Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Though largely sympathetic, his audience couldn’t help but notice the incongruity of Winston damning the dukes from the stage of the well-appointed Palace Theatre. In fact, at his first mention of the noblemen, someone in the crowd shouted, “What about your grandfather?”

  As much as Winston may have wanted to lead the Liberal charge on privilege, he couldn’t escape his Blenheim background. He merely gave his enemies on both the right and the left an opportunity to ridicule him for trying. A Tory politician in Manchester asked how Churchill could presume to attack the aristocracy when he had a dozen titled relatives and came from “a family who had produced nine dukes.” Instead of upstaging Lloyd George, Winston made himself look foolish. There was no effective way to answer the headline that appeared shortly after his speech: TWELVE TITLED RELATIVES. MR. CHURCHILL’S CLAIM TO ATTACK DUKES.18

  The audience at Leicester was the same size as the crowd at Limehouse, but Churchill’s impassioned speech fell flat, and Lloyd George’s became a legend.

  * * *

  In the middle of this raucous period Winston stopped to chat with Violet Asquith at Number 10. After listening to him explain the latest political developments, she looked at him with something of an accusatory air and said, “You’ve been talking to Lloyd George.” She knew him well enough to note a difference in his way of speaking.

  “And why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

  “Of course there’s no reason why you shouldn’t,” she said, “but he’s ‘come off’ on you. You are talking like him instead of like yourself.”19

  He denied this, but the influence is unmistakable in his Leicester speech, and Violet was quick to note the change and to warn him that it showed. Perhaps it made a difference that Clemmie was encouraging him to sound more radical. She didn’t care for Sunny Marlborough, and thought that Winston was too enamored of his old Tory friends, and too quick to forget and forgive the bitter disputes that had driven him out of the Conservative Party.

  In one letter from these years Clemmie urged him not to be misled by the glamorous lives of his Tory friends. “They do not represent Toryism,” she wrote; “they are just the cream on the top. Below, they are ignorant, vulgar, prejudiced.” She signed the letter, “Your Radical Bristling.”

  Though Winston was careful to maintain good relations with Sunny, Clemmie would find it increasingly difficult to hide her disapproval of the duke’s high Toryism and general arrogance. For the most part in this period she managed to treat him with polite reserve, but a few years later she would lose her temper in dramatic fashion when she stormed out of Blenheim Palace after a thoughtless remark from Sunny. Having noticed one day that she was writing to Lloyd George, he scolded her, “Please, Clemmie, would you mind not writing to that horrible little man on Blenheim writing-paper.” Without another word Clemmie packed and left for the station, ignoring Sunny’s apologies.20

  It was wise not to mention Lloyd George’s name in Tory mansions. One aristocratic landowner announced to his tenants that the day Lloyd George was thrown out of office he would, “in token of his joy, roast a live ox in his park.” When informed of this, Lloyd George calmly replied that he “would strongly advise the noble lord not to get too near the fire on that day lest he should be mistaken for the ox.”21

  As often happens in politics, the fight over the budget descended into bitter name-calling and rhetorical blasts that had little or nothing to do with the facts of the case. Both sides exaggerated their virtues and their grievances until the sound and fury of it all drowned out the chance for a reasoned argument between them. At the end of October Charles Hobhouse bluntly asked Lloyd George about his reasons for waging such a heated battle over the budget. Was he hoping to go down in history as “the author” of a triumphant “financial scheme”? The chancellor agreed that he was “but added that he might be remembered even better as one who had upset the hereditary House of Lords.”22

  Whatever else he may have wanted from this fight, he was determined to score a victory over the old ruling class by goading the House of Lords into fighting an unwinnable battle. An hereditary chamber with a veto power was an anachronism that couldn’t survive for long in the twentieth century, but reforming it didn’t become a do-or-die issue for the Liberals until Lloyd George made it so, and then it overshadowed all other issues. It must have delighted him to have a duke’s grandson fighting at his side.

  As the day of reckoning grew near, he was gleefully rubbing his hands at the thought of how neatly he had manipulated the crisis. He wrote his brother in October, “They all realize—both sides—that they must fight now or eat humble pie. . . . I deliberately provoked them to fight. I fear me they will run away in spite of all my pains.” He had done his work so well that it was too late for either side to retreat. When the House of Lords reacted as expected and rejected the budget on November 30 (Winston’s thirty-fifth birthday), the stage was set for a constitutional showdown, and a general election was called for the beginning of 1910.23

  Instead of being able to build on their large majority by pointing to solid legislative achievements, the Liberals went into the election to plead for the right to have a budget that increased taxes, spent millions on dreadnoughts, and frightened the establishment. It wasn’t exactly a winning formula, yet only two months before the polling began, Lloyd George optimistically predicted that his party would emerge with a majority of ninety seats. He would be proven wrong.

  In any case, not everyone shared his rosy view. Reggie McKenna’s wife, Pamela, sat in the Ladies’ Gallery on December 2 and thought the future looked grim as she watched the House of Commons finish its business. She was unhappy that the government didn’t have more to show for its time in power. “Starting its work with such promise,” she wrote in her diary, “and an almost unprecedented majority it seems cruel looking back on the four years of arduous toil that so little has been accomplished.”24

  It wasn’t apparent to many at the time, and it has been obscured ever since, but the greatest—and most effective—Liberal figure in Britain in the crucial year of 1909 (the last year of the party’s commanding majority in the House of Commons) was Winston Churchill. Brash and cunning, Lloyd George was the standout on style, which had usually been Winston’s strong point. But after entering the Cabinet, Churchill had shown that he was also a political leader of real substance. He was the one with the most innovative ideas, the most detailed plans, and the most coherent explanations of New Liberalism’s aims. Though not a theorist, he knew how to get results, and his views were practical and straightforward.

  Just before the Lords rejected the budget, he published a collection of speeches that was, in effect, a manifesto for his party, but it arrived too late. Already the party was in dire trouble, and the details of social insurance were not as vital to candidates or voters as the more immediate question of the budget. Yet Churchill’s Liberalism and the Social Problem was welcomed by some of the party faithful, and by a few radical reformers. They found it inspiring, and were holding out hope for a big election victory in 1910, when they could renew efforts to promote a progressive agenda. One of these admirers was the economist J. A. Hobson, who praised the book as “the clearest, most eloquent and most convincing exposition” of the New Liberalism.

  Even prolific Liberal journalists were astonished at how swiftly Churchill had managed to lay out his vision of a Britain protected and liberated by what later generations would call a social safety net. H. W. Massingham—“the spiritual godfather of the New Liberalism,” as one historian has called him—wrote the introduction to Winston’s book. He praised its “directness and clearness of thought” and its author’s “power to build up a political theory, and present it as an impressive and convincing argument.” He stopped just short of declaring it the movement’s bible. In its “force of rhetoric and the power of sympathy,” he wrote, “readers of these addresses will find few examples of modern English speech-making to compare with them.”25

  In the relatively short pe
riod of Liberal ascendancy Churchill led the way in passing or proposing measures “designed to give,” in his words, “a greater measure of security to all classes, but particularly to the labouring classes.”26 Besides helping to create such vital services as labor exchanges and unemployment insurance, he also had ambitious plans to use public works to provide employment in hard times, and to use education as a way of creating a better workforce. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity was closing for Churchill as the champion of comprehensive reform. Though he didn’t know it yet, his new book—supposedly a blueprint for the future—was in fact his valediction as Liberalism’s leading legislator.

  XIX

  LIFE AND DEATH

  It was when he was desperately trying to escape a mob by scrambling over a brick wall that David Lloyd George may have realized his party wouldn’t do well in the election of January 1910. He had wanted to start a fight, he had told his brother. He got one.

  Conservative diehards in the northern seaport of Grimsby let him know he wasn’t welcome from the time he arrived in the town late at night on Friday, January 14. Mounted policemen surrounded his motorcar when it left the railway station around midnight. Supporters had organized a torchlight parade to welcome him, but as they made their way to the house where he was spending the night, a rival crowd tried to block the way and struggled with police. Bottles and potatoes were hurled at the car, breaking one of its windows. The protestors shouted insults, including the cry “Traitor!”

  The next day detectives escorted him to a local skating rink, where he was scheduled to address a modest gathering. Uniformed officers guarded the platform and the entrances. But soon the rink was surrounded by a few thousand angry opponents, and the police were faced with the same dilemma that had confronted the authorities in Birmingham when Lloyd George was cornered there by a mob in 1901: How could they get him out safely? Chief Constable Stirling decided it was best to make a run for it. He advised leaving by a back door, and then trying to race across a bridge over the rail line before anyone was the wiser.

  They didn’t make it. The mob spotted them and gave chase. The only hope was to climb over a brick wall next to the rails and seek safety inside a nearby fire station. And so the Chancellor of the Exchequer scaled the wall with the help of a few constables and disappeared inside the fire station, where he hid out until a fast car picked him up twenty minutes later and whisked him away to his next speaking engagement. A few days later a cartoon appeared in the national press showing a frantic Lloyd George getting a boost over the wall by a burly policeman. “Still running,” said the caption.1

  While the chancellor was busy trying to outwit the Grimsby mob, Winston was safely at work on his campaign in Dundee, where he was now a favorite of the townspeople and wasn’t worried about losing his seat. The speeches he gave were generally mild, partly because Asquith wanted him to tone down his rhetoric for the election. But he experienced a few lapses. Attempting to account for early election losses in other parts of the country, he darkly hinted that the backwoods peers had intimidated their local people and pressured them into voting against the government. “No doubt,” he said, “there has been, as we expected, a very sharp turn of the feudal screw.”2

  When the final results were announced, he won his seat easily. But the Liberal losses in the rest of the country were so large that they couldn’t be dismissed as simply the result of Tory dirty tricks. The Conservatives and their Unionist partners saw their number of seats soar from 157 in 1906 to 272. The Liberals fell from 377 to 274. To survive in power, Asquith would now have to rely on the support of two minor parties—Labour and the Irish Nationalists—creating new tensions (especially over Irish Home Rule) that would make governing increasingly difficult. The Liberals wanted to treat this election disaster as a mild setback, but it emboldened the opposition and should have cast doubt on the wisdom of following Lloyd George’s divisive approach.

  In private, Margot Asquith told Churchill that the chancellor’s inflammatory rhetoric alone had probably cost the party thirty seats. The electorate had given them a strong rebuke, she admitted, acknowledging that a lack of “moderation & self control has smashed our splendid majority.” She congratulated Winston on behaving more responsibly in the campaign and urged him to continue being agreeable. “Why not turn over a completely new leaf and make everyone love you and respect you?” she asked in her demanding way. “You think it’s dull, but it’s much duller to talk to journalists and to be always bracketed with Lloyd George.”3

  Winston didn’t make much of an effort to defend his colleague. He understood that the new alignment in the House of Commons would make the work of passing legislation more time-consuming and complicated. The Liberal losses undermined much of what he had been doing for the last two years. He could have stayed at the Board of Trade and continued to slog ahead, but he was always looking for quick results and was rightly worried that the Liberal reign might end abruptly. It was also important to raise his standing in the Cabinet so that he was on an equal footing with Lloyd George.

  Conveniently, the prime minister agreed that he deserved promotion and offered him “one of our most delicate and difficult posts—the Irish Office.” But Churchill had his eye on bigger things and wasn’t interested in a “difficult” job that would become even more onerous because of fresh demands from the Irish Nationalist MPs. Knowing Asquith and his family as well as he did, he felt comfortable taking the risk of turning down the Irish Office and suggesting his own promotion. Two jobs appealed to him as offering both the scope of action he craved and the prestige he thought he had earned. He wrote the prime minister on February 5, “I should like to go either to the Admiralty (assuming that place to become vacant) or to the Home Office. It is fitting, if you will allow me to say so—that Ministers should occupy positions in the Government which correspond to some extent with their influence in the country.”4

  In other words, as he had shown in the last year, he was worthy to stand alongside any of his colleagues, and he wanted a position to prove it. Asquith didn’t see any reason to argue and gave it to him. Within a few days the announcement was made that Churchill was the new Home Secretary. The promotion vaulted him into the first rank of the Cabinet. Not incidentally, it also gave a major boost to his own finances, more than doubling his salary at the Board of Trade to £5,000.

  * * *

  A few days after he took up his duties at the Home Office—where his responsibility for law and order involved him in the work of the police, the prisons, and the courts—he was at a dinner party and was so lost in one of his intense, thoughtful moods that he didn’t say much until halfway through the meal. And then he suddenly turned to the handsome older woman seated beside him and said—as though thinking out loud—“After all we make too much of death.” Jean Hamilton, the wife of Winston’s friend General Ian Hamilton, knew him well enough to understand that he cared little for small talk and often made unusual, abrupt remarks for no apparent reason. So she took his comment in stride and responded politely, “Yes, I think we do—but why do you say so now?”

  As it happened, Churchill had been brooding the whole day about his first experience with the most difficult part of his new job.

  “I have had to sign a death warrant for the first time today,” he said, “and it weighed on me.”

  “Whose?” she asked. “For what?”

  Winston’s answer revealed why he couldn’t stop thinking about the case: “A man who took a little child up a side street and brutally cut her throat.”

  Jean Hamilton was shocked but didn’t see any reason to lament the death of such a killer. “That would not weigh on my mind,” she said.5

  But it weighed heavily on Winston’s mind because he couldn’t understand how such a horrible crime could take place in a supposedly civilized society. Joseph Wren, an unemployed former sailor living in a Lancashire mill town, had murdered a child of three and a half in December and left the body near the railway. Convicted in January, h
e had been sentenced to death on February 14, the day Churchill was appointed to the Home Office. Wren had already survived a suicide attempt in his prison cell and had admitted his crime, saying that when he killed the child he had been “so depressed that he did not know what he was doing.” On February 21 Churchill reviewed the case and found no reason to issue a reprieve. That night, while Jean Hamilton debated the wisdom of capital punishment with the new Home Secretary, Wren was sitting in his cell at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. The next day he was hanged.6

  In his work as a Liberal legislator, Winston had been trying to create a better life for the millions struggling to survive in the hard conditions of industrial Britain. But in his job at the Home Office he was given a harrowing view of the crime and depravity in the nation’s slums and was forced to confront how intractable these problems were. Details in case files brought the underside of the Edwardian world vividly—sometimes painfully—to life by putting before him the intimate, human stories of crime and punishment. He had not expected to be so affected by this work, nor to wrestle so much with his duty as the government official who, with a few strokes of his pen, could condemn a prisoner to the gallows or order a reprieve.

  He kept near his desk a grim ledger with the words “Death Sentence” in black at the top of each page. Forty-two names were added to this book for the period in which he served as Home Secretary, all of them prisoners condemned to die by hanging. At the end of a row of information on each name was a column marked “Result.” For twenty prisoners, Churchill decided to allow a reprieve, but for twenty-two the word written in the “Result” column was “Executed.” This last group included the infamous murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen and more common killers like William Henry Palmer, who strangled an old woman after breaking into her house and robbing her.7