The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (179 page)

In the House he spoke to empty seats, dozing MPs, and disapproving frowns. Once the cry “Winston’s up!” had brought members scurrying from the lobby and the smoking room. Now—like Edmund Burke six generations earlier, warning Parliament that unless the government changed its policy, Britain would lose her American colonies—he was largely ignored. There is a time to be eloquent, and there is a time when eloquence is wasted. Many of his greatest addresses, writes an Oxford historian, were delivered before “inattentive or skeptical audiences.” To Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who was in Germany, the 1930s were a period in which he, “like so many others, tried desperately to convince those in authority of the growing menace of National Socialism.” They “failed miserably.” It was “in those days,” Wheeler-Bennett recalls, that “Winston was a tower of strength and comfort to us, the one British statesman who understood the warning which we sought to give, and who perceived, in all its starkness, the danger of a fresh outbreak of the
Furor Teutonicus
.”
¹⁶

England, to paraphrase Melville, seemed cloaked in a damp, drizzly, foggy November of the soul. So did France. In his Paris home at 110, boulevard Raspail, Major Charles de Gaulle was writing
Vers l’armée de métier
, advancing his concept of a small professional army, mobile and highly mechanized, which, he believed, should replace the reigning static theories of war symbolized by the Maginot Line. In the London murk Churchill, with his moral compass, knew exactly where he was, but few Englishmen even glimpsed him. Sir Robert Vansittart, “Van,” the permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office, wrote: “Left or Right, everybody was for the quiet life.” To those who saw what lay ahead, the quietude was excruciating. Franklin Roosevelt, sworn in as president five weeks after Hitler became Reich chancellor, was lifting American hearts with his fireside chats, and an MP suggested to Churchill that MacDonald or Baldwin try the same thing. “If they did,” said Winston, “the fire would go out.”
¹⁷

Lady Astor—née Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Virginia—was rarely reflective of the British public’s mood, but threading the maze of parliamentary intrigue with consummate skill, she always knew who was welcome at No. 10 Downing Street and who was not, even when those who were not included her. Joseph Stalin, receiving a British delegation headed by Nancy and George Bernard Shaw, had bluntly asked her about Winston’s political prospects. Her eyes had widened. “
Churchill?
” she had said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied, “Oh, he’s
finished
.” Afterward, in Red Square, Shaw told the waiting press that he found the Soviet Union admirable, and would, indeed, advise young men from all over the world to pack up and settle in it. Nancy smiled and nodded, which, Virginia Cowles points out, was “reprehensible, because up until then she had been a tremendous anti-Bolshevik, denouncing the slaughter of the Russians in speech after speech.” Winston’s rhetorical weapons were of larger bore. He fired his broadside in the
Sunday Pictorial
, pointing out that the lady in question “denounces the vice of gambling in unmeasured terms, and is closely associated with an almost unrivaled racing stable. She accepts Communist hospitality and flattery, and remains the Conservative member for Plymouth.” The Russians, he said, “have always been fond of circuses and traveling shows,” and “here was the world’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one, and the charming Columbine of the capitalist pantomime.”
¹⁸

In Parliament Churchill was supported by five MPs at most. The power of the party whips in those days was immense. Their effectiveness, Churchill wrote, combined with the “lethargy and blindness” of the three parties, made this “one of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation seems to fall from its high estate, loses all sense of purpose, and appears to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forge their arms.” A. J. P. Taylor observes that Winston had “periods of great distinction when he seemed right at the front, and he had a gift for sliding down the ladder again. His life was one of snakes and ladders. Until the very end of the 1930s, there were more snakes than ladders. Before then, his reputation, in a sense, was at its lowest ebb.” He had served twenty years in one cabinet or another, but because of his stand against independence for India, the “majority of the party,” recalled Harold Macmillan, then a Conservative MP, not only “regarded his attitude as reactionary and unrealistic,” but also questioned “the soundness of his judgment.” The consequence, Macmillan believed, was that “all his warnings about the German threat and the rise of Nazism, as he himself has described, were in vain.” Baldwin told his whips to keep a sharp eye on the outcast and to foster the view, Lord Winterton recalled, that Churchill was “an erratic genius; that he was utterly unreliable”; he had caused “unnecessary trouble to the Prime Minister and to all his colleagues in every Cabinet in which he has served by his volubility in disregarding every opinion except his own.” In sum, according to Boothby, “The breach between Winston and the Conservative leaders was complete.”
¹⁹

In these years Churchill, in Lady Longford’s words, was often “far away from the ‘clatter and whirlpool,’ beached, like one of the boats he painted.” The British left, led by Clement Attlee and pledged to pacifism and disarmament, deeply distrusted him. Thus he outraged MPs on both sides of the Commons. But in Parliament, at least, traditional civility was observed. Outside Westminster was another matter. Afterward he said there had been “much mocking in the Press” about his fall from grace. The political cartoonists in
Punch
, the
Daily Herald
, the
Express
, and above all David Low in Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard
were brutal. Public appearances became an ordeal for him. Chosen rector of Edinburgh University, he was unable to deliver his rectorial address; students hostile to his calls for a strengthened national defense repeatedly shouted him down until he gave up and left the platform. A particularly ugly book published in 1931 was
The Tragedy of Winston Churchill
. Disregarding all evidence, including the findings of the Dardanelles Commission, the author wrote: “Overriding the considered opinions of every seaman who knew his job, he [Churchill] rushed blindly into that wretched fiasco of the Dardanelles. He had great gifts but ‘nothing to offer’ any member of any party.” The author asked, “What has been Mr Churchill’s career in reality but the tragedy of the brilliant failure, of whom it has been repeatedly said that he secretly despises those who pass him on the road to office and power?”
²⁰

Churchillian apocrypha has it that he was unwounded by all this, that throughout he was supremely confident that his hour would strike. On the contrary, his daughter Mary remembers, he was “far from resigned to his exclusion from the exercise of power”; the slanders, libels, and the distortions of his long career “hurt him deeply.” In the House an MP launched a personal attack on him, saying: “All his political life has been notorious for changing opinions, just like the weathercock, which vacillates and gyrates with the changing winds. It is about time this House took notice of this menace.” When Winston cited figures on the growing (and illegal) Nazi Luftwaffe and all but begged the government to strengthen the Royal Air Force, Sir Herbert Samuel, an eminent Liberal, compared him to “a Malay running amok.”
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His old acquaintances and former colleagues were convinced that he was misjudging the Nazis as he had India. Beaverbrook wrote that Churchill had “been everything to every party. He has held every view on every question…. He is utterly unreliable in his mental attitude.” After Hitler became chancellor, the Beaver predicted that “Winston Churchill will retire from Parliament. It is really the best thing for him to do.” Hindenburg died, Hitler’s power grew, and Max convinced himself that Winston’s speeches were stanzas in a swan song. “Now that he seems to have reconciled himself to the part of a farewell tour of politics, he speaks better than for years past.” Beaverbrook’s biographer writes: “It became clear even to Churchill that Beaverbrook was no longer on his side, nor even sympathetic to him.”
²²

Nevertheless, the two men occasionally saw one another. Beaverbrook’s devotion to his newspapers approached that of a
religieux
; Churchill always produced good copy, so the Beaver paid him to write a column every other week for the
Evening Standard
. Malcolm Muggeridge was a young reporter for the
Standard
; at the next desk was Winston’s son. Randolph, now in his early twenties, was already difficult, constantly quarreling with his father and nearly everyone else who crossed his path. Churchill would nod briefly at his son as he passed through the
Standard
’s office with his fortnightly piece. Muggeridge recalls that Winston “just looked awful. You’d say to yourself, ‘There’s a guy who’s not well, or down on his luck, or dead broke.’ If you knew he was a politician you’d think, ‘He’s washed out, he’s had his chance and now he’s through.’ ” Randolph rarely mentioned his father in the office, but one afternoon, as he watched him depart, he said to Muggeridge, “He’s in a terrible state.” Then, in an amused tone: “He misses his toys.” Muggeridge asked, “What toys?” Randolph said: “His dispatch boxes.”
²³

E
ven before Hitler became chancellor, British intelligence had confirmed Churchill’s unofficial estimates, based on his private sources of information, that the Nazis had over 400,000 storm troopers in uniform. During the Chancellor Crisis, Churchill had told the House: “I do not know where Germany’s parliamentary system stands today, but certainly military men are in control of the essentials.” Each concession which had been made to them, he said, each softening of the Versailles agreement, “has been followed immediately by a fresh demand.” To him the peril was clear. If the Germans were permitted to reassemble their military juggernaut, every nation bordering the Reich would be in mortal danger. These, he said, were facts. The British people were being told lies. The prime minister and his cabinet had developed a “habit of saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause.” He could not recall “any time when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now.”
²⁴

MacDonald and Baldwin should have been aware of the threat. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, was an exceptional diplomat. In early March 1933, less than four days after Hindenburg had signed the emergency decree, Rumbold sent the Foreign Office a lengthy assessment of the new regime. The Nazis, he reported, had brought out “the worst traits in German character, i.e. a mean spirit of revenge, a tendency to brutality, and a noisy and irresponsible jingoism.” In the heart of the capital, whippings and clubbings could be seen in every block and every park, even the Tiergarten. Rumbold regretted the failure of foreign opinion “to have fully grasped the fact that the National-Socialist programme is intensely anti-Jewish.” It was no passing phase: “The imposition of further disabilities… must therefore be anticipated, for it is certainly Hitler’s intention to degrade, and if possible expel the Jewish community from Germany.”
²⁵

The ambassador knew this dispatch would be unwelcome to both the prime minister and the Foreign Office, but he continued to send them stark appraisals, including an account of the March 23 Enabling Act and its immediate consequences. The Nazis, he wrote, had ordered local burgomasters to “carry on anti-Jewish propaganda among the people.” Jews were being “systematically removed from their posts” throughout the civil service because of “the accident of race.” Youths were being enrolled in infantry training programs, boys under sixteen were subject to military training, pilots were being recruited for a Luftwaffe—all in open defiance of Versailles. The departure of “so many writers, artists, musicians, and political leaders has created for the moment a kind of vacuum [because] they numbered among their following the intellectual life of the capital and nearly all that was original and stimulating in the world of arts and letters.” Most ominous of all, Jews, together with “Social Democrats, Communists, and non-political critics of Nazi policy” were being seized and sent to “large concentration camps” which were “being established in various parts of the country, one near Munich”—it was Dachau—“being sufficiently large to hold 5,000 prisoners.”
²⁶

The ambassador was genuinely alarmed. He told Foreign Secretary Simon that he viewed the future with “great uneasiness and apprehension…. Unpleasant incidents are bound to occur during a revolution, but the deliberate ruthlessness and brutality which have been practiced [here] seem both excessive and unnecessary. I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.”
²⁷