The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (484 page)

Before the election, a London
Times
editor informed Churchill that the newspaper was about to advocate two points—that Churchill should campaign as a nonpartisan world statesman and then ease himself into retirement sooner rather than later. “Mr. Editor,” Churchill said to the first point, “I fight for my corner.” And, to the second: “Mr. Editor, I leave when the pub closes.”
⁴²

The pub had just closed.

Dinner at No. 10 that evening was a somewhat muted affair, Mary later wrote, but less gloomy than lunch. Uncle Jack was on hand, and Diana and Sarah, and Sarah’s friend Robert Maugham (Somerset’s nephew). Bracken attended, as did Anthony Eden, a remarkable gesture of fealty on his part given that he had learned just five days earlier that his son Pilot Officer Simon Eden, RAF, had been killed in Burma. Clementine took herself off to bed before dinner. The others tried “to say and do the right thing” for Churchill’s sake, with some success. Maugham told Harold Nicolson a few days later that Churchill had accepted his defeat with good grace. When someone at the dinner table said to Churchill, “But you have won the race, sir,” he replied, “Yes, and in consequence I’ve been warned off the turf.”
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Sometime earlier that afternoon, Churchill composed a concession statement, which he sent to the BBC to be read during the nine o’clock news. Brian Gardner, writing in
Churchill in Power,
called the statement “perhaps the most gracious acceptance of democratic defeat in the English language.” Churchill:

F
riday, July 27, was a day for farewells at No. 10. As Churchill took his leave from the Chiefs of Staff, Alan Brooke found himself “unable to say very much for fear of breaking down. He [Churchill] was standing the blow wonderfully well.” A decade later, when Brooke—by then the 1st Viscount Alanbrooke—edited his diaries for publication, he inserted a line that stands in sharp contrast to his wartime rants against Churchill: “On reading these diaries I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him [Churchill], especially during the latter years.” Then, as if he could not let go, Lord Alanbrooke felt compelled to remind readers that during the latter part of the war “Winston had been a very sick man… with repeated attacks of pneumonia…. This physical condition together
with his mental fatigue accounted for many of the difficulties in dealing with him…. I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying in my life.” Only after enunciating his caveats did the viscount finally add the now oft-quoted tribute to Churchill: “For all that I thank God I was given an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”
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Eden thought the entire afternoon a “pretty grim affair.” He was the last to leave, having been called into the Cabinet Room by Churchill for a final chat. That night, Eden wrote in his diary: “He [Churchill] was pretty wretched, poor old boy…. He couldn’t help feeling his treatment had been pretty scurvy.” Before Eden left, Churchill looked about and said, “Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but I shall not.”

Eden assured Churchill that “his place in history could have gained nothing” by a return to No. 10 in the postwar years, adding, “That place was secure anyway.” Churchill accepted that, and the two men parted. As Eden left he reflected upon the six war years he had spent in that room, writing that night: “I cannot believe I can ever know anything like it again.”
⁴⁶

Churchill departed No. 10 for Chequers, which the new prime minister had put at his disposal for the weekend. Chartwell was not yet reopened and staffed, and although the Churchills were interested in purchasing a London town house at 28 Hyde Park Gate, they had not yet finalized the transaction. Under other circumstances, Mary later wrote, the weekend would “have been a very cozy jolly party” but “we were all still rather stunned by the events of the previous week.” Ambassador John Winant was on hand, as was Sarah, who had decided to end their long love affair. It had always been more courtly than torrid, but it was doomed in any event by the fact that Winant was a married man and Sarah—aptly nicknamed the Mule—was a very independent woman. She later wrote that it had been an affair “which my father suspected but about which we did not speak.”
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Colville—who now served Attlee—was on hand that weekend in order to help Churchill gather his personal effects. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—had motored out, as had Brendan Bracken. Churchill’s former bodyguards and private secretaries had gone off to Berlin with the new prime minister. No motorcycle dispatch riders roared up the drive; the phones did not ring; the Chiefs of Staff did not report in. Most noticeably, the secret boxes and Ultra decrypts did not appear. “Now there was nothing,”
Mary wrote. “We saw with near desperation a cloud of black gloom descend.” To dispel the cloud, they played records on the gramophone—American and French marches, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Noel Gay tune “Run Rabbit Run.” They ran movies, too—
The Wizard of Oz
was a favorite. They played cards and staged a croquet match, which Churchill watched from the sidelines. The cloud lingered. On Sunday, the twenty-ninth, the clan of fifteen sat down to dinner at the great round table, where they drank a Rehoboam of champagne in a futile attempt to make merry. At some point during dinner, Churchill said “it was fatal to give way to self-pity, that the Government had a mandate” and that “it was the duty of everyone to support them.” Before retiring, they all signed the Chequers guestbook, Churchill last. Underneath his signature he wrote:
Finis.
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Churchill and Clementine took up residence at Claridge’s the next day. Two weeks later, on August 14, Churchill hosted a dinner in his Claridge’s suite for Eden and a few Conservative colleagues. Late in the evening, they learned that the Japanese had surrendered. The Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Tokyo had been silent in the days since, but now, as Eden put it, “the six years of ordeal was over.” The dinner companions adjourned to another room, where a wireless was set up. There, they listened as Clement Attlee “barked out a few short sentences, then gave the terms…. The war was over.”

“There was a silence,” Eden wrote. “Mr. Churchill had not been asked to say any word to the nation. We went home. Journey’s end.”

C
hurchill had by all rights at age seventy reached the sixth and penultimate of Shakespeare’s seven stages of life. The fields and orchards and rose gardens at Chartwell, wild and overgrown after five years of neglect, were in need of his attention, as were the fish ponds, and the fish, and the house itself. Little Winston and the other “wollygogs” needed him, as did Sarah, Mary, Diana, Randolph, and Clementine. Yet he had no intention of becoming Shakespeare’s “slipper’d pantaloon.” He considered his journey by no means over. He was the leader of the opposition, in which role he enthusiastically took his seat in the front row of the opposition bench in the Commons and proceeded to oppose. On his return to the House (still meeting in the Lords’ chamber while the bombed-out Commons was being rebuilt), Conservative MPs leapt to their feet and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Labourites countered with “The Red Flag.”

Though England’s greatest leader led the opposition, Churchill could
not reverse the Labour mandate, and knew it. Labour had pledged to nationalize the Bank of England, the coal and utility industries, railroads, and the steel industry. As Labour in coming months and years created government control boards to manage each industry, bureaucracy became Britain’s fastest-growing industry. Two years after V-E day, Churchill told the House: “A mighty army of 450,000 additional civil servants has been taken from production and added, at a prodigious cost and waste, to the oppressive machinery of government and control. Instead of helping national recovery this is a positive hindrance.” That was one of his gentler rebukes of the socialist experiment. Labour’s showcase priority was the creation of the National Health Service (which came to pass in 1948, with Aneurin Bevan installed as its first minister). Labour proposed free health care, free false teeth, free eyeglasses. Just four months after the election, Churchill told the House:

Sir Stafford Cripps, Churchill declared, “is a great advocate of Strength through Misery.”
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Churchill, sure that the Labour tide would someday ebb, looked beyond England. He intended, with two broad objectives in mind, to transcend British politics and reinvent himself as an international statesman. He sought a special relationship (that he as yet had not explicitly defined) among the English-speaking peoples, including the Americans, and a similar but more crisply defined relationship among Western European countries—his old idea of a United States of Europe. He was, and had always been, a European patriot. Britons had sacked him, but Europeans loved him. This was political capital he began to invest. On November 16, he told an audience in Brussels that in order to prevent another “Unnecessary War” (caused in part, he said, by America’s unwillingness to join the League of Nations and confront German re-armament), “we have to revive the prosperity of Europe: and European civilisation must rise again from the chaos and carnage into which it has been plunged: and at the same time we have to devise those measures of world security which will prevent disaster descending upon us again.” He proposed a “United States of Europe, which will unify this Continent in a manner never known since
the fall of the Roman Empire, and within which all its peoples may dwell together in prosperity, in justice, and in peace.”
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Not all in the Tory leadership shared his visions for the future of Britain, of Europe, and even of the Tory party. The voters having thrown out the Conservatives, many in the Tory hierarchy felt it was time for Churchill to step down from the party leadership, to take “a long rest,” as Lord Moran framed it. Churchill should write a history of the war, as only he could. He should paint, travel, and enjoy life. “Prefaced by elaborate protestations of admiration and respect,” some of Churchill’s colleagues began to advance the theme of retirement to Moran. They no longer would tolerate Churchill’s grudging, sometimes cruel, and usually overbearing style of leadership. “In short,” Moran wrote, “with the war behind them the Tory leaders were no longer prepared to stomach [Churchill’s] summary methods.” Churchill had no intention of abdicating the Tory leadership. “A short time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully,” he told Moran in 1946. Of the new Labour government, Churchill offered to Moran: “Now I’m going to stay and have them out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them. I’m in pretty good fettle.” It was “the Jerome blood,” Winston said.
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During the first week of January 1946, foreign secretaries and diplomats from around the globe convened in London for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. Churchill was not among the luminaries. On January 9 he, Clementine, and Sarah boarded the
Queen Elizabeth,
bound for New York and a two-month vacation in Florida, Cuba, and the eastern United States. Not having yet decided to write his memoir of the war, he worked on his unfinished
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
during the voyage. But soon after he arrived in Miami, he read recently published essays by Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, which Butcher had based on his diary entries. Butcher’s tales of Churchill’s late nights and liquid lunches were incomplete, trivial, and not at all flattering to the Old Man, who, not about to take such “history” lying down, summoned his prewar European literary agent, Emery Reves. Butcher (and Elliott Roosevelt, with
As He Saw It
) helped force the decision; Churchill would write his version of the war.