April 17, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 36

Action This Day: Winter 1986-87, 1911-12, 1936-37, 1961-62

By Michael McMenamin

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125 Years Ago
Winter, 1886-87 • Age 12 “I am Robin Hood”

In December Winston’s father, Lord Randolph, resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer and, much to his surprise, was not asked to come back by the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. He was never to hold office again.

Churchill’s son Randolph wrote that Winston was to grow up in the background of Lord Randolph’s fatal resignation, being only 20 when his father died. Winston’s contemporary letters do not reveal any strong feelings about the event, but he certainly developed them later. At the time, however, the only difference in his letters to his father was that he no longer asked for copies of Lord Randolph’s autograph to sell to other students.

On 25 January he advised Lady Randolph that he was “getting on very well in Conduct [and] am in the first 11 of football. Give my love to all.” On 1 February he wrote her about something she had apparently promised him: “Do not forget to get the set of chess for me. I should like the board to be red and white and not black and white. In our singing classes, we are now learning an Operetta entitled ‘The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest.’ I am Robin Hood….”

His letter to his mother of February 23rd commenced with “I write, or rather I try to write, this small epistle unto you, hoping you are in good health” and concluded with the most familiar refrain of his letters: “Do not forget my request for more money.”

100 Years Ago
Winter, 1911-12 • Age 37 “No such right”

Notwithstanding Churchill’s appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, he continued to be the chief government spokesman on Home Rule for Ireland. He was scheduled to give a speech on the subject in Belfast to the Ulster Liberal Association in early February. The meeting was originally scheduled for Ulster Hall where his father had spoken twenty-five years earlier against Home Rule. The Ulster Conservatives objected to the choice of venue. In January, Churchill engaged in correspondence with his cousin Lord Londonderry regarding the Unionist threats of violence to keep him from speaking.

Londonderry replied that his main objection was to Churchill holding the meeting in the Ulster Hall. “By selecting the Ulster Hall with its historic traditions and the memories connected with your late father’s visit in 1886, and the advice he then gave to the people of Ulster, I have no doubt you intended directly to challenge the genuineness of the oft-expressed determination of those who have made up their minds never under any circumstances to allow themselves to be degraded from their present position under the Imperial Parliament.”

Churchill denied that the venue had been chosen for that reason: “You are wrong to think that the Ulster Hall was ‘selected’ by me as a ‘challenge’ to you or your friends. Beyond consenting, in fulfillment of an old promise, to make a speech for the Ulster Liberal Association before the meeting of Parliament, I had nothing to do with the local arrangements. I am told, and you no doubt are aware of it, that the Ulster Hall was only ‘selected’ by the Liberal party in Belfast, after other alternatives had fallen through, because it happened to be free on the date in question. You know quite well that it is a Hall by Act of Parliament open to all parties, and that many Home Rule meetings of importance—one of them as lately as last month—have been freely held there. It is therefore the Ulster Unionist Council who seek to fasten a quarrel, and search for grounds of offence where none are intended.”

That Churchill twenty-five years later was still bitter about his father’s fall from power was clearly evident later in his letter to Lord Londonderry:

“One word more. Your letter forces me to refer to a personal matter. Your Lordship has a claim, to which I bow, to remind me of the memory of Lord Randolph Churchill. You were his friend through evil as well as good days. The Unionist Party, who within a few months of the very speech which is now on their lips pursued him with harsh ingratitude, have no such right.”

Churchill intended to take his wife with him for the Belfast speech and kept her informed as to the dispute over the venue. The chief government whip wrote to Churchill on 31 January urging him not to bring his wife: “The police report that great quantities of bolts & rivets have been abstracted from the yards, and many revolvers have been taken out of pawn. My own feeling isthat there will be no serious riot, but that isolated disturbance may take place is probable…and moreover you cannot satisfy yourself that [your wife] does not run considerable risk.”

In the event, Clementine accompanied Churchill where he gave a speech in the Catholic district of Belfast. Churchill’s motorcade from the Grand Central Hotel to the speech venue was set upon by an angry Loyalist crowd approaching 10,000, who surrounded Churchill’s car and lifted its back wheels eighteen inches into the air before police beat them off. It was a grim foreshadowing of the unlawful conduct of the Ulster Unionists, which was to accompany their opposition to Home Rule in the next two years.

Churchill’s main concern during the winter of 1912 continued to be with his new post as First Lord of the Admiralty. The new German Navy Law proposed building fifteen dreadnought battleships over the next six years rather than the previously planned twelve. Churchill wrote to the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, observing that previously, Britain would have built twenty-one ships but now would have to build twenty-seven in order to maintain a “60% superiority over Germany…in Dreadnoughts & Dreadnt Cruisers.”

Two days after his speech in Belfast, Churchill spoke in Glasgow on the respective naval power of Britain and Germany. “The purposes of British naval power are essentially defensive,” he explained. He added that the difference between British and German naval power was that “The British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury. Our naval power involves British existence. It is existence to us; it is expansion to them.”

Germany did not react well to Churchill’s characterization of their Navy as a luxury, and jokes abounded over their luxus flotte. It could be argued that Germany’s desire to have a stronger fleet was not quite the luxury Churchill made it out to be at the time: Only six years later, German civilians were dying from starvation as a consequence of the British fleet’s successful blockade of German ports.

75 Years Ago
Winter, 1936-37 • Age 62 “I enjoyed our day so much”

One of the principle members of Churchill’s informal intelligence network, Ralph Wigram, died suddenly on New Year’s Eve. Churchill learned of this on January 2nd and promptly wrote a letter to Wigram’s wife Ava: “…I admired always so much his courage, integrity of purpose, high comprehending vision. He was one of those—how few—who guard the life of Britain. Now he is gone—and on the eve of this fateful year. Indeed it is a blow to England and to all the best that England means.”

Notwithstanding Wigram’s death, Churchill’s intelligence network continued to keep him informed. Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography chronicles the extensive information Churchill received from his network during the winter of 1936-37.

Within the government, the accuracy of Churchill’s warnings about the lack of parity between British and German air power was recognized even by Neville Chamberlain, who admitted privately that Britain was “a long way behind Germany numerically.”

Churchill’s biographers have mostly glossed over his first love, Pamela Plowden, and their continuing affection and platonic friendship over the years. Churchill’s destruction of most of her letters to him may have something to do with this. Evidence of their affection remains from the winter of 1937. Clementine and their daughter Mary went skiing in the Alps in January and Clementine urged Churchill to join them and paint the scenery. He left for the Alps on 3 February, but not before spending the previous day in the company of “his Pamela” (as Clementine referred to the now-Lady Lytton) at Knebworth House north of London.

Pamela (then Plowden) was the first woman to whom he had proposed. Improvidently he had written his mother that she was “the only woman I could ever live happily with.”

Of their hours together Churchill wrote: “Dearest Pamela, I enjoyed our day so much. Do let me come again & finish the masterpiece. Always yr loving friend, W.” That same day, Churchill wrote to the other—and equally beautiful—woman he eventually found with whom he could live happily: “My darling, I am off tomorrow, & look forward much to joining you 10th or 11th either at St. M or Davos—as you decide.” He closed his with a similar salutation as he sent to Pamela: “Always yr loving husband, W.”

50 Years Ago
Winter, 1961-62 • Age 86 “With my Humble duty…”

Churchill spent Christmas at Chartwell, where his guests included his daughter Diana and his grandchildren Julian and Celia Sandys. On February 5th, Sir Winston wrote to HM the Queen on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her ascending to the throne:

“Madam, At the conclusion of the first decade of your Reign, I would like to express to Your Majesty my fervent hopes and wishes for many happy years to come. It is with pride that I recall that I was your Prime Minister at the inception of these ten years of devoted service to our country. With my Humble duty, I remain, Your Majesty’s faithful Subject and Servant, Winston S. Churchill.”

The Queen replied in a hand- written letter on February 6th:

“My dear Sir Winston, I was most touched to receive your letter of good wishes on the tenth anniversary of my succession. I shall always count myself fortunate that you were my Prime Minister at the beginning of my reign, and that I was able to receive the wise counsel and also friendship which I know my father valued so very much as well. Yours very sincerely, Elizabeth R.”