The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (141 page)

It was certainly the end of it. Churchill’s last budget, presented on April 15, 1929, after the Tories had lost nine safe seats in by-elections over the past two months, offered little to calm their growing anxieties. His delivery, as always, was masterly. Taxpayers were to be allowed deductions for each child (“Another example of our general policy of helping the producer”). Labour’s demand for deficit spending was “the policy of buying a biscuit early in the morning and walking about all day looking for a dog to give it to.” The
Sunday Times
called his performance “the most brilliantly entertaining of modern Budget speeches,” and Harold Macmillan would write of the Churchillian style in his
Winds of Change
that none of the new generation of MPs “had ever heard anything of the kind… such mastery of language, such careful deployment of the arguments, such dexterous covering of any weak point.” But as political nourishment it was poor fare. He abolished taxes on tea, gambling, and railway passage; reduced taxes on motorcycles and bicycles; raised them on telephone service; and introduced new duties on tobacco, beer, and liquor. It was a swan song in falsetto. Grigg thought it not inappropriate. As chancellor, he said, Winston had “tended to overestimate revenue and underestimate expenditure,” had “convinced himself that there was a good deal to be said at that time for respectability… in economic affairs,” was “apt to spoil a brilliant project by not assuring himself in advance of sufficient resources to carry it through to the end,” and was “therefore reduced to all sorts of shifts and expedients in order to avoid having to go back on the policies on which he had perhaps too confidently embarked.”
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Yet it’s fair to add that during Churchill’s Exchequer tenure state benefits had been extended to 344,800 children, 236,800 widows, 450,000 Britons over sixty-five years old, and 227,000 over seventy. He may have been no better at handling Britain’s finances than his family’s, but here, as at home, he had established the right priorities.

I
n retrospect there is an air of foreboding about the English upper classes’ late 1920s, a feeling that everyone of consequence is wearing tennis whites, gabbling manically, and emptying magnums of Dom Perignon in a Rolls-Royce racing headlong toward the edge of a towering precipice. It is illusion, of course, a vision of hindsight. At the time these years seemed fruitful and teeming with hope. One pictures a typical country weekend, with the Duke of York striding off the eighteenth green, Sir Samuel Hoare immaculate and not even perspiring after winning three straight sets six–love, Rex Whistler absorbed in his painting, Balfour dozing in a leather armchair, Osbert Sitwell laughing his infectious laugh as the Prof describes his recent trip to India, and Churchill and Bernard Shaw arguing over teacups about Shaw’s newly published
Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.
In other homes Sir Jacob Epstein is sculpturing his
Madonna and Child;
Virginia Woolf is writing
To the Lighthouse;
D. H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover;
Trevelyan, his
History of England;
Evelyn Waugh,
Decline and Fall;
and A. A. Milne, to the delight of a much larger if less discriminating audience,
Winnie-the-Pooh
. In Washington, Andrew W. Mellon, “the best Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton,” is spreading his gospel, an echo of Sackville-West, that ostentatious consumption by the rich is a source of great pleasure for the poor. At No. 11 Downing Street a buoyant chancellor of the Exchequer is supplementing his ministerial salary by writing “The United States of Europe” for the
Saturday Evening Post,
and, for the
Daily Telegraph
, a series of articles exposing welfare cheats called “The Abuse of the ‘Dole.’ ” T. S. Eliot has become a British citizen. England is preparing to launch an experimental public television service. Bernard Shaw has concluded that in the absence of a world government, the British Empire is best qualified to rule the world. That world is at peace; Britain still dominates world politics. A disarmament conference, with the United States participating, is convening in Geneva. Germany has been admitted to the League of Nations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, sponsored by the U.S. secretary of state, has outlawed war and provided for a pacific settlement of disputes. Italy has just signed a twenty-year friendship treaty with Ethiopia.

Among those gulled by the Italian dictator, now in his fifth year of power, was Winston Churchill. Once the coal strike had ended he had plunged into his third
Crisis
volume and accepted an invitation from Roger Keyes, now an admiral, to join a week-long cruise on the Mediterranean. “On leaving you,” he wrote the admiral, “I am going to stay in Rome for a few days to see Mussolini (while he lasts), and I am taking with me my brother Jack, whom you know, and my boy Randolph.” After Christmas at Chartwell they departed aboard the
Esperia.
On January 4, 1927, he wrote Clementine from Genoa that he was greatly taken by the Fascist society: “This country gives the impression of discipline, order, smiling faces. A happy strict school—no talking among the pupils. Great changes have taken place since you & I disembarked [here] nearly 6 years ago.” The local Fascists and the employees at his hotel were particularly attentive: “They have been saluting in their impressive manner all over the place, &… gave us a most cordial welcome.”
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Correcting proofs until 2:30
A.M.
in his hotel room, he sent them off to his publisher “under threats of vengeance from Mussolini if anything goes wrong.” In Rome he saw the Duce twice and then held what can only be described as an unfortunate press conference. It was perfectly clear, he said, that his host “thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understands it, of the Italian people.” Indeed: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” Englishmen had “not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form,” but when the time came “we shall succeed in grappling with Communism and choking the life out of it—of that I am absolutely sure.” In his opinion the Duce had “provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Here after, no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against cancerous growths, and every responsible labour leader in the country ought to feel his feet more firmly planted in resisting levelling and reckless doctrines.” As a consequence, “Externally, your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.”
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Work: In London

The text of these remarks was published in
The Times
of January 21, 1927. Liberals and Labourites were choleric. The
New Leader
stormed: “We have always suspected that Mr Winston Churchill was a Fascist at heart. Now he has openly avowed it.” C. P. Scott of the
Manchester Guardian
was so incensed that he all but lay down and drummed his heels on the floor. Clementine wrote Winston: “Scott is I see vexed over your partiality to ‘Pussolini.’ ” Her husband was unruffled. He took the classic view of British foreign policy: England should support any continental regime which was hostile to England’s greatest enemy—in this case, at that time, Soviet Russia. Later, when the Duce became a piratical adventurer, Churchill would scorn him as “Mussolini the swine,” and “Mussolini the jackal.”
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Vesuvius obligingly erupted when Winston, Jack, and young Randolph visited Naples. Churchill played his last polo game on Malta (“It is dreadful giving it up for ever,” he wrote), reported to Clementine on their son (“The Rabbit is a very good travelling companion,” he disclosed, adding with relish: “We have played a great deal of chess in which I give him either a Queen or two castles, or even castle, bishop and knight—and still wallop him”), and, with Randolph, was received by Pope Pius XI. The audience was preceded by much wrangling over protocol. As an important minister serving under a Protestant monarch, Winston absolutely refused to kneel. They compromised on three bows as he entered the pontiff’s reception hall. Randolph later wrote in his memoirs: “The early part of the conversation was a little sticky. Then my father and the Pope got on to the subject of the Bolsheviks and had a jolly half hour saying what they thought of them.” After stops at Athens, Paris, Dieppe, and Consuelo’s villa at Eze, Churchill and his party arrived at Newhaven aboard the night ferry on January 29. A box of Treasury papers from Grigg awaited him in his car; he studied them on the way to Chartwell.
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Play: At Chartwell

Between the Exchequer and his publishers’ deadlines, nearly all his holidays were working holidays. He meant to take most of the summer of 1927 off, painting at Chartwell, entertaining friends there, and sweating over walls, dams, and ponds, but then he decided to start writing an account of his youth. It is his most delightful book. Subsequently serialized in the
News Chronicle
and published by Thornton Butterworth as
My Early Life,
it sold 13,753 copies in Britain, was issued by Scribner’s in the United States under the title
A Roving Commission,
appeared, condensed, in the
Reader’s Digest,
and was translated into thirteen languages and Braille. Not all his conceptions reached full term. He planned a book on socialism with the working title
The Creed of Failure
but abandoned it after outlining the first five chapters. Then T. E. Lawrence, now 338171 Aircraftman Shaw, suggested Churchill’s major biographical work, writing him from his RAF base: “If the Gods give you a rest, some day, won’t you write a life of the great Duke of Marlborough? About our only international general… and so few people seem to see it.”
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Winston’s immense output—he was still writing regularly for magazines and newspapers—was possible because of his extraordinary methods of work. Like Dr. Johnson producing his dictionary, he assembled a committee of researchers and secretaries and guided them as they tackled one topic after another. Asked about the thread of narrative, he said, “Oh, I have all that in my head.” And he continued to work all hours. However late his Chartwell guests had retired, he would pace his study, dictating; one visitor recalls wakening to hear “the sounds of footfalls on the boards and his familiar voice clearly audible.” In one month, he told Clementine, he had banked the equivalent of $72,414: a £6,000 advance for the Marlborough, £5,200 in stock dividends, £1,700 in
World Crisis
royalties, and nearly £2,000 from magazines—“a small fortune,” he wrote, of which he was “trying to keep 2,000 fluid for investment & speculation with Vickers & McGowan. This ‘mass of manoeuvre’ is of the utmost importance & must not be frittered away.” It seemed sound. But most of his investments were in the New York stock market. And the year was 1929.
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A few months earlier, during a finance bill debate, he had been stricken by influenza, and his slow recovery suggested a weakened constitution. Those around him were worried; they were afraid he was driving himself toward a nervous collapse. The only way to divert him from public or private work was to put him on a ship or a hunt, in front of an easel, or in the midst of a crowd. Beaverbrook persuaded him to spend five days sailing to Amsterdam and back on his private yacht; the Duke of Westminster induced him to fish and hunt stags in Scotland; by royal command he hunted grouse with George V at Balmoral and painted the Highland scene from his window there. (The painting was subsequently auctioned for £120.) He wrote a friend: “I had a particularly pleasant luncheon with the King when we went out deer-driving, and a very good talk about all sorts of things. I am very glad that he did not disapprove of my using the Ministerial room as a studio, and I took particular care to leave no spots on the Victorian tartans.”
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Especially sweet was a return trip to Belfast, where, on his last visit, he and Clementine had narrowly escaped a lynch mob. This time Queen’s University awarded him an honorary degree, and cheering students, after presenting him with a shillelagh and a “paddy hat,” rode him around on their shoulders.