The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (207 page)

But in the streets of London children were chanting a different couplet:

That was not all she had pinched. Listening to the former king’s broadcast at Chartwell with Bill Deakin, Churchill was moved to tears, not by his own prose but by its implications. For him, and for those working to strengthen the defense of England, the crisis had been disastrous. Afterward he wrote: “All the forces I had gathered together on ‘Arms and the Covenant,’ of which I conceived myself to be the mainspring, were estranged or dissolved, and I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.”
¹⁷⁶

Certainly his campaign for preparedness was a casualty. Violet Bonham Carter wrote that many of his loyal followers “expressed to me (and no doubt to others) the view that if he continued to lead us our cause would be hopelessly compromised.” Had it not been for the Simpson crisis, Macmillan believed, Arms and the Covenant “might have succeeded in shaking the already weakened position of the Prime Minister. We might have been able to force a change of policy or of Government or both. Alas!… All the effect of the Albert Hall meeting was destroyed—first by the Abdication and secondly by the catastrophic fall in Churchill’s prestige.”
¹⁷⁷

In an angry letter written immediately after the shoutdown in the House, Boothby had reminded Winston of their agreement that “you were going to use all your powers,” which could have been “decisive” in a successful resolution of the royal marriage issue. “But this afternoon you have delivered a blow to the King, both in the House and in the country, far harder than any that Baldwin ever conceived of. You have reduced the number of potential supporters to the minimum possible—I shd think now about seven in all.
And you have done it without any consultation with your best friends and supporters
.” Boothby wanted “to follow you blindly” because, as he wrote in a second letter, “I believe, passionately, that you are the only man who can save this country, and the world, during the next two critical years.” But now the Churchillians were under attack by men who had been on the verge of conversion to Winston’s cause. One of them had been prepared “to send a series of cables to friends of his in the Australian Government… under the aegis of your authority,” but now refused to do so. Boothby pointed out that it was “only when you rely on the power of clear disinterested argument, based on your unrivalled intellect and experience, with
the solid central mass of the House of Commons
, that you rise to the position of commanding authority which you should always occupy.”
¹⁷⁸

At the new king’s coronation in Westminster Abbey in May, Winston leaned toward Clementine and whispered: “You were right. I see now the other one wouldn’t have done.” But a public apology was impossible for him, and an acknowledgment of error nearly so. On Christmas Day he wrote Lloyd George, vacationing in the West Indies: “It has been a terrible time here…. You have done well to be out of it”—as though the Welsh radical, with his humble origin and scorn for aristocracy, would have risked his career to save a man who had abandoned a kingdom for a woman. To the Duke of Westminster, Churchill wrote: “It is extraordinary how Baldwin gets stronger every time he knocks out someone or something important to our country.” But had Edward been important to England, and to the cause Churchill championed, he would not have appeared in Germany, on his honeymoon, striding down the middle of a street lined with Nazis extending their arms in a
Hitlergruss
—and returning the greeting with a stiff-armed
heil
of his own.
^*
179

Churchill, the strategist and statesman, could not recognize the achievement of Baldwin, the political technician. Macmillan grudgingly admired the feat which left “Baldwin’s authority… immensely strengthened and Churchill’s fallen almost to nothing.” Nicolson, singling out “the supremacy of Baldwin” as the chief consequence of the Simpson affair, quoted “a leading Labour man” as saying to him: “Thank God we have S.B. at the top. No other man could have coped with this.” Nicolson was proud of “how unanimous the House really is in times of crisis. There has been no hysteria and no party politics.” Actually, of course, there had been both: hysteria in the outburst against Churchill, and, in Baldwin’s triumph, Tory gains equivalent to a victory at the polls.
¹⁸⁰

In the end Winston grasped the extent of his debacle and was plunged into gloom. In Paris after the abdication he told Beaverbrook, “My political career is over.” The Beaver replied, “Nonsense,” but later he wrote: “It was only by chance that he was a Member of Parliament when the war broke out.” After the war Bernard Baruch reminded Churchill how, in 1936, “your political career seemed ended, and you wondered whether you should enter some business.” The Albert Hall rally had turned to ashes. When Lord Davies urged Winston to rouse the nation by embarking on a public speaking campaign, Churchill replied that he thought there was a tendency to “overrate the value of public meetings,” that at “the present time nonofficial personages count for very little,” and that “one poor wretch may easily exhaust himself without his even making a ripple upon the current of opinion. If we could get access to the broadcast [
sic
] some progress could be made. All that is very carefully sewn up.”
¹⁸¹

Indeed it was; the appeasers, secure once more, and still convinced that Churchill was a dangerous provocateur, took every opportunity to muzzle him. The cabinet reviewed a BBC plan for a new series of broadcasts on European affairs. Duff Cooper, again a minority of one, thought all knowledgeable Englishmen should be invited to speak; the rest of the cabinet voted to exclude “independent expression of views.” Secretary to the Cabinet Hankey suggested that Winston’s privilege, as a privy councillor, to see copies of Air Ministry replies to his criticisms of the RAF be discontinued. “So far as I can see,” he said, “there is no advantage in continuing this controversy with Mr Churchill.” Baldwin approved, then quickly reversed himself when Winston phoned threatening to circulate his own memoranda “to any of my friends I might think fit.” The government knew how accurate Winston’s information was, though as yet none of them had made it a major issue.
¹⁸²

He knew—and told Inskip—that Britain’s rearmament was falling “ever more into arrears,” and that the country’s weakness in the air was “marked and deplorable.” Lord Rothermere, who had been staying at Berchtesgaden as the Führer’s first overnight foreign guest, wrote Churchill that the Führer “professes great friendship for England but it will be friendship on his terms and not ours.” Rothermere predicted that “even without a great war Britain and France will be practically vassal states before the end of the present decade. The idea that we cannot fight is spreading all over England.” In the
Evening Standard
on February 5, 1937, Winston wrote that fifteen million Czechs now lived “under the fear of violent invasion, with iron conquest in its wake.” There the Goebbels “hate-culture continues, fostered by printing press and broadcast,” and at any time Berlin’s propaganda might be directed against Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, even Britain.
¹⁸³

All this deepened his melancholy. Clementine and fourteen-year-old Mary were staying at the Flexen Hotel in Zürs am Arlberg, skiing in the Austrian Alps. Winston was alone at Chartwell with Deakin, working on
Marlborough
, and, as he wrote his wife, turning out “articles to boil the pot.” Yet they weren’t enough; unpaid bills lay in a heightening pile on his desk. Even the weather was cheerless—bleak and gray, with a heavy, pounding rain which confined him and his easel to one end of the drawing room, where he erected dust sheets to protect the furniture and peered out, painting what he could see. At last it cleared. Cecil Roberts, a journalist and an old acquaintance, called and found him seated by Chartwell’s lake, hunched over, staring at his swans. Winston spoke mournfully of the imminent changing of the guard at No. 10, with Baldwin moving out and Chamberlain in. He said, “There’s no plan of any kind for anything. It is no good. They walk in a fog. Everything is very black, very black.”
¹⁸⁴

And as his debts mounted and his gloom deepened, England’s indebtedness to Stanley Baldwin rose. He had kept that undesirable woman out of Buckingham Palace, and now, in his final deed for his homeland, he joined Chamberlain in telling Tory MPs that if they felt they must deplore totalitarianism and aggression, they must not name names. It was important, he said, to avoid “the danger of referring directly to Germany at a time when we are trying to get on terms with that country.”
¹⁸⁵

Fleet Street cheered. So did Britain. These were men of
peace
.

C
HURCHILL’S
popularity touched bottom in the months following the royal marriage crisis. After the holidays Randolph brought the American writer Virginia Cowles to a Chartwell lunch. Late in life she recalled: “The year 1937 was one of the most painful in Churchill’s life. His influence had fallen to zero, partly because of the Abdication Crisis, partly because Hitler and Mussolini remained quiet and people began to feel that perhaps there would not be a war after all.” Exploring the grounds, she found him “down by the pond, in a torn coat and battered hat, prodding the water with a stick, looking for a pet goldfish which seemed to have disappeared.” The goldfish was retrieved; his prestige in London was not.
¹

On May 27, 1937, six days after the coronation of George VI in Westminster Abbey, Stanley Baldwin resigned, departing, wrote Churchill, “in a glow of public gratitude and esteem.” Harold Nicolson noted in his diary, “No man ever left in such a blaze of affection.” At the abbey the applause for Baldwin had rivaled that for the King. Dawson’s editorial declared that the Dear Vicar had “revealed himself as the authentic spokesman of the nation”—a startling accolade; until then Dawson had reserved that role for
The Times
—and, he continued, the crowds had “cheered him just because they had come to look upon him as the embodiment of their own best interests.” At No. 10 that evening, as the maids packed, the departing P.M. became Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, Knight of the Garter, while his lordship’s ladyship was invested as a Dame of the British Empire. “All hearts seem open at the moment,” S.B. wrote Halifax. “It is wonderful. I feel tired, happy, and at peace.” Churchill, of course, did not join the chorus. Instead he said: “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”
²

History has coupled Baldwin’s name with Neville Chamberlain’s, though they were very different men, leaving No. 10 with different legacies. S.B. approved of appeasement, but passively; unsure of himself in foreign affairs, he waited for other governments—particularly Germany’s—to take the initiative. Chamberlain, never troubled by self-doubt, gave the policy drive. As Churchill later wrote, S.B.’s “vague but nonetheless deep-seated intuition” had been succeeded by the “narrow, sharp-edged efficiency” of an “alert, businesslike, opinionated, and self-confident” man. Macmillan thought the new P.M. “only too sure that he was right on every question. Baldwin’s attitude to problems was largely one of temperament and feeling; Chamberlain approached them with a clear, logical mind. The only trouble was that when he was wrong he was terribly wrong.”
³

Part of Baldwin’s charm had been his air of boundless tolerance; he had refused openly to take offense even when offense was deliberate. Chamberlain, on the other hand, “was resentful of criticism even from his supporters,” Leo Amery wrote in his memoirs. “It seemed to him akin to insubordination, and no team could get on without discipline.” Eden and Duff Cooper, outspoken men with independent minds, were all but ignored in cabinet meetings. At first Eden had been delighted by Chamberlain’s ascent of what Disraeli called “the greasy pole.” He had told Halifax that it would be a great relief “to have a Prime Minister who would take some interest in the foreign side.” Eden was less pleased when he learned that Neville meant to be his own foreign minister, and that when the P.M. did seek advice on foreign affairs, he sought it from two other ministers who had presided over the Foreign Office: Simon and Hoare. Simon, Hoare, Halifax, and Chamberlain himself formed what Fleet Street called “the Big Four.” The lesser three refrained from contradicting Chamberlain or challenging his judgment. “Both by instinct and training,” wrote Hoare, “I was bound to find myself in accord with Chamberlain’s ideas.” In other words, if you wanted to get along, you went along.
⁴

As they veered away from traditional British foreign policies and turned down the garden path, the appeasers seemed wholly unaware of Hitler’s great design, blueprinted in
Mein Kampf
and now emerging as an alarming reality. They preferred to concentrate on political intrigue. Halifax, lord president in Chamberlain’s cabinet, had his eye on Eden’s office at the FO, and Chamberlain was seriously considering the switch, despite the fact that in the first year of the new government Halifax demonstrated how imperfect his grasp of diplomacy was. On November 17, 1937, he became the first member of a British cabinet to call on the Führer at Berchtesgaden, accepting an invitation which had pointedly excluded the French. When the car arrived he remained seated. Viscounts do not open doors for themselves. He saw a man’s black trousers just outside. Assuming they were those of a footman, he muttered impatiently about the delay until the shocked chauffeur whispered hoarsely, “
Der Führer! Der Führer!
” Wrenching the door open, Halifax made matters worse by explaining why he had not done what he ought to have done. Adolf Hitler was the last man to enjoy being mistaken for a servant, and he glared as only he could. The noble lord laughed heartily. It was not a propitious overture. When Halifax reported back to No. 10 the P.M. agreed that the misunderstanding was a great joke, however, and that, for Halifax, was what counted. He told Chamberlain of Hitler’s solution for the turmoil in India: “Shoot Gandhi.” That, too, amused the P.M. It occurred to neither of them that the Führer had been serious.
⁵

Chamberlain was appalled when the House of Commons voted to debate Halifax’s trip. Determined to forge bonds of friendship and trust with the Third Reich, he was dismayed by the possibility that the Führer, who understood neither a free press nor parliamentary debates, might be offended by critics over whom the P.M. had no control. He sent Eden word that he hoped nothing would be said to “upset the dictators.” It was a vain hope; on December 21, 1937, Winston delivered a powerful speech. Twice, he noted, the Nazi foreign minister had been invited to London; twice the invitation had been rejected. Halifax’s mission, Churchill said, was an unseemly response to obduracy and bound to offend the French. He attached “the greatest significance to the relations we have with France.” The security of the two democracies was “founded upon the power of the French Army and the power of the British Fleet.” Noting that since Hitler had become Reich chancellor and Führer “the Germans in Czechoslovakia” had loudly denounced “the form of government under which they have to live,” he expressed the hope that no more Europeans would come under Nazi rule; they would suffer for it—“particularly the Jews.” It was unspeakable, he said, the timbre of his voice rising, that Hitler should plot to exterminate a race from the society “in which they have been born,” or that, from their earliest years, “little children should be segregated, and that they should be exposed to scorn and odium. It is very painful.”
⁶

Chamberlain had been following a different line of thought. Over the holidays he read Stephen Roberts’s
The House That Hitler Built
, a powerful indictment of National Socialism by an eminent Australian scholar, but he wrote his sister Ida: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t. Fortunately I have recently had a ‘scintillation’ on the subject of German negotiations. It has been accepted promptly and even enthusiastically by all to whom I have broached it and we have sent for [Nevile] Henderson [the British ambassador in Berlin] to come and talk it over with us.”
⁷

Churchill watched the evil stirring in central Europe and felt strengthened in his conviction that it was time, and past time, that Britain looked to her defenses. An unimpeachable source had sent him a tentative draft of the Führer’s
Fall Grün
, or Case Green, a plan to invade Czechoslovakia with three Wehrmacht corps in two or three months. Another informant had written Chartwell of the frantic attempts in eastern Europe’s capitals “not to provoke Germany” and how the Nazi hierarchy was “convinced that we would be neutral if they attacked Czechoslovakia.” Still another had provided him with figures on the RAF’s loss of new aircraft due to inexperienced pilots and incompetent, untrained mechanics.
⁸

But Chamberlain, certain there would be no war, saw no future for the armed forces. Churchill was standing against the tide, and on March 16, 1937, he had lost his most prestigious ally in the campaign to waken England when Sir Austen Chamberlain died. “Nothing can soften the loneliness or fill the void,” he wrote Lady Chamberlain. “In this last year I have seen more of him and worked more closely with him that at any time in a political and personal association of vy nearly forty years.”
⁹

As the character of Neville’s foreign policy emerged—alliances with Italian fascism and German Nazism, leaving France out and thus, by washing England’s hands of old quarrels, assuring peace for Britain—ministers would hear less and less of it from the prime minister himself. The new householder at No. 10 rarely received anyone. Visitors appearing at the door were greeted by Sir Horace Wilson, a deferential man of hooded eyes and soft voice who had entered the civil service at the time of the Boer War. As chief industrial adviser to the government he had proved indispensable to Chamberlain during Neville’s six years as chancellor of the Exchequer. On taking over the reins from Baldwin, the new P.M. appointed Sir Horace head of the civil service and head of the Treasury. Although never elected to office and unknown to the British public, Chamberlain’s adviser held more power than most members of the cabinet, and he served his master as Rasputin had served the last czar. By the end of 1937 he would build for himself, writes W. J. Brown, “a more powerful position in Britain than almost anybody since Cardinal Wolsey…. His influence was almost wholly bad…. In all the critical years, when swift, bold, strong action alone could have served our need, Wilson’s temporising, formula-evolving mind reinforced and emphasized the weakness of the Prime Minister.” The Big Four made headlines, but it was Wilson, working through Chamberlain—whose faith in him was boundless—who became the high priest of appeasement.
¹⁰

In a spirit of reconciliation Churchill had volunteered to appear at the Conservative convention to second the nomination of Chamberlain as leader of the party, but it was a wasted gesture. He was never a bearer of grudges; nevertheless, Sir John Colville recalled, he always retained “some bitterness toward ‘the caucus’ which, first under Baldwin and then under Chamberlain,” had kept him “out of office throughout the nineteen-thirties.” His nominating speech, delivered at Caxton Hall on May 31, 1937, was not quite what the Tories had come to hear. After paying ritualistic tribute to Neville’s accomplishments as chancellor in stimulating foreign trade and restoring England’s foreign credit (“a memorable achievement”), he put the Conservatives on notice: he intended to continue on his lonely, unpopular path. The role of leader, he said, had never been interpreted as “dictatorial or despotic”; the House “still survives as the arena of free debate.” He felt confident, he said—though he felt no such thing—that Chamberlain, “as a distinguished Parliamentarian and House of Commons man,” would “not resent honest differences of opinion,” and that party opinion would “not be denied its subordinate but still rightful place in his mind.” In his diary one Tory MP described it as “an able, fiery speech not untouched by bitterness.”
¹¹

Even Nicolson chose not to march under Churchill’s banner. To his wife, Vita, he wrote: “Don’t be worried, my darling. I’m not going to become one of the Winston brigade. My leaders are Anthony [Eden] and Malcolm [MacDonald].” Eden’s following outmatched Churchill’s, still limited to Boothby, Bracken, and Duncan Sandys, Winston’s son-in-law since his 1935 marriage to Diana.
¹²

T
here can be little doubt that Chamberlain was the choice not only of Conservative MPs but of the general public, and that Churchill was seen as a scaremonger. Sir John Reith saw to it that he was seldom heard over the BBC, and in that Reith had the full backing of the prime minister; twice in one week Horace Wilson summoned Reith to No. 10 to warn him that Chamberlain disapproved of broadcasting excerpts from parliamentary speeches critical of the government. Excerpts in which the P.M. chided his critics were another matter. Like all evangelists he observed two standards, arrogating all power to himself when his own cabinet disagreed with him, and, whenever possible, gagging eloquent critics.
¹³
But he could never have got away with it had his countrymen disagreed. The voices of 1930s appeasement fall strangely on the ear today; at the time a consensus of Englishmen not only thought them sensible, but those who argued otherwise were scorned, vilified, and even accused of treason. That same year British crowds packed cinemas to see Frank Capra’s
Lost Horizon
, based on the novel by James Hilton. Early in the film the protagonist, Robert Conway—memorably played by Ronald Colman—bitterly reproaches himself for his flawed character. As a pacifist he had believed that Great Britain should dismantle her army, scuttle the Royal Navy, destroy all RAF bombers and fighter planes, and beat her swords into plowshares. Should hostile troops arrive on English soil, he had argued, they should be greeted politely and asked what they wanted, and be immediately given it. But when he was appointed foreign secretary with extraordinary powers, his nerve had failed him. When the movie was shown to Tommies and GIs in the early 1940s it required heavy editing. The uniformed audiences knew what Hitler would have done had he stumbled upon Shangri-La, whose inhabitants were clearly non-Aryan.