The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (489 page)

When Harold Nicolson attended a January 1947 meeting of the Historic Buildings Committee of the National Trust, he did so wrapped in a greatcoat because there was no heat. Lighting, too, was a matter of chance after Attlee’s government imposed rolling blackouts between 9:00
P.M.
and 12:00
A.M.
and 2:00 and 4:00
P.M.
That winter was one of the worst in memory. Its “most crushing blows fell on Britain,” Dean Acheson later wrote, with blizzards regularly battering the island, with six million out of work, and with rations below wartime levels.
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“Gloom reigned in the bomb-devastated streets of London and the provincial cities,” Jock Colville later wrote of those winter months. “London was grey; life was grey.” By then Colville toiled as private secretary to the Heir Apparent, Princess Elizabeth, just twenty-one. It was a post he accepted with reluctance, spurred on by Churchill, who told Colville, “It is your duty to accept.” Britons depended for sustenance upon millions of food parcels that arrived from the United States and the Commonwealth, including several thousand sent to Buckingham Palace. Princess Elizabeth organized a group of more than one hundred women volunteers who wrapped each parcel and dispatched them to shops and homes throughout the land. Even the royal family carried their clothing ration books that year. Elizabeth had to use her coupons to procure the material for her wedding gown in order to walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in November with Philip Mountbatten, her second cousin once removed (and Dickie’s nephew). The currency stringency grew so severe that year that the Attlee government slashed the importing of foods and essential commodities, even going so far as to slap a 75 percent import duty on Hollywood films. Hollywood responded by ceasing all shipments of movies to Britain. England found itself now a pale moon eclipsed by the blazing sun of the United States. “My God!” Nicolson proclaimed to his diary in late 1947. “What the poor people of this country have had to suffer in the last seven years.” Clothing rationing did not end until 1949. Food rationing had fully seven more years to run. Londoners dwelled now in pea-soup fogs—smog, really, a poisonous, stinking by-product of hundreds of thousands of fireplaces burning soft coal and coal gas. Day was almost as dark as night. Britons called it “austerity,” but conditions were not much different from what Americans knew during the Great Depression.
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On November 30, 1947, Colville, after dining with the Churchill family in celebration of the Old Man’s seventy-third birthday, told his diary: “Winston is in a sombre mood, convinced that this country is going to suffer the most agonising economic distress.” The Battle of the Atlantic, Churchill had claimed, was but “a mere pup in comparison.” Had Franklin Roosevelt lived just a few years more, he would have witnessed the complete fulfillment of his strategic vision for imperial Britain and its role in
the world. The United Kingdom had been reduced to debtor status, and the Empire, with the departure of Burma, Ceylon, and India by 1948, was vastly reduced in geographical scope. King George remained King, but he had to scrub “Emperor” from the royal stationery.

“Never in his [Churchill’s] life has he felt such despair,” Colville wrote, “and he blamed it on the Government whose ‘insatiable lust for power is only equalled by their incurable impotence in exercising it.’ ” Colville took heart from Churchill’s “phrases and epigrams [that] rolled out in the old way, but I missed that indomitable hope and conviction which characterized the Prime Minister of 1940–41.” For this misery Churchill held Attlee accountable. Over drinks with Chips Channon one evening at Claridge’s, the Old Man said of Attlee: “Anyone can respect him, certainly, but admire—no!”
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In the House Churchill registered his displeasure with the Attlee government regularly and with increasing vehemence. He told Britons that it was not the government’s management of unfolding events within the diminishing empire, but its
mismanagement.
Of the continuing need of rationing, he said: “What the German U-boats could never do to us has been achieved by our own misguided fellow countrymen through their incompetence, their arrogance, their hordes of officials, their thousands of regulations and their gross mismanagement of our affairs, large and small.” On at least seventeen occasions between 1945 and 1950, he delivered addresses wherein he spoke (with a snarl) of “socialism” and “utopia” in the same breath, often tossing in a “feeble,” “foolish,” “squalid,” or “fantasy” for good measure. He just as consistently reminded his listeners that he had been Lloyd George’s loyal lieutenant when the great Welshman overhauled British social services earlier in the century. Making his case required a nimble performance; here was Winston Churchill—the leader of the Conservative Party—championing the philosophical underpinnings of Labour’s social programs. He was up to the task. It was the heavy-handed implementation of programs, not the programs themselves, he objected to. In July 1946, he told Britons (and three years later told MIT students much the same):

Later that year he recycled a line he had used during a March 1945 memorial service for Lloyd George (who had died that month): “We do not seek to pull down improvidently the structures of society, but to erect balustrades upon the stairway of life, which will prevent helpless or foolish people from falling into the abyss. Both the Conservative and Liberal Parties have made notable contributions to secure minimum standards of life and labour. I too have borne my part in this.” Indeed, he had done so, when he had “ratted” to the Liberal Party four decades earlier. By the late 1940s—long after “re-ratting” back to the Tories—he was one of very few Conservatives who could honestly say that he had been in favor of social reforms from the beginning, albeit while sitting on the opposing bench at the time.
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W
inston is happy at Chartwell,” Moran told his diary in 1946, “as happy as he can be when the world has gone all wrong.” Churchill could only bear witness from the opposition bench between 1946 and late 1951 as Britain’s knights and castles—India and Burma, its influence in Egypt and Palestine—were swept from the chessboard.
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In early May 1946, Attlee announced his government’s intent to remove all British forces from Egypt, including the Suez Canal Zone. This was a policy Churchill could not consent to, telling the House on May 24: “I assert that it is impossible to keep it [the canal] open, unless British personnel are permanently stationed in the Canal Zone. There may be doubts about our ability to keep it open in the air age, even if we have garrisons and fighter aircraft in that zone. But at any rate without that personnel there is no chance of keeping it open whatever.” Especially galling to Churchill was the fact that Britain owed Egypt £400 million for services rendered during the war when, as Churchill told the House, Egyptian troops did not fight and “the debt which Egypt owes to us is that in two world convulsions she has been effectively defended by Great Britain and not only by this island. The Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans have shed their blood freely to prevent Cairo and Alexandria being looted and ravished, ground down and subjugated, by Italian and German hordes.” To safeguard the Suez, Attlee proposed using one hundred thousand British troops then in Palestine, from where they could respond to a crisis in the Suez. But guarding the canal with troops
bivouacked three hundred miles away struck Churchill as ludicrous. As well, British troops in Palestine made easy targets for Zionist terrorists.
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In the House of Commons on August 1, with the Suez and Palestine debates ongoing and civil war likely in India, Churchill delivered something of a valedictory for the British Empire:

The entire world, Churchill believed, not only the British Empire, was poised on the brink of great and deadly trials. A week after his speech, over lunch with Clementine and Lord Moran, Churchill predicted another war. “You mean in eight or ten years?” Moran asked. “Sooner,” Churchill replied. “Seven or eight years. I shan’t be here.” He thought it would take the form of a final battle between England, Belgium, France, and Scandinavia against the Russians. “We ought not to wait until Russia is ready,” Churchill offered. “I believe it will be eight years before she has these [atomic] bombs.” He smiled. “America knows that fifty-two percent of Russia’s motor industry is in Moscow and could be wiped out by a single bomb.” He smiled again. “The Russian government is like the Roman Church; their people do not question authority.”
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By the autumn of 1946, Attlee chose to keep British troops in the Canal Zone, where Egyptians resented their presence much as Palestinian Arabs (and many Zionists) resented the British presence in Palestine. The debate over Palestine continued into 1947, when in March Churchill told the House: “One hundred thousand Englishmen [are] now kept away from their homes and work, for the sake of a senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who. ‘Scuttle,’ everywhere, is the order of the day—Egypt, India, Burma. One thing at all costs we must preserve: the right to get ourselves world-mocked and world-hated over Palestine.”
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If the British in Palestine could not or would not force a settlement
between Arabs and Jews, Churchill advised Attlee to hand over the British Mandate of Palestine—which was costing London eighty million pounds a year—to the United States, which as the world’s greatest power had, in Churchill’s view, inherited such responsibilities but had yet to spend a dollar or send a battalion to Palestine. If not to the United States, Churchill advised passing the mandate to the United Nations, which had been created for such purposes. Churchill believed doing so would help Britain keep its promise to help create a national homeland for Jews, a pledge it could no longer make good on by itself. He also proposed transferring troops that were then serving in Palestine to India, where the bloodshed he had long predicted had begun. It made no sense, Churchill told the House in January 1947, that British troops should stay in Palestine because the Labour government believed their exit “would lead to a terrible quarrel between Jews and Arabs.” Yet in India, “We are told to leave the Indians to settle their own affairs.” Churchill titled his speech “Blood and Shame.”
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On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, which had taken over the British Mandate in May, voted to partition Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab. Arabs in Palestine rejected the UN solution.
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The Jewish state—Israel—proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948. The next day, three Arab armies—from Transjordan, Syria, and Egypt—attacked. Churchill believed the Arab coalition would “fall to pieces” as soon as it met Israeli forces. It did. Eight months later, on January 26, 1949, with Britain still not having recognized the new Israeli state, Churchill took to the floor of the House to assault the Attlee government’s performance in the Middle East since 1946: