May 2, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 148, AUTUMN 2010

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

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125-100-75-50 YEARS AGO

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125 Years Ago
Autumn 1885 • Age 11
“When the elections are over”

Winston continued to pine for his parents’ affection and—unsuccessfully— for their visit to his school. On 29 September he wrote to his mother, “when do you think Papa will come & see me?” On October 20th he wrote with dismay to his father: “I cannot think why you did not come to see me while you were in Brighton. I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.” A fortnight later his mother received another message: “There is a portrait of you in The Graphic. I wonder when you are coming down to see me.” A week later: “I am not very happy. But quite well. I want you to come and see me when the elections are over.”

On 24 November Winston wrote his father: “I hope most sincerely that you will get in for Birmingham, though when you receive this, the election will be over.” Lord Randolph did not get in for Birmingham, where he was defeated by 773 votes. But he was elected the next day by 1706 votes at Paddington South, where an admirer had instantly stood aside to let Lord Randolph run in his place.

100 Years Ago
Autumn, 1910 • Age 36
“Take that, you dirty cur!”

Three episodes in Churchill’s life a century ago are worthy of note. One involves a lie still repeated today, that he used army troops who fired against striking miners at Tonypandy. The second involves the Suffragettes’ hostility to Churchill’s position on the women’s vote. The third involves the general election in December, the second within the last twelve months.

During a coal miners’ strike in South Wales during the first week in November, the local constable, after a few incidents of window breaking, asked the army directly to send troops. When Churchill found out the next morning what had been done he immediately decided to use police, not the army, to deal with the problem. He sent 200 police from London to South Wales and the troops, already on their way, were ordered to stop. When the striking miners attacked a colliery and were driven off by local police, they moved on to the village of Tonypandy and began looting local shops. When the rioting continued, Churchill sent an additional 500 police from London and authorized one cavalry squadron to move to a nearby rail junction to be available should police be unable to handle the problem. But the police proved sufficient, and not a single soldier came into contact with a striking miner, let alone fired shots. The Times criticized Churchill for not sending in troops, while the left-wing Manchester Guardian praised him for his restraint. (See also page 9.)

On 18 November, suffragettes held a demonstration in Parliament Square to protest Asquith’s proposed dissolution of Parliament without acting on women’s suffrage. Contrary to Churchill’s written instructions, the police did not, as in the past, promptly arrest those who engaged in a breach of the peace, but instead began a six-hour free-for-all fight with the demonstrators where, as Randolph Churchill reported in the official biography, “Stories of women being punched, kicked, pinched and grabbed by the breasts seem well-authenticated.” On the 26th Churchill was attacked with a whip on a train by a man who had been arrested at the Parliament Square demonstration. “Take that, you dirty cur!” the man shouted, and later spent six weeks in jail after a conviction for assault.

At Dundee on December 2nd, Churchill explained that he was “in favour of the principle of women being enfranchised” but opposed extending it only to women with property, because it would “unfairly” alter the balance between parties, i.e., to the advantage of the Conservatives at the expense of the Liberals.

During the bitter 1910 election campaign, Churchill engaged in ad hominem attacks, even on Tories he otherwise liked and respected. In a speech in London on November 28th Churchill said of some of them:

Mr. Balfour is an amiable dilettante philosopher who is content to brood serenely, sedately, over the perversity of a world which he longer attempts to influence. Mr. Austen Chamberlain is a very admirable and honourable young gentleman, but, after all, with all his faults, I would rather have old Joe [laughter and cheers]. I would rather always have the principal than the understudy [cheers]….Then there is Mr. F. E. Smith…a man of excessive sensibility [laughter]. He would have played a very effective part in this election but for one fact. At the outset he was terribly shocked by the wicked language of Mr. Lloyd George…he has been running about ever since endeavouring to say things which he believes will be as effective…but with this difference— that whereas Mr. Lloyd George is invariably witty, Mr. F. E. Smith is invariably vulgar. So much for their leaders. I do not think these will work out at more than about six and a half pence a pound.

Seventy-five Years Ago
Autumn 1935 • Age 61
“A gentler figure in a happier age”

Churchill continued to warn of the growing power of Nazi Germany. On 26 September he told the Carlton Club in London: “The German nation, under Herr Hitler’s dictatorship, is spending this year at least six times as much as we are on the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force put together.”

Italy invaded Abyssinia on 3 October and Churchill addressed this issue at Chingford on 8 October: “It may well be that Italian ambitions would never have taken this dangerous scope if they not been led to believe that Britain was becoming feeble and degenerate and that they would soon become the heirs to all our interests and rights in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East.”

Churchill believed that Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, while deplorable, paled in significance to “the scale and rapidity of German rearmament.” Speaking in the House of Commons on 24 October, he reminded Members that Abyssinia (where slavery was still practiced) was not a “civilised” nation and that the League of Nations should take the opportunity afforded by the Italian invasion to make Abyssinia “put its house in order”:

The native independence of Abyssinia cannot be made a matter for compromise or barter. But no one…can justify the conditions that prevail in that country….No one can keep up the pretence that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy and equal member of a league of civilized nations. The wisdom of the British policy was shown in our opposing their admission and the unwisdom of Continental countries, who now bitterly regret what they did, was shown in its admission. It was a mistake. Steps must certainly be taken to make sure that the oppression by the dominant race in Abyssinia of the tribes which they have recently conquered is not perpetuated as the result of League of Nations action.

An article by Churchill in the November issue of The Strand Magazine drew a formal protest from the German Ambassador in London for its “personal attack” on Hitler. In fact, Churchill was restrained in his characterization of the German leader:

Hitherto, Hitler’s triumphant career has been borne onwards, not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them….Does [Hitler] in the full sunlight of worldly triumph, at the head of the great nation he has raised from the dust, still feel racked by the hatreds and antagonisms of his desperate struggle; or will they be discarded like the armour and the cruel weapons of strife under the mellowing influences of success?….[Hitler appears to be] a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner.

Ever the optimist, Churchill added that “we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

At the Conservative Party Conference on 4 October, Churchill openly praised Stanley Baldwin. A General Election was set for November 14th. Many of Churchill’s friends—as well as Hitler—expected WSC to be given a position in the new Cabinet. Churchill hoped so too. He campaigned for himself and other Tory MPs, urging accelerated rearmament, but when the Labour Party accused the Conservatives of planning “a vast and expensive rearmament programme,” Baldwin told the Peace Society, “I give you my word there will be no great armaments.”

The Conservatives won 432 seats in the election, 278 seats more than Labour, but Churchill was not asked by Baldwin to join the new government. In a private letter, Baldwin explained why: “I feel we should not give him a post at this stage. Anything he undertakes he puts his heart and soul into. If there is going to be war—and no one can say that there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.”

Fifty Years Ago
Autumn 1960 • Age 86
“Charming and affectionate”

Sir Winston and Lady Churchill went on holiday in the south of France in September, staying at the Hotel de Paris because Emery Reves had refused WSC’s request to stay at the villa La Pausa. Reves said his wife Wendy had been distressed that the previous January, Churchill had declined an earlier invitation. Lady Churchill wrote to Wendy on 23 September 1960 that her husband was “surprised and sorry that you should feel the way you do,” while Winston wrote to Wendy on 9 October: “…the months I spent at your charming house were among the brightest in my life.” Although subsequently invited, Churchill never returned to La Pausa.

On 22 October, Winston and Clementine met with President de Gaulle in Nice where private secretary Anthony Montague Brown reported that de Gaulle was “charming and affectionate.” On 10 November, Churchill was at Harrow School, where he gave his last public speech. Five days later while saying good night to his wife in her room, he fell and broke a vertebra. Mary Soames records that he did not go to hospital but was not well enough to attend the wedding of his granddaughter Edwina Sandys to Piers Dixon in December.

On the 23rd, young Dixon was summoned to Chartwell to meet his bride’s grandfather. Edwina later said that her grandfather “had never looked so ill.” Later that day, according to his physician Lord Moran, Churchill suffered a small stroke, which kept him in bed for a week but did not prevent him from receiving birthday visitors, including Beaverbrook and Onassis. 

 

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