The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (230 page)

The P.M. had been “pleasantly tired” during the flight home, but once he saw the size of the crowd awaiting him at Heston Airport, he felt as though he had shed fifty years. To his entourage he seemed as excited and energetic as a youth returning from an adventure. They cheered. He read his three pitiful paragraphs, and they cheered louder, shouting, “Good old Neville!” and singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” Then a courier wearing royal livery appeared and handed him a message from the King, asking him to come straight to Buckingham Palace, “so that I can express to you personally my most heartfelt congratulations…. In the meantime, this letter brings the warmest of welcomes to one who, by his patience and determination, has earned the lasting gratitude of his fellow-countrymen throughout the Empire.” Afterward, Neville wrote Ida: “Even the descriptions of the papers give no idea of the scenes in the streets as I drove from Heston to the Palace. They were lined from one end to the other with people of every class, shouting themselves hoarse, leaping on the running board, banging on the windows, and thrusting their hands into the car to be shaken.”
²⁷⁸

But it was in Downing Street that the adulation peaked, and there—though it was not immediately obvious to the crowd—Chamberlain over-reached himself. In the lore of every nation there are scenes, phrases, and deeds which live in the popular imagination. But an event, a speech, or a legend can never be repeated, for part of its appeal is that it is unique. That is why there cannot be another Arthur, another Joan of Arc, another Lincoln. It also explains why Chamberlain’s last public act on his day of glory was a blunder.

Benjamin Disraeli’s supreme diplomatic triumph came in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin. Unlike Chamberlain’s Munich, Berlin was a genuine contribution to European peace. The states of eastern Europe were at each other’s throats; the Russian diplomats were bumbling from bad to worse; even Bismarck couldn’t broker a general settlement. Disraeli could and did. His mastery of divergent cultures permitted him to take the map apart and rebuild it, throttling several wars before they could break out and ending a full-fledged conflict between the Russians and the Turks. The memory of that feat sixty years earlier was on many minds that fall evening in 1938, including Chamberlain’s. He wrote his sister that he spoke to the great crowd below “from the same window, I believe, as that from which Dizzy announced peace with honour 60 years ago.” (He was wrong; Disraeli’s declaration was made in the House of Commons on July 16, 1878.) Now his wife said, “Neville, go up to the window and repeat history by saying peace in our time.” He replied icily, “No, I do not do that kind of thing.” Then he did it. Waving the piece of paper he and Hitler had signed, he called to the dense throng below: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.” On the whole, public men are wise to avoid extravagant predictions. Very soon Chamberlain would have reason to regret this one.
²⁷⁹

Meanwhile, however, the combers of admiration and praise continued to break at his feet. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield,”
The Times
trumpeted, “has been adorned with nobler laurels.”
Paris-Soir
offered him “a corner of French soil” where he could cast for trout, his favorite sport, than which “there could be no more fruitful image of peace.” Fifty Englishmen wrote to Printing House Square, calling for a national fund in Chamberlain’s honor. Those who had cheered his departure for Munich felt vindicated. Nicolson wrote of an exchange with Margot Asquith. She had said: “Now, Harold, you must agree that he is a great man.” He replied, “Not at all.” “You are as bad as Violet,” she snapped; “he is the greatest Englishman that ever lived.” Yet even Nicolson confessed in his diary that he momentarily felt “an immense sense of
physical
relief, in that I shall not be afraid tonight of the German bombs.”
²⁸⁰

But, he added “my moral anxieties are in no way diminished.” After the cheering, a few thoughtful men, in the quietude of reflection, read the terms of Munich and were troubled. Halifax had sensed what was coming; in the triumphant ride from Heston he had astounded the prime minister by suggesting that he form a national government, bringing Churchill and Eden back and inviting Labour to join. Chamberlain replied that he would “think it over,” but there is no evidence that he did. Lord Lloyd, who had been in the roaring throng outside No. 10, remembered feeling “elated” until Chamberlain said “peace with honor.” Then “my heart sank; it was the worst possible choice of words, for I realized that he had sold honor to buy peace.”
²⁸¹

The most sensational defection from Chamberlain’s entrenched majority was that of his first lord of the Admiralty, Alfred Duff Cooper, “the pioneer,” Conservative backbencher Vyvyan Adams called him, “along the nation’s way back from hysteria to reason.” Revolted by Chamberlain’s fawning over Hitler, his sellout of the Czechs, and his smug pride in the piece of trumpery he and Hitler had signed, on Saturday, October 1, the day after the prime minister’s return, Cooper resigned. Chamberlain, Duff Cooper wrote, was “as glad to be rid of me as I was determined to go.” Lady Diana Cooper recalled that she “telephoned the news to Winston. His voice was broken with emotion. I could hear him cry.” Churchill exulted that “one minister alone stood forth…. At the moment of Mr. Chamberlain’s overwhelming mastery of public opinion, he thrust his way through the exulting throng to declare his total disagreement with its leader.”
²⁸²

The first doubts were struggling to the surface, but it was too soon for them to coalesce. Although some MPs were already wrestling with their consciences, they would have to put themselves on record in just five days, the evening of October 5, at the close of a three-day debate, when the issue before them would be: “That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace.” The vote was never in doubt, with the huge Conservative margin Baldwin had won three years earlier. But even those Conservatives who had remained doggedly faithful to their leader were becoming troubled. After the vote, Sir Alan Herbert, an independent member, wrote: “My soul revolted at the thought of another, and, I was convinced by many expert opinions, a much worse war…. But, ‘wishful thinker,’ ‘anxious hoper,’ ‘old soldier,’ or ‘Christian believer’—what you will—I wanted Mr. Chamberlain to be right, and keep the peace successfully…. I voted sadly for Munich; and the whole thing made me ill.”

O
N
the Saturday before Parliament’s Munich debate, Winston was at Chartwell, vigorously slapping bricks into place and awaiting a visitor, a twenty-six-year-old BBC producer, unknown then but destined to become infamous in the early 1950s. He was Guy Burgess, who with Kim Philby and Donald Maclean—all three upper class, all Cambridge men—would be cleared to review the U.S. government’s most sensitive documents, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s daily traffic and dispatches from Korea. In fact they would be Soviet intelligence agents. Burgess’s notoriety lay far in the future that sunbright morning, however, when Churchill, in a blue boilersuit (a forerunner of his wartime “siren suit”), left his bricks to greet his visitor, a trowel still in one hand. The meeting was purposeless; Winston had been scheduled to give BBC listeners a half-hour talk on the Mediterranean, but when the Czech crisis erupted he had asked that the program be canceled. Burgess was keen to meet him anyhow, however, and Churchill, feeling that was the least he could do, had agreed.

In the beginning he was gruff. He complained, Burgess recollected afterward, that he had been “very badly treated in the matter of political broadcasts and that he was always muzzled by the BBC…. He went on to say that he would be even more muzzled in the future, since the BBC seemed to have passed under the control of the Government.” According to Burgess, Winston said he had just received a message from Beneš—he always called him “Herr Beans”—asking for his “advice and assistance.” But, he asked, “what answer shall I give?—for answer I shall and must…. Here am I, an old man without power and without party. What advice can I give, what assistance can I proffer?” Burgess stammered that he could offer his eloquence. Pleased, Winston said: “My eloquence! Ah, yes… that Herr Beans can rely on in full and indeed”—he paused and winked—“some would say in overbounding measure. That I can offer him. But what else, Mr. Burgess, what else can I offer him?” Burgess, usually garrulous, was tongue-tied. Moment succeeded moment, but he could think of nothing to say. He saw a great man, the scourge of fascism, caged by frustration. Then Churchill spoke. “You are silent, Mr. Burgess. You are rightly silent. What else can I offer Herr Beans? Only one thing: my only son, Randolph, who is already training to be an officer.”
¹

Throughout 1938 Churchill’s warnings had grown more and more persistent, and less and less effective. His mots were seldom passed along now because his targets, the “Men of Munich,” as Fleet Street called them, were believed to have prevented a general European war. In almost any gathering, it would have been indiscreet to remark: “Have you heard what Winston says about Neville? ‘In the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender.’ ” Or: “Churchill says the Government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war, too.” Yet some hit home. Malcolm MacDonald, son of Ramsay and minister for the colonies and Dominions under Chamberlain, recalls with discomfort but also amusement how, during a speech on the future of Palestine, he was moved to say that “I cannot remember a time when I was not told stories of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Prince of Peace.” And as he paused for breath Churchill muttered: “I always thought he was born in Birmingham.”
²

At 3:34
P.M.
on Monday, October 3, 1938, Parliament opened its debate on the Munich Agreement. In the observance of custom, Duff Cooper, as a resigning minister, spoke first. “The Prime Minister,” he said, “has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist…. We have taken away the defences of Czechoslovakia in the same breath as we have guaranteed them, as though you were to deal a man a mortal blow and at the same time insure his life.”

Chamberlain, he noted, attached “considerable importance” to the document he and Hitler had signed at Munich. “But,” he asked, “what do those words mean? Do they mean that Herr Hitler will take ‘no’ for an answer? He has never taken it yet. Or do they mean that he believes that he will get away with this, as he has got away with everything else, without fighting, by well-timed bluff, bluster and blackmail? Otherwise it means very little.” Duff Cooper ended: “I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter. I have retained something which is to me of great value. I can still walk about the world with my head erect.”
³

The House was deeply moved by Cooper’s resignation speech. Antony Winn, the
Times
lobby correspondent, reported that it had been well received. Dawson, who hadn’t been there, tore up Winn’s piece and wrote an account of his own, dismissing the speech as “a damp squib,” and headed the story “From our lobby correspondent.” Winn resigned.
⁴

The prime minister, following Duff Cooper, paid ritualistic tribute to him and ignored his arguments. Chamberlain had already set forth his own views to the cabinet earlier in the day, and the kindest interpretation of his position is that he had forgotten he was prime minister and thought himself once more watchdog of the Treasury. Ever since his stewardship as chancellor of the Exchequer, he had told the cabinet, he had been haunted by the possibility that “the burden of armaments might break our backs.” Therefore he had sought “to resolve the causes… responsible for the armaments race.” Now, after his agreement with the German führer, England was in “a more hopeful position.” The next steps would be further agreements “which would stop the arms race.” The effort to strengthen the country’s defenses should proceed, but that was “not the same thing as to say that as a thank offering for the present détente we should at once embark on a great increase in our armaments programme.” His goal, he now told the House, had been “to work for the pacification of Europe, for the removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air. The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles.” Czechoslovakia had been “the latest and perhaps the most dangerous” of these obstacles, but “now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.”
⁵

The House did not hear him in silence. When he spoke proudly of the release by the Czechs of Sudetendeutsche prisoners, one MP called: “What about the kidnapped Czechs?” When he spoke of his “profound feeling of sympathy” for Czechoslovakia, several members cried, “Shame!” He replied: “I have done nothing to be ashamed of. Let those who have, hang their heads. We must feel profound sympathy for a small and gallant nation in the hour of their national grief and loss.” A backbencher interrupted him: “It is an insult to say it.” He told the House that “the real triumph” of Munich “is that it has shown that representatives of four great Powers can find it possible to agree on a way of carrying out a difficult and delicate operation by discussion instead of by force of arms, and thereby they have averted a catastrophe which would have ended civilisation as we have known it.”
⁶

Watching the prime minister, Harold Nicolson thought: “He is obviously tired and irritable and the speech does not go down well. Then up gets Anthony Eden. I felt at first that he was not coming out strongly enough, but he was getting the House on his side before opening the attack. When it came, it was superb.” Eden doubted that “the events of the last few days… constitute the beginning of better things, as my right honorable friend [Chamberlain] hopes.” Instead, he believed, “they only give us a breathing space, perhaps of six months or less, before the next crisis is upon us.”
⁷

Attlee, coming next, declared that they were “in the midst of a tragedy. We have felt humiliation. This has not been a victory for reason and humanity. It has been a victory for brute force.” Sinclair noted that the P.M. had called the Munich terms a victory for self-determination; it was, he said, “a plain travesty of self-determination,” because although the areas ceded were inhabited by “a substantial minority” of Germans, they
were
a minority, and many of them wanted no part of the Reich. The “irruption of German troops,” he predicted, accurately, “will sweep before them a whole crowd of refugees who certainly would have been in favour of remaining in those territories. There is no justice or self-determination about that.” Attacks on the settlement by Amery, Macmillan, and Bracken followed.
⁸

Churchill sat, silent and immobile, for nearly three days of debate. He was scheduled to speak Wednesday after Sir John Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wound up for the government. Simon declared that Chamberlain would be vindicated by time: “It can only be for history to decide hereafter whether the things done in Munich the other day lead… to better things, or whether the prognostications of increasing evil will prove to be justified.” The crisis, he said, had been a splendid experience for the British people. Next time they would know precisely what to do. The Munich terms were “a vast improvement over the Godesberg Memorandum,” he insisted. Everyone in the chamber knew that was untrue, and he finally acknowledged that His Majesty’s Government was “deeply conscious today that while war has been avoided, Herr Hitler has again achieved the substance of his immediate and declared aim without declaring war.”
⁹

It was 5:10
P.M.
when the Speaker recognized Churchill, and as Winston rose the mood of the House resembled that of Spaniards when the bull lunges into the arena. Before he had spoken a dozen words the turmoil began, and because nothing he said was conciliatory, it continued throughout the forty-nine minutes of his speech, led by Nancy Astor’s cries of “Rude! Rude!” Sweeping the House with a hard stare, chin down, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, feet solidly planted far apart, he declared that he would begin by saying “the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing…. We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and… France has suffered even more than we have.” Nancy called out, “Nonsense,” and he whirled on her: “When the Noble Lady cries ‘Nonsense’ she could not have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer admit in his illuminating and comprehensive speech just now that… the utmost… the Prime Minister has been able to secure by all his immense exertions, by all the great efforts and mobilisation which took place in this country, and by all the anguish and strain through which we have passed in this country, the utmost he has been able to gain has been—” He was interrupted by cries of “Peace!” “… the utmost he has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.” He saw no point in distinguishing between the positions reached at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich. “They will be very simply epitomized, if the House will permit me to vary the metaphor. One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally, the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence and the rest in promises of good will for the future.” The terms Chamberlain had brought back with him could have been reached “through the ordinary diplomatic channels at any time during the summer. And I will say this, that I believe the Czechs, left to themselves and told they were going to get no help from the Western Powers, would have been able to make better terms than they have got.”

He reviewed Hitler’s successive aggressions and why all efforts to check him had failed: “There can never be absolute certainty that there will be a fight if one side is determined that it will give way completely.” He himself had “always held the view that the maintenance of peace depends upon the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor, coupled with a sincere effort to redress grievances.” France and Britain—“especially if they had maintained a close contact with Russia, which certainly was not done”—could have influenced the “smaller States of Europe, and I believe they could have determined the attitude of Poland.” Indeed, their impact would have been felt in the Reich, giving “strength to all that intense desire for peace which the helpless German masses share with their British and French fellow men, and which, as we have been reminded, found a passionate and rarely permitted vent in the joyous manifestations with which the Prime Minister was acclaimed in Europe.”

Alliances and deterrents “of Powers, great and small, ready to stand firm upon the front of law and for the ordered remedy of grievances… might well have been effective.” He did not “think it fair to charge those who wished to see this course followed, and followed consistently and resolutely, with having wished for immediate war. Between submission and immediate war there was this third alternative, which gave a hope not only of peace but of justice.” Naturally, for such a policy to succeed, Britain “should declare straight out and a long time beforehand that she would, with others, join to defend Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression. His Majesty’s Government refused to give that guarantee when it would have saved the situation, yet in the end they gave it when it was too late, and now, for the future, they renew it when they have not the slightest power to make it good.

Plebiscites, he said, as defined in Hitler’s Munich office, could not “amount in the slightest degree to a verdict of self-determination. It is a fraud and a farce to invoke that name. We in this country, as in other liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian States who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds.” In any event “this particular block of land, this mass of human beings to be handed over, has never expressed the desire to go under Nazi rule. I do not believe that even now, if their opinion could be asked, they would exercise such an option.”