September 5, 2013

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 26

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

One hundred years ago:

Spring 1900 »Age 25

“Politics, Pamela, finances, books”

Spring 1900 found Churchill very much engaged in the war against the Boers, heedlessly taking chances with his life on occasions where only his death would have afforded him any publicity. On one occasion, in April 1900, Churchill, as a correspondent, joined a cavalry attempt to capture a small hill, racing a group of Boer horsemen to the summit. The Boers won and Churchill and the others were in danger of being cut off. They had just dismounted when the Boers arrived and started firing. Churchill’s horse was spooked and bolted, leaving him behind and on foot. Dodging bullets, he ran towards his own men and was saved by a trooper who picked him up but whose horse was killed in the process. His son Randolph recounts that the trooper was unawed: “Oh my poor horse,” moaned the trooper. “Never mind,” said Churchill, “you’ve saved my life.” “Ah,” rejoined the scout, “but it’s the horse I’m thinking about.”

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On another occasion in late May, WSC risked being shot as a spy when, based on a report from a Frenchman he had just interviewed for an article, he rode a bicycle through the middle of Boer-occupied Johannesburg, dressed in civilian clothes, carrying a British military report from General Hamilton to Lord Roberts. Manchester critically wrote: “Even the debonair Frenchman—if indeed he was what he said he was; Winston, with his own atrocious French, was no judge of that, and no one else here had ever laid eyes on the man before—conceded that armed Boers were thick in the streets. A simple search by any one of them and Winston would be shoved against the nearest wall and executed by an ad hoc firing squad.”

As a reward for Churchill’s daring in Johannesburg, Lord Roberts let WSC and his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, ride at the head of the column which entered Pretoria a few days later. Churchill and his cousin made a beeline towards the POW camp he had escaped six months earlier where, in poetic justice, they liberated the camp. As one of the freed prisoners wrote in his diary:

“…suddenly Winston Churchill came galloping over the hill and tore down the Boer flag, and hoisted ours amidst cheers and our people some of which had been in for six months or more were free and at once the Boer guards were put inside and our prisoners guard over them! It was roarable and splendid.”

On 11 June, Churchill’s initiative under fire enabled the British to win the Battle of Diamond Hill. General Hamilton wrote in his memoirs: “…Winston gave the embattled hosts at Diamond Hill an exhibition of conspicuous gallantry [the phrase often used in recommendations for the Victoria Cross] for which he has never received full credit….” Hamilton recommended Churchill for the V.C. but Roberts and Kitchener refused because Churchill “had been only a Press Correspondent.”

Two days before Diamond Hill, Churchill had written to his mother “…I need not say how anxious I am to come back to England. Politics, Pamela, finances and books all need my attention….” Such a ranking of Churchill’s priorities probably explains as well as anything why Pamela Plowden faded from the picture, to be replaced a few years later by a life mate, Clementine, who understood perfectly well and agreed that this was how their lives together would be ordered.

Seventy-five years ago:

Spring 1925 • Age 50

A Forecast of the Next War

Churchill was hard at work on his first budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s government. He presented it in his first budget speech on 28 April, taking over two and a half hours to do so. He led off with the return to the Gold Standard (uncriticized by any party at the time). Next was his new plan of pensions for widows, their children and orphans, covering more than 200,000 women and 350,000 children.

“I like the association of this new scheme of widows’ pensions and earlier old-age pensions with the dying-out of the cost of the war pensions,” Churchill said. “I like to think that the sufferings, the sacrifices, the sorrow of the war have sown a seed from which a strong tree will grow, under which, perhaps many generations of British people may find shelter against some at least of the storms of life. This is far the finest war memorial you could set up to the men who gave their lives, their limits, or their health, and those who lost their dear ones in the country’s cause.”

Finally, Churchill introduced the centerpiece of his first budget: across-the-board income tax reductions, with the greater benefits going to lower income groups. He termed his budget “national, and not class or party in its extent or intention,” adding, “I cherish the hope…that by liberating the production of new wealth from some of the shackles of taxation the Budget may stimulate enterprise and accelerate industrial revival, and that by giving a far greater measure of security to the mass of wage-earners, their wives and children, it may promote contentment and stability, and make our Island more truly a home for all these people.”

Baldwin called Churchill’s speech “one of the most striking Budget speeches of recent years” and wrote to the King: “The general impression was that Mr Churchill rose magnificently to the occasion. His speech…was a first-rate example of Mr Churchill’s characteristic style. At one moment he would be expounding quietly and lucidly facts and figures relating to the financial position during the past and current years. At another moment, inspired and animated by the old political controversies on die subject of tariff reform, he indulged in witty levity and humour which come as a refreshing relief in the dry atmosphere of a Budget speech. At another moment, when announcing the introduction of a scheme for widows’ and mothers’ pensions, he soared into emotional flights of rhetoric in which he has few equals; and throughout the speech he showed that he is not only possessed of consummate ability as a parliamentarian, but also all the versatility of an actor.”

During this same period, Churchill was instrumental in defeating a proposal in the Cabinet, by Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, for a defense pact with France based upon maintaining the Versailles treaty and guaranteeing Britain would come to France’s aid if attacked by Germany. Churchill was opposed to helping France until she backed off the oppressive terms of Versailles and agreed to a “real peace” with Germany, one which involved a “substantial rectification” of Germany’s frontier with Poland. As Churchill had earlier told the French President, Doumergue, he “was personally convinced that [Germany] would never acquiesce permanently in the condition of her eastern frontier.” Without such a revision, Churchill presciently told the Committee of Imperial Defence, a new war loomed on the horizon over Poland:

“This war which has occurred between France and Germany several times has broken up the world. What guarantee have we got while things are going as they are that we shall not have another war. In fact, it seems as if we were moving towards it, although it may not be for twenty years, certainly not until Germany has been able to acquire some methods of waging war, chemically or otherwise.”

In March, the senior Cabinet ministers assembled, in Austen Chamberlain’s absence in Paris, and endorsed Churchill’s view that no defense pact with France would be concluded unless it included an arrangement with Germany as well.

Fifty years ago:

Spring 1950-Age 75

“Fertile milch cows are greatly valued…”

Churchill’s vision for Europe was that no enduring peace was possible without an understanding between France and Germany. As he told the House on 28 March: “Let me, therefore, express our policy as I see it in a single sentence. Britain and France united should stretch forth hands of friendship to Germany, and thus, if successful, enable Europe to live again.”

Cutting oppressive income tax rates was still on his mind. On 28 April, Churchill spoke to the House on the Labour Party’s budget. Speaking of the confiscatory tax rates set by the budget, he remarked: “Hate is not a good guide in public or in private life. I am sure that class hatred and class warfare, like national revenge, are the most costly luxuries in which anyone can indulge. The present Chancellor has boasted of the number of persons who have net incomes of £5000 or over a year. He has boasted that it has been reduced from 11,000 before the war to 250 at the present time, and that the number of those over £6,000 has been reduced from 7,000 to 70.”

Churchill’s view was that the government should follow policies which lowered taxes and increased the number of rich people so they could pay more in taxes, the same policies which resulted in unprecedented prosperity in the United States during the last twenty years of the twentieth century. Using his experience as a dairy farmer, Churchill illustrated why Labour’s pride in reducing the ranks of the rich was a bad idea: “It is a great advantage in a dairy to have cows with large udders because one gets more milk out of them than the others. These exceptionally fertile milch cows are greatly valued in any well-conducted dairy, and anyone would be thought very foolish who boasted he had got rid of all the best milkers, just as he would be thought very foolish if he did not milk them to the utmost limit of capacity, compatible with the maintenance of their numbers.

“I am quite sure that the Minister of Agriculture would look in a very different way upon the reduction of all these thousands of his best milkers from that in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer looks upon the destruction of the most fertile and the most profitable resources of taxation.”

Twenty-five years ago:

Spring 1975

Jock Dead at “91”

For the first time in seven years there was nothing to report from the International Churchill Societies, which had gone into hibernation following three successive failures to find an editor for Finest Hour, which Dalton Newfield could no longer produce. But Newfield banked the treasury in an interest-bearing account, hoping that one day the Churchill journal would revive.

Chartwell reported another death in the family: “Jock,” Sir Winston’s marmalade cat, died aged 13, the feline equivalent of 91, one year more than Churchill’s 90 years. A gift from Jock Colville, the cat had accompanied WSC on his lap during commutes between Chartwell and Hyde Park Gate, and Sir Winston kept a photograph of him by his bedside as his life drifted away in January 1965. The cat was immediately replaced by “Jock II,” who dominated the scene at Chartwell for many years until he passed on, giving way to “Jock III,” the present Lord Warden of the Cinque Mouseholes.

On April 2nd, Baroness Clementine Spencer-Churchill of Chartwell celebrated her 90th birthday with a family lunch at Claridge’s Hotel in London. She was reported in good spirits despite failing eyesight which had afflicted her in recent years. Ten days later she was escorted by the Duke of Marlborough to the Temple of Diana at Blenheim where WSC had proposed to her 67 years before.