The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (129 page)

I
t was true, and it was especially true in Dundee. Now, as in 1908—when he had jubilantly claimed it as his “life seat”—Dundee was a two-member, working-class constituency of shipbuilding craftsmen, linen weavers, jute sackers, marmalade bottlers, and commercial bakers. But he had changed since then, and so had they. After four years of disillusionment and Labour blandishments the voters saw their most illustrious MP in a new light. Unemployment was high; they were concerned with bread-and-butter issues. Winston knew that. Earlier in the year he had advised the National Liberal Council that the party must back “better social and industrial conditions for the people.” Workers, he said, “must know that earnest effort will reap its own reward, that the cost of living will fall.” In a statement to the Dundee electorate, written in the nursing home bed where he was convalescing from his appendectomy, he vowed to provide improved public services, increases in unemployment compensation, and better housing. The Tories, he said, represented the antithesis of this: “Mr Bonar Law has described his policy as one of negation. Such a message… will strike despair in the heart of every striver after social justice. It cannot be accepted by any generous-hearted man or woman…. Over the portals of 10 Downing Street the new Prime Minister has inscribed his words: ‘Abandon hope ye who enter here.’ ”
¹²⁶

Yet he had to temper his attacks on Tories. He had asked Dundee’s Conservatives to support him as “a Free Trader,” writing them that “the formidable socialist attack which is gathering” demonstrated “the need for patriotic men and women of sincere goodwill to stand together.” He singled out his leftist opponents: “A predatory and confiscatory programme fatal to the reviving prosperity of the country, inspired by class jealousy and the doctrines of envy, hatred and malice, is appropriately championed in Dundee by two candidates both of whom had to be shut up during the late war to prevent them from hampering the national defence.” The Labour vote, he warned those around him, “will be a very heavy one.” The local Tories agreed to put up no candidate against him, and he ran on the coalition’s record, charging that the Carlton Club rebellion was attributable to “the fury of the Die-Hards at the Irish Treaty,” a settlement which nevertheless would “live and prosper.” The Chanak crisis had been admirably resolved; “I regard my association with it as one of the greatest honours in my long official life.” He supported Lloyd George, though his praise was oddly phrased: “I am sure that among the broad masses of faithful, valiant, toiling, Britain-loving men and women whom he led to victory, there will still be found a few to wish him well.” But he turned again and again to his radical adversaries, Georges Morel-de-Ville, who had been endorsed by Labour, and William Gallacher, a Communist. Each had been a wartime pacifist; both were meat for Churchill. Morel-de-Ville, he declared, was a member of “that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle to their subversive sickness.” Of Gallacher, who had organized strikes in defense industries when Winston was minister of munitions, he said that he would be remembered for his “crazy and ferocious outpourings” and “long record of malignant if ineffectual blows” at the integrity and safety of England, though on the whole the “crudity” of his speeches “renders them less pernicious and certainly less harmful than the more slimy and insidious propaganda of his companion and comrade Mr Morel,” by which, of course, he meant that Morel was more popular in Dundee and therefore a greater threat at the polls.
¹²⁷

This was vintage Churchill, but though the words were the words of Winston, the voice was the voice of a party representative in Dundee. The incumbent was still confined to his bed in Dorset Square. His being hors de combat, a supporter wrote him, “has really been a disaster… in these critical days.” The press, here and throughout the country, was hostile to the coalition. Beaverbrook, an admirer of Bonar Law, was bankrolling Tory candidates in many constituencies where Lloyd George men were unopposed, thus splitting the anti-Labour vote and boosting the socialists’ chances. In Dundee the two local newspapers, owned by D. C. Thompson, had come out against Churchill. Moreover, he was not the only Liberal candidate. Ever since Lloyd George’s eviction of Asquith in 1916 the party had been divided into Asquithians and Georgians, and Asquith was fielding his own national slate. To Churchill’s dismay and indignation, his old ally C. P. Scott of the
Manchester Guardian
supported Asquith’s man in Dundee. Winston wrote Scott, protesting “wrecking and splitting candidatures between Liberals” and “the pursuance of personal vendettas,” adding: “I expect you are pretty well ashamed in your heart of hearts at the line your caucus is taking in its bitter malevolence.” But the
Guardian
continued to trumpet the virtues of the “Independent Liberal,” although it became increasingly clear that he had no chance of winning.
¹²⁸

Winston asked his wife to stump the district for him during the last ten days of the campaign, and off she went, carrying her last baby—an “unbaptized infant” as the Dundee
Courier
maliciously put it. Among the Churchill friends who had come to do their part was the former Edward Spiers, now Spears; he had changed the spelling of his surname in 1918. Spears watched women spit on Clementine and wrote: “Clemmie’s bearing was magnificent—like an aristocrat going to the guillotine in a tumbril.” Her first meeting was bedlam. In an unusual dirty trick, rival partisans filled the hall with sneezing powder, and both speaker and audience were convulsed. “The meeting,” the delighted
Courier
reported, “was in a state of uproar almost from the beginning to end.” Outside, as Clementine fled, a taunting mob waved red flags and green IRA banners. Putting a bright face on it, she wrote Winston, “Every rowdy meeting rouses sympathy & brings votes & will especially as you have been so ill. Even in the rowdiest foulest place all of the people tho’ abusive were really good-natured.” The newspapers, she said, were
“vile.”
He was being called a warmonger, “but I am exhibiting you as a Cherub Peace Maker with little fluffy wings round your chubby face.” She thought “Smash the Socialists” was the wrong line to take. The Labour line was very convincing in Dundee, especially among the destitute, who were many: “My darling, the misery here is appalling. Some of the people look absolutely starving. Morel’s Election address just out
very moderate
& in favor of only constitutional methods. So one cannot compare him with Gallacher.” She felt “the minute you arrive the atmosphere will change & the people will be roused…. I am longing to see you & so is Dundee—I shall be heartbroken if you don’t get in.” Clemmie gamely remounted the stump, was hissed, heard her husband described as the head of England’s “Fascisti party”—Mussolini had seized power in Rome the week before—and left, head high, a reporter wrote, when a meeting “broke up in disorder.” Birkenhead arrived to help. She wished he hadn’t. He assailed Morel on the peculiar ground that he was French. “France is a very great country,” he said, “and, on the whole, I like a man to stick to the country, particularly if it is a great one, in which he was born.” Clementine commented tartly: “He was no use at all. He was drunk.”
¹²⁹

A very shaky Churchill arrived four days before the election and checked into Dundee’s Royal Hotel. Sitting in a padded chair, he spoke that evening at the Caird Hall, defending the coalition, the Irish Free State, and Britain’s “unshaken and unshakable” position in the world. At the end he rose painfully and asked the voters to send “a message which will resound far beyond the limits of this small island and carry its good cheer to the suffering, struggling, baffled humanity the wide world o’er.” This, according to one journalist, was followed by “loud cheers.” But the Caird Hall audience was friendly; it had been carefully picked. Two days later his reception was very different. “As I was carried through the yelling crowd of Socialists at the Drill Hall to the platform,” he later wrote, “I was struck by the looks of passionate hatred on the faces of some of the younger men and women. Indeed, but for my helpless condition I am sure they would have attacked me.” They booed, hissed, and refused to let him speak. He managed to say: “The electors will know how to deal with a party whose only weapon is idiotic clamour”; then, according to the
Courier,
“pandemonium broke out anew.” His voice rose in brief snatches: “… if about a hundred young men and women in the audience choose to spoil the meeting—if about a hundred of these young reptiles…. We will not submit to the bullying of the featherheads, we will not be ruled by a mob….” But in the end he did submit, telling the appalled platform party: “I am finished.” Detective Thompson slept by his hotel door that night, pistol in hand. A champagne party was in progress across the hall. Spears later remembered that each time a cork popped, “We thought it was Winston being shot.”
¹³⁰

In the morning Churchill was grim. Only a desperate candidate attacks the press, and it is a measure of his plight that he lashed out at the Dundee publisher, holding him up “here in the district where he lives to the reprobation of his fellow citizens.” D. C. Thompson, he said, had subjected him to “ceaseless detraction, spiteful, malicious detraction” and was “narrow, bitter, unreasonable, eaten up with his own conceit, consumed with his own petty arrogance.” The poll was held on November 15, 1922. That morning Thompson managed, as publishers always do, to have the last word. His editorial described Winston as a man “in a vile temper. He takes on pains to conceal the fact. Like the disappointed man on the station platform he kicks out at anybody who happens to be near him. He has sprayed Labour with invective, has sprinkled many doses of it upon his fellow candidates… and now he has turned the full blast of his vituperation upon the Dundee newspapers. Whose turn it will be tomorrow God only knows.”
¹³¹

Dundee elected Morel-de-Ville and a Prohibitionist. Of 151,701 votes cast, Churchill received 20,466—less than 14 percent of the total. For the first time in twenty-two years, nearly thirteen of which had been spent in the cabinet, he was out of Parliament. He left Dundee at once, explaining that he “was far from well.” In London he found himself, as he put it, “without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.” Replying to Stamfordham, who conveyed the King’s regrets, he wrote: “It was very trying, having to do three days of electioneering with a wound so newly healed. It was quite impossible for me to defend myself in so short a time. I have always held Dundee by speeches and argument and at least three weeks are required to deal with such a large number of electors.” T. E. Lawrence wrote Eddie Marsh: “I’m more sorry about Winston than I can say.” Lord Esher wrote Sir Philip Sassoon: “The women put Winston out. When he loses his temper, he looks so damned ugly.” A fellow guest at a dinner party, Lloyd George’s former private secretary, noted that “Winston was so down in the dumps he could scarcely speak the whole evening. He thought his world had come to an end—at least his political world. I thought his career was over.” The
Daily Mail
crowed: “Mr Churchill has had as many lives as the proverbial cat, but the indictment against him is a long one.” The
Daily Telegraph,
although never his admirer, had a more charitable word: “The House of Commons loses, for a time, its most brilliant and dazzling speaker…. His is perhaps the most sensational defeat of the whole election.”
¹³²

That was saying a great deal. Nationally, the repudiation of the coalition had been overwhelming; 81 percent of the electorate had gone to the polls, most of them to register disapproval of the government. The Tories had swept the country, winning 345 seats. Labour, with 142, was now the principal Opposition party. Lloyd George’s “National” Liberals had carried only 62; Asquith’s Liberals, a mere 54. Neither man would ever hold office again. Asquith wrote Venetia Montagu that he was “inclined to gloat over the corpses on the battlefield,” but five-sixths of his candidates had gone down to defeat. Churchill was far from through; on the morrow after the returns he was offered a dozen seats, among them that of Spears, who had just been elected member for Loughborough. Winston replied that he was “greatly touched by the extreme kindness of yr offer & the willing sacrifice that it involves. It is a splendid proof of yr friendship. I cd not accept it from you. I want you to enjoy yr seat in Parliament & I shall like to feel I have one or two friends there…. The Whips will find me a seat if I want one; but what I want now is a rest.” Margot Asquith advised him to “lie low” for a while, to “do nothing in politics, go on writing all the time & painting; do not join yr former colleagues who are making prodigious asses of themselves in every possible manner: Keep friends in every port—lose
no
one…. If you have the patience of Disraeli with your fine temper glowing mind & real kind unvindictive nature you cd still command a great future.” It was sensible advice, and Churchill took it. He decided to recuperate on the Riviera, renting a villa, Le Rêve d’Or, near Cannes, for the winter. The whole family joined him there for Christmas and New Year’s. He worked on his Admiralty memoirs. Paul Maze, the painter, encountered him on a beach and said: “Well, Winston, I’m painting hard, trying to forget all about the war. What are you doing?” Churchill said he was writing a book on the war. Maze said that was “like digging up a cemetery.” Winston replied: “Yes, but with a resurrection.”
¹³³