The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (192 page)

O
n Thursday, November 14, Britain voted. By evening it was clear that the Conservatives, winning 432 seats, had retained their overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. Labour had won 154 seats, a gain; the Liberals 21, a loss. Churchill was among the few Conservatives actually to increase his plurality; he polled over 10,000 votes more than his two opponents combined. That evening he dropped by Albert Hall to watch the results posted. Once the outcome was certain, he took a cab to Stornoway House, where Lord Beaverbrook was throwing a victory party. Beaverbrook’s first words to Churchill were: “Well, you’re finished now. Baldwin has so good a majority that he will be able to do without you.” Twelve years later, in an unpublished note, Winston wrote: “I was taken aback and offended by this.” A “man like Mr. Baldwin,” he had believed, “would not be influenced… about my joining the Government by the size of his majority.”
¹⁶¹

When he had resigned from Baldwin’s shadow cabinet nearly five years earlier, Churchill had told Vansittart: “I have cheerfully and gladly put out of my mind all idea of public office.” Van knew that was untrue. “Without office he was miserable,” he wrote, “although I could never understand why. The big boy without a bauble had at his command every other gift in the world, and much attention if small assent. He should have been radiantly happy as the greatest of his time, probably of all time.” Van had pointed out to him that should he become one of the cabinet’s twenty-two ministers, the only consequence would be an increase in his frustration. Churchill believed the government thought well of him. Vansittart knew he was wrong: “Right and Left he was in bad odor for his gloomings. The Left called him ‘the darling of the die-hards,’ who proved too faint-hearted to back him.” And the right regarded him a renegade. “The pity was great” for both Winston and himself, Van recalls, “for a lone voice can accomplish nothing, and in the last analysis a British public servant can do little to serve the State. We both pegged away, he with orations, I with comments and memoranda.”
¹⁶²

In June, when Baldwin moved into No. 10, he had appointed Hoare as Simon’s successor at the FO and replaced Londonderry with the abler Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, an admirer of Churchill. The new air minister’s greatest achievements were to be his promotion of new fighter planes: the Hawker Hurricane, first tested five months after he took office, and the Spitfire, whose prototype flew four months later. In the House Winston had continued what he later described as his “severe though friendly” criticism of the government. He supported the government’s position, in Geneva and elsewhere, with increasing frequency. “It is a terrific decree in life,” George Meredith wrote, “that they must act who would prevail.” A backbencher could not act. Vansittart notwithstanding, a minister could. In previous cabinets Churchill had found that he could often sway decisions. As his desire for a seat on the Treasury Bench grew, so did the frequency with which he praised Baldwin in public. In October he had written him: “If yr power is great, so also are yr burdens—and yr opportunities. I think you ought to go to the country at the earliest possible moment, & I hope you will do so…. I will abide with you in this election, & do what little I can to help in the most serviceable way.” It is impossible to miss the hunger in these last words.
¹⁶³

This, then, was how matters stood when Beaverbrook told Churchill that Baldwin didn’t need him. Six months had passed since Winston had last spoken disparagingly of the P.M. His ministerial experience surpassed that of any other man in the House save Lloyd George. Despite slighting references to his age (in May a Tory MP had patronized him: “Although one hates to criticise anyone in the evening of his days…”) he was at the height of his powers. And he yearned for office. This longing was inexplicable to Vansittart, but Winston found no pleasure in playing the independent critic. His imagination, his energy, and his capacities could be best expressed only when he occupied a seat of power. He hoped to be given the Admiralty but would take what he could get. Therefore he left London for Chartwell and awaited a call from Baldwin.
¹⁶⁴

It never came.

He remained near the telephone for six suspenseful days, and then, abandoning hope, sank into one of his deepest depressions, unable even to paint. Actually, Baldwin had toyed with the idea of bringing him into the government earlier, when he had reshuffled the cabinet after taking over as P.M. Dawson had talked him out of it, arguing that senior members of the party would be resentful and, moreover, that Churchill would be “a disruptive force, especially since foreign relations and defense will be uppermost.”
¹⁶⁵

Ironically, Churchill’s greatest handicap among his fellow Tories is now seen as a source of his splendor. Far more suspicion and disfavor in the party were aroused by the strength and coherence of his convictions than by his stinging phrases in the House or his undisguised lust for office. “No strongly centralized, political organization,” Isaiah Berlin noted, “feels altogether happy with individuals who combine independence, a free imagination, and a formidable strength of character with stubborn faith and a single-minded, unchanging view of the public and private good.”
¹⁶⁶

After the November 14 landslide, other Conservatives joined
The Times
editor in urging Baldwin to keep Churchill out. Nancy Astor wrote him: “Don’t put Winston in the Government—it will mean war at home and abroad. I know the depths of Winston’s disloyalty—and you can’t think how he is distrusted by
all
the electors of the country.” Three days after the election Thomas Jones wrote in his diary: “Winston will be kept out, I think.” Later in the day, when the decision had been made, he noted with relief that the government had “kept clear of Winston’s enthusiasm for ships and guns.”
¹⁶⁷

To Jones, Baldwin said: “One of these days I’ll make a few casual remarks about Winston…. I’ve got it all ready. I am going to say that when Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why we delight to listen to him in the House but do not take his advice.”
¹⁶⁸

But no fairy tale was responsible for Churchill’s disappointment. Baldwin was swayed by other, less enchanting motives. One was recrimination. The Dear Vicar’s geniality was legendary, but he would have been masochistic not to nurse the wounds Winston had inflicted on him in the past. In one of Baldwin’s less affable moments he snapped: “Winston is part of the flotsam and jetsam of political life thrown up on the beach.” Those around him agreed. Neville Chamberlain came close to the truth when, arguing against giving Churchill a ministry, he commented that his powers of persuasion might convince the cabinet to increase rearmament, which would have pressed the Treasury to produce funds. The Depression was still a grave problem. The City and the Bank of England were wedded to stable prices and a stable pound. Deficits were considered wicked, except in wartime, and deplorable even then. As A. J. P. Taylor puts it: “The secret of Pandora’s box which Schacht had opened in Germany and which the American New Deal had also revealed, was still unknown to the [British] Government.” Taylor believes that the MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain administrations “feared to offend economic principles even more than to offend Hitler.”
¹⁶⁹

Apprehension over the reaction in Berlin was a factor, though Churchill’s conclusion was that Baldwin had denied him office to pay “some of his debt to the pacifist deputation which he had received in the last days of the election.” The truth was more ignoble. It hadn’t occurred to Winston that a British prime minister, in selecting his cabinet, would bow to German sensitivities. He was wrong. According to Lady Longford, in considering a cabinet reshuffle, “Baldwin felt less inclined than ever to annoy Hitler by including the bellicose Churchill.” Years later Boothby said: “Many people asked why Mr. Churchill, who had held the offices of first lord of the Admiralty, secretary of state for war, secretary of state for air, and minister of munitions, had not been appointed. The answer is quite simple. He would have roused, disturbed, and rearmed the country.”
¹⁷⁰

Winston felt he had to leave England for at least six weeks. Afterward he wrote that he had “agreeable consolations. I set out with my paintbox for more genial climes without waiting for the meeting of Parliament.”
¹⁷¹
Like all Churchillian holidays, this one would be a working vacation, largely devoted to writing the third volume of his Marlborough biography.

It seemed to be an excellent time for a Conservative member of Parliament to be absent from London. The situation in northeastern Africa had become critical; Italian troops massed in the horn of East Africa, on the frontiers of the Italian Somaliland, had invaded Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was called then, undeterred by a commitment Sam Hoare had made to the League of Nations in Geneva. Slapping the lectern with the flat of his hand, the foreign secretary had declared: “The League stands, and my country stands with it for… steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression!” The press and the overwhelming majority of league delegates had agreed with Belgium’s revered Paul Hymans: “The British have decided to stop Mussolini even if that means using force.”
¹⁷²
But they hadn’t. In Geneva, Hoare, schooled at Harrow and Oxford, the very model of an English gentleman, had sown the seeds, not of resolve, but of hypocrisy.

S
URVEYORS
establishing landmarks work from several known reference points, and those who wish to view the past in perspective may adopt a similar technique. In the mid-1930s Europe’s anticipation of the future began its swing from the unthinkability of war to the thinkability of it to the fatalistic acceptance of its inevitability. The omens were unmistakable. In March 1935 Hitler had announced that Germany was rearming; eleven days after Baldwin replaced MacDonald as prime minister in June the calamitous Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed; and, after the Tory landslide in November, the redemption of Hoare’s vow came due. Dead ahead lay the three pivotal crises: Ethiopia, the Rhineland, and Spain.

Using a boundary dispute as an excuse, Italy had begun its east African buildup in February 1935. Emperor Haile Selassie withdrew his troops twenty miles behind his frontier to avoid the kind of incident Mussolini was seeking, but the Duce would not be denied; he declared that he intended to use every weapon at hand, including poison gas, which had been outlawed by international convention. Hoare’s warning speech in Geneva was delivered on September 11, a month before the fighting began. The historian of the league wrote that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of his electrifying address, putting Mussolini on notice.”
¹

It was Hoare’s finest hour, though he hadn’t meant it to be; to the end of his life he insisted that the world had simply misunderstood him, he hadn’t intended to sound resolute. The fact is that he had been carried away by his own rhetoric. It had been his intention to suggest obliquely that if the league should censure any rupture of the Ethiopian frontier, invoking mild sanctions against Italy, the Duce might be bluffed into backing off. This, in Hoare’s words, would infuse “new life” into the league’s “crippled body.” But bluffs work only if the other side thinks them real. And Italian intelligence agents, after burgling the British embassy in Rome, knew Britain had no intention of using force—had, in fact, no force available to use. Royal Navy ships routinely cruised the Mediterranean, but none carried ammunition. Therefore Mussolini felt quite safe when, as it was reported to Hoare, he appeared on his balcony, jutted his jaw to the cheers of the throng below, and cried that Britain was trying to “rob” Italians of “a place in the sun.”
²

Churchill’s steady eye was still fixed on Nazi Germany. England and France needed allies, and the best possible solution to that problem was a strong, united League of Nations. Compared with Hitler’s Reich, he told Parliament, Ethiopia was “a very small matter.” Nevertheless, he had read with pride that the foreign secretary had taken a stand for the independence of the ancient mountain kingdom confronting Italian invasion. It was, he said, a matter of honor. The League of Nations was “fighting for its life. Probably it is fighting for all our lives. But it is fighting.” He believed that the league “has passed from shadow into substance, from theory into practice, from rhetoric into reality. We see a structure always majestic, but hitherto shadowy, which is now being clothed with life and power, and endowed with coherent thought and concerted action. We begin to feel the beatings of a pulse which may, we hope, some day… restore a greater measure of health and strength to the whole world.”
³

Actually, he was troubled. His feelings about the issue were far more ambivalent than he publicly acknowledged. In the last war the Allies had barely beaten the Germans with Italy on their side. Backing the league made sense if all the member nations observed its covenant. If they didn’t, Britain’s stand would prove disastrous, for Italy would be alienated. And Ethiopia was not, in his view, a moral issue. Like most men of his generation, he regarded blacks as an inferior race. In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had written that he distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was asked whether he had seen the film
Carmen Jones
. He had walked out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.”
⁴

Berlin, not Rome, remained the enemy capital. To him Ethiopia was a “wild land of tyranny, slavery, and tribal war.” He later wrote: “In the fearful struggle against rearming Nazi Germany which I could feel approaching… I was most reluctant to see Italy estranged, and even driven into the opposite camp.” Moreover, Britain and France were in an awkward position. Arguably they were Italy’s accomplices, because in April at Stresa they had not done what they ought to have done. At the end of the conference Mussolini had made a point of excluding Africa from the mutual agreement to abstain from aggression. The Allied diplomats decided not to argue the point. In Churchill’s words, “Everyone was so anxious for Mussolini’s support in dealing with Germany that it was felt undesirable at that moment to warn him off Abyssinia, which would obviously have very much annoyed him.”
⁵

Now they were facing the consequences. On August 21, when east Africa’s rainy season was still holding Italian troops in check, Hoare and Eden, now minister for League of Nations affairs, had approached Winston for his advice. According to Hoare’s record of their talk, Churchill had “showed himself deeply incensed at the Italian action,” had “urged reinforcement of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet,” and, above all, had stressed the need for “collective” action—not in the service of the league’s ideals, but because of his “main interest in the League as a defence against Hitler.” Churchill explained, noted Hoare, that “if the League now collapsed in ignominy,” it would mean “the destruction of the bond that unites British and French policy and of the instrument that might in the future be chiefly effective as a deterrent to German aggression.”
⁶

He said as much in Parliament, supporting Hoare’s pledge because the integrity of the league was at stake, but adding that he could not envisage Haile Selassie in the role of martyr. “No one,” he said, “can keep up the pretense that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy, and equal member of a league of civilized nations.” The sanctity of the League Covenant was still paramount, however; he proposed that the British government leave no doubt in Mussolini’s mind that England was prepared to observe the covenant “even to the point of war.”
⁷

The issue was moot and still is. As Telford Taylor writes: “In retrospect, it seems that the wisest course, if bold, would have been to play the game of collective security to the hilt and bring Mussolini down, even if it meant a war, in which Italy would have had no allies. But benefit might also have been derived from a more cautious, if cynical, policy of keeping the Duce on the side of the angels in Europe by allowing him a bit of deviltry in Africa.”
⁸

As it happened, neither course had been given a chance. In “The Hollow Men” T. S. Eliot had written:

Rome’s new legions struck southward from Eritrea on October 3, 1935, erupting across the frontier in a festive mood, trumpets blaring and huge battle flags rippling overhead. But even before they could reach Haile Selassie’s troops the banners were discarded, the trumpets mute, and the Duce’s gladiators bogged down in the wild, pathless terrain. Then the African defenders, attacking to drive them back, proved unexpectedly fierce. Evelyn Waugh described the Italian fighting, if that is the word for it, in his satirical
Scoop
. But events in the diplomatic arena were even more absurd. The British delegation in Geneva rallied the support of fifty nations in condemning Italy as the aggressor. Asked how far he would go in backing the covenant, Churchill replied, “The whole way with the whole lot.”
⁹

The league voted overwhelmingly to impose economic sanctions upon the Italians, but Baldwin’s list of sanctions suggested that the prime minister had developed a bizarre taste for black humor. Among the items denied to the aggressor were camels, mules, donkeys, and aluminum—a metal so available in Italy that it constituted one of the country’s chief exports. Unmentioned were the raw materials essential to the waging of war: steel, iron, coal, and, most remarkably, oil. Had they been deprived of petroleum, Mussolini’s mechanized columns would have vanished in the ravines and chasms separating them from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Indeed, had Baldwin been serious, he could have achieved an even quicker end to the Italian offensive by simply closing the Suez Canal to the Duce. It was suggested. Eden and his colleagues in Geneva answered that if Mussolini’s patience were tried he might lose his temper and spread the war to the Continent, or launch a “mad dog” assault on His Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet.

This opéra bouffe gained in lunacy as it went along. Ice skating was Hoare’s passion. En route to Switzerland, and accompanied by Vansittart, he broke his journey on Saturday, December 7, to confer with France’s premier, Pierre Laval. Together they concocted a plan which would end the Ethiopian war by ceding two-thirds of the country to Italy—including vast tracts she could never win by force of arms—leaving Haile Selassie with the remainder of his territory and a corridor through Italian territory to the Red Sea. If Mussolini balked, the emperor would be given a different corridor running through the adjoining colonies of Britain or France. Elated, Hoare entrained for the Swiss village of Zuoz, laced on his skates, glided across the frozen lake, and fell, breaking his nose. Churchill, upon learning of the cynical intrigue in Paris, growled, “Too bad it wasn’t his neck.”
¹⁰

The conspirators had agreed to keep their scheme secret until their governments had approved of it, but
Paris-Soir
acquired the complete text before Hoare even reached Zuoz, and on Monday the details were on every front page in the world. Churchill was in Majorca. Friends persuaded him that he was lucky to be abroad, so he decided to stay outside Barcelona, painting and writing in the serene countryside. There was no serenity in England; in the House a Labourite proposed that a new sign be erected over the league portals: “Abandon half, all ye who enter here—half your territory, half your prestige.” In a letter to
The Times,
Harold Macmillan declared that were the Hoare-Laval plan approved, Britain would be party to a conspiracy “to undermine the very structure which a few weeks ago the nation authorized us to underpin. I have never attended the funeral of a murdered man, but I take it that at such a ceremony some distinction is made between the mourners and the assassins.”
¹¹

The Hoare-Laval scheme, a loser from the beginning, now became an albatross. Mussolini, Haile Selassie, Baldwin, and Laval’s cabinet all denounced it. On December 17 Randolph sent his father a full account. Relations between the two were strained—and would soon be strained further—but Churchill had found his son a resourceful reporter. Randolph wrote that “Baldwin, Hoare, and Vansittart” had “planned this shameful surrender,” and “are extraordinarily confident of the outcome.” Outraged public opinion on the other side of the Channel forced Laval from office, and the day after Randolph’s report the British cabinet voted overwhelmingly—Neville Chamberlain was the sole exception—to demand Hoare’s resignation. Desmond Morton wrote to Churchill: “Baldwin has completely lost every shred of confidence. He is believed to have sacrificed his friend, not because that friend made an error in method, but because he believed it was the only hope of saving his own skin.”
¹²

In hindsight it seems that Churchill’s wisest course would have been to reject his friends’ advice and return to London the moment the scandal broke. But he still believed his chances of reaching office were greater if he kept his sword sheathed and let others attack the prime minister. Indeed, from October 1935 to March 1936 he neither wrote nor spoke a single word criticizing the prime minister in public. Even his memoirs are bland on the Hoare-Laval deal; he merely comments that Vansittart, preoccupied with the Nazi menace, wanted to strengthen the Anglo-French entente “with Italy in their rear a friend and not a foe.”
¹³

Perhaps the most perceptive glimpse of Churchill during the Ethiopian crisis is provided by Vincent Sheean, the American foreign correspondent. Sheean, like Churchill, Lloyd George, the writer Michael Arlen—and, later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—was a friend of Maxine Elliott, a rich retired actress whose white, terraced villa in Cannes, the Château de l’Horizon, offered exotic asylum to celebrities.

“Churchill first became visible to me,” Sheean wrote, “in a red bathrobe over bathing trunks; he wore a large, flopping straw hat, and slippers and a cherubic grin.” He was defensive on the Ethiopia issue, but never evasive. When an elegant Frenchwoman pointed out that the British Empire had been built by the sort of small wars Italy was now waging, Winston smiled benevolently and said: “Ah, but you see, all that belongs to the unregenerate past, is locked away in the limbo of the old, the wicked days. The world progresses.” That, he said, explained the purpose of the League of Nations. Winston declared that the Duce was “making a most dangerous and foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure.” The results were “quite incalculable. Who is to say what will come of it in a year, or two, or three? With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent—Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for your children?”
¹⁴

In such company he never criticized His Majesty’s Government, but his letters are full of it. After four days with Lloyd George at the Hotel Mamounia in Marrakech, he wrote Clementine that Britain was “getting into the most terrible position, involved definitely by honour & by contract in almost any quarrel that can break out in Europe” with her “defences neglected” and the cabinet “less capable a machine for conducting affairs that I have ever seen.” He believed that the “Baldwin-MacDonald regime has hit this country very hard indeed, and may well be the end of its glories.”
¹⁵