his wedding, he arranged for the three of them to have lunch in London. Violet behaved herself but still wasn’t impressed with Clemmie. When she was alone with Winston, he told her that his wife “had more in her than met the eye.” Violet wanted to say something cutting. Yet it is a measure of her new effort at self-restraint that she simply smiled and gave him a double-edged response: “But so much meets the eye.”20
Though Violet’s mood was still bitter, it was in everyone’s interest to forget about the troubles of the summer, and so the subject was hushed up. Violet would remain Churchill’s strongest advocate in Downing Street, yet it seems that both took precautions in later years to obscure the depth of their involvement with each other. Very little correspondence between them has survived, which is unusual since both were avid letter writers. Churchill said almost nothing in public about Violet. There are just a few scattered references in his published comments, the best of which was his memorable description of her devotion to her father. He called her Asquith’s “champion redoubtable.”21
Trying not to hurt Violet, and to keep Clemmie happy, was a struggle for Winston. But his efforts were sincere. He didn’t want to lose the friendship of one or the love of the other. In their first year or two together his wife did have fears that he was having second thoughts about the marriage. There was no one else, he hastened to assure her. She was the only one he loved. “You ought to trust me,” he told her, “for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you.”22
He meant every word of it, unusual though that was for a politician of his age and ambition.
XVII
EMINENT EDWARDIAN
It was a remarkable rise. In little more than seven years Churchill had gone from the Conservative backbenches to a prominent place in the Liberal Cabinet, with commentators on all sides predicting that he would one day be prime minister. When his engagement was announced, the Daily Mirror made the case that the glowing expectations for his political future were perfectly reasonable. With a tongue-in-cheek reference to his narrow escape from the burning mansion in Rutland, the newspaper declared, “If prophecy were ever safe, it would be safe to predict that Mr. Winston Churchill—soldier, war correspondent, traveller, biographer—and in view of quite recent events one may add, fireman—will one day, and that not far hence, attain to the Premiership.”
A. G. Gardiner, of the Daily News, portrayed him as a kind of premier-in-waiting: “He stands before the country the most interesting figure in politics, his life a crowded drama of action, his courage high, his vision unclouded, his boats burned.” James Douglas, an editor at the Star, was so excited by the young statesman’s prospects that he didn’t see much point in following any other politician’s career. “There are many clever men in the House of Commons,” wrote Douglas, “but not one of them stings you with the romantic excitement of adventurous ambition. . . . Mr. Churchill alone tingles with a dramatic future.”1
It was time now for the promising politician to prove that he could meet some of the high expectations for his career. Could he establish himself as the capable head of a major department, a powerful force in the Cabinet, and a parliamentary figure with impressive legislative skills? Over the next year, in fact, he would demonstrate convincingly that he could do all three. Though he is not usually given credit for it, Churchill, as president of the Board of Trade, was largely responsible for three major legislative achievements of the Edwardian age.
Two became law in 1909. The first was the Labour Exchanges Act, which created a national job placement system. It was a bold but practical initiative to help the unemployed in one region find work in another. The second was the Trade Boards Act, which helped to alleviate the unhealthy working conditions and miserable pay among so-called sweated laborers—mostly women in small workshops. It was the first important legislation to establish the principle of a minimum wage. After it became law, a grateful Mary Macarthur—secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League—said of the reform in an address to an American audience, “I don’t think England quite realizes what has been done. It is simply a revolution. It means revolution in our industrial conditions.”2
The third achievement took more time, but it was Churchill who began work in 1908 to develop what would become the scheme for unemployment insurance in the National Insurance Act of 1911. Lloyd George would claim credit for it, but it was Churchill who did the spadework with his staff at the Board of Trade. He first suggested the idea to Asquith in early 1908, then proposed a detailed plan at the end of the year, and circulated a memo to the Cabinet with specific costs a few months later. But, at Lloyd George’s specific request, he delayed bringing a
bill to the House of Commons. The two men had decided that unemployment and health insurance needed to be coupled as one bill, and Lloyd George wanted more time to prepare the health provisions. The Chancellor of the Exchequer wasn’t even sure he could create a viable plan, but he wanted to try, and Churchill agreed to wait.3
Almost two and a half years later Lloyd George would insist that the whole plan originated with him, and that Winston had simply “walked off”—as he put it—with the unemployment scheme. There was no truth to this. In fact, Lloyd George was so caught up in preparing his budget of 1909 that he could do little more than listen to Winston’s ambitious plans for reform. But, in 1911, he would pretend that his colleague’s contributions to the insurance bill had never been significant. As Winston would later point out, in a letter to Clemmie, “Lloyd George has practically taken Unemployment Insurance to his own bosom, & I am I think effectively elbowed out of this large field in which I consumed so much thought and effort.”4
As one way to put these matters in a broader context, it is worth looking back at Lloyd George’s own tenure as president of the Board of Trade. He was there from the end of 1905 to April 1908, when Churchill took over. In all that time he did little to formulate plans for social reform. His major legislative accomplishments were the Merchant Shipping Act, the Patents and Design Act, and the Port of London Act. His was not exactly a record of radical innovation.
One of his biographers has wondered why Lloyd George’s long period at the Board of Trade was nothing like what came “afterward” for the “radical” politician. The answer, in part, is that his greatest Cabinet colleague and rival—Winston Churchill—came afterward, stirring Lloyd George to do more than simply sound radical. Once Churchill joined the Cabinet everything changed. As a pair of powerful personalities with high ambitions—a colleague called them “the two Romeos”—Winston and Lloyd George came to dominate the Liberal government, both as partners and as rivals, with each trying to reinforce or undermine the other, depending on their shifting self-interests.5
But Winston was the spark that ignited the change from the old liberalism of the Campbell-Bannerman administration to the more radical agenda of the Asquith years, and what was sometimes called the New Liberalism. The Cabinet noticed the change right away. Winston made it clear that he was not there to do business as usual. “I intend to make myself damned disagreeable!” he was heard to say before heading off to a Cabinet meeting in 1908. He succeeded. In a diary entry from the same period Charles Hobhouse—the new Financial Secretary of the Treasury—wrote, “Winston Churchill’s introduction to the Cabinet has been followed by the disappearance of that harmony which its members all tell me has been its marked feature.”
Hobhouse put the blame on Winston for provoking Lloyd George into becoming a more demanding colleague. He so disliked Churchill’s abrasive manner and unconventional ideas that he thought it was all part of a ploy to lead Lloyd George over a cliff. “I cannot help suspecting that Winston Churchill is deliberately urging Lloyd George to ride for a fall.”6
More than one minister thought that Churchill was causing trouble just to get others in trouble and clear the path for himself. Hearing the grumbling from the Cabinet, Lord Esher observed, “My idea is that Winston wanted to push to the front of the Cabinet. He thinks himself Napoleon.”7
Like everyone else, Lloyd George had read the stories in the press about Churchill “the future Prime Minister” and knew that he had to work fast to stay ahead of his colleague. From his new home at the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer—11 Downing Street—he was in a good position to keep track of what was happening at Number 10. No doubt he was aware of Winston’s close relationship with the prime minister’s daughter. And he could not have mistaken Violet’s contempt for him. She thought he was a shallow schemer, and she wasn’t good at hiding her opinions.
Violet liked to tell the story of the time she asked John Maynard Keynes, “What do you think happens to Mr. Lloyd George when he is alone in the room?” Smiling, Keynes had replied, “When he is alone in the room there is nobody there.”8
For a short period in late 1908, Beatrice Webb was so encouraged by Churchill’s work at the Board of Trade that she began to think he had eclipsed Lloyd George as the most impressive Liberal figure. Winston was proving to be “brilliantly able,” she noted in her diary. She now liked him better than Lloyd George, whom she called “a clever fellow” with “less intellect than Winston, and not such an attractive personality—more of the preacher, less of the statesman.”9
But while Winston may have seemed merely personally ambitious to some, he was also doing the hard work of reform. He worked so hard that by the end of 1908 he was able to outline for Asquith a comprehensive plan. No one else in the Cabinet—including Lloyd George—moved so far ahead in mapping out real changes to British society through Liberal legislation. With his usual confidence, he more or less dictated the way forward to the prime minister, writing him that the government had two years to get the job done.
“The need is urgent & the moment ripe,” he wrote Asquith. “Germany with a harder climate and far less accumulated wealth has managed to establish tolerable basic conditions for her people. She is organised not only for war, but for peace. We are organised for nothing but party politics.”
His list of necessary reforms included his plans for labor exchanges, unemployment insurance, a system of “National Infirmity Insurance,” a general overhaul of poor relief, improvements in education and transportation, and a more aggressive industrial policy to promote better relations between employers and workers. It was just the beginning of his initiatives. But these first steps constituted a bold plan for the times, and in Churchill’s estimation they were practical and affordable. More important, he thought that the legislation could be crafted in ways that would win wide acceptance, even in the House of Lords.
If they were successful, he told Asquith, they would make the nation and the Liberal Party stronger. Even if they failed, he said, it would be better “to fail in such noble efforts, than to perish by slow paralysis or windy agitation.”
Asquith welcomed Winston’s agenda, encouraging him to “push on” with his efforts to promote new legislation. In effect, Churchill was proposing to do for the nation what he had been doing for himself—to achieve quick success by thinking big, taking risks, and making the most of opportunities while they lasted.10
Criticized so often for being erratic and unreasonable, Churchill showed a steady nerve as he methodically put forward groundbreaking measures that passed into law with relative ease. As he noted proudly after the Trade Boards legislation was introduced, it was “beautifully received” in the House, with even “friendly” nods of agreement from Balfour and other leading Conservatives. As a government minister determined to amass legislative victories, he so tempered his language and manner in the House of Commons that for a while he was able to get what he wanted without resorting to invective. Now he was happy to speak kindly of Balfour, thanking him for the “extremely fair” treatment he had received from the opposition and declaring that it was his “object in the conduct of the Bill to endeavour to carry at all stages the greatest measure of support.”11
At the beginning of 1909 Churchill was brimming with confidence. He told a friendly journalist that the coming year would be full of exciting progress. “Very large plans,” he confided, “are being industriously and laboriously shaped.” In two years, he believed, if all went well the country would have in place a rational and efficient system to help those who couldn’t help themselves and to create better opportunities for those who could. As he had argued a few months earlier—in October, when he had returned from his honeymoon to speak in Dundee—his great purpose now was to meet “the need of this nation for a more complete or elaborate social organisation.”
It was in this speech at Kinnaird Hall in Dundee on a Friday night with more than two thousand of his constituents in the audience, and with his new bride b
eside him, that he had made his stirring claim: “We are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on—swinging bravely forward along the grand high road—and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.”12
* * *
Just when Churchill was relishing his new part as the great Liberal prophet—a young, clean-shaven Moses pointing the way to the promised land—two powerful forces rose up to throw huge obstacles across his “grand high road.” One was Germany, the other Lloyd George.
While the Kaiser’s generals had been playing war games as if they were knights training for chivalric tournaments, his admirals had been busy planning a modern fleet to rival that of Britain’s. In 1906 they had been forced to modify their plans when the Royal Navy launched HMS Dreadnought, a monster battleship with such impressive firepower that it could sink any ship afloat. It might have been wise not to trumpet the superiority of its long-range guns, but the British couldn’t resist. As a proud officer told the press, “On the day that the battleship Dreadnought hoists the pennant, all the navies of the world will be rendered obsolete.” By the end of 1908 a dozen of these British warships had been built or were in the works.
The German admirals were undeterred. They saw the new ship as a challenge that must be met and surpassed. They didn’t waste much time getting started. In 1908 they launched four battleships with capabilities similar to those of the Dreadnought, and they were reportedly on course to create a fleet of twenty-one by 1912. Fears grew in Britain that the nation’s long reign of naval supremacy might be endangered. The earlier claims that the new British warship was superior to all others had helped to create an arms race. “If we were about to make foreign fleets obsolete,” said the Edinburgh Review, “we had shown foreigners the way to do the same to ours.”13
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