March 18, 2015

Finest Hour 160, Autumn 2013

Page 42

By Michael McMenamin


125 YEARS AGO

Autumn 1888 • Age 14

“It spoils my afternoon”

Six of Winston’s nine letters to his parents this season contained pleas to visit him at Harrow. His father never did; his mother came once. Writing in anticipation of her visit he said: “try and come early because it spoils my afternoon to wait at the Railway Station.” Next he wrote: “Would you let me have a line to say by what train you could come? Do let me know because it is rather ‘stale’ waiting.” On 26 October, the day before her arrival, he again wrote: “Will you come tomorrow morning as early as possible. Do come, you can take me out to luncheon & we can be very happy. I have a lot to tell you but as I am expecting you tomorrow I shall wait.”

Winston wrote to his father on the 28th, the day after his mother’s visit, and told him of the “grand Sham fight” between the Harrow Rifle Corps and Cambridge, which his mother had witnessed. “I am going to learn 1000 lines of Shakespeare this term for the Prize,” Winston added. “I hope I shall get it.” In the event he did not, but he put a positive spin on his effort. “I lost the Shakespeare Prize for the Lower School by 27 marks,” he wrote his mother the next day. “I was rather astonished as I beat some twenty boys who were much older than I.” He did not tell his father until November: “I came out 4th for the Lower School among some 25 boys— some of whom were not less than 7 forms above me. I got 100 marks & the boy who got the prize got 127.”

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100 YEARS AGO

Autumn 1913 • Age 39

“Only do play up”

Churchill was engaged in the Irish Home Rule controversy. When the Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law threatened civil war over Home Rule, WSC had told his friend F.E. Smith, a leading Conservative, that such threats were not “playing the game.” Smith subsequently began feeling out his colleagues about giving Home Rule to southern Ireland while excluding Ulster, a position not popular with die-hard unionists. Smith wrote Churchill October 5th, urging him to meet with the Ulster leader Sir Edward Carson to explore the issue: “I think you will agree that I have played up well. I hope you will do the same now.” After giving advice and suggesting questions to put to Carson, he concluded by saying: “But you can do the thing so much better than I can suggest. Only do play up. I have run no small risks and incurred considerable censure.”

In a speech on October 8th, Churchill duly allowed that Ulster could be given special consideration. Six weeks later he discussed Ulster’s exclusion from Home Rule with his friend Austen Chamberlain, a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer. In a long report to Bonar Law, Chamberlain wrote that “the impression left on my mind by the whole conversation is that W. genuinely wants a settlement.”

One hundred years ago, no one remotely contemplated a European war in less than a year. With Europe at peace, elements in the Liberal Party wished to cut naval expenditures proposed by Churchill’s Admiralty, reducing its proposed four new battleships to two. The dispute put a strain upon Churchill’s relationship with the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. The Prime Minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, wrote to Lloyd George on 17 November admonishing him not to “let Winston have too much money—it will hurt our party in every way—Labour & even Liberals. If one can’t be a little economical when all foreign countries are peaceful I don’t know when we can.”

Churchill’s Naval Estimates were opposed in cabinet by Postmaster-General Herbert Samuels, Attorney General John Simon, Home Secretary Reginald McKenna [WSC’s predecessor at the Admiralty] and, ultimately, Lloyd George. The first three openly wanted Churchill out of the cabinet. Lloyd George privately said, “I do not agree with some of my colleagues.” But he also privately predicted that Churchill would resign “later on,” i.e., after the Naval Estimates dispute.

At the December cabinet meeting when Lloyd George first openly opposed the Estimates, Churchill passed him a note: “I consider that you are going back on your word; in trying to drive me out after we had settled, & you promised to support the Estimates.” Lloyd George wrote back that he supported the 1914 Estimates only: “I told you distinctly I would press for a reduction of a new programme with a view to 1915.” Churchill rejected this: “No. You said you would support the Estimates.”

The prospect of Churchill resigning if his Estimates were not approved was real. He wrote to Asquith on December 18th that if the number of battleships was reduced, “there is no chance whatever of my being able to go on.” The same day, Churchill’s aunt, Lady Wimbourne, implored WSC not to “wreck your political life” by making an “error of judgement” like the one his father had:

“You are breaking with the tradition of Liberalism in your Naval expenditure; you are in danger of becoming purely a ‘Navy man’ and losing sight of the far greater job of a great leader of the Liberal party. Peace, retrenchment and reform must ever be its policy and you are being carried away by the attraction of perfecting your machine for war and expenditure.”

75 YEARS AGO

Autumn 1938 • Age 64

“Great Defeat of Churchill”

Vanity is a frequent part of the character of national leaders, as is self-delusion—and both qualities when combined can be dangerous. The Czechs learned this when Neville Chamberlain, in their absence, caved in to Hitler and forced them to turn over the Sudetenland to Germany. On October 5th Churchill said that “the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.…I believe the Czechs, left to themselves and told they were going to get no help from the Western Powers, would have been able to make better terms than what they have got— they could hardly have worse.”

Vanity and self-delusion had combined disastrously. Hitler had appealed to the PM’s vanity when he said at their second meeting, “You are the first man for many years who has got any concessions from me.”  (It was a standard line which Hitler had used seven months earlier on the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg.) Chamberlain repeated this to cabinet colleagues, saying he had “established some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler,” who would “not go back on his word once he had given it.” The same self-delusion was present at their first meeting a week earlier, when Chamberlain told the cabinet that Hitler “would not deliberately deceive a man he respected.”

Hitler, of course, did not respect Chamberlain at all. In a secret, post-Munich speech at the German Foreign Ministry, he said that he had learned “how to deal with the English—one had to encounter them aggressively.”

On November 14th Foreign Minister Lord Halifax reported that Hitler had said: “If I were Chamberlain, I would not delay for a minute to prepare my country in the most drastic way for a ‘total’ war and I would thoroughly organize it. If the English do not have total conscription by the spring of 1939, they may consider their world empire as lost. It is astounding how easy the democracies make it for us to reach our goal.”

Martin Gilbert wrote: “Halifax then argued in favour of ‘increased and hastened’ aircraft production, and a National Register of those liable to conscription in war.” That was to his credit—indeed those aircraft would soon prove crucial—but it was of course said privately. In public the Chamberlain government continued appear supine. On November 22nd, it defeated a Liberal amendment calling for a Ministry of Supply to coordinate the defense effort.

An anxious Churchill appealed to his colleagues, saying that if only fifty Tory back-benchers voted for the Amendment, it would not damage the government, “but it would make them act.”

Unfortunately, the only Conservatives to vote aye were Brendan Bracken, Harold Macmillan and Churchill. The amendment failed, 326 to 130.

German newspapers hailed Britain’s apparent failure to prepare for war with such a modest reform as a “Great Defeat of Churchill.” It does seem that Hitler knew early who his real enemy was. In early November he criticized Churchill twice by name. “I am surprised,” Churchill shot back, “that the head of a great State should set himself to attack British Members of Parliament who hold no official position and who are not even leaders of parties.”

Hitler had held an accurate appreciation of Churchill for some time. In 1936, the Fuehrer’s personal and political friend, Rudolph Hess, said to the son of Churchill’s cousin Lord Londonderry: “Why do you not have Winston Churchill in your British Cabinet; then we should know you meant business.”

50 YEARS AGO

Autumn 1963 • Age 89

“Your Grandmother is unwell”

Lady Churchill, feeling the strain of caring for Sir Winston, went to her daughter Mary’s home in Kent, and later to a hospital, to rest and recuperate. Churchill, feeling better, received visits from Harold Macmillan and Jock Colville, but he missed his wife. On September 30th he wrote his grandson: “Your Grandmother is unwell and is having a rest cure…so I am alone and it would be very nice if you would come and see me.” Clementine promised to spend the first weekend of October with him at Chartwell; WSC said it would give “a few days which, like others in their time, will be sweet and happy.”

Tragedy struck October 14th, when the Churchills’ 54-year-old-daughter Diana committed suicide. Neither was well enough to be at her funeral, but they did attend a Memorial Service on the 31st. It was a painful event, particularly for Clementine; advancing old age helped cushion the blow for WSC.

Churchill arrived in a wheelchair at the Commons on November 28th, where he was warmly received. Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Hume gave up his own seat on the front bench for him. But when asked later by Jock Colville to support his idea of making Churchill a life member of the Commons in his “rapidly closing twilight,” the PM refused. Colville, writing to WSC’s private secretary, called the decision “unimaginative.” Anthony Montague Browne replied with irony: “It is perhaps appropriate that those responsible for our own ‘very rapidly closing twilight’ should not wish to honour the setting sun. So I suppose we must await a Socialist Government who may treat him more honourably than his ‘friends.’”

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