The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (166 page)

A Synopsis of

THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL
;

Visions of Glory: 1874–1932

T
HE GRANDSON
of a duke, Winston Churchill was born in splendrous Blenheim Palace during the autumn of 1874, when the British Empire was the world’s mightiest power. Almost immediately the infant was entrusted to his plump nanny, “Woom,” who became his only source of childhood happiness. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant if erratic member of Parliament—he was, briefly, chancellor of the Exchequer—actually loathed Winston. The boy’s breathtakingly beautiful American mother, Jennie, devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, slipping between the sheets with handsome, powerful men in Britain, in the United States, and on the Continent. Her husband was in no position to object. He was an incurable syphilitic.

Winston rebelled against school authority, first becoming a disciplinary problem and then, at Harrow, the lowest-ranked scholar in the lower form. His dismal academic record ruled out Oxford or Cambridge, so he went to Sandhurst, England’s West Point. On February 20, 1895, less than a month after his father’s death from paresis, young Churchill was commissioned a second lieutenant and gazetted to the Fourth Hussars, preparing to embark for India. In Bangalore Churchill succeeded where his schoolmasters failed. During the long, sweltering siestas, he educated himself, reading Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer, and poring over thousands of pages of parliamentary debates. Developing a flair for the language, he found he could earn money writing newspaper and magazine articles and books. At the same time he felt strong stirrings of ambition. He would, he decided, seek a seat in Parliament. But first he must become famous. Ruthlessly manipulating his mother’s lovers (who included the Prince of Wales), he managed to appear wherever the fighting was fiercest. By 1899 he was in South Africa. Taken prisoner in the Boer War by the Boers, he managed a sensational escape from a POW stockade, making his way across three hundred miles of enemy territory to freedom. His breakout made him a national figure. Returning home, he was elected to Parliament while Victoria still reigned.

In the House of Commons his rise was meteoric. At thirty-three he was a cabinet minister. Appointed president of the Board of Trade, he joined with David Lloyd George, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, in the move to abolish sweated labor despite die-hard peers in the House of Lords. In 1908, working in tandem, they conceived and then guided through the Commons an unprecedented program of liberal legislation: unemployment compensation, health insurance, and pensions for the aged, all of them to be financed by taxes on the rich and the landed gentry. Winston denounced the aristocracy in savage speeches, and titled relatives stopped speaking to him. But he had a new, exciting supporter: Clementine Hozier, who became Mrs. Winston Churchill in 1908. Long afterward the groom said that they had “lived happily ever afterwards.” In fact, they remained deeply in love until his death nearly sixty years later.

When the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, plunged all Europe into the Great War of 1914–1918, Churchill had anticipated it. Since 1911 he had been first lord of the Admiralty. The fleet was ready. But on the western front the great armies were locked in a bloody, hopeless stalemate. It would be years before either side could hope for victory in the west. Churchill saw a way to break the deadlock. He proposed that the Allied navies open a new front in the eastern Mediterranean, exploiting the weakness of the Central Powers’ unstable ally, Turkey. If the Dardanelles strait were forced by battleships, Constantinople would fall within hours. The French and British could then join hands with their Russian ally and sweep up the Danube into Hungary, Austria, Bavaria, and Württemberg, ripping open the Second Reich’s undefended southern flank.

Today military historians agree that the Dardanelles strategy could have ended the war in 1916 with a German defeat. But a timid British admiral, who had been sweeping all before him, turned tail at the first sign of resistance—even as the Turks, believing themselves beaten, abandoned their forts on the strait and began the evacuation of their capital. Then equally incompetent British generals botched the landings on Gallipoli Peninsula, which flanked the Dardanelles. The British public demanded a scapegoat, and Churchill, as the stratagem’s most flamboyant advocate, was dismissed from the Admiralty. He joined the army, crossed to Flanders, and, as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion in the trenches.

After the Versailles peace conference, in which he played no part, he became secretary for war and air, and established the Royal Air Force. Then, as colonial secretary, he was responsible for Britain’s postwar diplomacy in the Middle East. He planned the Jewish state, created the nations of Iraq and Jordan, and picked their rulers. It was typical of Churchill, whatever the question, that he would open with a ferocious stance. Negotiations would lead to compromise and solution. Thus he responded to postwar IRA terrorism by creating a force of Black and Tans—former British soldiers who became terrorists themselves. Yet in the end it was he who befriended Michael Collins, the IRA guerrilla leader, and who piloted the Irish Free State treaty through Parliament.

In 1922 Lloyd George’s coalition government fell and was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives. As a Liberal, and then as a Liberal Free Trader, Churchill ran for Parliament in three elections and was defeated each time. Changing parties, he won as a Tory in 1924 and was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer—traditionally, a step away from the prime ministry—by Baldwin. His appointment was in fact unwise. Rejecting the counsel of John Maynard Keynes and accepting instead the advice of the Bank of England, he returned Britain to the gold standard. Markets abroad couldn’t afford British exports. A coal miners’ strike led to a crippling general strike. Winston founded a strike-breaking newspaper; then, after the strike had failed, he took up the coal miners’ cause and fought the mine owners, including a close Churchill relative, for higher pay and safer pits.

After Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party won the election of 1929, Winston held the Exchequer post in the Tory shadow cabinet, which would return to power when Labour’s slim majority disappeared. But before that could happen, he fell again. The issue was a grant of dominion status for India, putting her on a level with Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He, like Disraeli, regarded the British Raj as the brightest jewel in England’s imperial crown. He told Parliament that India was “a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” Facing a stone wall of hostile Tories, Churchill resigned from the shadow government on January 27, 1931. Less than seven months later a new government was formed, and in November what might have been Churchill’s place at the Exchequer was filled by Neville Chamberlain. Thrice fallen from grace—the Dardanelles, the lost elections, and now India—Churchill had become a political pariah, out of joint with the times.

In the early 1920s, a small legacy and £20,000 in royalties from sales of his six-volume history of the Great War had permitted him to buy Chartwell Manor, a country home near the small Kent town of Westerham, where he did most of his writing. John Kenneth Galbraith has pointed out that administrations suspicious of intellectuals unwittingly make substantial contributions to scholarship and writing. “It comes about,” he wrote, “from not employing the scholars or scribes.” During Churchill’s long spell as a backbencher he wrote and published a million words.

His chief concern was that Britain might be vanquished by a tacit conspiracy between Prussian aggression and English pacifism. Typically in the House of Commons, he would contemplate his colleagues, then lower his head like a bull confronting a matador and slowly shake it. After a pitifully weak MP revolt against government policy, Aneurin Bevan encountered him in the smoking room and asked: “What have you been up to? We haven’t seen much of you in the fight lately.” “Fight?” growled Winston, sweeping the room with a challenging glance. “I can’t see any fight. All I can see in this Parliament is a lot of people leaning against each other.”

Chartwell. 1932. Early morning.

T
HE FIRST
olive moments of daylight, anticipating the imminent appearance of the sun over the English Channel, disclose a wide, misty, green plain descending to the South Downs and the sea. This is the great Weald of Kent. It is a peculiarity of the Weald’s terrain—demonstrated in the shrouded past by Romans, Saxons, and Normans—that it would be quite defenseless should an enterprising foe cross the Channel. Were any force to prepare for an invasion, its campfires on the far shore would be visible from nearby Dover. But now, fourteen years after the Armistice of 1918, the Weald is an idyll of peace, and the explorer on foot finds that it possesses camouflaged delights. Its smooth breast, for example, is not entirely unbroken. The pastureland, sloping upward toward London, is cleaved by a shallow valley. This combe rises to a timbered crest. There, among eighty sheltering acres of beech, oak, lime, and chestnut, stands the singular country home of England’s most singular statesman, a brilliant, domineering, intuitive, inconsiderate, self-centered, emotional, generous, ruthless, visionary, megalomaniacal, and heroic genius who inspires fear, devotion, rage, and admiration among his peers.
¹

At the very least he is the greatest Englishman since Disraeli, a quaint survivor of Britain’s past who grapples with the future because he alone can see it. His past is illustrious; in the House of Commons he has, at one time or another, held every important ministry save those of prime minister and foreign secretary. Now, however, he is a backbencher—an elected member of Parliament excluded from the cabinet. In his fifty-eighth year, he is already regarded as an anachronism. He first became a household word as a gallant young British officer, a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, handsome and recklessly brave, serving alongside the Buffs in battles on India’s northwest frontier, with Kitchener at Khartoum, and in the Boer War—all symbols of the nation’s imperial pride, which he fiercely defends despite flagging allegiance elsewhere in the realm. He is mocked for failures which were not his, notably his strategy to force the Dardanelles in 1915. He seems less a figure of the twentieth century (which he loathes) than of the nineteenth—or, reaching even farther back, of Renaissance versatility. The wide sweep of his interests and activities embraces literature, painting, philosophy, hunting, polo, military science, the history of the United States—even architecture, bricklaying, and landscaping. Indeed, many of the shining ponds and pools and the happy waterfalls between the Weald and the manor were created by him, wearing hip-high Wellingtons and excavating the rich earth with his hands.
²

Tree-locked and silent at dawn, Chartwell’s immediate grounds further testify to his stamina. On the south side of the mansion, a garden surrounded by pleasant red brick—walled by him—invites his guest to peer inside the “Mary Cot,” a brick playhouse which he built for his nine-year-old daughter. Between the playhouse and the great house lie his orchard of fruit trees and a tennis court of barbered grass he shaped for his wife, Clementine. Eastward, the flushed sky reveals a lawn terrace; northward, his heated swimming pool and ponds inhabited by black swans and “Churchill’s goldfish” (actually golden orfe). He is planning to cement into Chartwell’s north wall, overlooking the pool, the family’s coat of arms and its Spanish motto, so appropriate in these years of his political exile:
Fiel Pero Desdichado
—Faithful but Unfortunate.

On the grounds are various lesser buildings. A painting studio. A white cottage with two bedrooms houses Maryott White, Mary’s governess—“Nana” to the little girl but “Cousin Moppet” to the others. She and Nellie Romilly, Clementine’s sister, are two of Mrs. Churchill’s relatives in residence, sharing the household tasks. Another cottage is planned; Winston expects to finish it in 1939; then he and Clemmie will move into it, leaving the mansion to their son, Randolph. It is startling to realize that all this is less than twenty-five miles from Hyde Park corner. There men on soapboxes tell crowds, who nod in agreement, that society is rushing toward catastrophe. In eight years it will be upon them, but here all is serene. The sound of heavy guns, the roar of hostile bomb-laden aircraft overhead, arrowing toward London, are unimaginable. Quietude lies like a comforting veil over the house and grounds; Winston’s 1932 Daimler 35/120 six-cylinder Landaulette seems an intrusion. He would do without the motorcar if he could; he despises automobiles, and if he encounters a traffic jam on one of those infrequent occasions when he himself is at the wheel, he simply drives on the sidewalk.

The house is a metaphor of its squire. It is above all staunch. On the outside the red bricks meet neatly; within, the walls are upright. Studs join beams with precision, doors fit sensibly. Like the householder it is complex, and, like him, steeped in the past. Most of the existing structure dates from the fifteenth century, but annals record an owner in 1350, and the oldest part of the building, now occupied by Churchill’s study, was built twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, making it ten years older than Westminster Hall. After acquiring it for £5,000 in the early 1920s, he spent £18,000 on renovations. The front is stately, almost classic in its simplicity. The door frame, which Winston acquired from a London dealer, originally belonged to some other great country home when Victoria was a very young queen; the wood is silvered by age, and its pilasters and scrolls strike a baroque note. The back of the mansion is craggy, a consequence of the master’s many accretions.

At daybreak the air is fresh and cool, but by midmorning it will be uncomfortably warm, and the mullioned, transomed windows are open. There is an exception. Those in Churchill’s bedroom are puttied shut. He likes the country, but not country air; drafts, he believes, invite common colds, to which he has been susceptible since childhood. There is also the matter of noise. Any noise, especially if high-pitched, is an abomination. The jangling of cowbells will destroy his train of thought. But whistling, notes W. H. Thompson, the Scotland Yard detective who serves as his bodyguard from time to time, is the worst: “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—intense, immediate, and irrational. I have seen him expostulate with boys on the street who were whistling as he passed.”
³

Daybreak brings movement to Chartwell’s grounds. Sleep still envelops master, mistress, and their four children—Diana, twenty-three and about to be married; Randolph, twenty-one and already a problem (he has been drinking double brandies since he was eighteen); titian-haired Sarah, dreaming of fame on the stage at eighteen; and, in the bedroom above her, little Mary, who mercilessly taunts Sarah about her beaux. The pets are up and about, however. Trouble, Sarah’s chocolate-colored spaniel, Harvey, Randolph’s fox terrier, and Mary’s Blenheim spaniel Jasper, a gift of the Duchess of Marlborough, are investigating the rosebushes and anointing them. Winston’s pet cat, a marmalade named Tango, stretches himself; so does Mickey, a tabby cat. A fox trots up from the studio; horses begin to snort; a small black goat strides across the orchard; a goose wanders about aimlessly.

Presently people appear. Because today is a special occasion—all the children are home—the cook is Mrs. Georgina Landemare. These days Mrs. Landemare is here on and off, but like many other Westerham folk she will eventually be absorbed by Chartwell and the needs of its master. Already there are eighteen servants, including a butler, a footman, and an assistant gardener, who now arrives from his home in nearby Westerham to prowl the grounds in his daily search for the cigar butts Winston discarded yesterday, to use in his pipe. Most of the staff are natives of nearby Westerham. Both his secretaries, Grace Hamblin and Violet Pearman (“Mrs. P.”), live within walking distance. Since childhood they have known Frank Jenner, the Westerham taxi driver who sometimes carries Churchill to Parliament and back and also serves as Chartwell’s handyman; and Harry Whitbread, the laborer who taught Churchill to lay bricks and returns from time to time to work beside him. All of them, regardless of political persuasion, are proud of their eminent neighbor, though far from awed. Whitbread lectures him on how workingmen see social issues; Winston is attentive and thanks him afterward. The town delights in Churchillian lore. Once a month Westerham’s barber trims his fringe of hair in his bedroom. Recently a temporary replacement asked him how he would like his hair cut. Churchill replied: “A man of my limited resources cannot presume to have a hairstyle. Get on and cut it.”
⁴

Chartwell is Churchill’s sanctuary, his great keep. All his forays into tumultuous London politics are made from this sure base. However harsh the storms in the House of Commons, or the attacks on him in the press, here he is among friends and on grounds which, to him, epitomize his island nation. To him the essence of Chartwell is that it is completely, utterly, entirely
English
.

As one of the great advocates of the British Empire, he remembers the dictum of Queen Victoria: “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” His struggle against England’s pledge to free India has cost him much. But on matters of principle he has never learned how to compromise.
He does not know how to give in
.

Had he yielded on India, he could have looked to broader, brighter horizons. But he believes in his star. And if he can be spectacularly wrong he can also be terrifically right. If we are to follow his victories and his defeats—they will be many—we must try to define him, to identify him. One way is to follow him through a typical day at Chartwell. It is worthwhile if only because he will be forever remembered, not only as a great statesman, but also as one of history’s great originals.

T
he spacious cream drawing room overlooks the Weald. Beneath the prismatic gleams of its eighteenth-century chandeliers, an exquisite little clock stands upon a mahogany Louis XVI
bureau à cylindre
. Now, at 8:00
A. M
., it chimes. Above, in the householder’s study, the sound is echoed as another clock also tells the hour. Simultaneously a sibilant rustle of Irish linen sheets breaks the hush in Churchill’s bedroom a few feet away, as he sits bolt upright and yanks off his black satin sleep mask.
He
, not the sun, determines when he will greet the new day. Fumbling on the bedside table, he rings the bell for his valet-cum-butler, or, as Churchill calls him, “my man.”
⁵

Churchill’s man is called David Inches by the rest of the household, and like his master he is considered eccentric, “a tremendous character,” in the words of Grace Hamblin, Winston’s chief secretary, “always overworked, always perspiring, sometimes drunk!” Awaiting him, Churchill peers around, rumpled but remarkably alert in view of the fact that he retired, as is his custom, only six hours ago. Poised thus, he is surrounded by Churchilliana. Elsewhere, Chartwell’s decor reflects Clementine Churchill’s understated upper-class elegance; but her husband is a flamboyant swashbuckler, a throwback to the Cavaliers or the Elizabethan patriciate with its aristocratic disdain for the opinions of others. Thus this most personal part of the mansion is decorated, not with implicit grace, but with explicit flourish—an ornate Fabergé cigar box, engraved plates of gold and silver, and, standing in solitary splendor, a gold-headed walking stick engraved “to my youngest minister.” This last was his wedding present from King Edward VII and a reminder of the 1880s, when Edward was Prince of Wales and he and Winston’s mother, Jennie, were intimate—an evocation of the first decade of the new century, when young Winston was a rising power in the Edwardian Parliament.
⁶

A minute passes; two minutes. No valet. Winston fumes; the Churchillian lower lip juts out. His bizarre daily schedule deceives visitors who think it disorderly. Those who live at Chartwell know better. Though very odd, it
is
a schedule—is, in fact, a rigid one. Young F. W. D. (“Bill”) Deakin will soon leave his don’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, and become chief researcher (at a mere £300 a year) for Winston’s multivolume biography of his great ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Long afterward Deakin will recall: “He was totally organized, almost like a clock. His routine was absolutely dictatorial. He set himself a ruthless timetable every day and would get very agitated, even cross, if it was broken.” He is very cross now. His valet is often dilatory, though today the blame is not his. Lately the bell has not been working properly. And though Churchill is now bellowing, his shouts are unheard. That is partly his fault. The walls in this part of the mansion are thick. By puttying all the crevices he has effectively soundproofed the room.
⁷

Raging, he flings aside the counterpane, leaps out, stamps his bare foot like a spoiled child, and then stalks dramatically across the room, crossing the threshold and reaching the landing in pursuit of his man. This happens from time to time, and the effect is sometimes spectacular, for Churchill sleeps naked and remains so on such sorties. He will don a robe when visiting other homes, “in deference,” as he puts it, to his hosts’ “views of propriety,” but at Chartwell he feels free to roam around nude; as one of his servants will later explain, it seems “completely natural to him.” It did not seem natural to a young housemaid who has just left his employ. Looking up the stairwell one morning she beheld, on the top step, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill in the buff—all 210 pounds of him, a massive pink man with a bald, smooth dome and broad if slightly stooped shoulders, glaring down at her, as one of Winston’s secretaries remembers, “like a laser beam.” The girl fled the house shrieking. She has sent for her belongings and her pay.
⁸