The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (143 page)

O
n August 3, 1929, the
Empress of Australia
steamed out of Southampton, bound for Quebec. Among its first-class passengers were Churchill; his brother, Jack; Randolph, now eighteen; and Jack’s young son Johnny. Winston spent most of the voyage working or attending to his personal exchequer. He wrote two pieces, “Will the British Empire Survive?” for
Answers,
and a profile of a peer for
Nash’s Pall Mall. John Bull
had already paid him for a piece on the election, “Why We Lost.” The
Daily Telegraph
had agreed to pay him £2,500 for ten articles on this trip. In addition, £1,000 in
World Crisis
royalties had arrived before he left London, and a sale of utility shares had brought him another £2,000. He invested every shilling he could spare in the New York stock market. Financial security, he wrote Clementine from the ship, was “a wonderful thing.”
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The warmth of his Canadian welcome was also wonderful. “The workmen in the streets,” he wrote her, “the girls who work the lifts, the ex-service men, the farmers, up to the highest functionaries have shewn such unaffected pleasure to see me & shake hands that I am profoundly touched.” The Canadian Pacific had put a stenographer-typist at his disposal for the journey across the continent, and Bernard Baruch had persuaded Charles Schwab to lend Churchill his private railway car, with double beds, private bathrooms, a parlor, a dining room (which Winston converted into an office), a kitchen, servants’ quarters, a refrigerator, fans, and a radio. The radio, he wrote Clementine, was especially useful: “The wireless is a great boon, and we hear regularly from [Horace] Vickers [his broker] about the stock markets. His news has, so far, been entirely satisfactory.” The passing scenery fascinated him. He wrote that he wanted “to see the country at close quarters, and nibble the grass and champ the branches.” To Randolph he said, “Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees to make pulp for those bloody newspapers and calling it civilization.”
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Along the way he paused to open exhibitions, dedicate memorials, consult with officials, and deliver speeches, in one of which he deplored proposals to reduce France’s army, reminding his audience that Germany had twice as many youths of military age as France, which had been invaded by Germans twice within living memory. After driving across the Rockies, which he painted, a sombrero shielding him from the sun, they visited Vancouver and took the ferry to Victoria, their last Canadian stop. The next day Randolph wrote in his diary: “We are now on the ship bound to Seattle, American soil and Prohibition. But we are well-equipped. My big flask is full of whisky and the little one contains brandy. I have reserves of both in medicine bottles. It is almost certain that we shall have no trouble. Still if we do, Papa pays the fine and I get the publicity.” Papa would have been hit by both;
he
had a case of brandy in stone hot-water bottles. In San Francisco the British consul general met their train and drove them southward through the redwoods. Winston wrote his wife that the greater part of their six-hundred-mile journey “lay through the woods with these enormous trees. They are really astonishing. One we saw, the biggest, 380 foot high, was three thousand or four thousand or even five thousand years old and it took fourteen of us to join our arms around its stem.”
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The high point of their California trip was a four-day visit with their chief California host, William Randolph Hearst, a fervent anglophobe who nevertheless wanted Churchill’s by-line in his papers. Winston was willing, though he drove a hard bargain: £40,000 for twenty-two pieces. He was dumbfounded by San Simeon, Hearst’s thirty-million-dollar castle. Blenheim pales beside San Simeon, a composite of all the European palaces and cathedrals the owner had admired, with tapestries, sarcophagi, stained glass, corbels, choir stalls, Gothic rooms, carved staircases, fretwork-ornamented towers, stables, swimming pools, and tennis courts. The entire property was surrounded by a transplanted forest. The man of the house dwelt in a third-floor “Celestial Suite,” from which he descended in an elevator whose walls were hung with priceless paintings. Winston was charmed by Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, formerly an MGM star, and enchanted when they all went off on a picnic accompanied by sixteen pack mules loaded with caviar, champagne, and a hillbilly band. Of Hearst himself, Churchill wrote home that he was “most interesting to meet, & I got to like him—a grave simple child—with no doubt a nasty temper—playing with the most costly toys. A vast income always overspent: ceaseless building & collecting not vy discriminatingly works of art: two magnificent establishments, two charming wives [Mrs. Hearst and Marion]; complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy (to us at any rate) & the appearance of a Quaker elder—or perhaps better Mormon elder.” One afternoon the householder was conferring with his attorney when a maid rushed in. “Mr Churchill is fainting!” she cried. “He wants some turpentine!” Hearst rushed out to a terrace, where he found Winston painting, not fainting, awaiting a thinner for his oils and placidly puffing a fat cigar.
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Churchill and his party moved on to Santa Barbara and then, for five nights, to the Biltmore in Los Angeles—their hotel bills, Winston wrote, were paid by “a hearty Banker”—where they toured the Hollywood studios and were Hearst’s guests once again, at the Montmartre Club. That evening they dined with sixty guests, including Charlie Chaplin. Winston wrote his wife that Chaplin had “acted his new film for us in a wonderful way. It is to be his gt attempt to prove that the silent drama or pantomime is superior to the new talkies.”
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Randolph noted in his diary: “Papa wants him to act the young Napoleon and has promised to write the Scenario.” Instead, said Chaplin, he intended to play Jesus Christ. Churchill thought a moment and then asked: “Have you cleared the rights?”
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After a fishing expedition off Catalina Island (Winston caught a 188-pound swordfish in twenty minutes), his party proceeded eastward, again in Schwab’s private car, across the Mojave Desert, by the Grand Canyon, to Chicago. Baruch met him at the station there and introduced him to the Commercial Club. Asked about Ramsay MacDonald, who was also in the United States at the time, negotiating naval disarmament, Churchill replied that England was fortunate to be represented “by so experienced a statesman and so distinguished a man”—and then called for more British
and
American warships. On the Atlantic coast he paid a courtesy call on Herbert Hoover; toured Civil War battlefields, to pick up material for a series of
Collier’s
pieces; and was in New York, staying at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, when the market crashed. Still shaky on economics, he was slow to grasp what was happening. On the evening of “Black Tuesday,” when the stock market, honeycombed with credit, collapsed of its own weight, sixteen million shares changing hands, he dined at Bernard Baruch’s Fifth Avenue mansion. The other guests were bankers and financiers. When one rose to toast their British visitor, he addressed the company as “friends and former millionaires.”
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Churchill visits Charlie Chaplin at his Hollywood studio

The next morning Churchill heard shouts below the Savoy-Plaza apartment and looked out, he wrote, to find that “under my window a gentleman [had] cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade.” Ever the curious journalist, he made his way to Wall Street. There, recognized by a stranger, he was invited inside the Stock Exchange. “I had expected to see pandemonium,” he wrote, “but the spectacle that met my eyes was one of calm and orderliness.” No wonder; apparently he hadn’t been told that brokers are forbidden to run on the floor of the exchange, and the big sellout was over anyhow, stocks now being offered for a fraction of their value. Churchill concluded: “No one who has gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man, and showing to all nations much that they should attempt and much that they should avoid.”
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He still hadn’t made the connection, still didn’t grasp that since September 3, when he had left Vancouver, Wall Street investors had lost over thirty billion dollars, almost as much as the United States had spent on World War I. Later he would realize that this “Economical Blizzard,” as he came to call it, was responsible for turning all England into “one vast soup kitchen,” driving the country back off the gold standard, doubling the number of British unemployed, and radicalizing politics throughout Europe, especially in Germany. In California, coming under the spell of a local stockbroker, he had been persuaded to speculate heavily. The Wall Street fever of that autumn had afflicted him; he had written his wife: “Since my last letter from Santa Barbara I have made another £1,000 by speculating in a stock called Simmons. It is a domestic furniture business. They say, ‘You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress.’ There is a stock exchange [ticker] in every big hotel. You go & watch the figures being marked up on slates every few minutes. Mr Van Antwerp advises me. He is a stockbroker & one of the leading firms. I think he is a vy good man. This powerful firm watch my small interests like a cat a mouse.” William Van Antwerp was a member of E. F. Hutton, a reliable company, but the most stable brokers were impotent in the panic selling of Winston’s last week in New York. Though he had not been wiped out, his financial independence had disappeared in the reams of ticker tape. Throughout the coming decade he would have to write furiously to keep his family and style of living afloat. This bleak dawn was just beginning to break upon him when he sailed from New York on October 30. But when he reached Southampton he momentarily forgot it. A more immediate threat hung over the world he loved. Lord Irwin,
^*
the new viceroy in New Delhi, had recommended “the attainment of Dominion status” as Britain’s goal for its Indian Empire, Labour had endorsed Irwin’s proposal, and so, without consulting other leaders of the Conservative party, had Stanley Baldwin.
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D
escribing his new Hollywood acquaintances to Clementine, Winston had written that he had entertained “the leading men I like best, mostly British born, & all keenly pro-England.” Among the English expatriates there was a craggy-faced, forty-six-year-old ex-soldier named Victor McLaglen who had served three years in the Life Guards, commanded a company of the Irish Fusiliers in the Middle East during the war, and, during the months which followed the Armistice, policed Baghdad as provost marshal. After touring the Empire as a boxer, wrestler, and vaudeville stunt man, McLaglen had arrived in Hollywood and found employment on the Fox lot, where he was now rehearsing
The Black Watch
under the direction of John Ford. A few blocks away, MGM was shooting two other motion pictures:
Trader Horn,
with W. S. Van Dyne, Harry Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith, and, simultaneously,
Son of India,
starring Smith. These three were the first in a series of films which, for the next several years, would provide millions of moviegoers with images of the glory, legends, and myths of the British Empire. They included
The Lost Patrol
(McLaglen, Gary Cooper, Boris Karloff),
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(Cooper, Franchot Tone),
Clive of India
(Ronald Colman and Loretta Young),
Rhodes of Africa
(Walter Huston),
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(Errol Flynn),
Gunga Din
(Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Sam Jaffe, Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant, McLaglen),
Wee Willie Winkie
(Shirley Temple, McLaglen, Smith), and
Stanley and Livingstone
, which tugged at many a heart when Spencer Tracy, courteously removing his hat, approached Sir Cedric Hardwicke and said: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
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It was great entertainment, if poor history—Colman and Huston were not in the least like the ruthless Clive and Rhodes—and the lush California countryside was far more romantic than the stark Khyber and the African bush. But it was presented as history, something over and done with, and therein lies its real significance. No one outside England, not even Hollywood’s dream merchants, could pretend that the Empire was still like that. Inside England was another matter. Opinion was divided there. Imperial destiny still had its rapt congregations in Britain, even in the Labour party; they believed that Britain’s position in the world, even its self-confidence, depended upon its far-flung realms. The faithful joined the Victoria League, the United Empire League, the British Empire Union, the League of Britons Overseas, and the Empire Day movement, whose only achievement was securing a half-holiday once a year for England’s schoolchildren. The Tory press, notably the
Daily Express,
remained fiercely chauvinistic. Boy Scouts, then at the height of their popularity, wore the broad-brimmed hats of the Boer War and shared their motto “Be Prepared” with the South African police. British soldiers continued to fight colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Palestine, battling first the Mad Mullah of Somaliland and then a Burmese monk whose followers believed he could fly if he chose, though to their disappointment he never so chose. Indeed, imperial possessions were still being acquired; the Empire reached its territorial peak in 1933 with the conquest of the Hadhramaut, a remote (and worthless) tract in southern Arabia. When a battle cruiser bearing the Prince of Wales passed through the Suez Canal and sailed down the Red Sea, with RAF biplanes forming a ceremonial umbrella overhead, native troops on both banks cheered, and in Aden the prince was greeted by massed Union Jacks and an enormous streamer:
TELL DADDY WE ARE VERY HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE
. In Buckingham Palace, Daddy addressed all his global subjects by radio every Christmas. Imperial conferences, determining policies vital to the Dominions, were still held regularly in London. So enlightened a parliamentarian as Boothby, visiting Jamaica, was reassured to see four Royal Navy battle cruisers anchored off Kingston, “one of them waving the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, West Indies Station…. The British Empire still existed.” At No. 10 Stanley Baldwin proclaimed: “The British Empire stands firm as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea.” No public event in England was complete without a passionate chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Soldiers of the Queen,” with its affirmation that “England is master” and:
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Yet Baldwin was now preparing to let the Indian Raj do just that. He wasn’t moved by principle. If Churchill’s symbol is the hand forming a
V
for victory, Baldwin’s was the wetted forefinger held up to test the wind. He did it very well. In England, he knew, ardent imperialists were a minority. Labourites were at best indifferent to the Empire; the billion pounds invested in India wasn’t theirs. The passion of the new age was egalitarian. Even among the aristocracy one found young patricians who felt guilty about their membership in a privileged class. For most postwar Britons, it seemed, imperial songs and slogans had become empty rituals; in their hearts they didn’t much care. “The British were losing interest in their Empire,” James Morris wrote, “and there was a falling-off of recruitment for the Indian services.” By the early 1930s the Indian Civil Service had shrunk to five hundred men. In England news from remote colonies interested the older generation; their children, including Oxbridge graduates, found it rather tiresome. As late as February 9, 1933, with Hitler in power, the Oxford Union debated the resolution “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”—and then approved it, 275 to 153. The King himself, still Emperor of India and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, wrote somberly, if awkwardly: “I cannot look into the future without feeling no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.” Walter Lippmann, echoing Burke while pondering the indifference or even hostility of young aristocrats to imperial strength, reminded them that no empire in history has long survived without a devoted, steadfast ruling class.
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The fashionable—and fashionable Englishmen have far greater influence than their counterparts in, say, the United States—rejected every symbol of the Victorian era, from oratorios and organs to antimacassars. Kipling was mocked. The Prince of Wales was popular because he himself was rebelling against the Establishment he soon would lead, it was then assumed, for the rest of his life. When abroad he flirted with unsuitable young colonial women, fox-trotted until long after midnight, and rode bucking broncos. He didn’t even dress properly. Tieless, in trousers too short to cover his ankles, his cap on the back of his head, he looked far more like one of Mayfair’s Bright Young Things than the royal family’s heir apparent. This was not only conduct unbecoming to England’s future sovereign; it was downright “un-British.” His critics didn’t actually mean he seemed Jewish. The term had been expanded during the 1920s. In the past, English dignity had been stiffened by the intangible concept of British national character. Even Ireland had been awed by it. The Dominions and Crown Colonies were expected, not only to admire it, but to imitate it. As the 1920s were succeeded by the 1930s it became evident that they were letting the side down, were becoming un-British. Canadians were aping the Americans; Toronto was indistinguishable from Buffalo. The Australians talked like cockneys, and loud cockneys at that. English settlers in South Africa, it was said, had become effete, unlike the robust Afrikaners. Worst of all, for those loyal to the Empire, was the mockery of imperial solemnity at home—the braying, irreverent laughter of their own intellectuals. The image of the traditional, fatherly British colonel, once exemplified by men like C. Aubrey Smith, was being replaced by David Low’s Colonel Blimp, who told tedious barracks tales to obese chums in a Turkish bath. P. G. Wodehouse depicted sons of the aristocracy as weak, incompetent, dipsomaniacal clowns, and J. B. Morton—a Harrovian and an Oxonian who had led troops in France—ran mocking little pieces in the
Daily Express:
“
ADVERTISEMENT CORNER
: Will the gentleman who threw an onion at the Union Jack and repeatedly and noisily tore cloth during the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Orphans’ Outing on Thursday, write to Colonel Sir George Jarvis Delamaine Spooner, late of Poona, telling him what right he has to the Old Cartbusian braces which burst when he was arrested?”
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The Raj was the chief target of the English literati. Aldous Huxley, grandson of the great Thomas Henry, was another traitor to his class; India, he wrote, reminded him of the old man of Thermopylae, who never did anything right. “All over India,” wrote George Orwell, “there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part.” E. M. Forster’s
Passage to India,
perhaps the finest English novel of the 1920s, written by a Bloomsbury author who had been private secretary to a maharaja, was a devastating, though perhaps unjust, portrayal of Indian Civil Service racism. In the eyes of such men all imperial achievements were dross. Burma was part of the Indian Empire; Orwell had served there as a policeman, and he dismissed the sum of British efforts there as “second-rate.” Bombay was, in Huxley’s opinion, “one of the most appalling cities in either hemisphere.” The architecture of rebuilt Kuala Lumpur, the capital of British Malaya, was similarly derided, and so was New Delhi, the work of Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, though here the critics may have had a point. The only city expressly designed to intimidate a people, New Delhi was begun in 1911, when George V traveled there during the Coronation Durbar to lay the foundation stone, and it was finished just in time for the British to move out, an ambiguity vaguely preserved in its disconcerting Secretariat. But what dismayed traditionalists most was the intellectuals’ total renunciation of every value, every standard, every icon which had been cherished in the imperial past. Nothing was sacred, not even the Crown. When George V died his last words were: “How is the Empire?” The story got around London drawing rooms and the common rooms in Oxford and Cambridge that he had actually said: “What’s on at the Empire?”
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