March 22, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 32

Action This Day: Summer 1887,1912, 1937, 1962,

By Michael McMenamin

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125 YEARS AGO
Summer 1887 • Age 12
“Not to do any work…”

Winston wrote his mother on 24 June to report success reading Euclid (“I and another boy are top of the school in it”) and to ask her to send him one of two new novels, She or Jess, by his favorite writer H. Rider Haggard. While he didn’t ask for money, he did seek to resupply stock for his cottage industry of selling his parents’ autographs: “Please be quick and send me the autographs 6 of yours & 6 of Papa’s.” Four days later he repeated his request for Jess (“I want something to read very much”) and the autographs. Possibly anticipating auto- graph earnings, he assured his mother that “My Money will last a long time yet….” A long time apparently meant seven days: on July 5th he wrote: “I should like 5/- as I am absolutely bankrupt.” In a follow-up on July 8th he added: “My darling I hope you don’t intend to make my holidays miserable by having a Tutor.”

But that in fact was his mother’s intention. The tutor was to be one of Winston’s masters, and he accepted this conditionally: “I shall not mind him at all, on one condition v.i.z. ‘Not to do any work.’ I give up all other conditions except this one. I have never done work in my holidays and I will not begin now. I will be very good if this is not forced upon me and I am not bothered about it. When I am doing nothing, I don’t mind working a little, but to feel that I am forced to do it is against my principles.”

His cheeky ultimatum did not go over well. His mother’s next letter enclosed autographs and money but upbraided him. He wrote back contritely: “…I did not enjoy the letter so much, nevertheless I deserved it, I know. I promise you I will be a very good boy indeed in the Holidays. Only do let me off the work because I am working hard this term & I shall find quite enough to do in the Holidays. Subsequent letters are silent as to whether he ever received either She or Jess.

100 YEARS AGO
Summer 1912 • Age 37
“Almost treasonable activity”

Churchill’s attention during the summer was divided between his duties at the Admiralty and his continuing role as the government’s chief spokesman in Parliament on Irish Home Rule. Earlier in the year, he had accused the Tory leader Bonar Law of “almost treasonable activity” in his speeches to large crowds in Ulster which were not “warnings to the Government but incitement to the Orangemen…Had British statesmen and leaders of great parties in the past allowed their thoughts so lightly to turn to projects of bloodshed within the bosom of the country, we should have shared the follies of Poland.”

Andrew Bonar Law took nearly four months to respond, on 27 July, in terms which made Churchill’s “almost treasonable” accusation seemed modest. Bonar Law called the elected government of Great Britain “a revolutionary committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud. In our opposition to them we shall not be guided by considerations or bound by the restraints which would influence us in an ordinary constitutional struggle…there are things stronger than Parliamentary majorities….I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I would not be prepared to support them.”

Ulster’s resistance included conspiring with Germany to provide the weapons for a civil war within the UK by the Ulstermen and their Tory co-con- spirators. Yet no one was ever indicted for conspiring with Germany at a time when she was universally considered to be an enemy of Britain.

Churchill then turned to the Irish, in a 31 August letter to John Redmond, leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, asking him to allow Orange majority counties—three or at best four—to opt out of Home Rule and an Irish Parliament for several years. This Redmond eventually agreed to do. In response, Bonar Law and the Orangemen would turn to Germany for arms. The Kaiser was pleased to accommodate them.

Simultaneously Churchill at this moment was advising the Committee of Imperial Defence on naval policy:

…the whole character of the German fleet shows that it is designed for aggressive and offensive action of the largest possible character in the North Sea or the North Atlantic…The structure of the German battleships shows clearly that they are intended for attack and for fleet action. They are not a cruiser fleet designed to protect Colonies and commerce all over the world. They have been preparing for years, and are continuing to prepare, on an even larger scale a fleet which, from its structure and character, can be proved by naval experts to have the central and supreme object of drawing out a line of battle for a great test of strength in the North Sea or in the ocean.

Churchill was undoubtedly correct in this aspect of his analysis. Germany’s fleet was designed to confront the British fleet. But why? Churchill never understood. In public he had caused no little controversy by calling the German fleet a “luxury.” He didn’t say this to provoke Germany, though it did. In private to the CID, he said the same thing. After noting with approval Bonar Law’s statement that the German fleet “was almost a loaded cannon continually pointed at us,” Churchill wrote, “Of course, they may say that our fleet is similarly pointed at them”—which it clearly was. Then Churchill wrote what proved to be untrue but played a role in Germany’s eventual defeat: “…nothing we can do on the sea can menace the freedom or security of Germany [or] can make any difference to that which makes life worth living for them.”

Churchill certainly believed this in 1912. The continued British naval blockade of Germany after the November 1918 armistice, however, and the resulting postwar starvation of German civilians, would be major factors in Germany reluctantly signing the treaty dictated at Versailles.

75 YEARS AGO
Summer 1937 • Age 62
“The power of personal example”

While appeasement is popularly linked with the Anglo-French betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938, an incident during the summer of 1937 illustrates how the Foreign Office, even under Anthony Eden, took pains to avoid offending a Germany bent on war.

Churchill, in the process of compiling Great Contemporaries, had sent copies of various articles he intended to include for comment by others. One of these was his 1935 Strand Magazine article on Hitler, which he sent on 2 July to Sir Robert Vansittart, an open opponent of Hitler at the Foreign Office.

In that article, Churchill expressed admiration for the “courage, perseverance and the vital force” Hitler had displayed on his rise to power. He described Hitler as “highly competent, cool, well-informed…with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile and…a subtle personal magnetism.” Churchill hoped “that we may yet live to see Hitler as a gentler figure in a happier age.” Clifford Norton, Vansittart’s Private Secretary, replied that the essay would not be “at all palatable” to Germany, and asked if “republication just now was advisable.” Although he made a few deletions “to take the sting out of the article,” WSC reatined the Hitler chapter. (See review of Great Contemporaries, page 53.)

While believing privately that Hitler was bent on war in 1938 or 1939, Churchill publicly said nice things about the German dictator. In the Evening Standard on 17 September he urged Hitler to cease persecution of German Jews, Protestants and Catholics, but added: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” This was part of Churchill’s characteristic generosity toward opponents, but has since been used to pillory him for “naivete.”

Morale in the Royal Air Force was dangerously low. Wing Commander Tor Anderson, one of Churchill’s many sources of information, visited Chartwell on 1 August where WSC read aloud from Marlborough. On the 5th, Anderson wrote: “…I was very impressed by that incident in the life of the Duke of Marlborough…and by your conclusion as to the power of personal example and inspiration. It is just that influence which is so disastrously absent from the Air Force at this moment.”

50 YEARS AGO
Summer 1962 • Age 87
“I want to die in England”

Churchill broke his hip on June 28th in Monte Carlo, after slipping off the edge of his bed. Calmly he told his male nurse, “I think I’ve hurt my leg.” He was transported to a Monaco hospital where he told his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, “I want to die in England.” Montague Browne relayed this to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who dispatched an RAF Comet to carry WSC back to Britain.

At Middlesex Hospital, successful surgery was performed and he remained there three weeks. One of his physicians, Dr. Herbert Seddon, joined him for coffee and brandy each evening and noted in his diary:

I have never met anyone who could make a modest dose of cognac last so long….Maybe I was in on one or two film sessions, but can remember only one: Sink the Bismarck. I think I watched the Grand Old Warrior as much as the movie. He never took his eyes off it, and they lit up. He sat upright and his usually pale face flushed. His cigar went out; he just held it; his mouth opened in rapt attention. Winston was fighting the battle over again.

On July 20th Churchill was visited at Middlesex Hospital by former President Eisenhower and the Prime Minister. Macmillan noted in his diary that Churchill had been reading a C.S. Forester novel. On 21 August Churchill returned to his London residence at Hyde Park Gate, which had been remodeled to install a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor. It had easy access to the garden, where his daughter Mary said “he loved to sit.”