The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (181 page)

In the
Daily Mail
of November 17, Churchill called on the government to look to Britain’s defenses: “If Geneva fails, let the National Government propose to Parliament measures necessary to place our Air Force in such a condition of power and efficiency that it will not be worth anyone’s while to come here and kill our women and children in the hope that they may blackmail us into surrender.” Six days later he addressed the House on the issue. He had studied Baldwin’s speech and thought it needlessly pessimistic. It had “created anxiety,” he said, “and it created also perplexity.” S.B. had left an unjustified impression of “fatalism, and even perhaps of helplessness.” The time had come not to dismantle the RAF, but to expand it. “Why should we fear the air?” he asked. “We have as good technical knowledge as any country.” He pressed the government to “consider profoundly and urgently the whole position of our air defense.”

Of the French, he said, “They only wish to keep what they have got, and no initiative in making trouble would come from them.” He was “not an alarmist” (this drew jeers) and did not “believe in the imminence of war” (more jeers). But, he continued, “the removal of just grievances of the vanquished ought to precede the disarmament of the victors.”
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Diplomatic conversations and disarmament pacts seemed tiresome to Britons in those years. The Depression persisted, and they sought diversion in the yo-yo craze, three trunk murders, and the exceptional seductive prowess of the middle-aged rector of Stiffkey, who prowled London teashops, persuading an astonishing number of young waitresses to slip into toilets with him, assume awkward positions, and copulate. Defrocked, the vicar found employment as a tamer of lions and was eaten by one. The popular songs of the era were played in slow, almost lugubrious measures: “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Say It Isn’t So,” and “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming,” which, Churchill later suggested, ought to have been Ramsay MacDonald’s theme as the prime minister crossed the Channel in February 1933 and entrained for Geneva, where the plan bearing his name would highlight the agenda of the resuming disarmament talks.
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Churchill was not impressed. In Parliament he produced a copy of the Swiss newspaper
La Liberale Suisse
and quoted from the leading article. Prime Minister MacDonald’s call for “German equality in armaments,” he said, was depicted in the Swiss paper as raising suspicions “all over the Continent” that England wanted to “help Germany at the expense of her neighbours.” The Swiss, he continued, saw it as “part of a deliberate plot by which the British Prime Minister is pursuing those pro-German sympathies which he has had for so many years. It is devised in order to bring about the defeat or paralysis of France at the hands of Germany and Italy, and so to expose the small nations to the ambition of the Teuton mass.” Churchill tossed the paper aside. “Of course it is not true,” he told the House, but “you see how small countries work out these proposals.”
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MacDonald had called the Continent a house “inhabited by ghosts.” It wasn’t, said Churchill; “Europe is a house inhabited by fierce, strong, living entities. Poland, recreated at Versailles, is not a ghost: Poland is a reincarnation.” But he was anxious about Teutonic influences. Poland’s national character, like Germany’s, was marred by a livid streak of anti-Semitism; the “odious conditions now ruling in Germany” might spread across the border “and another persecution and pogrom of Jews [begin] in this new area.” Czechoslovakia—“the land of Good King Wenceslas”—had also emerged from Versailles “with its own dignity established.” To be sure, there were Germans living within its borders, but they had always lived there, as inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither they nor their ancestors had ever been citizens of the Reich.

Indeed, he continued, at the Versailles peace conference, “No division was made of the great masses of the German people…. No attempt was made to divide Germany…. No State was carved out of Germany. She underwent no serious territorial loss, except the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which she herself had seized only fifty years before. The great mass of Germans remained united after all that Europe had passed through, and they are more vehemently united today than ever before.”
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The response in Germany was outrage. The
Birmingham Post
’s Berlin correspondent cabled: “Today’s newspapers are full with ‘sharp warnings’ for England, introduced by headlines about… Mr Winston Churchill’s ‘impudence.’ ” Winston had no intention of lowering his voice. Eleven days later he told the Royal Society of St. George that the greater peril lay not in Berlin, but in British “defeatist doctrines” arising from “the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.” He said: “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”
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The House did not shout him down, but it came close, when his attacks on MacDonald took a more personal turn. Returning from Geneva, all smiles, the prime minister of the coalition briefed Parliament on the various proposals he had initialed, all of immense importance, he assured them, though he astonished and embarrassed his admirers by adding, “I cannot pretend that I went through the figures myself.” Winston snapped up that line, noting that though MacDonald was unfamiliar with the numbers, he had taken “responsibility for them. It is a very grave responsibility. If ever there was a document upon which its author should have consumed his personal thought and energy it was this immense disarmament proposal.” This was harshly critical perhaps, but still permissible. Other of Winston’s observations, however, were incendiary: speaking on March 23, Churchill described the prime minister as “our modern Don Quixote,” returning with the “somewhat dubious trophies” collected among the “nervous tittering of Europe.” In Churchill’s opinion, the proceedings in Geneva had been “a solemn and prolonged farce.” He hoped that MacDonald would now take “a good rest, of which I have no doubt he stands in need,” and then devote himself to “the urgent domestic tasks which await him here,” leaving “the conduct of foreign affairs, at any rate for a little while, to be transacted by competent ambassadors through the normal and regular diplomatic channels.”
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Harold Macmillan, who was elated, later recalled “hearing the speech from the back benches and the impression made by his formidable attack,” but Winston himself saw the “look of pain and aversion” on the faces round him. Even while he was in the midst of it, the protests had begun. MacDonald’s four years in Downing Street, he said, “have brought us nearer to war and made us weaker, poorer, and more defenceless.” This touched off cries of “No, no, no!” Turning toward those who had interrupted him, Winston replied, “You say ‘No.’ You have only to hear what has been said here today to know that we have been brought much nearer to war.” And when they cried, “By whom?” he said sensibly that he didn’t “wish to place it on one man,” but when a single individual had held “the whole power of foreign affairs for four years,” nothing was to be gained “by pretending that there is no responsibility to be affixed anywhere.” Once he sat down MPs from all three parties rose, variously deploring “a disgraceful personal attack on the Prime Minister,” which was “thoroughly mischievous,” and “mean and contemptible.” Winston himself was described as “a disappointed office-seeker,” the pursuer of a “personal vendetta” who was trying to “poison and vitiate the atmosphere” which MacDonald and his foreign secretary had tried to create in Switzerland.
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As usual Winston had a bad press. The
Northern Echo
called his performance “vitriolic,” one of “the most audacious he has delivered,” a “furious onslaught.” The
Daily Dispatch
reported: “The House was enraged, in an ugly mood—towards Mr Churchill.” So it was. It was perhaps a sign of the contempt MacDonald felt for his critic that he chose a thirty-six-year-old Foreign Office under secretary to reply for the government. Churchill’s fear of Germany was groundless, the young diplomat told the House; the Germans merely wanted to replace their small long-service army by a larger, short-service militia. It was unfortunate that the member from Epping had thought so solemn a matter as foreign affairs an occasion for “quips and jests.” To hold the prime minister accountable for deteriorating international relations was “a fantastic absurdity.”

So said Anthony Eden in the House of Commons on March 23, and under his debonair manner he seemed honestly puzzled. Eden had fought in France as a young officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps; he had fought in the trenches, been gassed and decorated. As a Tory he disagreed with MacDonald on most domestic issues, but in pursuing a lasting European peace he felt they should “all pull together,” as in the Eton boating song, “steady from stroke to bow.” How could anyone misinterpret the prime minister’s reply to the rising Nazis? It was certain, Eden earnestly told the House, to “secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed.” If appeased, Hitler’s anger would vanish; his fear of encirclement would disappear; the Nazis, freed from anguish and insecurity, would become sensible, stable neighbors in a Europe free of rancor. The House gave him a standing ovation—Churchill and those around him remained seated. The MacDonald Plan was supported by Conservatives, Labour, and Liberals alike. Its essence was simple. The Nazis were entitled to bear arms. At the same time, Germany’s former enemies should take the first long steps toward disarmament. And the first country to spike its guns should be that aggressive, martial, bellicose country—France.
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So defined, the word implies a slur, but Eden had used it in its original meaning—to bring to peace, pacify, quiet, or settle. In that sense it has been in the language for five centuries and appears in Chaucer, Spenser, and Samuel Johnson. Churchill had employed it after the general strike of 1926 in describing his approach to the negotiation of a settlement between miners and the owners of coalfields. As an aspersion, however, it had been introduced in the House of Lords on November 5, 1929. The speaker had been the dying Lord Birkenhead, F. E. Smith. Condemning Britain’s conciliatory tactics toward advocates of Indian independence, F.E. called them “appeasers of Gandhi.” Eventually, Telford Taylor notes, “the word became a symbol of weak and myopic yielding when resistance would be bolder and, in the long run, safer.”
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Churchill used it as a stigma in 1933, when the coalition’s determination to meet the German dictator’s demands became clear to him. Appropriately, the first cabinet minister to rebuke Churchill outside the House for his attack on MacDonald was the man who would become known to history as the archpriest of appeasement. Speaking to his Birmingham constituency on March 24, Neville Chamberlain deplored Churchill’s abuse of his talent “to throw suspicion and doubts in the minds of other Governments who have not expressed such feeling.” He declared it England’s duty to make “every effort,” exert “every influence,” and “act as mediators” to preserve the peace by reconciling estranged countries. The British government wanted to avoid all wars between nations because—and this was a typical Chamberlain touch—“they thereby destroy the possibility of markets for ourselves.”
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Appeasement became evangelical; indeed, for some the line between foreign policy and religion became blurred. Thomas Jones denounced Vansittart’s hostility toward the Nazis; Baldwin commented: “I’ve always said you were a Christian.” Rage, wrote Margot Asquith, the widow of the prime minister, should be met with Christian love. “There is only one way of preserving Peace in the world, and getting rid of yr. enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him—and the
viler
he is, the more you must fight him with the opposite weapons than his.” She concluded: “The greatest enemy of mankind today is
Hate
.”
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As for mistreatment of the Jews—some said this and some said that. After all, no one could deny that Jews were, well,
different
. Churchill, an ardent Zionist since 1908, could speak for himself, but here as in so many ways he was unrepresentative of England’s upper classes. This was over ten years before the Holocaust. The martyrdom of Jews in the 1940s would strip anti-Semitism of its respectability, but in the 1930s it was a quite ordinary thing to see restaurants, hotels, clubs, beaches, and residential neighborhoods barred to people with what were delicately called “dietary requirements.” As late as the 1950s the
Pocket Oxford Dictionary
defined
Jew
as “1.
n
. Person of Hebrew race; (fig.) unscrupulous usurer or bargainer. 2.
v.t
. (colloq.). Cheat, overreach.” Contempt for them was not considered bad form. They were widely regarded as unlovable, alien, loud-mouthed, “flashy” people who enriched themselves at the expense of Gentiles. Some even said the Germans who abused them were only getting back a little of their own. As Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott observed: “Even England was not free of anti-semitism. Not all Hitler’s criticisms of Jews were discounted. Rumbold hated the anti-semitism of the new Germany; other Englishmen were less certain in their condemnation.”
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One of Churchill’s relatives, a peer and an anti-Semite, argued that Anglo-German friendship was mandatory if Western civilization was to be preserved. Churchill replied: “You cannot expect the English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerance of Naziism.” But, he was asked, how brutal
are
the Nazis? Britons wondered whether Nazi excesses were sufficiently outrageous to permit a deterioration of relations between London and Berlin—thereby forfeiting what many believed could be a lasting peace.
The Times
thought not. The “shouting and exaggeration” in the new Reich, it assured its readers, was “sheer revolutionary exuberance”; Hitler’s men, feeling “themselves to be the only true patriots, are enjoying the sound of their own unrestrained voices.” The trouble was that the noise, the ugly language, and the accounts of bestial conduct didn’t stop. Be patient, counseled
The Times
; hysteria was un-British: “Anxious Germans may rest assured that all this is not deliberately misconstrued by foreigners.” Most
Times
leaders on foreign policy were written by editor Geoffrey Dawson or Robert Barrington-Ward, a fellow Oxonian, both of whom shared Lothian’s conviction that France and Russia were conspiring to deny Germany her rank among the great powers, a place, Dawson said, “to which she is entitled by her history, her civilization, and her power.”
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