August 12, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 16

By Michael McMenamin

125 Years Ago:

Winter 1877-78-Age 3

“An occasion to strike at the Government safely”

In early 1878, after an armistice had been signed in the Russo-Turkish War with the Russian armies at the gates of Constantinople, the Disraeli government was prepared to go to war with Russia if it seized the Dardanelles. Lord Randolph was opposed to his own government’s policy. In a letter to Winston’s mother prior to a Commons debate, Lord Randolph expressed the quandary in which he found himself:

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“I am sure the debate will be very stormy. I am in great doubt what to do. I think I could make a killing speech against the Government….Of course, I have my future to think of, and I also have strong opinions against the Government policy. It is very difficult. I shan’t decide until the last night of the debate….” In the event, Lord Randolph did not vote against the Government and engaged in secret correspondence during February with his friend and a leading Liberal politician, Sir Charles Dilke, on introducing a motion of censure on his party’s policy, and whether the Liberal Party would support him.

In a letter to Dilke, Lord Randolph wrote, “I am sure that my views, whatever they are worth, are in accordance with your speech and Harcourt’s and Gladstone’s on the question of the future policy of this country….I feel I am awfully young to endeavour to initiate such a motion; but I am so convinced of the soundness of our view that I would risk a smash willingly to have that properly brought forward.”

The Liberals declined Lord Randolph’s efforts to undercut his party—efforts which, as Churchill later wrote of his father, could have altered the course of his career: “Devoted as he was to his party, Lord Randolph was by this time thoroughly out of sympathy with them in their Irish and foreign policy. Indeed it is not improbable, had he in fact moved his resolution as he wished, that he would have been driven out of the Conservative ranks altogether.”

Nonetheless, Churchill continues, his father was still looking “for an occasion to strike at the Government safely, and for a victim to appease his wrath. He found the first in the County Government Bill and the second in Mr. Sclater-Booth.”

100 Years Ago:

Winter 1902-03-Age 28

“Mr. Brodrick’s Army”

Churchill traveled to Egypt in December for a trip up the Nile as the guest of Sir Ernest Cassel, where he continued to work on his father’s biography. Once back in England, he gave a series of speeches attacking the government’s Army policy. Speaking in Oldham on January 17th, he said: “We did not want to have in England three army corps of soldiers to sail away and attack anybody anywhere at a moment’s notice. That is a dangerous and provocative provision. That is enough men to get us into trouble with a great European nation, and nothing like enough men to get us out again [Hear, hear]….There is scarcely anything more harmful to the British Army than this perpetual imitation of the German system [Hear, hear], of German uniforms, and of methods. Sometimes I think the whole Cabinet has got a touch of German measles [laughter], but Mr. Brodrick’s case is much the worst. He is spotted from head to foot [laughter], and he has communicated the contagion to the Army.”

75 Years Ago:

Winter 1927-28-Age 53

“A rising tide of trade”

Churchill continued to push for major tax relief to industry from local government. In late December, he circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet stating that “Productive industry of every kind suffers an excessive and injurious oppression….The fact that all producers will know that as from April, or at the latest from October 1929, all their rates will be taken over by the Exchequer, will from that moment enable forward contracts to be made upon a greatly improved basis. This on a rising tide of trade will help business and diminish unemployment and all its deleterious reactions on the health and economy of the State. It will hold the political field. The opposing parties will, out of partisanship, attack it to their disadvantage. This is a controversy from which, pushed in every field, we have nothing to fear.”

Churchill’s chief opposition to tax relief came from Neville Chamberlain, who wrote to WSC on December 20th: “…in its present form I see grave difficulties departmental or administrative, financial and political….” Behind Churchill’s back in a private letter, Chamberlain was even more critical: “I thought I heard Winston asking for your opinion of his great scheme, and I concluded that he had sent you a copy of that secret print which must now be known to half London. You may like to know that I have sent him a very critical study of it setting out a long list of difficulties. The fact is that I do not believe such a disturbing scheme to be practicable in time for next budget….”

In a letter to Churchill on New Year’s Day, Harold Macmillan speculated on the consequences if the Conservative Party did not adopt WSC’s tax proposal, in words which could well be used to describe the Conservative Party seventy-five years later:

“The Conservative Party will of course go on, whatever Conservative statesmen may do to wreck it. There will always be room for it in the body politic. But it will not, alas!, be the party of our dreams. It will become more & more the party of vested interests….If it merely drifts along aimlessly and incoherently it cannot much longer command the support of active and energetic men. It will rather sink to the position of a party dominated by middle-class aspirations, composed of middle-aged personalities, and attractive only to mediocre minds.”

On Macmillan’s advice Churchill agreed to a two-thirds remission of local taxes on industry rather than his initial proposal of a complete remission.

Churchill went to France for two days in January to hunt wild boar. The Daily News reported, “If you want a ‘close-up’ of the Chancellor just consider him in the light of this adventure of the French forests. He goes to France in a gale, he rises in the dank cold and sets out in the rain over a sodden muddy country. He rides hard for hours, subsisting on sandwiches….”

Two days later, Churchill was back home in Chartwell entertaining guests. As one of the guests wrote years later to Martin Gilbert: “One evening we remained at that round table till after midnight. The table cloth had long ago been removed. Mr. Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought. It was a thrilling experience. He was fascinating. He got worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.”

50 Years Ago:

Winter 1952-53-Age 78

“Income-tax people take it all”

Churchill traveled to America in January aboard the Queen Mary. During the voyage, he presciently told his young private secretary, Jock Colville, that if he lived his normal life span, Colville “should assuredly see Eastern Europe free of Communism.”

On the evening of January 2nd, Colville and Churchill went over a list of questions which might be asked by reporters upon arrival in New York. He recorded in his diary some of Churchill’s spontaneous answers: “Qn: What are your views, Mr. Churchill, on the present stalemate in Korea? Ans: Better a stalemate than a checkmate. Qn: How do you justify such great expenditure on the Coronation of your Queen when England is in such financial straits? Ans: Everybody likes to wear a flower when he goes to see his girl.”

While in America, Churchill met with both President-elect Eisenhower and President Truman. Colville records some of the conversations at a small dinner party with Eisenhower at Bernard Baruch’s New York apartment: “Winston said that a protoplasm was sexless. Then it divided into two sexes which, in due course, united again in a different way to their common benefit and gratification. This should also be the story of England and America….After dinner I listened to the PM and the President-elect talking: Winston made one or two profound observations. For instance, ‘I think you and I are agreed that it is not only important to discover the truth but to know how to present the truth’; and (apropos of the recent treason trials in Czechoslovakia) ‘That they should think it good propaganda is what shows the absolutely unbridgeable gulf between us.'”

The next day Churchill traveled to Washington, where he hosted a dinner for President Truman. Colville again: “After dinner Truman played the piano. Nobody would listen because they were all busy with post-mortems on a diatribe in favour of Zionism and against Egypt which W had delivered at dinner (to the disagreement of practically all the Americans present, though they admitted that the large Jewish vote would prevent them disagreeing publicly). However, on W’s instructions, I gathered all to the piano and we had a quarter of an hour’s presidential piano playing before Truman left.”

On January 9th, Churchill flew to Jamaica for a holiday before returning home to England at the end of the month. Josef Stalin died on March 5th and Churchill immediately began thinking of the implications Stalin’s death might have on world peace. (See this section overleaf.)

Late in February, Churchill discussed with his physician, Lord Moran, the complications wrought by his new-found postwar wealth: “I might go on another eight years. If I do it will be very tiresome for those who manage my finances. Things are already getting very complicated. You see, Charles, during the war I retired from business, but by the end of the war I had become notorious; and all sorts of things, such as film rights and me copyright of my books, gave me quite a bit of capital. For the first time in my life I was quite a rich man. But the income-tax people take it all.”