March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 42

By Michael McMenamin

125 YEARS AGO

Winter 1887-88 • Age 13

“I don’t want to go at all.”

With their parents in Russia, Winston and his brother Jack spent Christmas at 2 Connaught Place with their nanny, Mrs. Everest, and were visited by their Aunt Leonie and Uncle Jack (later Shane) Leslie. In the evening, they went to the Leslies’ home on Stratford Place and played games. Winston had been invited by his grandmother, the Duchess of Marlborough, to spend a week with her at Blenheim over the holiday, but Winston wrote his mother on Boxing Day, “I don’t want to go at all.” His Aunt Leonie obliged him and sent a telegram to Blenheim saying Winston would not be coming.

Leonie’s short telegram apparently arrived just after the Duchess had written her son, Lord Randolph: “I have asked Winston to come to stay a week with me. I would be responsible for him. He wrote me such a nice little letter & I never see him.” After reading Leonie’s telegram she continued: “Just got a Tel from Leonie that Winston is not to be allowed to come & see me! I feel much aggrieved & shall trouble no more about my Gd-Children. I should have thought I was able to take care of him as [well as] Leonie and Clara.”

In the event Winston and Jack both ended up with their grandmother—in London. Mrs. Everest came down with a bad case of diphtheria and could not take care of the boys. Leonie sent another telegram asking for her help, and the Duchess agreed to keep the boys at her town house at 46 Grosvenor Square. She advised Lord Randolph: “I will keep them there until you return. Poor Leonie was much perplexed abt them & glad to telegraph to me in her difficulty so that I am appeased as regards Winston not having been allowed to come [to Blenheim].”

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Excerpts of subsequent letters from the Duchess to Randolph illustrate why Winston was not eager to visit her. January 19th: “I fear Winston thinks me very strict, but I really think he goes out too much.…He is so excitable. But he goes back to school on Monday. Meantime, he is affectionate & not naughty & Jack is not a bit of trouble.” January 23rd: “Winston goes back to school today. Entre nous, I do not feel very sorry for he is certainly a handful. Not that he does anything seriously naughty except to use bad language which is bad for Jack.”

To his mother on January 31st, Winston wrote: “I had rather dull holidays but I am sure you will make them up to me.” On March 16th, he passed the entrance exam to Harrow but as Miss Charlotte Thomson wrote to his father: “He has only scraped through.”

100 YEARS AGO

Winter 1912-13 • Age 38

“I was stupid last night.”

With the dispute over Sir Francis Bridgeman’s retirement behind him, Churchill traveled to Toulon on board the Admiralty yacht. There, he and his wife exchanged a series of letters that showed their love for each other. On January 30th he wrote to her:

I was stupid last night—but you know what a prey I am to nerves & prepossessions. It is a great comfort to me to feel absolute confidence in your love & cherishment for your poor P.D. [Pug Dog]. P.S.: I wish you were here; I shd like to kiss your dear face and stroke your baby cheeks and make you purr softly in my arms. Don’t be disloyal to me in thought. I have no one but you to break the loneliness of a bustling and bustled existence…X X X Here are three kisses one for each of you. Don’t waste them. They are good ones.

His letter does not indicate why he’d been stupid, but it was sufficient for him to add the emotional postcript. Clementine, not the conventional model of the Edwardian wife, replied with affection but an admonition:

My sweet Darling Winston I love you so much & what I want & enjoy is that you should feel quite comfortable and at home with me—You know I never have any arrière pensée that does not immediately come to the top and boil over; so that when I get excited & cross, I always say  more than I feel & mean instead of less—There are never any dregs left behind. The only times I feel a little low is when the breaks in the ‘bustling & bustled existence’ are few and far between. I suppose they are not really few, but I am a very greedy Kat and I like a great deal of cream. I have kept the three precious kisses all to myself, as I appreciate them more than the P.K. [Puppy Kitten = Diana] & C.B. [Chum Bolly = Randolph].

Winston Churchill had ruffled the Germans when he referred in 1912 to the German High Seas Fleet as a “luxury,” but a March 12th letter from Hugh Watson, naval attaché in the British Embassy in Berlin, to Eddie Marsh suggests that Churchill’s speeches had had a useful effect:

After a year’s observation of the effects of the 1st Lord’s speeches of last year, I would say there is not a shadow of doubt that they have been a big factor in bringing about a widespread feeling in Germany that Naval competition with England is hopeless and that Germany must stick to her proper arm of defence, the army. Indeed it is true to say that Germans are realizing at present that the Army is the Nation’s life and the Navy a subsidiary, if not a luxury. Views to this effect have been expressed to me quite recently by strong Conservative-agrarians.

75 YEARS AGO

Winter 1937-38 • Age 63

“No pledge can last forever.”

Neville Chamberlain is known for the appeasement policies which failed to deter Nazi aggression during 1937-39. Some claim he deserves credit for rearming Great Britain, but privately he repudiated a pledge made by his predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, to maintain air parity with Germany, denying his own Air Ministry’s request for increased expenditures on bombers.

Chamberlain’s Minister for the Coordination of Defence, Thomas Inskip, surveying defense expenditures for the Cabinet on December 22nd, recommended they not be increased, both for economy and because Britain’s foreign policy was aimed at “changing the present assumption as to our potential enemies.” He rejected recommendations of the Air Ministry, even while acknowledging Britain’s inferiority in the air to Germany. Inskip specifically opposed the Air Ministry’s request for additional bombers and attempted to evade the issue of whether this violated Baldwin’s pledge of air parity by disingenuously saying he did not believe Baldwin’s promise compelled Britain “to base either the numbers or the types of our aeroplanes on the numbers and types of a potential enemy.”

Air Minister Swinton strongly objected, telling the Cabinet that his ministry had not “based their proposals on a mere mathematical comparison” with Germany. Rather, they were based on what was necessary to attack German factories and airfields. Not accepting them would constitute a “complete reversal of policy” as established by Baldwin’s air parity pledge and “would have a defeatist appearance.”

Chamberlain defended Inskip, saying he did not accept that air parity was still essential, and told the Cabinet: “No pledge can last forever.”

Churchill’s low opinion of the PM’s intellect and ability is borne out in the official biography. Sir Martin Gilbert writes that Chamberlain, having read The House That Hitler Built, by the Australian political economist and historian Stephen Roberts, wrote to his sister that it was “an extremely clever and well-informed but very pessimistic book…If I accepted the author’s conclusions, I should despair, but I don’t and I won’t.”

The book was not an anti-Nazi diatribe. Roberts was a respected scholar who had spent more than eighteen months in Germany researching his book as a guest of the government. The Nazis, according to Roberts, “did everything possible to aid my investigations even though they knew from the outset my attitude was one of objective criticism.”

Among other things, The House That Hitler Built exploded the myth of Hitler’s “economic miracle.” Roberts presciently warned that Hitler’s policy of autarky (“economic mobilization of all the country’s resources”), if unchanged, would “lead to war …unless Hitler modifies his teachings and methods or unless there is a peaceful transition to some other regime.” If it did not “learn the habit of political and economic collaboration in international matters,” Germany would be “confronted by ultimate ruin.”

Why did Chamberlain reject Roberts’ conclusions? As he explained to his sister, he had a new idea (a “scintillation”) which had been “promptly and even enthusiastically” accepted by all those he told it to: offering Germany the African colonies she had lost at Versailles! But unlike Churchill, Chamberlain had never been to Germany or Africa and, apparently, was ignorant of Mein Kampf, where Hitler had no interest in the lost colonies.

Less than a month later, Germany intimidated Austria into changing its cabinet and Anthony Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary over Chamberlain’s decision to recognize the Italian conquest of Abyssinia. On February 22nd, Churchill told the Commons:

This has been a good week for Dictators. It is one of the very best they have ever had. The German Dictator has laid his heavy hand upon a small but historic country, and the Italian Dictator has carried his vendetta to a victorious conclusion against my Rt. Hon. friend the late Foreign Secretary.

The conflict between the Italian Dictator and my Rt. Hon. friend has been a long one. There can be no doubt, however, who has won. Signor Mussolini has won. All the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire was no protection to my Rt. Hon. friend. Signor Mussolini has got his scalp.

Less than three weeks later on 12 March 1938, Hitler’s armies invaded Austria and it was swallowed by the Reich. Years before when he had left Austria, Hitler declared: “I felt in the depth of my soul that it was my vocation  and my mission given to me by destiny that I should bring my home country back to the great German Reich.” He made no mention of Africa.

50 YEARS AGO

Winter 1962-63 • Age 88

“A serene yet sad decline”

Sir Martin Gilbert wrote that 1963 was “a year of serene yet sad decline.” In a letter to the British Ambassador to Germany, Anthony Montague Brown described Sir Winston as “somewhat lethargic and indifferent to events.” He continued to see old friends. Lady Violet Bonham Carter was a frequent visitor, dining with him on February 20th and March 14th, lunching on February 9th and March 12th. In a letter to Sir Martin in March, she wrote that WSC’s mind was “drifting further & further away alas! Remembering it as I do in its full glory I am agonized.”

Sir Winston attended another meeting of the Other Club in February. On March 5th, he sent an appreciative letter to Lord Beaverbrook, saying that the Canadian’s new book, The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George, would be of “enormous value to historians.”