Shrouded in secrecy, the naval preparations in Germany created so much uncertainty that British authorities couldn’t say how lethal the new ships were nor exactly how many were in production. One day in December 1908 a member of the opposition, John Lonsdale, asked Reginald McKenna, now head of the Admiralty, if he could provide “the number and description of the big guns to be carried by the new German battleship Posen.” McKenna responded, “I am unable to give the information desired.”
Incredulous, Lonsdale asked, “Does not the right hon. Gentleman think it desirable to take steps to make himself acquainted with these facts?” McKenna tried to turn the question on the questioner. “If the hon. Gentleman,” he said, “can help me to discover the armament of the Posen, I shall be extremely glad.” Lonsdale shot back, “It is not my job.”14
McKenna may have been in the dark about the specifics of certain battleships, but he knew more than he was willing to admit. The problem was that he didn’t want to say anything to start a panic. As he confided to Asquith two weeks later, “German capacity to build dreadnoughts is at this moment equal to ours.” If this “alarming” information became known, he warned, it “would give the public a rude awakening.” McKenna was so worried by the latest reports that he gave his backing to a plan for adding six—and perhaps as many as eight—British dreadnoughts to the fleet at a staggering cost of at least £9 million. The Cabinet took up the question in January 1909, and for the next two months its members argued over what to do.15
Immersed in his plans for social reforms, and caught up in the excitement of courtship and marriage, Churchill had been paying less attention to foreign affairs than usual. The prospect of war wasn’t on his mind. The young man who had once been so eager to go into battle and risk his life had become accustomed to the less harrowing adventures of political combat, and he was slow to see the dangers in the growing naval rivalry between Britain and Germany. Reform, retrenchment, and peace were the great Liberal watchwords, and Churchill had been stirred by these noble aims. They seemed now to offer him a better path to glory than the old-fashioned one of war.
Far from being a warmonger, which later critics would assume was an intrinsic part of his character, Churchill wanted to believe that no reason for war existed between two nations as highly advanced as Germany and Britain. “I think it is greatly to be deprecated,” he told an audience in Wales, “that persons should try to spread the belief that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense. . . . No, these two great peoples have nothing to fight about, no prize to fight for, and no place to fight in. . . . I have a high and prevailing faith in the essential goodness of great peoples.”16
While Winston dreamed of peace and prosperity, it fell to mild-mannered Reggie McKenna to push for a massive expansion of the British war machine. The amount of money required was so large that Winston couldn’t help but question it. After months of carefully searching for affordable ways to improve society, he wasn’t in any mood to see millions spent to meet what seemed a dubious threat. So he decided that it was more important now to do battle with McKenna than to step up preparations for some future conflict with Germany.
His comrade in the effort was Lloyd George. They argued that building four new dreadnoughts would be sufficient for the coming year. Together they fought their colleague so tenaciously that Reggie was driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown. “I hate my colleagues,” he told his wife after months of turmoil over the naval issue.17
His adversaries questioned everything he did. McKenna would submit a written statement of his plans to the Cabinet, and Churchill would resubmit it with copious criticisms in the margins. Reggie became so angry and frustrated that he started coming to Cabinet meetings with a letter of resignation in his pocket, just waiting for the moment when Winston would push him too far. Lloyd George was delighted by the conflict. He urged Winston on in warlike language, telling him how much he enjoyed the verbal firepower “raking McK’s squadron.”18
Because his own modest power with words was no match for Churchill’s, McKenna kept hoping that Asquith would intervene to stop the pummeling. But the prime minister was inclined to sit back and let the battle rage until one side surrendered or a good compromise could be found. As First Lord of the Admiralty, McKenna naturally expected more support from Asquith when the subject concerned the Royal Navy, and the chief critic was the president of the Board of Trade. Instead he often fought alone, and was sometimes reduced to silence as Churchill stormed the heights and took over the meetings. “Today’s cabinet gave the usual opportunity for an exhibition of Winston’s rhetoric,” Reggie complained to his wife. “Cabinet rule is impossible unless the driver holds the reins with an iron wrist. . . . My work is a trial.”19
Part of his problem was that neither Churchill nor Lloyd George respected him, and so they tended to dismiss what he said out of hand. When he insisted that the Germans were on a path to war and would soon threaten Britain’s control of the seas, they simply refused to believe him. In their view he was a weak First Lord who was being used by his admirals to get more ships. When Lloyd George first heard that “we may have to lay down 8 Dreadnoughts,” he told Winston, “I believe the Admirals are procuring false information to frighten us.”20
As the dispute dragged on and attitudes began to harden, Asquith finally stepped in to offer a compromise. Instead of building eight new dreadnoughts right away, he suggested starting with four and adding the rest later if the Admiralty’s suspicions of German naval advances were confirmed. No one seems to have been happy with this compromise, but McKenna was allowed to present it to the House of Commons on March 16.
To a hushed chamber, he gave his view of the crisis facing the navy. General reports of dissension within the Cabinet had leaked out, but the public wasn’t aware of how grave McKenna considered the situation to be. He didn’t hold back now because of any fear of starting a panic. He was blunt.
“There will come a day,” he said, “when by an almost automatic process, all ships of an earlier type than the Dreadnought will be relegated to the scrap heap. The maintenance of our superiority then will depend upon our superiority in Dreadnoughts alone. We could not be sure of our supremacy at sea if we fall behind in this class of ship.” Though his words were carefully measured, they hit the Commons and the nation like a thunderbolt.
For most of the British public it was almost unimaginable that a First Lord of the Admiralty would ever have any doubts about Britannia ruling the waves. It was the equivalent of suggesting that one day the sun might fail to rise. But the sentence in his speech that caused the greatest sensation was this unusually frank statement on the German navy’s shipbuilding plans: “The difficulty in which the Government find themselves placed at this moment is that we do not know—as we thought we did—the rate at which German construction is taking place.”21
If even the First Lord didn’t know how fast the Germans were turning out dreadnoughts, it was easy for fears to escalate in the general population. Suddenly there was a widespread sense of urgency that Britain must speed up its own production of the mightiest warships. Otherwise, it was said, the island nation might wake up one day to find itself surrounded by the German navy. “It is impossible to open a newspaper,” noted a retired naval officer who was also a member of the opposition, “without seeing nearly a page devoted to the alarm felt throughout the country.”
It took less than two weeks for the public to find a rallying cry in a slogan first used on March 27 by the handsome Tory George Wyndham: “We want eight and we won’t wait.” From that moment—and whether all the politicians realized it or not—there was no escaping the great Edwardian arms race. The anxious public would soon get their eight new dreadnoughts, and many more. Convinced that a war with Germany would break out “in a few years,” Wyndham told Wilfrid Blunt, “The only thing we can do is to go on building ships.”22
* * *
Lloyd George desperately wanted to save the cost of those four ext
ra battleships and use the money instead for the social agenda that he and Winston were promoting. He told the House that he considered it “an act of criminal insanity to throw away” millions on “gigantic flotillas to encounter mythical Armadas.” Yet as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was obliged to find the money to support the Cabinet’s decision while also creating more revenue to supply the domestic side. Accordingly, he filled his “People’s Budget” of 1909 with tax increases. He spread them over a wide variety of sources—everything from motorcars and mineral royalties to land values and incomes. But a primary target was the rich, whose incomes would be subject to greater taxes to support a 10 percent increase in government expenditure.23
Churchill was so eager to have the extra revenue that he altered his view of retrenchment to make an exception for worthy social plans. After the budget was introduced in April, he wrote his wife that he was looking forward to having “ample funds for great reforms next year.” Carried away by this prospect, he conveniently put aside many of his old notions about government—notions that he would return to in time, but which, in this heady period, when his eye was so fixed on the “grand high road” to a better future, he chose to modify.24
One old notion went back to the days of his fight against protectionism, when he was still a Conservative. He had argued then against using tariffs to raise revenue because so much money went into the pockets of government that it merely encouraged spending for its own sake. “Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away,” he had said. “You may put money in the pocket of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.”
Now, in 1909, one difference for him was that government no longer carried the taint of corruption and incompetence that it did in the days of the Hotel Cecil. He wanted to believe that he and Asquith and Lloyd George could put the increased revenues to good use. They were noble stewards, he hoped, who would spend wisely and well for the benefit of society, and not for their own selfish interests. “I am not going to pretend that taxes are good things in themselves,” he told a London audience in 1909. “They are not. All taxes are bad.” He hastened to add, however, that they were needed to supply such vital things as national security—and, in his estimation, “social security” was as important as military security. Lloyd George’s budget, he told his audience, would provide the “necessary” money “for the country to embark upon the great field of social organisation.”25
But neither Churchill nor the other Liberal leaders would have the chance to do much more than “embark upon” this endeavor. They would be held back by not only the increasing cost of naval security, but also the disastrous way in which Lloyd George handled his “People’s Budget” after presenting it to the House of Commons. Instead of at least trying to guide its passage into law in the usual way, he picked a fight with the House of Lords from the start, daring them to reject it. A 10 percent increase was considerable but hardly revolutionary, and not at all impossible to pass with careful management. The Liberal journalist and political insider J. A. Spender believed that if the budget had “been in Asquith’s hands, it would almost certainly have been let pass,” with just a modest protest from the opposition. After all, much of the budget increase was necessitated by the very naval expenditures that the Tories themselves wanted to boost to even higher levels.
But Lloyd George insisted on turning his budget into a fight over political power instead of pounds and pence. He wanted a fight more than he wanted a budget, and he was certain he would win. He saw himself leading the Liberals triumphantly into the next general election to crush the Tories and humiliate the House of Lords. In fact, what he did was plunge the country into a two-year constitutional crisis, which delayed social reforms, and which would—before he was finished—cost his party its overall majority, and allow the Tories to pick up more than one hundred seats in the Commons. Lloyd George’s decision to wage class warfare would, in Spender’s words, drive “the Tory party off its mental balance. It saw red and acted accordingly.”26
Lloyd George inflamed passions by referring in the House of Commons to his “War Budget.” He was going to take money from the rich “to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness,” as he put it. But this was mostly rhetoric. More than two-thirds of the increase in his budget went to pay for just two things—new dreadnoughts and old-age pensions. (Devised and advanced by Asquith, the new pension scheme covered only those over seventy, but it was proving more costly than expected.) Lloyd George fully expected that he would have to put even more money into the Royal Navy. If the four extra dreadnoughts were ordered, he admitted, “the Naval bill for the year will attain very serious and grave dimensions indeed, at which the taxpayer may well shudder.” Understanding that the new arms race would dishearten Liberal supporters, he cleverly promoted the budget as being more progressive than it was.
The Liberals may have wanted to wage a general war on poverty, but preparations for an expected naval showdown with Germany would consume an increasingly large amount of the available revenue. In just the next two years naval expenditure would grow by 20 percent. Meanwhile, the few major weapons against poverty that emerged from this period owed much to Churchill’s ideas on national insurance. 27
In his reform efforts Winston would make the mistake of deferring too much to Lloyd George. For a time he seemed to forget how crucial his independence had been to his success. Knowing how much Churchill enjoyed a fight, Lloyd George chose the battle, and then persuaded him to join it. It was a brilliant way to steal the lead from his upstart colleague. In middle age Churchill would offer one explanation for why he had allowed himself to fall under his rival’s influence. “At his best he could almost talk a bird out of a tree,” he wrote. “I have seen him turn a Cabinet round in less than ten minutes, and yet when the process was complete, no one could remember any particular argument to which to attribute their change of view.”28
Everyone who worked closely with Lloyd George was aware of how easily he could lay on the charm when it suited him. “When you entered the room,” recalled the diplomat and author Harold Nicolson, “he would come bounding up to you, lead you in, throw his arms about you as he spoke, give a great impression of friendliness, exuberance and simplicity. His voice was very attractive, very warm and intense. He was a good listener, too, and when he was listening, or pretending to—half the time he wasn’t—he used to look at you as though you were the only intelligent person he ever met.”29
It was difficult to break the spell of the man who would come to be known as the “Welsh Wizard.” Winston liked to think that they were equals and would later say, “Together we were a power.” But Lloyd George didn’t see their relationship in that way. Watching the pair in Cabinet meetings, Charles Hobhouse noted in his diary that Lloyd George had a “wonderful power of managing men for a short time. He knows no meaning in the words truth or gratitude. Asquith is afraid of him, he knows it, but likes and respects Asquith. He . . . treats Winston Churchill like he would a favourite and spoilt naughty boy.”
Now and then, Winston would rebel and tell Lloyd George, “You can go to Hell your own way. I won’t interfere. I’ll have nothing to do with your [damned] policy.” Or, as a mutual friend remembered him saying once, “No, no, no, I won’t follow [Lloyd] George.”30
But, time and again, he would come back and take his place at the other’s side. It was an odd show of weakness in a young man whose lack of deference toward his leaders had been a hallmark of his rise to power. Somehow he had convinced himself that Lloyd George was a necessary partner—in part, perhaps, because of a dispassionate quality that made him valuable in a fight. But that same quality also made him more cynical, though Winston was slow to see that. “You are much stronger than I,” he once remarked to Lloyd George. “I have noticed that you go about things quietly and calmly, you do not excite yourself, but what you wish happens as
you desire it. I am too excitable. I tear about and make too much noise.”31
XVIII
SOUND AND FURY
The tall, creamy stucco house at one end of Eccleston Square—Number 33—was in a quiet part of London in those days, a leafy enclave tucked between the river and exclusive Belgravia. The area was home to many large, prosperous families headed by established professionals or successful businessmen, who lived well but not luxuriously. They were proud of the long, elegant gardens that graced both Eccleston Square and nearby Warwick Square, each neatly tended behind high railings. Yet just up the road—only half a mile away—was busy Victoria Station, where great waves of London commuters came and went all week long. Peaceful, but close to the heart of Westminster, Eccleston Square was an ideal place for Winston Churchill to settle with his young wife and start a family.
They moved into Number 33 in May 1909, with “a perpetual stream of vans” unloading furniture and carpets—both old and new—on a Friday and Saturday. Jennie had picked out wallpaper for some of the rooms, Winston had supervised the installation of bookshelves to hold his growing library, and Clemmie had ordered an attractive blue carpet for the dining room. She was also busy looking for new things to brighten a room for the baby she was expecting in the summer. At thirty-four Winston’s next big adventure was fatherhood.1
With mischievous glee, Lloyd George spread the false story that the child exemption in the income tax (or the “Brat,” as he called it) was the only thing Churchill liked in the financial overhaul. “Winston,” he told friends, “is opposed to pretty nearly every item in the budget except the ‘Brat,’ and that was because he was expecting soon to be a father himself.”2
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