Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  One of Jacky’s favorite stories was about an old lady who tapped a seafaring man on the shoulder in Trafalgar Square and pointed to the massive base of Nelson’s pedestal. “What are them lions a-guarding of?” she asked, munching on a penny bun. He smiled smugly and replied, “If it hadn’t been for the man them lions were a-guarding of, your penny bun would cost thrupence.”5

  Without Fisher, Churchill might not have had a single dreadnought afloat in 1912. He was the father of the dreadnought fleet and the greatest naval innovator of his time. Churchill had known him well for several years and owed much to his influence. It was Fisher who had impressed on him the importance of going to war with overwhelming superiority in speed and firepower, concentrating the fleet in the North Sea for maximum effectiveness against the German threat and keeping the enemy off balance by quick, decisive thrusts. The admiral’s view of war was based on his faith in what he called the three H’s and three R’s: “Hit first! Hit hard! Keep on hitting!” and “Ruthless, Relentless, and Remorseless.” When the shooting started, total war was the only option, he believed. “If you hate, hate,” he said. “If you fight, fight.”6

  He had officially retired in 1910 but he continued promoting his views as vigorously as possible through his large network of old friends. Though he was seventy when Winston became First Lord, he had lost none of his ferocious drive or combative attitude. He could be endearing to those who agreed with him, but insulting and vindictive to anyone brave enough to contradict him. With his flair for exaggeration he would shout in the hearing of his junior officers, “If any subordinate opposes me, I will make his wife a widow, his children fatherless, and his home a dunghill.”7

  In bad light, in the middle of a rant, he could look demonic, with a narrow, burning gaze, pug nose, and curled lip. When his mood was good, his taut features would soften, a twinkle would come to his eye, and then a big, disarming smile would spread across his face. At such moments he could be good company, spinning yarns and telling jokes in a hearty, fast-paced style. He had a large supply of witty epigrams and anecdotes, each tossed out with minimal introduction or logical connection to anything said before.

  One moment he might be explaining that, for the average person, the navy was “a huge mystery hedged in by seasickness,” and the next he would be telling the story of the stockbroker long separated from his wife who received a telegram after her sudden death abroad.

  “Cremate, embalm, or bury?” the undertaker wired.

  “Do all three,” the stockbroker replied. “Take no risks!”

  Sometimes, when carried away by a passionate point he was driving into the ground, he could be so overbearing that anyone facing him would have to keep backing away. One day at Balmoral Castle, Jacky forgot where he was and began angrily commenting on some pet peeve. “Will you kindly leave off shaking your fist in my face!” exclaimed King Edward.8

  There was no denying Fisher’s genius for engineering and design. He loved machines and was thrilled by the power they could create. But in his exuberance he would entertain possibilities that others were unwilling or unable to see. Sometimes the genius in him went awry, and he began to sound like a madman. In late 1904 he suggested to King Edward that the Royal Navy should put a quick end to Germany as an emerging naval power. Why not stage a sneak attack and destroy the ships in port? he asked. “My God, Fisher, you must be mad!” the king exclaimed.

  But he meant it. “The best declaration of war,” he wrote in April 1904, “would be the sinking of the enemy’s fleet! That’s the first they ought to know of war!”

  In 1908 he suddenly began to worry that the United States might join forces with Germany and launch a joint naval attack on Britain. The more he considered it, however, the more he liked the odds. He thought it would be possible to annihilate both navies in the North Sea. It whet his appetite. “One might almost wish the United States would join Germany,” he said, coldly calculating the damage his ships could do.9

  As he grew older he became increasingly eccentric and would proudly make declarations that left others scratching their heads. His talent for creating epigrams broke down, and he began sputtering strange battle cries. “Build more submarines,” he once told Winston, “not more Lobsters!!” On another occasion he signed off, “Oil, Chauffeurs & Wireless!”10

  Yet his wandering mind and dark imaginings also gave him prophetic visions of the slaughter that a European war would bring. He didn’t think of it the way that so many of his innocent contemporaries did. They seemed to expect a series of sporting matches with only occasional casualties and civilized breaks for tea and sightseeing. Fisher saw terror, collapse, chaos, and devastation. It would be the war of wars, a cataclysm that would shake the whole world. “The Battle of Armageddon comes along in September 1914,” he wrote Pamela McKenna on December 5, 1911. “That date suits the Germans, if ever they are going to fight. Both their Army and Fleet then mobilized, and the Kiel Canal finished, and their new building complete.” Off by only a month, Fisher began a countdown to Armageddon, periodically reminding Winston and others of the dwindling time for preparation.11

  Though volatile and madly fascinated by the dark arts of war, Fisher wasn’t someone Winston could ignore. He had vast experience, knowledge, and vision. But it was almost impossible to separate the good Fisher from the bad. He was a whirlwind that swept into a room spouting both nonsense and wisdom. Understanding which was which became more difficult with each passing year. The one constant was the old admiral’s intolerance for dissent. He preached the virtues of independent thinking, but the sermon really applied only to his thinking. He knew he was right and would highlight his views in capital letters with frequent exclamation marks, as if to give them the weight and authority of a posted command. “Compromise,” he liked to say, “is the beastliest word in the English language.”12

  All of this should have encouraged Churchill to be wary of relying too much on Fisher’s advice. But just as Winston had deferred too much to Lloyd George in the great campaign for Liberal reform, he was now tempted to measure his progress at the Admiralty by what Jacky Fisher thought. One person who doubted the wisdom of this new infatuation was, of all people, Lloyd George. As early as December 1911 he confided to George Riddell “that Fisher was not a very safe advisor, and that Winston would have to be cautious.”13

  It was widely known that Jacky had a habit of falling out with friends and colleagues and then blaming them for the falling-out. (His most infamous quarrel was with his fellow admiral Lord Charles Beresford, who hated Winston all the more for associating with Jacky.) To keep Fisher happy, Churchill had to resort to shameless flattery on occasion, and he was always having to phrase every communication in the most careful fashion to avoid offending him. When the inevitable blowups came, the old admiral would threaten to burn his bridges and swear that he would never deal with Churchill again.

  “I am going to transfer my body & my money to the United States,” Fisher vowed in April 1912 after vehemently objecting to three promotions Winston had just made. “You have betrayed the Navy in these three appointments,” he said, adding, “This must be my last communication with you in any matter at all.”

  Time and again, Winston would gently coax him back from the edge with kindly notes, and persuade him to write or meet for a private discussion. It was a tiresome process, yet Churchill seemed to think it was worth all the insults and incoherent digressions if, in their next communication, a few flashes of insight managed to sneak through. When he was at his best—arguing, for example, in favor of risking everything on the 15-inch gun—Fisher could conjure the “romance of design,” as Winston put it, and make the impossible seem suddenly achievable. “No one who has not experienced it,” said Churchill of his conversations with the admiral, “has any idea of the passion and eloquence of this old lion when thoroughly roused on a technical question.”14

  * * *

  To mend relations after their break over the disputed promotions, Churchill sailed to Naples f
or a meeting with Jacky, who was living in Italy for part of the year. As a way of emphasizing that the government needed the retired admiral’s help, Asquith agreed to accompany Winston. For business of this kind, the First Lord was able to travel in great style on HMS Enchantress, the Admiralty’s steam yacht—a sleek, well-appointed vessel with a crew of 196. Among those coming along on the voyage were Clemmie and Violet. The group left England on May 21 and went by train to Genoa, where they boarded the yacht and sailed in splendid weather to Naples.

  On the overnight rail journey through France, Clemmie was ill and broke down “in tears & nerves of exhaustion.” She was still suffering from the effects of her miscarriage but had resolved to make the trip anyway, thinking the cruise would do her good. As the train made its way through the mountains she stayed in bed, while Winston held forth in the next compartment on the subject of Napoleon crossing the Alps. At one point Violet went in to check on Clemmie, who asked sleepily whether Winston was talking or reading aloud. In her diary Violet noted with amusement that because Churchill’s sentences rolled off his tongue in such polished fullness, even his own wife couldn’t tell if the words were in print or not.15

  When the Enchantress arrived in Naples on the morning of May 24, everyone left the ship to stroll along the harbor, and when they returned Admiral Fisher was waiting for them. He gave the prime minister a warm welcome but “glowered” at Winston until they visited a house belonging to one of Jacky’s cronies. Once there, Fisher relaxed, began telling jokes, and by teatime his mood seemed upbeat.

  “He’s melting,” Violet whispered to Winston, who was distracted and asked in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “What’s melting?”

  Thinking fast, Violet saved the day by nodding toward the table and saying, “The butter.”16

  By the evening, Winston and Jacky were old friends again, and they spent hours walking the deck of the Enchantress discussing the navy’s problems. For the rest of the visit Fisher was on his best behavior, and gave Winston his promise to help formulate the plans for the navy’s future oil supplies. Jacky was so pleased with himself that when the ship’s band played on deck, he danced with Violet, lurching wildly from port to starboard. He was too full of energy and ideas to remain idle in the Italian sun, Churchill told him. He owed it to his country to be engaged in important work—otherwise, as Winston later put it, “Yr propellers are racing in air.”17

  With Fisher “recaptured,” the Enchantress was free to make a lazy cruise home to Portsmouth by way of Malta and Gibraltar. At stops along the way Winston and company took time to swim, chase lizards, go for picnics, recite poetry to the empty rows of an ancient amphitheater, and inspect naval installations. At sea, there was ample time to relax in the deck chairs and read or nap. The prime minister was absorbed in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, reading between the lines no doubt for guidance on how the next war might be fought.

  For Winston, the one depressing experience of the cruise came when he boarded the battleship Cornwallis to watch gunnery practice. With cotton wool stuffed in his ears, he studied the horizon as the ship—which predated the dreadnoughts—blasted away with 12-inch guns at a distant target being towed by another vessel. Afterward he paced the deck waiting for the results. The commander of the Mediterranean Fleet—Admiral Edmund Poë, who had spent forty years in Queen Victoria’s navy and was now nearing retirement—had the unpleasant duty of telling him that not a single shell had struck the target. Winston demanded an explanation, but the response infuriated him even more.

  “Well, you see, First Lord,” said the admiral, “the shells seem to have either fallen just short of the target or else gone just a little beyond it.”18

  Winston could increase the number of battleships a hundredfold, yet it would all be in vain if victory depended on Victorian timeservers like Admiral Poë. The First Lord had his work cut out for him, and time was running short.

  * * *

  A month after Churchill’s return from the Mediterranean, a political rally was held at Blenheim Palace far surpassing in size the one that had featured him in 1901. He wasn’t welcome at this event, however. Though he still considered Sunny a friend, the crowd of twenty thousand Conservative and Unionist faithful who swarmed the grounds on July 27, 1912, wouldn’t have tolerated Winston’s presence. In fact, for many of them, the point of attending the event at Blenheim was to proclaim the Unionist cause on his native soil. It was a way of taunting him for having dared to speak in Belfast for Home Rule. They also wanted the rally to serve as a reminder that Lord Randolph—and Winston—had once been on their side.

  Sunny and F. E. Smith, both of whom spoke at the rally, wouldn’t have expected Winston to see their participation as a personal betrayal. To them, it was just politics, and they were playing the game with the same aggressiveness that Winston himself usually showed on the political battlefield. But, given the trauma of her experience at the hands of the Unionists in Belfast, Clemmie didn’t look kindly on this Blenheim gathering. It added to her growing list of reasons for wanting her husband to see less of his Tory friends. There was nothing halfhearted about Sunny’s support for the rally. He spent lavishly on the event. In the house, and in the garden tents, reported the Daily Mail, “thousands of pounds of beef and ham and veal and hundreds of gallons of hock, claret, and beer, together with other sundries of an appetizing nature, were displayed and to be had for the asking.”19

  But this rally wasn’t merely the usual excuse for a day of fun at someone else’s expense. It had a sinister side that posed a danger to the nation and was embodied in the rising stars of the event—Sir Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law. Each used the occasion to threaten nothing less than civil war if the government pushed through Home Rule. With his long, gloomy face and slight frame, Bonar Law, who had recently taken Balfour’s place as the Conservative Party’s leader, looked more like a dull schoolmaster than a fiery seditionist, but his speech on the steps of Blenheim raised the possibility of an insurrection not just in Ulster but everywhere in Britain.

  The government, he proclaimed, was “a revolutionary committee which has seized by fraud upon despotic power. . . . We shall use any means to deprive them of the power which they have usurped.” If the Liberals insisted on a fight over Home Rule, he was sure of the consequences. “They would succeed in lighting fires of civil war which would shatter the Empire to its foundations.”

  The mood of discontent in these last few years had now led both the right and the left to countenance violence as a political remedy. On his own, the Tory leader wasn’t likely to strike fear in Liberal hearts. The son of a backwoods Presbyterian minister in Canada, Bonar Law knew how to sound apocalyptic, but no one could imagine him on a charger leading Tory divisions into battle. What he seemed to enjoy was the religious fervor of the Ulster Protestants who saw the fight against Home Rule as God’s cause. It excited him to know that “these people are in serious earnest. They are prepared to die for their convictions.” But he was content to be more of a spiritual leader in this cause than a field general. 20

  Sir Edward Carson, on the other hand, talked insurrection with the cold stare of a man who looked ready to fire the first shot. A rich barrister known for his remorseless interrogations (Oscar Wilde was one of his more prominent victims), Carson was a Protestant Dubliner who had settled in England but was now obsessed by the future of Ulster. Though he had no special connection to the region, he seized the chance to become one of its champions, quickly emerging in 1910 as one of the fiercest opponents of Home Rule. Churchill’s visit to Belfast had particularly enraged him. He said of the Liberal First Lord, “There is nothing that the men of the North of Ireland hate more than a turncoat.”

  As his private correspondence has revealed, he was expecting bloodshed from the start and reveled in the prospect of being at the forefront of the fight. In 1910 he wrote, “I like being chairman of the Ulster Unionists. . . . I feel boiling with rage & I hope there will be violence.” The following y
ear he was becoming downright trigger-happy. “I earnestly hope that all the bitterest hate of the innate savagery of the human being will be brought to play. . . . I never felt more savage.”21

  At Blenheim, while Bonar Law stood speaking for an hour to the vast crowd, Carson sat next to Sunny and leaned forward to catch every word. He wore a grim expression under his silk top hat, his big, smooth face like a block of ice, rigid and pale. When it was his turn to speak, he didn’t hesitate to accept the notion of a possible insurrection, and he dared the government to put it down. “They may tell us, if they like, that [this] is treason. We are prepared to face the consequences.”22

  Lulled by his wealth and ducal isolation, Sunny didn’t seem to have any idea of the consequences of civil war. Basking in the summer sunshine, surrounded by the grandeur of his palace, he applauded Carson along with everyone else in the crowd. But the hate that he was allowing the demagogue to stir up among the twenty thousand Unionists would soon have a direct consequence for Winston.

  It came later that autumn, when the House of Commons was debating Home Rule. As the speeches and shouting dragged into the evening, Carson and his Ulster Unionists became increasingly angry and disruptive. By half past eight, there was so much noise that the Speaker gave up and adjourned the House, announcing “that a state of grave disorder has arisen.” As members were leaving, the Unionists began throwing wads of paper at the Liberals. Amused, Churchill pulled out his handkerchief and waved it at the opposition benches.

  This was too much for one of Carson’s ardent lieutenants, Ronald McNeill, who was the most physically imposing man in the House. Standing six feet, six inches tall, he was described by a contemporary as “a big, square-jawed” fellow with “iron grey hair, brushed back from the forehead—a giant among big men.” Reaching over to the table, McNeill picked up a heavy volume—the Speaker’s copy of the Standing Orders of the House—then took aim and hurled it straight at Churchill. It slammed into his face, nearly knocking him down and drawing blood. As soon as Churchill had gathered his senses, he spotted McNeill and—despite the more than ten-inch difference in their heights—began to go after him. Other members restrained him, however, and McNeill walked away.23