April 4, 2015

Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07

Page 14

By Michael McMenamin

125 YEARS AGO:

Winter 1881-82 • Age 7

“Love and a great many kisses.”

While staying at Blenheim in January, Winston wrote his first known letter to his mother: “My dear Mamma, I hope you are quite well I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice it was so kind of you and dear Papa I send you my love and a great many kisses. Your loving Winston.”

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A few months later, his father Lord Randolph was taken ill and Winston wrote to him: “My dear Papa, I hope you are getting better. I am enjoying myself very much. I find a lot of primroses every day. I bought a basket to put them in. I saw three little Indian children on Saturday, who came to see the house. Best love to you and dear Mamma. I am, Yr loving son, Winston.”

So long ago….

100 YEARS AGO:

Winter 1906-07 • Age 32

“Taxes are an evil—a necessary evil, but still an evil.”

On 14 December 1906, Churchill spoke at the Reform Club dinner in Manchester about the political problems faced by the Liberal Party in its first year of office. In it, he issued a warning to the House of Lords not to play party politics with legislation sent to them from the House of Commons:

.. .We have difficulties of two kinds to face—difficulties which arise from the arbitrary action of the House of Lords, and difficulties which arise from the extreme violence of a comparatively small group of people, Socialist agitators, at the other extreme of politics. Both these things injure the Liberal Party….I have no desire for a quarrel with either of the extremes I have mentioned. I have no desire to see a violent quarrel between the Liberal Party and the extreme Socialists, but I say that persons who attack us must be met, and that when the Liberal Party is assailed it must not hesitate to strike back at those who assail it.

Looking in the other direction, I have no desire to see this party embark on a great constitutional struggle with the House of Lords….If we are not to have fair play in carrying our legislation, if the measures which come from the Commons to the House of Lords are to be regarded not on their merits but simply whether letting them through or throwing them out will most help the Tory Party or most hurt the Liberal Party…then I say reform of the House of Lords must become the first and principal question of Liberal and democratic politics.

Churchill spoke in the Commons on 17 December 1906 on the constitutions the Colonial Office was drafting under his direction for the Transvaal and Orange River Colony in South Africa:

The Boers will become the trustees of freedom all over the world. We have tried to act with fairness and good feeling. If by any chance our counsels of reconciliation should come to nothing, if our policy should end in mocking disaster, then the resulting evil would not be confined to South Africa. Our unfortunate experience would be trumpeted forth all over the world wherever despotism wanted a good argument for bayonets, whenever an arbitrary Government wished to deny or curtail the liberties of imprisoned nationalities. But if, on the other hand, as we hope and profoundly believe, better days are in store for South Africa, if the long lane which it has been travelling has reached its turning at last, if the words of [Orange Free State] President Brand, “All shall come right,” are at length to be fulfilled, and if the near future should unfold to our eyes a tranquil, prosperous, consolidated Afrikander nation under the protecting aegis of the British crown, then, I say, the good as well as the evil will not be confined to South Africa; then, I say, the cause of the poor and the weak all over the world will have been sustained; and everywhere small peoples will get more room to breathe, and everywhere great empires will be encouraged by our example to step forward—and it only needs a step—into the sunshine of a more gentle and a more generous age.

In February 1907, Churchill again criticized the House of Lords for their obstruction of legislation in a speech he made at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester:

Mr. Wyndham describes the acts of the House of Lords which I have just explained to you as being the attitude of umpire. Umpire, forsooth! [Cheers and laughter.] It looks to me more like the attitude of the footpad who waits for the dark night to stab his enemy than the act of an impartial chamber…

Speaking in the House of Commons on 12 February 1907, Churchill praised reciprocal free trade agreements between British self-governing colonies and explained why they were not inconsistent with the Liberal Party’s unilateral free trade policy.

But is there any reason why we should wish to interfere? I think distinctly not. Taking the simple position of the orthodox Cobdenite Free Trader, I am of the opinion that taxes are an evil, a necessary evil, but still an evil, and the fewer we have of them the better. Therefore every arrangement between protectionist States which takes the form of a reduction in the tariff barriers of the world is a distinct advantage to the world in general, and when it takes place within the circle of the British Empire it is a distinct advance towards that general system of free trade within the Empire which protectionists and free traders alike desire, although free traders are not prepared to purchase free trade within the British Empire at the cost of erecting a protective tariff round the shores of the United Kingdom.

75 YEARS AGO:

Winter 1931-32 • Age 57

“Terribly depressed at the slowness of his recovery…”

Churchill traveled to America in December to embark upon a lecture tour where he was originally scheduled to give forty speeches at £300 per speech. Speaking at the Economic Club in Worcester, Massachusetts on 11 December 1931, Churchill stressed Anglo-American accord: “Cooperation of the two great English speaking nations is the only hope to bring the world back to the pathway of peace and prosperity. If ever we should help, it is now, when the world is off the track and the pathway of peace and prosperity seems lost. The leading men of all countries do not seem to have a clear idea of the situation nor the steps to take to bring us out of the chaos. However, there is one thing that we can be sure of: that wherever the pathway may lead, we shall travel more securely if we do it together like good companions.”

Two days later in New York City, Churchill was nearly killed crossing Fifth Avenue when he was hit by a car when he began to cross the street after looking the wrong way. On 15 December, he telegraphed his son Randolph with a description of his injuries: “Temperature 100.6 Pulse normal. Head scalp wound severe. Two cracked ribs. Simple slight pleura! irritation of right side. Generally much bruised. Progress satisfactory.”

Churchill left the hospital eight days later and sailed with his wife for the Bahamas, where they stayed for three weeks, allowing Churchill to recover from his injuries before resuming his lecture tour. While there, Clementine wrote to Randolph about his father’s low spirits.

I am sure he will be again as well as before, but he is terribly depressed at the slowness of his recovery and when he is in low spirits murmurs “I wish it hadn’t happened.” He has horrible pains in his arms and shoulders.. ..Last night he was very sad and said that he had now in the last 2 years had 3 very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the crash, then the loss of his political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible physical injury. He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from the three events.

Churchill resumed his speaking tour in February and traveled throughout the country for three weeks speaking in nineteen American cities. His speech in Chicago in 7 February 1932 was typical of the message he conveyed throughout the tour—unity between the English-speaking peoples:

“We hear always when we draw closer together in international affairs the whisper (and sometimes the cry), Ah, look! The English and Americans are working together!’ Well, why should we be ashamed of that?” Churchill’s aunt, Leonie Leslie, his mother’s younger sister and with whom he had always been close, wrote to him presciently on 14 February:

Thank goodness you are all right again, and with no tiresome after effects I trust. What an escape and how lucky for you that Clemmie was there. I was in hospital in Dublin myself at the time, and said many a prayer for you as I laid awake at night. Of course you have been spared to still do great things in the future and I mean to live on to see it all!

And Leonie did, living through Churchill’s and England’s finest hour in 1940 before dying in 1943 at the age of 83.

50 YEARS AGO:

Winter 1956-57 • Age 82

“I am not the man I was…”

With the United States and Great Britain still estranged over the failed Anglo-French invasion of Egypt to seize control of the Suez Canal, Churchill’s old secretary, Jock Colville, suggested he write a letter to President Eisenhower reminding him that the Russians not the British were the enemy. Churchill did so, and Eisenhower responded in kind: “The Soviets are the real enemy of the Western world, implacably hostile and seeking our destruction.”

Eisenhower went on to express his hope that the Suez fiasco “may be washed off the slate as soon as possible and that we can then together adopt other means of achieving our legitimate objectives in the Middle East. Nothing saddens me more than the thought that I and my old friends of years have met a problem concerning which we do not see eye to eye. I shall never be happy until our old time closeness has been restored.”

Churchill privately told Colville that the Suez invasion was “the most ill-conceived and ill-executed imaginable.” Yet, when his physician Lord Moran suggested that many people were wishing Churchill had been in charge, he demurred. “I am not the man I was. I could not be Prime Minister now.”