Gandhi & Churchill (54 page)

The prime minister took the prudent step of keeping Churchill away from the sensitive negotiations with the trade unions. Winston had to content himself with setting up and turning out his own newspaper, the
British Gazette,
which was supposed to replace the newspapers the strike had paralyzed. He wrote many of the
Gazette
’s more strident articles, whose unmeasured language made him a lightning rod of criticism. He denounced strikers and organizers as “reckless, violent,” and even unmanly—words that made him lifelong enemies in the ranks of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party.

By ignoring Churchill’s advice but also by adamantly refusing to give in to any demands until the strike was called off, Baldwin brought the General Strike to a halt. The coal miners held out for nearly five more months. To his credit, Churchill tried to work out a compromise to end it, but the coal owners turned it down.
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Finally on November 20, 1926, the coal strike collapsed. Capitalism in Britain had survived. Winston celebrated by taking a holiday trip to the Mediterranean. He planned to play a final game of polo on the Island of Malta (“If I expire on the ground, it will at any rate be a worthy end!” he wrote ) and to visit Italy. There he met for the first and last time the man who had ruthlessly seized power there in 1922, Benito Mussolini.

Privately, Churchill could be scathing about Italy’s dictator. But he believed (wrongly) that he and Mussolini shared a deep antipathy to Soviet Communism. In the aftermath of the General Strike, he embraced the vainglorious mountebank as an ally. After their meeting Winston said, “I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by his gentle and simple bearing.” He added that if he were an Italian, he would be a fascist, too. Churchill’s final words, telling Mussolini that “your movement has rendered service to the whole world,” burned whatever boats he still had left with the British Left.
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But to a growing circle of young Tories, Churchill was emerging as a hero. Many of them were dissatisfied with Prime Minister Baldwin, who had exhausted himself in the fight against the General Strike and whose hand was none too strong. They also disliked Baldwin’s high-minded but dull-as-dishwater allies like Chamberlain and the Minister of Air Sir Samuel Hoare (whom Lord Birkenhead said looked like he came from a long line of maiden aunts).
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By contrast, Churchill offered excitement, intellectual verve, good food and drink, and brilliant conversation. His house at Chartwell became a gathering place for the party’s young and not-so-young rebels; Churchill reigned as paterfamilias and general center of attention, much as Gandhi did at Sabarmati. On any given evening in the 1920s and early 1930s, disciples gathered at Chartwell to hear his words, catch his enthusiasm, and consume his whiskey.

Victor Cazalet considered himself a “liberal” Conservative along the lines of “Tory Democracy.” He had met Churchill during the war, and as MP for Chippenham Cazalet became a regular fixture at Chartwell. He spoke admiringly of Churchill’s “inspiration, courage, affection, vitality, and ability” in those years and of his disarming ability to talk unaffectedly for hours with people twenty or even thirty years his junior.
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Duff Cooper was thirty-four when he was elected to Winston’s old seat at Oldham. He came to Chartwell often, as did the twenty-four-year-old MP for East Aberdeenshire Robert Boothby, and Harold Macmillan, member for Stockton. Cooper and Boothby would remain Winston’s close disciples before and during the Second World War. But none would be closer than Brendan Bracken, a strange young man of no apparent parentage, with granny glasses and a thick thatch of carrot-colored hair whom others dismissed as that “red headed freak” but who made himself at home at Chartwell, and (despite Clementine’s hostility) virtually a part of the Churchill family—even Winston’s surrogate son.
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At Chartwell, Churchill usually rose at eight, after dictating pages of the last volume of his war memoirs,
The World Crisis,
until the early hours of the morning. His normal breakfast was orange juice, eggs, toast, a steak or chicken leg left over from dinner, and plenty of black cherry jam. After breakfast and a bath, he would glance through newspapers and letters, usually with a whiskey-and-soda, the first of the day, at his elbow as well as the first cigar (always a Havana). Then came more dictation before lunch, followed by work in the garden or on the new house he was building for his butler. Guests were often astonished to watch Winston intently laying bricks, trowel in one hand and cigar in the other, for four-hour stretches.
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The lunch guests would arrive. Sometimes they included a celebrity like T. E. Lawrence, who would appear on his motorcycle, or Charlie Chaplin. After lunch Churchill settled in for his daily nap, which often lasted an hour and a half, followed by more yard work until dinner. Then after dinner would come the highlight of the day as Winston would talk and his guests listened, in interlocutory sessions that often lasted past midnight. In compensation for the late hours, he supplied his audience “with unlimited quantities of champagne, cigars, and brandy.” And Winston talked, often pacing up and down the room with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and his head aggressively thrust forward, as the monologue moved effortlessly from the most recent political debates and his experiences in India to Alexander the Great’s campaigns and the American Civil War. Many of his observations were profoundly astute; others were wildly off the mark. Almost all were memorable. And if the brilliant flow of observation and reminiscence showed signs of slowing down, one listener remembered, “all you have to do is make some moderately intelligent observation, and off he goes again.”
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Churchill loved putting his younger guests on the spot, by jocularly comparing their still-meager accomplishments with those of great figures in history like Alexander or Napoleon or indeed Winston himself. Once he asked Alan Lennox-Boyd, later a longtime Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, how old he was. Lennox-Boyd said, “Nearly twenty-five.” Winston promptly replied that Napoleon had taken Toulon before he was twenty-five. He whipped out his watch. “You have just got time to take Toulon before you are twenty-five,” he growled goodnaturedly as he gazed at its face. “Quick, quick—go and take Toulon!”
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Others in the Chartwell circle were not quite so young. The brilliant and charismatic F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead and secretary of state for India, was two years older than Winston and a determined hard-liner on Indian independence. Another hard-liner was fifty-year-old George Lloyd, a graduate of Eton and Cambridge and former colleague of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt. After the war Lloyd had gone on to become governor of Bombay. He had faced the brunt of Gandhi’s Noncooperation campaign and was the one person in Winston’s inner circle who had personally dealt with Gandhi (except Churchill himself). In fact, it had been George Lloyd who sent Gandhi to the Yeravda jail.

Their paths had first crossed in March 1919. According to Lloyd, Gandhi’s first words were: “I wish to goodness, Sir George, you would arrest me.”
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In the midst of the Rowlatt satyagraha, Lloyd was all too willing to oblige. But Viceroy Reading had vetoed the move. Then came Chauri Chaura. Lloyd described the next encounter with Gandhi to a reporter.
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“You’re preaching non-violence,” Lloyd said he told Gandhi, “but that’s all theory. In practice it won’t work out…You can’t control men’s passions…You are responsible.” Bombay’s governor-general then pointed an accusing finger at the barefoot figure sitting in front of him.

According to Lloyd, Gandhi had covered his face with his hands and said, “I know it.” Then he murmured, “Put me in gaol, Your Excellency.”

“Yes, I will put you in gaol,” Lloyd had replied sternly, “but not until I get good and ready.” Lloyd had not wanted to make Gandhi a martyr and had to make sure his leading followers were rounded up before arresting him. Although Lloyd considered Gandhi a dangerous menace, he was not unyielding. He had given Gandhi two cells at Yeravda instead of one and allowed him his books and his diet of bread, goat’s milk, raisins, and oranges. But Lloyd had also sharply limited the number of visitors, and when Gandhi asked to have certain fellow prisoners transferred to his minimum security section, Lloyd turned him down flat.
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Very few British officials had closer dealings with Gandhi than Lloyd. It is very likely that on at least one evening in the 1920s, the conversation at Chartwell turned to the subject of the strange little Indian nationalist leader, with George Lloyd passing on his advice as he stroked his trim mustache and fingered his whiskey and soda, and Winston listening intently.
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“Just a thin, spindly shrimp of a fellow,” Lloyd would say. “He doesn’t care for material things, and preaches nothing but the ideals and morals of India.”

Then Lloyd would pause and glance at Churchill. “You can’t govern a country with ideals,” he would declare, “but that was where he got his grip upon the people. He was their god. India must always have its god. First it was [B. G.] Tilak, then Gandhi now.”

Remembering, the ex–governor-general would shake his head ruefully. “He gave us a scare,” he would admit. “His programme filled our gaols. You can’t go on arresting people forever, you know—not when they are 319 million of them.”

There would have been a burst of laughter around the room, while Churchill had time to recall his own prediction to Wilfred Blunt years before that if the Indians ever really stopped cooperating with the British, then “the game would be up with us.”

Lloyd then went on: “Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in [the] world’s history, and it came within an inch of succeeding. But he couldn’t control men’s passions. They became violent, and he called off the programme. You know the rest.”

Lloyd would then finish his drink, as Winston or F. E. or someone else would ask, “What’s your final assessment of him?”

“I am afraid he is really pretty wicked,” Lloyd would confess, “as cunning as a fox and at heart bitterly anti-British.”
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Whether this conversation ever took place is hard to say. But it is a fact that the man who first put Gandhi in an Indian jail would become Churchill’s most trusted adviser on India.

Meanwhile Churchill’s popularity with the young Tories, and the brilliance of the “Chartwell set,” could not disguise his increasingly
un
popularity where it counted, namely with his own leadership.

After the 1926 General Strike his conflicts with his cabinet colleagues redoubled. There were bruising battles over the naval budget and Soviet Russia; Churchill adamantly opposed any formal recognition of the Communist power. When George Lloyd became High Commissioner of Egypt the next year, he and Winston successfully wrecked an attempt to give the Egyptians more control of their country and the Suez Canal, which infuriated the Foreign Office. On the domestic front, Winston’s “derating” plan for eliminating taxation on certain industries and municipalities landed him in an ugly scrap with Neville Chamberlain, the man who was his likely rival in any leadership contest to replace the aging Stanley Baldwin.
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Meanwhile the next general election approached, set for May 1929. After seven years in power, the Tories seemed to have overstayed their welcome. Some speculated that if the Conservatives managed somehow to win reelection, they would have to find a new chancellor. “An announcement that Neville was going to the Exchequer,” Leo Amery pleaded with Baldwin, “would be worth twenty or thirty seats at least.” Although Winston was a friend, Amery warned “the fact remains that he is a handicap rather than an asset to us in the eyes of the public.”
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The next month voters went to the polls. On the night of May 30, as the results came in on a ticker tape, Winston went down to Number 10 to study the results with Baldwin. Sitting at a desk with a large whiskey and soda, he read through the thin slips of paper. An eyewitness watched him “getting redder and redder, rising and going out often to glare at the machine itself, hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge. As Labour gain after gain was announced…he glared at the figures, tore the sheets and behaved as though if any more Labour gains came along he would smash the entire apparatus.” His comments to the staff, the eyewitness added, “were quite unprintable.”
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Labour had won 288 seats, the Conservatives 260. The Liberals were reduced to just 59 seats—and political irrelevancy. Winston himself had been reelected, but without a majority. His young Tory friends Harold Macmillan and Duff Cooper had both been defeated. Bob Boothby scraped through to a win. Baldwin had no choice but to resign, and he, Churchill, Chamberlain, and the rest handed over their seals of office on June 6.

After five stormy years Churchill was out. The Labour Party, the party he feared and despised more than any other, was back in power, this time with a majority for the foreseeable future. Churchill feared for that future, including for the empire. That fear was confirmed when one of Ramsay MacDonald’s earliest acts was to dismiss George Lloyd as High Commissioner of Egypt. Soon afterward riots broke out in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Churchill warned that they were a “bloody foretaste of what would happen in Egypt and India if the protected and controlling hand of Great Britain were withdrawn.”

He trembled to think what Labour had up its sleeve but was powerless to do anything about it. So he bided his time by planning a new book, a biography of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, and by taking a trip to Canada and the United States.