The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (234 page)

This letter reached her in Barbados. The year just passed, so disastrous for British diplomacy, had also been wobbly for her. A succession of minor ailments discouraged activity, and in July she had spent nearly three weeks alone in the French Pyrenees “taking the cure.” In Paris she had broken her toe, a minor affliction but painful and slow to heal. Then came Munich and Winston’s denunciation of it. Early in their marriage, as the wife of a politician who took unpopular stands, she had known that part of the price he paid—social opprobrium—must be shared by her. At first, when old acquaintances crossed the street to avoid greeting her, she had been shocked and hurt. She had been young and resilient then, however; tempered by her own anger, she had learned to take such shabby partisanship in her stride. It had seemed a small sacrifice; she shared her husband’s convictions and was proud to be his wife. The pride was still there, but she was older now, and slights were harder to bear. Her spirits were at their lowest when deliverance, or what looked like it, appeared in the form of an invitation from Lord Moyne, suggesting that she join him and his friends for another voyage on the
Rosaura
, this time in the Caribbean. She loved the yacht and loved the idyllic islands, but her hopes of recapturing the ecstasy of their South Seas cruise four years earlier were crushed. As an unreconstructed Liberal she was outraged by conditions in the British West Indies. “These islands,” she wrote Winston, “are beautiful in themselves but have been desecrated & fouled by man.” Starchy food kept the population “alive but undernourished—eighty percent of the population is illegitimate, seventy percent (in several islands) have syphilis and yaws.” There was no sanitation of any sort, not even earth latrines. “And this,” she bitterly concluded, “is a sample of the British Empire upon which the sun never sets.”
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She felt he was neglecting her. In the past, when they were parted he had sent her long, clever holographs, decorated with drawings of pigs or pug dogs. Now, preoccupied with his manuscripts, avalanches of mail, and the recurring crises in Parliament, he dictated notes or cables. She responded tartly: “
Please
don’t telegraph—I hate telegrams just saying ‘all well rainy weather love Winston.’ ” The news he did send was worse than none: an obituary of Sir Sidney Peel, who had fallen in love with her when she was eighteen, just after the turn of the century. She had nearly married him; twice they had been secretly engaged. Winston commented: “Many are dying that I knew when we were young. It is quite astonishing to reach the end of life & feel just as you did fifty years before. One must always hope for a sudden end, before faculties decay.” By the time the
Rosaura
approached Nelson’s old dockyard on Antigua, Clemmie was plainly homesick. “I miss you & Mary & home terribly,” she wrote, “& although it is a boon to miss the English Winter & to bask in this warmth, I really think I should come home—only that I hope this prolonged voyage in warm weather will really set me up in health—I do not yet feel very strong, but I am sure I shall.”
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She found strength when, following the news and reading Winston’s letters—now frequent, long, and penitent—she realized how lonely and embattled he must be. In the February 9
Daily Telegraph
he had ruefully conceded that support for a firm stand against Nazi aggression was still weak, that “ripples of optimism” to the contrary were, “alas,” based on “insufficient justifications.” He pointed out that the press had reported long troop trains passing through Vienna and Munich and asked “What is their destination? What is their purpose?” Obviously, the British public didn’t care. Mussolini was mobilizing for an invasion of Albania, and Hitler had announced that Germany would support the Duce: “Indeed, it is clear that the German dictator could not afford to witness the downfall of his Italian colleague.”

Nevertheless, England remained lethargic. In an attempt to rouse it, he had left his Disraeli desk for a whirlwind lecture tour, but his audiences had been small and tepid. To a friend he wrote: “Nothing but the terrible teaching of experience will affect this all-powerful, supine Government. The worst of it is that by the time they are convinced, or replaced, our own position will be frightfully weakened.” Hitler appeared determined to fight on one issue or another; it hardly seemed to matter which. And each fresh concession by Chamberlain and Halifax debilitated Britain as the inevitable showdown approached.
⁴³

In the middle of one letter home Clementine blurted out, “O Winston, are we drifting into War?” England, it seemed, yearning for peace and all but defenseless, was nevertheless tottering toward the brink “without the wit to avoid it or the will to prepare for it.” Then she scrawled across the page: “God bless you my darling.” Thus clouds were gathering within her, and sooner or later Clementine’s overcast moods led to an outburst. One that entered Churchill family lore occurred when Moyne and his guests were listening to a BBC political broadcast. The speaker was vehemently pro-appeasement—Sir John Reith banned any arguments from the other side—and when Churchill was attacked by name, Lady Vera Broughton, another member of the party, cried: “Hear, Hear!” Clementine awaited a conciliatory word from her host, but he compressed his lips and remained silent. That put the wind in her sails. She flew to her cabin, wrote him a note of explanation, and packed. Lady Broughton arrived, begging Clemmie to stay, in vain; Winston Churchill had been insulted, and Mrs. Winston Churchill would accept no apologies. Ashore, she booked a berth on the
Cuba
, which was sailing for England in the morning.
⁴⁴

As she entered Chartwell’s front hall she cried their old mating call: “Wot!” And from deep within the mansion came the delighted echo: “
Wot!
” He embraced her, heard her story with pride and pleasure, described his progress on the manuscript, and then broke the news, as gently as possible, of a new attempt to expel him from Parliament. This second campaign, four months after the first, was again led by Thornton-Kemsley. But “Peace for our time,” which had pealed across the land then, now had a hollow ring. Winston knew he had but to hire a hall or two, give tongue to what was in his heart, and his constituents would come gamboling to him.

That was his strategy, and it worked, first in Chigwell, on March 10, 1939, and then at Waltham Abbey four days later. He was in fine, fiery form at Chigwell, repeating his indictment of Munich (“I do not withdraw a single word”), declaring that he would “cordially support” larger defense appropriations, approved of a recent Chamberlain call at the Soviet embassy “to show the world” that Britain was prepared to cooperate with Moscow “so long as Russia continues to show herself an active friend to peace,” and—this was mendacious—saying, “I have been out of office for ten years, but I am more contented with the work I have done in these past five years as an Independent Conservative than of any other part of my public life.” He asked them: “What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people?”
⁴⁵

Winston was confident, and no wonder. In the months following Munich, Hitler himself had entered the fray on behalf of those working against Churchill. No doubt the Führer had felt provoked: “When you look long into an abyss,” Nietzsche wrote, “the abyss also looks into you.” Churchill had been glaring at the Reich since the birth of the Nazi regime, and as the Führer looked up and their eyes locked, staring across the North Sea, Hitler impulsively decided to hound his gadfly from public life. The Führer had been nettled by the attempts of Britons, and particularly Winston in his syndicated columns, to arouse anti-Nazi Germans. Speaking at Weimar he said: “If Mr. Churchill had less to do with traitors and more with Germans, he would see how mad his talk is, for I can assure this man, who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Germany opposed to the régime—only the force of the National Socialist movement, its leaders and its followers in arms.” If Churchill returned to office, he predicted that his “aim would be to unleash [
loslassen
] at once a new world war against Germany.”
⁴⁶

Churchill immediately issued a statement expressing surprise that “the head of a great State” should attack private members of Parliament “who hold no official position and who are not even leaders of parties.” He said: “Such action on his part can only enhance any influence they may have, because their fellow countrymen have long been able to form their own opinions about them, and really do not need foreign guidance.” As A. J. P. Taylor puts it, Hitler tried to “split British opinion.” Assuming that Englishmen could be manipulated like Germans, he believed that advocacy of British rearmament would raise opposition among England’s pro-Germans—whose number he vastly exaggerated, and whom he expected to sway by denouncing Winston as a “warmonger” (“
Kriegshetzer
”). This, he thought, would be Churchill’s undoing. It was a
kolossal
error. The voters, in Taylor’s words, “resented Hitler’s interference in their affairs. They believed in non-interference. Hitler could do what he liked in Eastern Europe; he could demolish Czechoslovakia or invade the Ukraine. But he must leave British politicians alone.” His demands that Churchill be routed gave the English
Kriegshetzers
, Taylor observes, “a popularity which they could not have won for themselves.”
⁴⁷

One wonders who, or what, was behind the challenges to Churchill. Obscure backbenchers are voted in and out of the House, but no one could remember a concerted attempt to unseat an eminent statesman known and respected in every European capital. There was gossip of German money being distributed among Winston’s critics, but this lurid version is wholly without evidence. Thornton-Kemsley hinted at a more plausible source of support when he said that unless Winston was prepared to work with “our great Prime Minister, he ought no longer to shelter under the goodwill and name which attaches to a great Party.” Later he added: “It was made clear to me that the growing ‘revolt’ in the Epping Division… was welcomed in high places.”
⁴⁸

How high he did not say, but it was hardly a secret that the P.M. would be glad to see his eloquent critic retired; he had written his sister that Winston was “carrying on a regular campaign against me with the aid of [Jan] Masaryk, the Czech minister. They, of course, are totally unaware of my knowledge of their proceedings.” He said he had “information of their doings & sayings which for the nth time demonstrated how completely Winston can deceive himself when he wants to, & how utterly credulous a foreigner can be when he is told the things he wants to hear.” It seems unlikely that Chamberlain would instigate a plot against Churchill, but it is even unlikelier that Tories “in high places” would encourage Thornton-Kemsley without the knowledge and even the support of the party’s national leader. Viewed in any light, the effort to unseat Churchill is depressing, a symptom of the squalid political intrigues which afflicted England as her hour of peril approached—and a direct consequence, ironically, of a selfless but mindless crusade for peace.
⁴⁹

Entering Waltham Abbey for his speech on March 14, Winston was handed a report that Nazi troops were massing along the frontiers of mutilated Czechoslovakia. At the lectern he departed from his notes to say: “The Czechoslovakian Republic is being broken up before our eyes. They are being completely absorbed; and not until the Nazi shadow has finally been lifted from Europe—as lifted I am sure it will eventually be—not until then will Czechoslovakia and ancient Bohemia again march into freedom.” But, he added, to suppose that this new aggression did not threaten England was “a profound illusion.” Although Britain could “do nothing to stop it,” Britons would suffer “on a very great scale.” Not only would they have to make financial sacrifices, which “would have been unnecessary if a firm resolve had been taken at an earlier stage,” but English lives would be forfeit, and for the same reason.
⁵⁰

Late that night, after a BBC broadcast announced that Hitler had annexed Bohemia, Churchill—who was at the time writing about the late seventeenth century—told his son: “It’s hard to take one’s attention off the events of today and concentrate on the reign of James II—but I’m going to do it.” It was perhaps the most remarkable example of his genius for concentration. Randolph stared in astonishment as his father rose and plodded up the stairs to his study. The reports were, in fact, extraordinary, and the following day they were confirmed. Barely three years earlier, in the
Friedensrede
following his Rhineland coup, the Führer of the Third Reich had assured the world that he had “no territorial demands” to make in Europe, and that “Germany will never break the peace!” At Munich he had told Chamberlain that he wanted no Czechs in his realm and had even joined the British prime minister in guaranteeing the frontiers of the truncated Czech state. Now, on March 15, he was entering its capital at the head of his troops, standing erect in an open Mercedes, beaming and extending a stiff-armed
Hitlergruss
. But here, unlike Vienna and the Sudetenland, few arms rose in response. The Czechs were stunned. So was all Europe. So was Neville Chamberlain.
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