May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 111, Summer 2001

Page 22

By Michael McMenamin

One hundred years ago:

Summer 1901 ‘Age 26

“The Hughligans”

The war in South Africa droned on, and the expense of paying for it was the major issue. Speaking in the House on 17 July, Churchill said: “What is of great importance is that this House as a whole is thoroughly agreed upon the principal features of the policy that has led to all this expenditure which everyone deplores. But hon. members opposite have indeed advocated a somewhat curious policy. The Rt. Hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition I believe hopes to check the expenditure and to bring the war to an end at an early date by combining the policy of swords with that of olive branches. That is an extraordinary policy, and I quite agree with the Rt. Hon. Gentleman that the party opposite is the only party in the State who could carry it out, for it is the only party which has in itself all the elements which make for peace and for war.”

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It was during this period that Churchill joined forces with a few other dissident young Tory MPs, Ian Malcolm, Lord Percy, Arthur Stanley, and Lord Hugh Cecil. As Churchill’s son wrote in the Official Biography, “Later they were on occasion to be outrageous in their Parliamentary manners and the critics dubbed them the Hughligans, or Hooligans.” Together, they made things hot for the Tory establishment.

Churchill spent the last week of August and most of September in Scotland, including visits with the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Londonderry and Churchill’s uncle, LordTweedmouth.

During his stay in Scotland, he wrote several letters to The Times defending the sanitary conditions in the Scottish tweed industry against an anonymous correspondent, who had suggested that “scrupulously cleanly persons will hesitate to wear such garments.” Churchill replied: “Of course it may be possible that your correspondent is only one of those pseudo-scientific persons who have a mania for discovering bacilli in everything; and who, when they are neither anonymous nor insignificant, from time to time, and particularly in the holiday time, endeavour to alarm the British public through the columns of the newspapers.”

Seventy-five years ago:

Summer 1926* Age 51

“What the Pig Likes”

After the General Strike, Baldwin asked Churchill to join the Cabinet Committee on Coal. Churchill spent the rest of the summer unsuccessfully attempting to mediate a settlement. Churchill, in fact, felt betrayed by the mine owners. As Sir Martin Gilbert writes, “On June 15 the Government informed the Commons that it had decided to introduce a Bill legalizing an eight-hour working day in the mines, and that, in return, the mine owners had promised to put forward definite wage offers in each district within a national framework.”

The mine owners subsequently reneged on their agreement. Churchill, by now de facto head of the Coal Committee in Baldwin’s absence abroad due to an attack of lumbago, chastised the owners in what the Committee’s secretary described in his diary as a “Dingdong debate at No. 10 between Winston and Evan Williams,” the mine owners’ representative: “I am quite sure of this, that if we had known that following the passage of the Eight Hours Bill into law a new obstacle to a settlement, a new complication, would arise through the closing of one of those doors to peace we never should have passed the Bill or proceeded with it. Therefore, if you take up the attitude that…there can be no national negotiations of any kind…I do think you will see that we shall have been placed in a position which is from our point of view at any rate, extremely unfortunate and even, as it might be thought, unfair….”

When Williams denied there was ever a link between the Eight Hours Bill and a national framework for agreement, Churchill shot back: “I cannot possibly accept that.” Mine owners, he said, well knew of the linkage and had said nothing at the time: “You singularly failed to undeceive us.”

Churchill proposed to Baldwin that the Government “amend the Eight Hours Act so as to deny its indulgence to any pit which does not conform to certain conditions.” But, in the event, Baldwin agreed with those Tories who were critical of what they perceived to be Churchill’s sympathies for the mine workers, and did nothing.

One Committee member observed that Churchill was “jolly difficult when he’s in a Napoleonesque attitude, dictating instructions in military metaphors, and the spotlight full on him….he is a most brilliant fellow, but his gifts aren’t those of judgment, nor of appreciating industry, nor of a negotiator.” Another participant gave a milder report: “I don’t think Winston’s activities are at present beyond what the circumstances of the situation call for, or are actuated by any desire for self-advertisement.”

Even his closest friend, Lord Birkenhead, was critical, writing in a telegram: “I am not happy about your attitude….Why should we impose upon owners national settlement if they are strong enough to obtain district settlements?” Finally, while not offering her opinion on the merits, even his wife Clementine offered a gentle suggestion on how to treat his cabinet colleagues on the Committee: “You are having an anxious but a thrilling & engrossing time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes….I suppose Steel-Maitland and Lane-Fox are not often allowed near the trough? I hope you let them have a tit-bit now & again. If the Cat were Minister of Labour or Mines she would not give up her place there without a few ‘miaows.'”

Fifty years ago:

Summer 1951 • Age 76

“Bland Truisms and Platitudes”

Sensing an election was near, Churchill continued to speak critically of the Government throughout the summer even as he completed work on the fifth volume of his World War II memoirs. On 21 July he spoke at the Royal Wanstead School in Woodford: “It is six years almost to a week since the Socialist Government came into office and we entered upon that melancholy period of eclipse and frustration which if it continues will lead to our decline and fall….[A]nd what is the cause? It is the attempt to impose a doctrinaire Socialism upon an island which has grown great and famous by free enterprise and valour and which six years ago stood in honour though not in size at the summit of the world.”

On 30 July he attacked the Government’s foreign policy in the Middle East, opening his statement with the not-so-subtle suggestion that Herbert Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, was a lightweight: Morrison, he said, “has treated us to an able and agreeable parade of bland truisms and platitudes which I fear must, in these busy times, have caused him many long hours of toil and study.” Churchill’s comments ranged from Palestine (“the mistakes and miscalculations in policy which led to the winding-up of our affairs in Palestine in such a way as to earn almost in equal degree the hatred of the Arabs and the Jews”), to Egypt (“These rich, well-to-do classes who have so much control in Egypt are the very ones who are trying to keep a popularity with the masses of the people by ungratefully assailing us today”), to the Government’s failure to secure Iranian ratification of a new agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Churchill left for France on 15 August for a week, followed by two more weeks in Venice, buoyed by the favorable reviews on Volume IV of his memoirs in The Times: “Mr. Churchill’s true genius is not epic but dramatic. The essence of tragedy lies in reversal of fortune. So also does that of comedy, and Mr. Churchill, with die youthful zest which has carried him unfatigued through half a century of public life, here misses no opportunity of picking out the little comic things in the midst of the sorrows and terrors of war.” The Times Literary Supplement wrote: “It is a breathtaking book. To say that Mr. Churchill is a romantic, as immortally young as the hero of Treasure Island, is not to lose sight of the massive common sense of his judgment at the grimmest moments or his superhuman resilience in facing the ugliest facts squarely and taking tremendous decisions. It is rather to point at one deep source of his strength.”

Returning to England in the third week of September, Churchill undoubtedly enjoyed even more a note on 20 September from Prime Minister Attlee: “My dear Churchill, I have decided to have a General Election in October…”

Twenty-five years ago:

Summer 1976

“Half admiring, Half disbelieving”

The Times focused on our honorary member Winston Churchill MP, Sir Winston’s grandson, in a July 11th article, producing in the process a tribute to Sir Winston’s son: “He will repeat the worst anecdotes involving Randolph Churchill, his father, with a half-admiring, half-disbelieving grin….His father remains in his thoughts, not only in pity for that self-desiccating man’s perpetual eclipse by the Churchillian shadow. He remembers being required, as a small child, to read out to his father the leading articles from The Times. He used to fear the consequences of his father’s rage: only gradually did he come to respect its absolute impartiality and understand the appalling disappointment that was its source. And Randolph did inspire him. It was his father’s performance in Korea, rather than his grandfather’s in South Africa, which attracted him to the life of a foreign correspondent. He speaks of Randolph’s literary style with more than a little envy.

“As an MP, he has proved competent….He is fettered by no party appointment beyond his secretaryship of the Conservative Commonwealth and Foreign Affairs Committee, and so is able to indulge in bursts of foreign reporting. His articles appear prominently in the Daily Telegraph, drawing attention to the menace of Russia. He has almost completed a biography of his father, uncovering much about Randolph—including a strain of physical heroism—that is new to him.” In the event the biography, His Fathers Son, was delayed until 1996, but received critical acclaim (see FH 92:30).