Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  When Diana Churchill was born at Number 33 on July 11, her parents were overjoyed. Her hair was reddish like her father’s, which amused him. He was fascinated by her and was encouraged to see how healthy and strong she was. “Her little hands shut like a vice on one’s fingers,” he wrote.3

  But, like many young families, the Churchills were sometimes overwhelmed by the various burdens of taking care of a new baby while establishing themselves in a new house. Clemmie’s pregnancy went well, but she was slow to recover her strength after giving birth, and spent many weeks recuperating in the countryside with her mother and family friends. When they were apart, husband and wife kept a steady stream of correspondence going, sharing news and endearments. They took a childish delight in calling each other by nicknames and in exchanging the private codes of affection, their relationship deepening into a comfortable intimacy with occasional flashes of a more intense passion.

  Bachelor life had been lonelier than Winston had wanted to admit, and now he finally had a companion with whom he could share everything. They were a good match, and they were grateful for it. “I feel a vivid realisation of all you are to me,” Winston wrote, “& of the good and comforting influence you have brought into my life. It is a much better life now.”4

  This happiness in marriage was noted by others. After lunching with the couple at his place in Sussex, Wilfrid Blunt was struck at how close the two had become after just a year together. “They are a very happy married pair,” he wrote in his diary. As might be expected of a poet, he found meaning in small gestures—how Winston took pains to indulge Clemmie’s wishes or spare her any discomfort. Sitting with them in his garden, he watched Winston’s reaction when a wasp came near. “Clementine was afraid of wasps,” he wrote, “and one settled on her sleeve.” Before she could panic, her husband leaned over and silently eliminated the threat. “Winston gallantly took the wasp by the wings, and thrust it into the ashes of the fire.”

  Clemmie was fond of Blunt and often boasted to him of her pride in her husband. After watching Winston give a lively speech in the House of Commons, she wrote the poet, “I was very proud when I heard him from the gallery. I hope he will never catch the usual Official Mood.” Following a lunch at Eccleston Square—not long after Diana was born—Blunt wrote in his diary, “There is no more fortunate man than Winston at home.”5

  But such happiness wasn’t cheap. The responsibilities of family life brought increased expenses. The new furnishings needed to be paid for, the doctor had sent his bill, and the new house, which was much larger than his previous house, required him to spend more on servants and general upkeep. Fortunately, he had recently made £225 from a new reprint of his novel Savrola, and his investments managed by Sir Ernest Cassel were continuing to produce good returns. Among his holdings were bonds in the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, and United States Steel. His annual salary as president of the Board of Trade was £2,000. But he was stretching his resources, and no longer had the free time to turn out bestselling books.6

  When Diana was born, a story was told about Churchill’s great pride in his first child. Though it has the ring of truth, the story was probably embellished a bit for the purpose of gently mocking him in political circles. It was said that one day he was seated on the front bench in the House of Commons beside Lloyd George, who turned to him during a lull and asked, “Is she a pretty child?”

  Winston supposedly beamed. “The prettiest child ever seen.”

  “Like her mother, I suppose?” asked Lloyd George.

  “No,” Winston replied with a serious look, “she is exactly like me.”7

  * * *

  For Winston, an important reason for moving to Eccleston Square was that his friend F. E. Smith had a house there. With his wife and two young children, Smith lived at Number 70, and Winston thought the two families would make great neighbors. A brilliant barrister, Smith had entered the House of Commons as a Conservative in 1906, but for several months he had avoided getting to know Churchill, whose defection to the Liberals he was slow to forgive. Once they had a chance to talk, however, they became friends almost immediately.

  On the surface, they didn’t seem to have much in common. Frederick Edwin Smith had the dark good looks of a matinee idol, and dressed like one in expensive suits perfectly tailored to fit his muscular figure. A naturally gifted athlete, he was a strong swimmer and a hard-driving tennis player. In the early years of his relationship with Winston, he was one of the strongest and wittiest critics of the Liberals. All the government ministers, including the prime minister himself, tried to avoid tangling with him for fear of being stung by his rapid-fire barbs. Churchill was one of the few who could match wits with him, and it was their shared love of high-speed repartee that helped to forge a bond between them.

  F.E.—as he was usually known—made a small fortune as a barrister and was often in the news because of his dazzling success in a string of sensational trials. He was even wittier in court than in the House of Commons, and judges were the victims of some of his best retorts. When one judge solemnly informed him, “Mr. Smith, having listened to your case, I am no wiser,” F.E. fired back, “Possibly not, m’lud, but much better informed.” A pompous county court judge named Willis was a favorite target. Offended by his impertinence, Judge Willis asked in desperation, “What do you suppose I am on the bench for, Mr. Smith?” Politely, F.E. answered, “It is not for me, Your Honour, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.”

  Like Winston, he could set off sparks at dinner parties when seated next to the wrong guest. “I’ve got a silly sort of fancy to tell you the story of my life,” a society matron once whispered in his ear, to which he replied, “My dear lady, if you do not mind I would rather postpone that pleasure.” Fond of strong liquor, he could sound a little less debonair if he had been drinking too much. When a dinner companion introduced herself as “Mrs. Porter-Porter with a hyphen,” he gave her a boozy stare and snarled that he was “Mr. Whisky-Whisky with a syphon.”8

  If anyone could help Churchill polish his own verbal skills, it was F.E. They would spend hours trading quips and laughing, enjoying the kind of verbal games that Winston liked to play with Violet Asquith, but raised to dizzier heights. In fact, it was Violet who later said that of all Churchill’s friends it was F.E. with whom he had the greatest fun. But because F.E. was often wickedly funny at the expense of Liberals, he wasn’t much welcome in their circles, and Margot Asquith regarded him as a vulgar reactionary. She admitted he was “very clever,” but added in her inimitable way that “his brains have gone to his head.”9

  Clemmie didn’t care for him. She disapproved of his hard drinking and thought he was a bad influence on Winston, encouraging him to drink too much and to stay out too late. But once both families were in Eccleston Square it was hard to keep the two men apart. Whether at home or in the House of Commons or on field exercises with the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars (F.E. was one of Winston’s fellow officers in the reserve force), the friends were quick to find excuses for separating from others and entertaining themselves. After spending time with F.E. at the summer camps for their regimental training, Winston would always come home exhausted, partly from the physical exertion but mostly from staying up all night with his friend.

  There were memorable nights when Sunny Marlborough, Winston, F.E., and a few other friends would gather in a field tent and sit “on upturned barrels, by the light of tallow candles, playing cards till the flush of dawn.” One evening, when everyone was a little drunk, Sunny asked, “What shall we play for, F.E.?” Perhaps only half kidding, he looked at the duke and answered, “Your bloody palace if you like.” Wisely, Sunny passed.

  It was a good thing that Winston and F.E. were so determined not to let their political differences affect their private lives. When the battle over Lloyd George’s budget became increasingly nasty in the summer of 1909, the political divide between Liberal Winston Churchill and Tory F. E. Smith (who called the budget �
�that bladder of imposture”) would grow ever wider.10

  * * *

  It was a warm night on July 30, 1909, when Lloyd George arrived at a large mission hall in the East End to give a speech on his budget. He had been waiting for a good opportunity to launch a public attack on his Tory opponents, and had decided to speak at a location that would in itself send a strong message to them. It was a grimy, rambling building called the Edinburgh Castle, which had a façade that gave it the look of a cut-rate medieval fortress. Surrounding it were the dark, forbidding streets of Limehouse, one of the roughest districts in London. Part of it had been used in years past to house an enormous pub notorious as a vice-ridden “gin palace.” But then Thomas Barnardo—a reformer known for his charitable work with poor children—had come along and turned it into a center for an evangelical ministry to the poor, with a “Coffee Palace” to replace the pub, and the addition of a big hall for the “People’s Mission Church.”

  It was an unusual place to find a Chancellor of the Exchequer defending his budgetary proposals. Normally, those who spoke from its platform were thumping Bibles as they addressed audiences that sometimes numbered well over three thousand, which was the stated capacity of the hall. As one of Barnardo’s early biographers noted, “A great many of the best known and most influential evangelists and ministers in the country have taken mission services at the Edinburgh Castle, men of every degree and variety of gift, from Ned Wright, the converted prize-fighter, to University graduates and dignitaries of well-nigh all denominations of the Christian Church.”11

  Lloyd George didn’t want an ordinary political hall. He wanted a pulpit from which he could launch a secular crusade, and he wanted to do it surrounded by the people he was claiming to help—the poor who lived in places like Limehouse. Dutifully, they came in great numbers and filled the hall to overflowing, with hundreds gathered outside listening near the windows, which had been thrown wide open to let in the breezes on this warm summer night. They cheered him when he arrived, sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and quickly hustled out the few suffragettes who came to heckle him.

  Then they leaned forward and listened as Lloyd George ran his eyes over the crowded benches and began what would be one of his most important speeches. They were probably expecting him to do what Churchill had done in his “promise of the sun” speech at Dundee—give them a glimpse of the better things to come under Liberal reforms. But he barely mentioned what his budget would do for them. Instead he began almost immediately to pour his wrath on the devils of the Tory aristocracy who in his view were hoarding their wealth and anxiously plotting to block his tax proposals in the House of Lords. They were so stingy, he said, that they didn’t even want to pay for the dreadnoughts they had demanded.

  Like a good actor, he conjured a scene for his audience in which humble Liberals were going from one end of the country to the other collecting money for dreadnoughts. The poor workingman gladly paid his share, he said, but the rich in their fancy London mansions didn’t want to pay a penny more than they had to. “We went round Belgravia,” he told the Limehouse poor, “and there has been such a howl ever since that it has completely deafened us.” Great wealth, he said, came with responsibilities, especially in the case of the landed aristocracy. If rich dukes on their vast estates refused to pay more to help the larger community, then, he warned darkly, “the time will come to reconsider the conditions under which land is owned in this country.”

  To this threat he added another. “No country, however rich, can permanently afford to have quartered upon the revenue a class which declines to do the duty which it was called upon to perform since the beginning.”

  The Limehouse audience delighted in this vision of dukes being stripped of their land and their power because they refused to bow to the small Welshman speaking in Barnardo’s slum fortress dedicated to God and temperance. When Lloyd George roared to his conclusion by pledging to fight for the poor against the devil dukes, he cried out, “I am one of the children of the people.” And the crowd answered exuberantly, “Bravo, David.”12

  It was a powerful performance, and it had its intended effect on the Tories, who threw down their newspapers after reading the speech and were seized with such fits of apoplexy that some didn’t stop shaking for days. They couldn’t believe that the head of the Treasury was stirring up thousands to join him in a crusade of class warfare, and they were dumbstruck by the frightening suggestion that the hallowed acres of grand estates might somehow be subject to confiscation. CABINET SOCIALISM, the headlines said. “THE CHANCELLOR’S THREATS AGAINST LANDLORDS.” The Fortnightly Review called Lloyd George “the mob orator of Limehouse.” (His threats against property were, in fact, bluster. His land taxes would never produce much revenue and would be repealed in 1920 under the premiership of—David Lloyd George.)13

  If there had been any hope of passing the budget without a full-scale battle with the House of Lords, the Limehouse speech destroyed it. For the Tory peers, it was a call to arms they couldn’t ignore. The opposition MP Sir Edward Carson immediately concluded that the real purpose of Lloyd George’s budget wasn’t to address financial questions but rather to force a confrontation between the two chambers of Parliament. Carson was a successful politician and barrister known for his unflinching resolve and stern speech. Like many others on his side, he was more than ready for a fight.

  “The Chancellor of the Exchequer,” he said, “has been posing as a Minister anxious to meet objections to the Finance Bill and as a responsible trustee for the public welfare and public peace. In his speech at Limehouse Mr. Lloyd George has taken off the mask and has preached openly a war of classes, insult to individuals, the satiation of greed, and the excitement of all the passions which render possible the momentary triumph of the unscrupulous demagogue. . . . He is attempting to legislate, not for a Budget, but for a revolution.”14

  * * *

  The Limehouse speech changed everything for Lloyd George, making him unquestionably the most feared Liberal among the upper class and the most respected among the working class. Misled by his overheated rhetoric, both ends of the social spectrum exaggerated his potential for changing Britain. But image and word mattered more than deeds in the making of his public persona. Having successfully seized the initiative as the boldest defender of the people against the mightiest peers of the realm, he was now free to assail privilege and to wait until later to help the poor.

  Churchill didn’t want to wait. He admired Lloyd George’s brazen tactics, had no sympathy for the House of Lords, and thought the fight over the budget was a winning campaign issue. But he also wanted to act on some of the things his colleague was only vaguely promising. While the Liberals marched toward an inevitable collision with the upper chamber, Winston was traveling the country trying to drum up support for what he called “a mighty system of national insurance.”15

  Only four days before the Limehouse speech, he outlined for an audience in Norwich his plan for creating unemployment insurance that would cover 24 million workers. He expected that Lloyd George’s budget would provide the money to start this plan, and that both workers and employers would also contribute to the system. It represented a major social advance but received little attention. As long as the budget was stalled, the plan couldn’t move ahead. In November, as the battle over finance dragged into its seventh month, an exasperated Churchill complained that the budget had “received a greater measure of Parliamentary time and attention” than any other bill he could recall.

  From the start of the battle he had been torn between waging an uncompromising fight or allowing room for negotiation. In July he was still trying to sound moderate, reassuring the landed classes that property wasn’t under threat. “If property is secure here,” he told a Liberal club, “it is because we have over a long period of history been consistently laboring to force reactionaries to concede and revolutionaries to forbear.” But the Limehouse speech encouraged him to abandon moderation, though not without an inner s
truggle. Right up to the last minute, as he prepared his own version of a Limehouse explosion, he was still debating with himself over which direction to take. On August 30 he wrote Clemmie, “To-day I have been working at my speech for Leicester again. . . . I cannot make up my mind whether to be provocative or conciliatory and am halting between the two. But on the whole I think it will be the former!”16

  In fact, the speech he gave at Leicester on September 4 was mostly measured and mild except for the beginning and the end, where his language was even more provocative than Lloyd George’s. At the beginning he ridiculed the reactionary dukes as “unfortunate individuals” and “ornamental creatures” who had no business meddling in politics and who ought to be content “to lead quiet, delicate sheltered lives.” By the end he was using violent language to threaten their power, saying, “We will smash to pieces their veto.” He damned all the peers as “a miserable minority of titled persons who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody, and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, in their class interests, and in their own interests.” His pugnacious character came fully to the fore as he threatened not simply to defeat the House of Lords but to beat it into submission and demand unspecified forfeitures.

  It should be understood, he said, that “the fight will be a fight to the finish, and that the fullest forfeits which are in accordance with the national interests shall be exacted from the defeated foe.” Exactly what this meant wasn’t clear, but it sounded like an ultimatum from a general whose troops had the enemy surrounded.17

  Enraged Tories immediately condemned the speech for its “vulgar abuse” of the upper chamber, but if Churchill had been hoping to overtake Lloyd George as the “People’s Champion,” he failed. He was too late, for one thing. But, more important, his remarks lacked the theatrical effect of his rival’s at Limehouse. Whereas the feisty Welshman had cleverly taken his stand in the slums at a dusty mission hall, Churchill came out swinging on the well-lit stage of a brand-new theater in a prosperous provincial town with a mostly middle-class audience seated in comfort in sweeping balconies and private boxes. Leicester’s Palace Theatre even had a grand marble staircase with brass rails, and a pair of polished walnut doors at the main entrance.