The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (139 page)

This “terrible scene,” as Beaverbrook thereafter called it, turned out to be unnecessary. Early the following morning—Wednesday, May 12, the ninth day of the crisis—the unions capitulated. Their treasury was empty, the government’s attrition policy was working, and public opinion, fired by the
Gazette,
was hostile. Arthur Pugh, the TUC chairman, called at No. 10 to surrender. Accompanying him was the TUC’s general secretary, who wrote in his diary that evening: “While we were talking, Churchill, Baldwin, and Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland [minister of labor] were pacing rapidly up and down the garden, talking animatedly. There was no sign of jubilation amongst them, and Pugh muttered to me: ‘I saw Churchill a few minutes ago, and he said, “Thank God it’s over, Mr Pugh.” ’ ” That afternoon Winston announced that the next issue of the
Gazette
would be the last. Its final headline was unfortunate. It gloated:
SURRENDER RECEIVED BY PREMIER IN DOWNING STREET
. In an envoi Churchill told his readers: “The
British Gazette
may have had a short life, but it has fulfilled the purpose of living. It becomes a memory; but it remains a monument.” That evening he took a large party to see Adele and Fred Astaire in
Lady Be Good
, then playing at the old Empire Theatre. As he entered, the audience rose and gave him a standing ovation.
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Labor’s intellectuals now singled him out for attack. Kingsley Martin, a young leftist writer, studied the columns of the
Gazette,
noted its incendiary style, found certain striking omissions—Churchill had suppressed an appeal from the church which had blamed both sides—and concluded that Winston had been “discredited.” The
New Statesman,
then as now a journal of eccentric opinion, perpetrated a fraud. On the night of May 10, it reported, Churchill had led a “war party” of ministers who threatened to resign at once unless talks with the union leaders were broken off. The Churchill faction, it continued, had been “in favour of war at all costs.” This piece of outright fiction declared: “Mr Churchill was the villain of the piece. He is reported to have remarked that he thought ‘a little blood-letting’ would be all to the good.” Winston considered pressing charges of criminal libel against the editors. Sir Douglas Hogg, the government’s attorney general, advised against it. He would certainly win, Hogg said, but in court the defendants could discuss cabinet deliberations “in detail,” which would offend Baldwin Tories. Winston reluctantly let the matter drop, though it was already clear to him that run-of-the-mill Conservatives viewed him with little more favor than the Labourites. Dawson of the
Times,
in a widely read account of the strike, concluded that “Winston seems to have been the only minister who rather lost his head. He was excitable, provocative, and a great trial to his colleagues. They tried to divert his energies at an early stage to the editing of the
British Gazette,
an official propagandist organ, in which he became a similar trial to us.”
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Curiously, one journalist who commended Churchill’s editorial performance was the irascible Gwynne. He wrote him: “May I lay at your feet my tribute of admiration at your wonderful energy and your marvellous powers of seeing things through?” In time Winston recalled his
Gazette
experience with nostalgia. On June 10, 1927, he wrote Gwynne: “I shall always look back to that extraordinary ten days. They form one of the most vivid experiences of my somewhat variegated life, and were utterly different from every other episode. I am glad to think they have left behind them a better understanding between us.” He even exploited the episode in one of his quick turns of parliamentary wit. In a tense debate he faced the Opposition and said solemnly: “I have no wish to make threats or use language which would disturb the House and cause bad blood. But this I must say: make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you loose upon us again a General Strike, we will loose upon you”—angry shouts were on Labour lips—“another
British Gazette.
” The expected storm, Baldwin wrote the King, “gave way to an outburst of unrestrained laughter in which the House was convulsed.”
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I
n a long public life clouded with misunderstandings, none was more tragic than the inexpiable enmity between Churchill and Labour. He had been a progressive home secretary; he was a humane chancellor. His record on liberal issues in many ways resembles that of Bismarck, another farsighted conservative. It was far more impressive than that of, say, Ramsay MacDonald, who waffled again and again when in power. But Winston’s visceral reaction against socialism—he was always mistaking pink for red—led him into one rhetorical excess after another. It was Churchillian bombast which had touched off the Labourites’ antagonism toward him. They took him at his word, despite the fact that his word, however prickly, was often conspicuously at odds with his deeds. The Dawsons of the Conservative party distrusted him for an altogether different reason. When the strikers had unsheathed their sword, he had lunged for his; he could never back away from a challenge. But at heart he still believed that the miners were right and the mineowners wrong. When the TUC collapsed he had written Baldwin: “To-night surrender. Tomorrow magnanimity.” He had been moved to pity by Macmillan’s descriptions of the hovels in which the miners lived, their brutish working conditions, and their sickly children. Now that members of the other unions had gone back to work, ending the threat to domestic tranquillity, he was eager to settle the grievances in the coalfields, which were still idle. To his dismay, the strike there dragged on for more than five months, and he and Amery were the only members of the cabinet who urged action. “I’m all on the miners’ side now,” he told Boothby after closing down the
Gazette.
Baldwin, departing for an extended holiday at Aix-les-Bains, left the matter in Winston’s hands.
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It was a delicate, heartbreaking—and, in the end, doomed—task. The Tory ministers’ hostility toward the coal strikers was unabated. By the sheer force of will, intellect, and volubility, Winston preserved the workers’ right to picket peacefully; he throttled legislation to outlaw strikes when, in his words, “a majority of those affected are in favour of it”; he used Treasury funds, not to subsidize the mines’ proprietors, but to build miners’ homes and fund “training schemes and other forms of assistance for displaced miners”; and he saved the workers’ right to the secret ballot—the owners argued that this would increase the number of strikes—because he was “convinced that the majority of working men would adopt sound and sensible attitudes,” and because private polling, in his view, restricted the influence of the unions’ “extremist members.”
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MacDonald, he knew, was close to Herbert Smith, the president of the miners’ union. On Winston’s initiative, Churchill and MacDonald held two long, secret meetings, first at Chartwell and then in Sir Abe Bailey’s London home on Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch. Smith had authorized MacDonald to speak for him, and the two men forged an agreement. Winston then drew up an ultimatum to be delivered to the colliery proprietors, omitting the strikers’ most extravagant demands but including those terms which were minimal for them and the Labour party. Keeping Baldwin informed, he laid this compromise before the cabinet: “Do not, I beg you, throw this chance upon the rubbish heap of so many others.” His colleagues disapproved of this proposal—they thought it gave the workers too much—but, as one said afterward, “We couldn’t repudiate Winston.” The real question, as he had told MacDonald, was whether the coal barons would bow to the ultimatum. It was “quite likely,” he had said, that they “might refuse to come, or, if they did come, might take a line that would make progress impossible.” In that event, the government “would make no secret of their opinion that they were in the wrong,” but “the powers of actual coercion that the Government possesses are very limited.” The miners now believed that Churchill was their best hope; the
Evening Standard
reported that both they and the TUC, asked to choose between Winston and any other member of the government, had expressed “a marked preference for Mr Churchill as mediator.”
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It proved an impossible task. The owners, speaking through Evan Williams, the president of the Mining Association of Great Britain, refused to make any concession whatever. They knew the men were desperate, growing hungrier every day, with winter dead ahead. Thomas Jones described one meeting between Williams and Churchill as “acute and at times acrimonious,” but Williams wouldn’t budge. He fought every attempt at reconciliation. They met again at No. 10; Jones called it “a ding-dong debate” which accomplished nothing. Winston’s anger at the owners grew. He poured it out in letters to Clementine. She replied: “I fear you are having a very anxious and difficult time”; the proprietors’ position, she said, seemed “hard and cruel.” He wrote her that the talks were leading toward a “serious collision.” She hoped he wasn’t shouldering the other ministers aside and thus alienating them: “You are having an anxious but a thrilling and engrossing time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes—I suppose Steel-Maitland and George Lane-Fox [secretary for mines] are not often allowed near the trough? If the cat were Minister of Labour or Mines she would not give up her place there without a few ‘miaows.’ ”
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But Steel-Maitland and Lane-Fox would cede the miners nothing. And Baldwin, when he returned to London, agreed with them. Churchill proposed statutory intervention. Other wealthy contributors to Tory coffers had taken an interest in the talks, however, and when Winston wrote Baldwin, “I do hope that a little employers’ agitation will not prevent H.M.G. from advancing with courage & conviction against… detractors of the public interest,” he found that the agitation of Williams’s clients had done just that. The most the prime minister would promise was a toothless appeal tribunal. After Churchill scorned “the greedy appetites of the coal trade,” two of his closest friends, Birkenhead and Lord Londonderry, reproached him. Londonderry, a mineowner and one of Winston’s cousins, argued that the owners were fighting bolshevism. Winston replied: “With those parts of your letter which deal with the necessity for combating Bolshevism I am in entire accord. But there could be no worse way of combating Bolshevism than to identify the Conservative Party and His Majesty’s Government with the employers, and particularly with a body of employers like those headed by Mr Evan Williams…. The duty of the Government is to occupy an impartial position in the interests of the State and of the whole community…. You say that the Owners are fighting Socialism. It is not the business of Coal Owners as Coal Owners to fight Socialism. If they declare it their duty, how can they blame the Miners’ Federation for pursuing political ends? The business of the Coal Owners is to manage their industry successfully, to insist upon sound economic conditions as regards hours and wages, and to fight Socialism as citizens and not as owners of a particular class of property.”
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It was hopeless. He wanted to warn the owners that if they continued to be “unreasonable,” the government would appoint arbitrators and fix a national minimum wage. It seemed clear to him that a few rich Englishmen, and they alone, were blocking a settlement. When they refused even to participate in tripartite talks with the government and the union, he told the cabinet that their position was “wholly wrong and unreasonable, an attitude without precedent in recent times,” and charged that they had even influenced Tory whips in the House, who had “been at some of the Ministers, urging them to do nothing.” Certainly the cabinet’s reluctance to subject the owners to any pressure whatever is singular; the impasse, after all, was eroding the national economy. Harold Laski, after accompanying miner delegates to one meeting, wrote a friend that he thought Baldwin “quite tragic… hard and a little cynical and impatient of all criticism…. Churchill who was there was bigger and more skillful in every way—he knew how to negotiate. Baldwin merely blundering uncouthly.” Of the 1,250,000 union members, 100,000 demoralized men had returned to work by early October. Boothby, like Macmillan, went into the coalfields to talk to strikers. On October 9 he wrote Churchill from the Carlton Club: “It is the impression, growing every day, that the Government has now divested itself of all responsibility for the conduct of our national industries… that despite the promise of the first months it has become… a Government of reaction.” It would, he continued, “be difficult to exaggerate the effect of your vigorous intervention in the mining dispute last month” or “the disappointment which attended the failure of your efforts.” In the end the owners’ obduracy was triumphant. As Leo Amery wrote later: “The miners straggled back to the pits on the owners’ terms, including longer hours, a beaten and resentful army.”
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Worse followed. In the wake of the broken strike, the parliamentary Conservatives passed a wave of antilabor legislation. All the gains Churchill had achieved for the unions were abolished. Picketing was outlawed; no worker could be disciplined for refusing to join a strike deemed “illegal”; the attorney general was authorized to seize union funds; the Trades Dispute Act of 1906, which exempted unions from legal suit, was repealed. In a blow at the Labour party, unions were prohibited from collecting money from their members for political purposes unless they had secured their written consent. For Churchill, the low point came when a delegation of miners arrived at the Treasury and charged him with betraying them. Jones wrote in his diary that this was grossly unfair; that Winston had tried “to go to great lengths in the way of legislation on hours, wages and conditions—which terrified his colleagues.” But all the workmen knew was that he had failed them. Smith, their leader, stood before Winston, trembling with rage. Gaunt and pale, he was a symbol of their deprivation; born in a Lancashire workhouse, the posthumous son of a miner killed in a mine accident, he himself had begun working in the pits on his tenth birthday. Later he would write of this meeting: “We said to Churchill: ‘We understand you were a man of courage, but you have broken down at the first fence. You have dismounted. Have you been doing wrong while the masters have been away; and got reprimanded?’ He did not like it.”
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