The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (241 page)

W
hat the prime minister failed to grasp was that with all Europe rushing headlong into a maelstrom, the readings on traditional political barometers were meaningless. Normally, crises in public life peaked and passed, the issues quickly forgotten. Instead, all spring and throughout the summer Churchill and Chamberlain moved in elegant counterpoint, as though cast in one of those skillfully plotted Wilkie Collins novels in which the narrative moves among several sets of characters, some evil, some benign, with the reader unaware of which will win, or how. But among the British public in 1939 there was little doubt about which of the duelists aroused the greater enthusiasm. All over England, on posters, billboards, and cartoons, the theme echoed:
Winston must come back
.

The prime minister’s manner toward Churchill was unchanged—civility masking hostility. This disturbed Churchill. It was not in the parliamentary tradition; Winston’s differences with Neville’s father had been many and had cut deep, yet outside the House chamber they had been on good terms, and had frequently dined together. The prime minister’s coldness toward him derived in part from the reversal of their standing in the public opinion polls. Winston’s popularity was rising; one letter to
The Times
, which even Dawson hadn’t dared suppress, was signed by 375 professors, faculty members of every British university, “strongly urging” Churchill’s appointment to an important cabinet post.

It is impossible to say precisely when the yearning for Churchill first took hold, but even before Prague the turning toward him had begun. His foreign policy views had been set forth in the February 25, 1939, issue of
Picture Post
, which predicted that “the greatest moment of his life is still to come.” A second piece trumpeting him had appeared in the March 4
Picture Post
, and in a third, on March 11, Churchill answered thirteen questions put to him by the magazine’s editor, calling for a new government and cabinet seats for Labour. Newspapers ran letters or even editorials calling him “The Only Man”; an
Evening Advertiser
cartoon had depicted him camping outside No. 10, awaiting appointment as minister of supply.

By April demands that he be brought into the government were being published almost daily. On Friday, April 21, the
Daily Telegraph
ran an especially poignant one from an Oxford don whose father had been killed at Gallipoli. Saturday’s
Evening News
called for his appointment “as soon as possible,” and the day after that the
Sunday Pictorial
devoted its first two pages to Churchill, telling readers: “The jealousy and suspicion of others compel him to stand idly aside.” On Tuesday the editor wired Chartwell: “Huge mail has reached me this morning following my Churchill article Sunday. Letters are overwhelmingly in your favour.” Wednesday he sent word that he had received 2,400 responses from subscribers, 97 percent agreeing that Winston must return to office. Of the majority, he wrote: “I have never known such an unqualified response.” They came from all classes: ex-soldiers, men still in uniform, and especially the young. Typical comments, he said, were “No more boot-licking to Hitler,” and “We want a strong man who is not afraid.” The editor ended: “Your name on our street placards aroused tremendous interest, and there is not the slightest doubt of the overwhelming view of the country on this issue.”
¹³⁴

“
WE NEED CHURCHILL
” cried a page-one headline in
Time and Tide
on May 6. Four days later the
News Chronicle
published the results of a straw vote reporting that 56 percent of those polled wanted Winston in the cabinet, 26 percent were opposed, and 18 percent expressed no opinion. Horace Wilson destroyed No. 10’s copy of this edition before it reached the prime minister’s desk. It was a futile gesture; there was no way to keep Chamberlain ignorant of the massive shift in Fleet Street’s coverage of Churchill. After Munich speeches praising him had frequently gone unreported; all were covered now, and often published on front pages. On July 1 Archibald Sinclair told an enthusiastic audience that the prime minister should bring Churchill and Eden into his “inner counsels.” The
Yorkshire Post
carried a full account of the meeting. The
Star
assumed Winston’s appointment to office—“Mr Chamberlain will shortly strengthen his Cabinet. It is expected that he will invite Mr Churchill to join the Government”—and reported that Margesson, taking “soundings” among Tory backbenchers, had found that “in nearly every case the Chief Whip was told that the appointment of Mr Churchill to one of the key posts in the Cabinet would create fresh confidence.” The
Sunday Graphic
on July 2 predicted that Churchill would be named first lord of the Admiralty.
¹³⁵

Editorials became bolder. The
Observer
thought it incredible that Churchill, with “so firm a grasp of European politics,” should be excluded from office, adding that the phenomenon “must be as bewildering to foreigners as it is regrettable to most of his own countrymen.” On July 3 the
Manchester Guardian
urged the prime minister to put patriotism above personal rancor and use Winston’s gifts “in any capacity,” because England needed “Ministers of vision and power as well as administrators.” The
Daily Telegraph
agreed. That same week calls for Churchill’s return to office appeared in the
Daily Mirror
, the
Evening News
, the
News Chronicle
, and even the
Daily Worker
, on the ground that Churchill had been “the outstanding opponent of the ‘Munich policy.’ ” The
Mirror
described Winston as “the most trusted statesman in Britain… the watchdog of Britain’s safety. For years he warned us of dangers which have now become terrible realities. For years he pressed for the policy of
STRENGTH
, which the whole nation now supports.” The following day the
Daily Mail
and the
Evening Standard
joined the recruits; so, on July 7, did the
Spectator
, declaring that giving Churchill and Eden seats at the cabinet table would constitute “a decisive contribution to our cause” and might persuade Hitler to pause before sending his troops into yet another country.
¹³⁶

“Oh Winston dear,” Maxine Elliott wrote from the Riviera, “was there ever such a triumph for a public man! Press and public alike hotly demanding its one man who has told them the frightening truth all these years and now they run to him to try and pull their burning chestnuts out of the fire.” Leo Amery wrote him that he hoped the newspaper push “will result in your being brought in to the Government,” and Stafford Cripps asked: “Could you not make a public statement… stating your preparedness to give your services to the country…. I feel it would make a tremendous impact just now on the country and would intensify enormously the demand that is growing everywhere for your inclusion in the Government.”
¹³⁷

But Churchill replied that he was “quite sure that any such demarche would weaken me in any discussion I might have to have with the gentleman in question.” And he was right. In Hoare’s words, Chamberlain “resented outside pressure. The more, therefore, the Press clamoured for Churchill’s inclusion, the less likely he was to take any action.” Colin Coote at
The Times
—Winston called him his “friend in the enemy’s camp”—wrote Boothby that the “agitation” favoring Churchill would fail: “I will offer you a small bet that the other Mr. C. won’t listen to it for a moment; for his motto is still peace at any price except loss of office, and he is rightly sure that the inclusion of Winston means his own proximate exclusion.”
¹³⁸

Probably nothing would have stopped Hitler at this point. By the first anniversary of Munich he would have 7,188,000 Germans in Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe uniforms. Orders for the destruction of Poland had been cut, and although rebel generals were still scheming against him, five years would pass before they made their move. But Winston was the last Englishman the Führer wanted in office. In the early summer of 1939 the Foreign Office received an account of a conversation between James Marshall-Cornwall, a British general, and Count Schwerin von Krosigk, Reich finance minister and a member of the German cabinet. Krosigk had told the general that Chamberlain should “take Winston Churchill into the Cabinet. Churchill is the only Englishman Hitler is afraid of.” Marshall-Cornwall added that Krosigk had said that Hitler “does not take the PM and Lord Halifax seriously, but he places Churchill in the same category as Roosevelt. The mere fact of giving him a leading ministerial post would convince Hitler that you really mean to stand up to him.”
¹³⁹

But Chamberlain still did not believe in standing up to him. All evidence to the contrary, he remained convinced that if the Führer were treated with generosity, he could become Britain’s best friend. Therefore Churchill remained in Coventry. Lord Camrose, proprietor of the
Daily Telegraph
, called at No. 10 to state the case for Winston. The press lord did not represent himself alone. He spoke for a select group of the most astute and distinguished Conservatives and independents, all of them known to Chamberlain and most of them friends of his. One of them was Harold Nicolson, a disaffected National Labour member, and on June 30, four days before Camrose’s meeting with the P.M., he had noted in his diary: “The vital thing is to bring into the Cabinet people who are known abroad to be pledged to a policy of resistance and whose willingness to enter the Cabinet would show to the whole world that there can be no further Munichs.” Briefing Camrose, the group had discussed “how far the Prime Minister would be opposed to bringing in Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden…. Camrose says that Winston is the vital figure…. The difficulty is that the Prime Minister himself, as well as Hoare and Simon, are terrified of Winston and will put up the strongest resistance. It would be much easier for them to accept Anthony, Amery or Duff Cooper.” Camrose, however, was adamant. “You must have Winston,” he said, and a majority of the group agreed.
¹⁴⁰

That was the centerpiece of the case he put to Chamberlain. According to Camrose’s account, the prime minister replied that “while he appreciated Churchill’s ability, his own experience in Cabinet work with him had not been such as to make him feel that his (Churchill’s) inclusion in the Cabinet would make his own task any easier.” Over the years, Chamberlain said, “he had had two discussions with him which had ended in rather violent disagreement.” Anthony Eden’s name had also been put forward, Camrose reminded the P.M. “Well, Winston was Public Enemy No 1 in Berlin, and Eden was the same in Italy. Their inclusion in the Cabinet might strike both ways.” Chamberlain was cautious about Eden; his case was “not of the same consequence as that of Winston.” Ministers, he conceded, made mistakes. “Simon’s judgment, and Hoare’s, might have been wrong at times, but Winston’s was notorious.” Camrose did not mention the notoriety of Hoare’s deal with Laval, a far greater blunder than anything in Churchill’s career.
¹⁴¹

By the third week in July the Men of Munich thought “the Churchill flurry,” as they called it, had ended. Halifax’s chief aide wrote in his diary: “Pro-Churchill campaign dying down; no sign whatever of a move in No 10.” Chamberlain wrote his sister: “As for the Churchill episode it has in Joe Kennedy’s picturesque phrase ‘Fallen out of bed.’… Even Camrose has now dropped it in the Telegraph.” In another letter he wrote Ida that “the drive to put Winston in the government” had merely “enlivened” the week. “Anyway they have as usual over-played their hand,” he said, and Hoare, echoing him in a letter to Lady Astor’s son—she had startled Parliament by coming out for Churchill—wrote that “I was convinced that the attempt would fail. Anything that Winston attempts is overdone, and in this case it was so overdone that it has stirred up a great reaction against him.”
¹⁴²

Winston hadn’t had a thing to do with it; despite pleas from his supporters, he had remained aloof. At one point he drafted a statement: “I have taken no part in the movement in favour of broadening His Majesty’s Government, in which my name has been mentioned.” On second thought he decided not to make it public. On April 24, before the press campaign to put him in the cabinet had picked up momentum, he had spoken to a large gathering of city workers in the East End: “Those who now come forward to join the Territorial Army are discharging the highest duty of citizenship.” That was hardly incendiary, but once the press lords had tossed his hat in the ring he canceled all public addresses and spoke only in the House of Commons.
¹⁴³

Actually, he had no time to mount a major political campaign. He faced publishing deadlines, and the need to meet them was more urgent than ever. His income from newspaper syndication had dropped sharply, and the blow was not softened by the fact that Hitler was to blame. As the Axis empire grew—and the smaller states bordering the bloated Reich frantically followed pointed advice from the Wilhelmstrasse—editors dropped Winston’s column. Since the fall of Albania, for example, the government in Athens had prohibited publication of any article criticizing fascism or Nazism—this despite Britain’s guarantee of Greece’s frontiers. In Rumania, Imre Revesz wrote him in May, twenty-two newspapers were “controlled directly by the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin.” Poland was now Britain’s ally, but Warsaw authorities had suppressed his piece on the Nazi threat to the Poles. Churchill sent an account of all this to Cadogan at the Foreign Office. He was not the only victim of Goebbels’s strategy: articles by Duff Cooper, Attlee, Eden, and Henry Wickham Steed, Dawson’s predecessor at
The Times
, had also been rejected. It was “a serious matter,” Winston submitted to Cadogan. “A net is closing round our activities,” he wrote to Revesz, “through fear of Germany.” The literary agent, ever resourceful, opened negotiations with American networks for ten-minute Churchill broadcasts once or twice a month. Responding to this news, Winston wrote him on May 8, congratulating him for having “called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.” In little more than a year his use of that cluster of prepositional phrases, slightly altered, would arouse an embattled free world.
¹⁴⁴