The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (60 page)

Balfour had agreed to come and speak for him “if I could manage it.” Now he found he couldn’t. Chamberlain came, however, even though it meant a four-hour return train trip at night. They rode through Oldham together in an open carriage, with loud hurrahs rising on both sides, and afterward Winston wrote: “He loved the roar of the multitude…. The blood mantled in his cheek, and his eye as it caught mine twinkled with pure enjoyment.” It is doubtless true, as Violet Asquith wrote, that at this time Joe had “a genuine affection and admiration” for Churchill. But as party strategist he had a special interest in his campaign. In those days of “hammer and anvil politics,” as Winston called them, England did not vote in a single day. Voters went to the polls over a period of six weeks. On October 1, Oldham’s thirty thousand workmen would be almost the first to poll, and the results would affect Conservatives still on the stump. Thus, Churchill’s victory—his margin was only twenty-two votes, but it represented a crossover of fifteen hundred voters, and he had won a seat from a strong Liberal—instantly put his party in his debt. Salisbury personally telegraphed his congratulations. All over the country Tories in tight contests (including a penitent Balfour) begged him to come and campaign for them before their constituents voted. He went, he received standing ovations, and he was elated when victories followed in his wake. “I have suddenly become one of the two or three most popular speakers in this election,” he wrote Cockran, “and am now engaged on a fighting tour, of the kind you know—great audiences (five and six thousand people) twice & even three times a day, bands, crowds and enthusiasm of all kinds.”
¹⁶⁹

Politically, he had arrived. And his party still ruled England. Chamberlain’s tactics, however dubious, had worked. The khaki election assured the future of Salisbury’s Tory-Unionist coalition; it now held a solid majority of 134 seats over the Liberals and the Irish Nationalists combined. But when the new House of Commons met on December 3, its newest star was absent. Winston Churchill, MP, had decided to postpone his maiden speech until next year. His finances had priority. Sunny had contributed £400 to his campaign, and would pay £100 a year toward his constituency expenses, and Winston had his royalties and the checks from Borthwick, but he wanted more. He knew this wave of popularity would not last. He meant to cash in on it now, with lecture tours of England, the United States, and Canada. Beginning in late October, accompanied by Sunny, he covered more than half of Great Britain in a month, speaking for an hour or more almost every night except Sundays, and often twice a day, traveling ceaselessly, usually at night, seldom sleeping twice in the same bed. Because he was working with his tongue now, not his pen, he tried to master his stubborn speech between lectures by muttering under his breath such exercises as, “The Spanish ships I cannot see for they are not in sight.” Violet Asquith has left an endearing portrait of his weary figure as he trudged from hall to hall, his magic lantern under his arm, the profile already unmistakable by virtue of “the slightly hunched shoulders from which his head jutted forward like the muzzle of a gun about to fire.”
¹⁷⁰
He reached his objective; by December 8, when he sailed westward on the
Luciana,
he had made £4,500 and turned it over with the rest of his savings to Sir Ernest Cassel—who had been a friend of his father’s—for investment in consols.

On the whole his American tour was a disappointment. Cockran saw to it that he met President McKinley and Senator Chauncey Depew, and dined in Albany with Governor Theodore Roosevelt, the vice-president-elect. He was delighted when Mark Twain, one of his boyhood heroes, inscribed a limited edition of his works for him, writing on the first flyleaf: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.” But then Twain, introducing him to his first audience, in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria on December 12, 1900, made it clear that he thought the British treatment of the Boers ignoble. Describing the speaker as the son of an English father and an American mother, and therefore “the perfect man,” he said bluntly: “I think England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided, just as we have sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines.” The listeners murmured in agreement, then sat on their hands when Winston described his flight across the Transvaal. Afterward he turned to his host and growled: “My country right or wrong.” But he was not yet Twain’s match. “Ah,” the old man nimbly replied, “when the poor country is fighting for its life, I agree. But this was not your case.” Churchill, writing home, complained about his U.S. lecture agent, J. B. Pond: “First of all the interest is not what Maj Pond made out and secondly there is a strong pro-Boer feeling, which has been fomented against me by the leaders of the Dutch, particularly in New York.” Yet Baltimore and Chicago audiences were colder than New York’s, and beginning in Chicago, Irish-Americans, indignant over the Tory policy toward Ireland, came to boo. To quiet them, he would describe a dramatic crisis on a South African battlefield. The British position had been desperate, he would tell them, when “the Dublin Fusiliers arrived, trumpeters sounded the charge, and the enemy were swept from the field.” A newspaperwoman reported: “Suddenly the balconies grew silent, then thundered with cheers.”
¹⁷¹

But that was cheap, and he knew it. He wrote his mother that the tour was “vy unpleasant work. For instance, last week, I arrived to lecture in an American town and found Pond had not arranged any public lecture but that I was hired out for £40 to perform at an evening party in a private house—like a conjurer. Several times I have harangued in local theatres to almost empty benches. I have been horribly vulgarised by the odious advertisements Pond and Myrmidons think it necessary to circulate—and only my cynical vein has helped me go on.” He described the agent as “a vulgar Yankee” who had “poured a lot of very mendacious statements into the ears of the reporters.” Moreover, “Pond’s terms are vy grasping compared to Christie’s.” Christie, in England, had given him a generous share of the receipts: £220 in Cheltenham, £265 6s. 2d. at St. James’s Hall, and £273 14s. 9d. in Liverpool. Under Pond he made $330 in Boston, $175 in Baltimore, $150 in Springfield, and just $50 in Hartford. His total American earnings were $8,000, or £1,600. It was a glum start for the man who would one day become the first Honorary Citizen of the United States.
¹⁷²

Canada, on the other hand, was a ten-day triumph. In Ottawa he was the guest of the governor-general, Lord Minto—Pamela, to his surprise, appeared as a fellow guest—and in Ulster Hall, Lord Dufferin, introducing him, said: “This young man, at an age when many of his contemporaries have hardly left their studies, has seen more active service than half the general officers in Europe.” (Winston noted, “I had not thought of this before. It was good.”) The audiences were adoring and huge. In Winnipeg alone he made $1,150 (£230). On New Year’s Day he totted up his income since leaving the Fourth Hussars, deducted income tax—eleven pence to the pound, or 4.5 percent—and wrote his mother: “I am vy proud of the fact that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without any capital in less than two years.” She could, he told her, discontinue his allowance “until old Papa Wests [sic] decides to give you and G more to live on.” Henceforth, as long as he remained a bachelor, he could live on dividends and interest and devote all his energy to politics.
¹⁷³

On January 22, 1901, when Victoria breathed her last at Osborne, he was still in Canada. That night he wrote Jennie: “So the Queen is dead. The news reached us at Winnipeg and this city far away among the snows—fourteen hundred miles from any British town of importance began to hang its head and hoist half-masted flags.” But the sadness did not touch him. He was young, flushed with new wealth, and full of his recent accomplishments. His tone was jaunty. The end of a sixty-four-year reign was, to be sure, “a great and solemn event, but I am curious to know about the King. Will it entirely revolutionise his way of life? Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia? Will he become desperately serious?” Then, more delicately: “Will he continue to be friendly with you? Will the Keppel”—Mrs. Alice Keppel—“be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?”
¹⁷⁴

He sailed homeward aboard the S.S.
Etruria
on February 2, the day five kings and forty members of Europe’s royal families followed the Queen’s coffin down London streets, and a week later he was in his Mount Street rooms, working on his maiden speech. Around him the city still grieved. Every shop window was streaked with a mourning shutter. Crossing sweepers carried crepe on their brooms. Women of all ages were veiled; some had gone into perpetual mourning. Even the prostitutes, whose existence Victoria had denied, were dressed in black. Churchill ignored them; all his thoughts were of the future. Steevens of the
Daily Mail
—poor Steevens, who had died of fever in besieged Ladysmith—had said of him: “He has the twentieth century in his marrow.”
¹⁷⁵
Winston had liked that. But Steevens had been wrong. As time would prove with growing clarity, it was the nineteenth century that was in Churchill’s bones. He would become the most eloquent defender of its standards, the apotheosis of its ideals, the resolute champion of its institutions and values. They were his priceless legacy; he was their fortunate heir. His career would be inconceivable today. And it would have been equally unthinkable before Victoria came to the throne, when England had been an agricultural island, lacking in industry and without an Empire. Native drive, wise legislation, an educated and enlightened oligarchy ingeniously harnessed to genuine democracy, sea power, skillful diplomacy, faith in the supremacy of its island race—these had made imperial Britain, which, in that first Edwardian winter, despite the stigma of South Africa, continued to glitter on its splendid pinnacle, the envy of the world’s chancelleries.

Could any other nation in 1901 offer its young politicians the chance for greatness which was now his? Not the insular United States of nineteen-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, then an immature, unpromising Harvard freshman in a country of fewer than 76 million—less than a fifth of the Empire’s 412 million—which largely ignored the rest of civilization. Not the vast China of thirteen-year-old Chiang Kai-shek; its few pretensions to a national identity had been shattered with the crushing of the Boxer uprising the previous summer. Certainly not the locked medieval oriental kingdom of sixteen-year-old Hideki Tojo’s Japan. The domain of the Turk—the home of nineteen-year-old Mustapha Kemal—was an empire in name only. Czarist Russia seethed with anarchy, terror, despotism, nihilism, and intrigue, and was constantly menaced by uprisings in the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Georgia, where Joseph Stalin, then Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aged twenty-one, had just been fired from the only nonpolitical job he ever held, a clerkship in the Tiflis observatory. In Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the Hapsburg emperor presided over an equally unstable polyglot of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Austrians, including, in the Austrian town of Linz, a sullen eleven-year-old schoolboy named Adolf Hitler. Italy, where Benito Mussolini, seventeen, was the quarrelsome son of the Predappio blacksmith, had repeatedly tried to play the part of a world power under a recent series of ineffectual rightist premiers and had been humiliated every time. Italy was blinded by an
idée fixe,
the recovery of lost territories,
Italia irredenta;
the France of Charles de Gaulle, who had just celebrated his tenth birthday in Lille, by a yearning to settle the scores of 1871, which had marked the beginning of the Gallic decline in growth and prestige. Only Wilhelmine Germany loomed as an immediate rival to Britain, and the character of the kaiser’s regime excluded any commoner from a distinguished career in public life. Thus England alone could offer young Churchill the role he sought, and its prospects seemed certain to remain unique, barring monumental English folly, or loss of will, or the abandonment of such Victorian principles as disdain for continental alliances. The mere suggestion of any of these lapses would, in 1901, have evoked global laughter.

K
ING
Edward VII, stout and florid, personally opened the new session of Parliament, renewing a custom his mother had discontinued after his father’s death forty years earlier. It was Valentine’s Day, an occasion linked with his royal presence in the hearts and loins of an astonishing number of titled Englishwomen, all of whom had turned out to see him mount his throne. They were proud of him, and he was proud of himself; having waited a half century to wear the crown, he meant to carry out the ceremony with panache. Shortly after 2:00
P.M.
his huge state chariot, drawn by eight cream-colored Hanoverians draped with trappings of morocco and gilt, emerged from Buckingham Palace accompanied by Life Guards wearing dazzling silver breastplates and by postilions in red-and-gold liveries. The monarch and his cortege rode past dense masses of roaring Londoners along the broad Mall, the Horse Guards, Whitehall, and Parliament Square, where the carriage turned in and His Majesty descended, paused in the robing room, and entered the packed House of Lords. There his eminent subjects performed their obligatory gestures of homage, the ladies with curtsies, their masters with deep curvatures of the spine. The
New York Times
correspondent noted “the curious reversal of the customary appearance of the sexes. Here, for once, the women were sombre looking, in black… while the men, usually in black, were radiant with brilliant robes of scarlet and ermine.” But one lady was not drab: “The Duchess of Marlborough was a conspicuous figure. She wore all the famous Vanderbilt pearls in ropes around her neck, a high ‘dog’ collar of pearls and diamonds around her throat, and a tiara of diamonds with enormous diamond tips.”
¹
Sunny’s first duchess, the former Consuelo Vanderbilt, had never slept with HRH, now HM, and she wasn’t present to honor the King. She wanted to watch Winston take the oath as a member of the House of Commons afterward, and she meant to enter the gallery in style.

Edward tried to look disconsolate. This, he told the assembled lords and commoners, was “a moment of national sorrow, when the whole country is mourning the irreparable loss we have so recently sustained, and which has fallen with peculiar severity on myself. My beloved mother during her long and glorious reign has set an example of what a monarch should be. It is my earnest desire to walk in her footsteps.” Then, brightening, he turned from “this public and private grief” to other matters. The drought in his Indian Empire was over. Australia had been a commonwealth for six weeks; he planned to sail there, and to visit New Zealand and Canada. Peking having been captured, the Boxers were no more. His victorious troops were mopping up in South Africa; soon, he erroneously predicted, “the fruitless guerrila warfare maintained by Boer partisans in the former territories of the two republics” would end. Like his predecessors since the rout of Catholicism he assured his people that he would never be a vassal of the pope, and he entrusted the management of his crown revenues to the House of Commons.
²

In the House, Churchill, sworn, took a back-bench seat, tilted his top hat over his forehead, and, doubling up his figure in the crouched attitude assumed by seasoned parliamentarians and plunging his hands in his pockets, studied the chamber which was to be the arena of his political life for the next sixty-three years. The House dated from 1708, and its decor had not changed since the eighteenth century. Directly beneath the timbered ceiling lay the well, with the carved chair of the Speaker, who determined which members should have the floor. On either side of him the benches, upholstered in green, rose in five tiers. Those to the Speaker’s right were occupied by the party in power; the Opposition sat to his left. Each tier was separated at midpoint by an aisle, the “gangway.” The front government bench, extending from the Speaker’s chair to the gangway, was reserved for the prime minister and his cabinet; it was also called “the Treasury Bench” because the first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, had also been first lord of the Admiralty and chancellor of the Exchequer. Two red stripes on the well carpet marked the point beyond which no front-bencher could advance in addressing the House; the distance between the stripes was the length of two drawn swords. There were not enough seats for all elected members; this permitted the conversational style and avoided an impression of emptiness during routine sittings. “A crowded House” gave an air of urgency to dramatic moments.

Churchill knew all this; had known it since boyhood. He was also familiar with the customs of the House. Savage, even cruel words could be exchanged between members who, off the floor, were on the best of terms. Any speech made off the floor was said to be given “out of doors.” The House of Lords was “another place.” Committee meetings were held “upstairs.” Leaders of one’s own party were addressed as “my right honorable friend”; an Opposition leader was “the right honorable gentleman.” The dominant figures in the chamber were, for the most part, the same men who had prevailed during his father’s last days here. The Tories had remained in power, and the destroyer of Lord Randolph’s career, Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, was still prime minister. Salisbury’s grip on the controls had in fact tightened; he had maneuvered so many members of his family into key posts that wits called the House “the Hotel Cecil.” No fewer than seven Salisbury sons, nephews, and cousins sat on the Conservative benches. Four were in the government, and one, Arthur J. Balfour, “AJB,” leader of the House, was preparing to take over as prime minister when his uncle retired. As a youthful MP, AJB had belonged to Lord Randolph’s Fourth Party, but now he had put all that behind him and was as rock-ribbed a supporter of Tory policies as Joseph Chamberlain. The entire Tory-Unionist hierarchy stood four-square and was prepared to defend the established order down to the last desperate inch. Leaders of the Liberals, on the other side of the House, had been split over foreign policy since the Jameson Raid. The ablest of them—Rosebery, Herbert Asquith, Edward Grey, and R. B. Haldane—had become “Liberal Imperialists”: supporters of the Boer War. But a majority of the party’s MPs disagreed, remaining faithful to the Gladstonian tradition. The Liberal center was led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (“C-B”). If the party was returned to power, C-B would become prime minister. His followers included a group of antiwar radicals from the Celtic fringe, among them the charismatic young Welshman David Lloyd George, who wanted to geld the House of Lords and follow the lodestar of
la carrière ouverte aux talents
. Since only men of means could afford to enter Parliament, the left was underrepresented. Just two workingmen, supported by union dues, sat as MPs. These “Lib-Labs,” as they were popularly known, were identified in the House as members of the Labour Representative Committee; five years would pass before the committee was renamed the Labour party.

Mastery of the House has been given to few. Its moods arch the British spectrum, from cockney vulgarity through Midlands stolidity and Scottish skepticism to Welsh emotionalism and, in those days, Irish mysticism. It can be frivolous, irresponsible, and grave on occasions which any other body would treat with hilarity. No new member can be expected to hold it spellbound, but on the evening of February 18, 1901, when Churchill’s maiden speech was scheduled, the chamber was full. Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Grey faced him on the front Opposition bench. Balfour and Joe Chamberlain sat on the Treasury Bench. Mrs. Chamberlain was in the gallery. So were Jennie and four of her sisters-in-law—Lady Howe, Lady Tweedmouth (Fanny Marjoribanks), Lady de Ramsey, and Lady Wimborne—and the Duchess Consuelo. Winston was known as “Randy’s Boy,” and, in his own right, as a gifted journalist and a hero of the South African war. Moreover, in his first “division,” or vote—MPs vote by streaming from the chamber and into two different lobbies, Yes and No—he had sided with the radicals and the Irish. At home, as abroad, he was already magnetic. The
Morning Post
reported that his audience was one which “very few new members have commanded.” The
Yorkshire Post
observed: “In that packed assembly, everybody a critic, watching to see what sort of start he made in politics, Winston Churchill made his debut.”
³

He had decided to speak on the war, ignoring the advice of older Tories who had warned, “It is too soon; wait for a few months till you know the House,” and crossing the lobby he had been disconcerted to learn that, contrary to his assumption, not all these people were here just to hear him. Lloyd George was also expected to rise. He would, indeed, be Churchill’s immediate predecessor. Winston suffered from a parliamentary weakness and knew it: “I had never had the practice which comes to young men at the University of speaking in small debating societies impromptu upon all sorts of subjects.” He had spent days in front of a mirror, committing every word he intended to say to memory as his father had. But a House speech cannot stand alone; it must dovetail into the previous remarks, and Lloyd George, as usual, was unpredictable. He had been called to move an amendment, which would have been an easy thread for Winston to pick up. Instead, he was delivering a wide-ranging attack on the government’s record in South Africa. Its truce terms were vague: “Does anyone think the Boers will lay down their arms merely to be governed from Downing Street?” Losses were appalling: “There have been 55,000 casualties; 30,000 men are in hospital.” Kitchener’s burning of Boer barns was barbarous: “It is not a war against men but against women and children.” Every time Winston prepared an appropriate opening, the Welsh firebrand, egged on by radicals and Irish Nationalists, switched to a new tack. Churchill felt “a sense of alarm and even despair.” At that point an elderly member beside him whispered: “Why don’t you just say, ‘Instead of making his violent speech without moving his moderate amendment, he had better have moved his moderate amendment without making his violent speech’?”
⁴

When Lloyd George sat down Churchill said precisely that, drawing chuckles. His spirits rising, he continued: “I do not believe that the Boers would attach particular importance to the utterances of the hon[orable] member. No people in the world received so much verbal sympathy and so little support. If I were a Boer fighting in the field…” He paused dramatically. Then: “
And if I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field
…” Balfour groaned; Chamberlain muttered, “That’s the way to throw away seats.”
^*
The radicals cheered, then found he had trapped them, for he went on, “I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon[orable] members.” The Tories laughed—four years earlier a hundred radical MPs had sent an ineffectual cable of support to the king of Greece, immediately after which he had been obliged to capitulate to the Turks. Winston advocated a generous peace in South Africa, drawing a scowl from the Conservatives around him. Of course, he quickly added, the Boers might reject the offer “and stand by their old cry, ‘Death or Independence.’ ” This drew applause from the Irish Nationalists. But he had set another trap: “It is wonderful that hon[orable] members who form the Irish party should find it in their hearts to speak and act as they do in regard to a war in which so much has been accomplished by the courage, the sacrifices, and, above all, by the military capacity of Irishmen.” Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy was no worse, he said, than the German practice in the Franco-Prussian War of “throwing shells into the dwelling houses of Paris and starving the inhabitants of that great city to the extent that they had to live upon rats and like atrocious foods in order to compel the garrison to surrender.” Indeed, the British under Kitchener had done nothing not “justified by precedents set by European or American generals during the last fifty or sixty years.” Not that he thought Britain wholly in the right. He took a middle course: “I do not agree very fully with the charges of treachery on the one side and barbarity on the other.” Having established his independence—he had deftly said that the Boers were not traitors, that they were right to fight, that they deserved mercy—he drew to a graceful close, evoking his father’s name by attributing “the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me” to “a certain splendid memory which many hon[orable] members still preserve.”
⁵

Older members led him to the House bar, where, in his words, “Everyone was very kind. The usual restoratives were applied, and I sat in a comfortable coma till I was strong enough to go home.” Before he left, Lloyd George told him, “Judging from your sentiments, you are standing against the Light,” and Churchill replied, “You take a singularly detached view of the British Empire”—an inauspicious opening to what would become the strongest political friendship of Churchill’s early career. Lloyd George had missed the mutinous notes in the speech. So had most of the press. The Liberal (anti-imperialist)
Daily Chronicle
dismissed the new member as “a medium-sized, undistinguished young man, with an unfortunate lisp in his voice.” The Conservative papers approved of his remarks. He had “held a crowded House spellbound,” said the
Daily Express
, had “satisfied the highest expectations,” said the
Daily Telegraph,
had delivered a speech “worthy of the traditions of the House,” said Borthwick’s
Morning Post
. But Hugh Massingham noted in the Liberal (imperialist)
Daily News
that “this young man has kept his critical faculty through the glamour of association with our arms.” Not only had he kept it; it grew. As the weeks passed, and he listened to the Opposition members, he felt himself drifting steadily to the left, feeling, as Simone Weil did, that “one must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.” To intimate friends he confided that he now thought barn burning in the Transvaal and Orange Free State was “a hateful folly.” He had come to feel “sentimental about the Boers” and was both in revolt against jingoism and “anxious to make the Conservative party follow Liberal courses.” Outside his circle this was unknown. In public he remained a staunch Tory back-bencher. Yet all the while, cold as malice, unsuspected but deadly, the vengeful hand of Lord Randolph Churchill was reaching out of the grave to smite those who had struck him down fifteen years earlier, when his son had been twelve years old.
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