June 10, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 134, SPRING 2007

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

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125 YEARS AGO:
Spring 1882 • Age 7 “Give it ’em hot, Randy.”

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Lord Randolph was now a rising star and the most popular speaker in the Conservative Party. Churchill wrote in his father’s biography: “Before the end of 1882 a speech from Lord Randolph Churchill had become an event to the newspaper reader.” Churchill went on to describe the political impact of his father’s speeches.

At a time when Liberal orators and statesmen, “careering about the country,” as Lord Randolph described them, “calling themselves ‘the people of England,'” were looking forward to an election which should relegate the Conservative Party to the limbo of obsolete ideas, they were disconcerted by the spectacle, repeatedly presented, of multitudes of working men hanging upon the words of a young aristocrat…”Give it ’em hot, Randy,” cried the crowds in the streets and at the meetings, till he himself was forced to complain that he was expected to salute his opponents with every species of vituperation. But, to tell the truth, he responded to the public demand with inexhaustible generosity. He spared no one. Neither persons nor principles escaped an all-embracing ridicule.

Churchill described his father’s preparation and delivery:

His style was essentially rhetorical, and much more spontaneous than his peculiar methods of preparation would imply. He seems to have written with scarcely a single correction and without hesitation of any kind, as fast as he could set pen to paper. Indeed, I fancy that he wrote his speeches chiefly for an exercise of memory and to fix them clearly in his mind and did not by any means make them up with a pen in his hand.

Above all, they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams, imagery, argument—all were “Randolphian.” No one could guess beforehand what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries….

100 YEARS AGO:
Spring 1907 • Age 32 “I hear you are engaged to Miss Botha.”

The Colonial Conference took place in April 1907 and was attended by the Prime Ministers of Great Britain’s self-governing colonies. Among those in attendance was Louis Botha, Premier of the Transvaal, accompanied by his pretty 19-year-old daughter Helen. As Undersecretary for the Colonies, Churchill was actively involved in the Conference and rumors began spreading of a romance between Churchill and Helen. The rumors were widespread and eventually reached the South of France, evidenced by a letter to Winston from Muriel Wilson in early May. She had turned down his marriage proposal in 1896 but had remained a good friend:

My dear Winston, I hear you are engaged to Miss Botha — is this true?. . .I look forward to a peaceful old age here in the sun & surrounded by the blue sea, & you I hope—& Miss Botha, & all the little Bothas will come & see me & my garden. If there were a romance with Miss Botha, nothing came of it; but Churchill was exceptionally generous in his praise of her father at the Conference:

He was the first man into the war and he was the last man out of it. Nothing in the Conference is more dramatic and impressive than his presence amongst us. His visits and the speeches he has made have strangely touched the imagination of the British people, and I will tell him on their behalf that while we are slow to make a friend, yet once when we have made a friend we are slower still to throw him over. To those who, like my honourable and gallant friend and myself, fought during the war such an event comes home.

During the Conference, some of the colonies, including Australia, asked that preferential treatment be granted to their exports, i.e., that tariffs be imposed by Great Britain on other countries’ exports but not on the colonies’ exports. The Liberal government had been elected on the issue of Free Trade, so that proposal went nowhere. Churchill explained why in a speech in Edinburgh on 18 May:

We are told the Government has banged the door [on preferential tariffs]. Well, upon what have they banged the door? They have banged the door upon Imperial taxation of food. Yes, they have banged it, barred it, and bolted it. It is a good stout door of British oak, the largest Liberal, Radical, and Labour majority ever seen in the House of Commons have their backs firmly against it. That door shall never be opened….The Liberal Party stands like a rock between the hard-working masses, and all who would exploit their food supply and squeeze some shameful little profit out of the scanty pittance of the weak and poor.

In April, Churchill visited with his great American friend Bourke Cockran and Bourke’s wife Anne, who were on their honeymoon. Cockran had written to Churchill from Paris where the couple was staying at the Hotel Bristol:

My dear Winston, Your Mother whom I met at Monte Carlo said you would be at Biarritz near the end of last week — which explains my telegram. Since I received your answer I have been busy making arrangements to spend a day or two in London before our return to America….I won’t weaty you now with any discussion of perplexing problems further than to repeat I am still an optimist. There is nothing among all the evils which men are condemning as vehemently in both hemispheres that does not show conclusively the inexorable faces of progress, moral and material, steadily at work and moving inevitably to success. But of all this we have much to say at the meeting to which I look forward with eagerness.

75 YEARS AGO:
Spring 1932 • Age 57 “Do you wish for war?”

Churchill returned to England from his American speaking tour, still feeling the after-effects of his near-fatal injuries in New York in December, when he was hit by an automobile. He wrote Lord Salisbury on 2 April 1932:

I get tired more easily than I did; and of course eight nights out often in the train and twenty-five harangues in a month were a rough kind of convalescence.

On 29 April, Churchill spoke approvingly of emergency legislation to give the Government substantial new powers of search and seizure in India to combat increased violence and terror in India, where Hindu-Muslim riots killed and wounded thousands:
This decision, so courageously and soberly carried out, makes a great difference in my attitude towards the Indian policy of His Majesty’s Government. When I spoke at a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel in January, 1930, I said: “Sooner or later you will have to crush Gandhi and the Indian Congress and all they stand for.” That statement of mine was more censured than any other that I made and more condemned by those politicians who were at that time controlling Indian affairs. It was thought to be a shocking thing to say, but see what happened?…The Government of India, and the National Government at home, have adopted this very policy of crushing Gandhi and the Indian Congress.

During this same period, Churchill began to speak out against further disarmament proposed by British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon. On 13 May he told the House of Commons:

I should very much regret to see any approximation in military strength between Germany and France. . . . I would say to those who would like to see Germany and France on an equal footing in armaments: “Do you wish for war?” For my part, I earnestly hope that no such approximation will take place during my lifetime or diat of my children.

A month earlier, Hitler had received 40 percent of the votes for President in a campaign against Field Marshal Hindenburg. In less than a year, he would be Germany’s Chancellor.

50 YEARS AGO: Spring 1957 • Age 8 82
“What we desire is freedom.”

Churchill’s former private secretary Jock Colville lunched with Churchill’s physician Lord Moran in the spring of 1957, who dutifully recorded the following in his diary:

I asked Jock which of Winston’s gifts had been of most value to the country in the war. He said at once: “Winston’s capacity for picking out essential things and concentrating on them.” What next? “I think his great moral courage. If something went wrong he would patiently start again at the beginning. And his vivid imagination. It was always coming to his help in the war. His magnanimity of course, and his power of inspiring everyone he met.”

On 3 May 1957, Churchill addressed the Primrose League, founded by his father in the later 19th century, on the current political situation. He suggested that what his second premiership had accomplished since 1951 vindicated the position he took opposing the Labor Party which had defeated him so soundly in 1945: It is nearly six years now since the Socialist Government were removed from office, and I was entrusted with die formation of a Conservative administration.

Those six years have witnessed a remarkable improvement in the condition of all the people. All the people. The Tory Party is not and will never become the vehicle or instrument of any one class or section. Look back to 1951, and look around to-day. We are better fed. There is more to buy in the shops, and the nation is earning more with which to buy it. The burden of taxation, though still heavy, has begun to be relieved. We are better housed. To have built 10 million new houses in our first five years is a striking vindication of the programme we placed before the electors. And just as the new houses are going up, those blots on our great cities—the slums—are coming down….Back in 1945, when our arms had achieved victory and we were thinking again of the tasks and problems of peace, I ventured to give the newly formed Socialist Government a word of advice on the opening day of the new Parliament. “What we desire is freedom,” I said. “What we need is abundance.” “Freedom and abundance—these must be our aims.” That was nearly twelve years ago. My advice—as has sometimes been the case before in the course of my public life— was little heeded at the time; but I have been spared to see the policy adopted and some of its advantages reaped.

Things were not going as well with his wife, however as they were with the British economy, judging from this 21 May letter by Churchill to Clementine:

Your visit to me the night before I left was vy precious. Do not let the idea that I am “mean” to you tear your mind. As a matter of fact I take every lawful opportunity of passing money to you in a way which will avoid the 67% toll which the State will almost certainly take at my death & will continue to do so as long asI am able. Your life of devotion & kindness to me has made my own one both happy & successful.

My only wish is to live peacefully out the remaining years—if years they be. But you, dearest one, have the twilight of a glorious spell upon you in all probability. So be happy & do not let misconceptions of me darken & distort your mind.