The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (67 page)

His baths were drawn, his boots polished, his clothes laid out, and his small cellar of J. and C. Clark wines inventoried by his current valet, George Scrivings. A maid swept the gray pile carpet and dusted the gleaming, dark, heavy furniture, which, this being a typical Mayfair flat, required a lot of dusting. There were petit point chairs, a large Coromandel screen, a “sociable” on which two people of opposite sexes might sit, facing each other but properly divided by the arm; tortured carvings of ebony, Benares brass, a red-and-gold Crown Derby tea set; and mahogany tables littered with family and polo-team photographs, silver cannon models, model soldiers, jade ashtrays, Indian and Egyptian carvings, celadon bowls, a Fabergé cigar box, twin candelabra, and a small clock. The air was exotic with the scents of wax and furniture oils. Books were everywhere. There were even bookshelves in the bathroom. Hugh Massingham, coming to call, found the occupant literally “sleeping with encyclopedias.” Pasted in huge scrapbooks were newspaper clippings on every public topic and on prominent men, particularly Winston S. Churchill. In an unguarded moment he mentioned these to Balfour, explaining that they were useful for reference. AJB’s lip curled. He said disdainfully that he could not see the point of “rummaging through a rubbish heap on the problematical chance of finding a cigar butt.”
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Impressions of Churchill at this time are varied but vivid. Wilfrid Blunt, meeting him for the first time, described him as “a little, square headed fellow of no very striking appearance, but of wit, intelligence, and originality.” On the other hand, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who was ten years old when Churchill called on his father in Manchester, thought him very striking indeed; Winston was wearing “a frock coat with silk facings and below his chin was a large winged collar with a black bow tie…. I went so far as to buy—and wear in private—a large winged collar. Thus the imagination of a small boy was captured.” Directly after her first dinner-party encounter with him, Violet Asquith had gone to her father and told him that for the first time in her life she had seen genius. Asquith chuckled and said, “Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there—but I am not sure you will find many others of the same mind.” Then he added, “Still, I know exactly what you mean. He is not only remarkable but unique.” Jennie’s new sister-in-law, Daisy Cornwallis-West, was uncharmed; her brother’s marriage, she wrote, “made Winston Churchill a connection of ours, a prospect we viewed with somewhat mixed feelings. I cannot honestly say I ever cared for him very much.” The same trait attracted and repelled: his brilliant, compulsive conversation. His critics called it “bombast,” the “self-advertisement” of an “arriviste.” His admirers delighted in what they regarded as genuine wit. Lloyd George told him he was against the social order. Winston replied: “You are only against those parts of it that get in your way.” Churchill described F. E. Smith’s debating skills: “The bludgeon for the platform; the entangling net and unexpected trident for the Courts of Law; and a jug of clear spring water for an anxious, perplexed conclave.” “The difference between Balfour and Asquith,” he said, “is that Arthur is wicked and moral, while Asquith is good and immoral.”
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Churchill’s capacity for work was remarkable. His appointment book shows that in his first two weeks as an MP he dined out eight times, attended a trade conference, conducted an inquiry at the Treasury, called on the prime minister, delivered three speeches in the House, campaigned for a Conservative candidate in Manchester, and was there to congratulate him on his victory. One friend recalled in his memoirs that Winston “gave himself to work. When he was not busy with politics, he was reading or writing. He did not lead the life of other young men in London. He may have visited political clubs, but I never met him walking in Pall Mall or Hyde Park where sooner or later one used to meet most friends. I never met him at a dinner-party that had not some public or private purpose.”
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Once he began writing his father’s biography he attended even fewer parties, and was never seen at dances. The rest of his set hummed Franz Lehár’s new waltzes; Churchill was reluctant even to learn the step. In
Anglo-American Memories,
George Smalley, a journalist from the United States, described a weekend as Churchill’s fellow guest at Dunrobin, the seat of the Duke of Sutherland. Winston invited him into his bedroom, and Smalley gaped. The room, he wrote, “had been turned into a literary workshop, strewn with books and papers and all the apparatus of the writer. He had brought with him a tin box, some three feet square, divided into closed compartments. This was his travelling companion on journeys of pleasure…. His hostess had provided him with a large writing-table. This was covered with papers, loose and in docketed bundles, but all in exact order for ready reference…. When we left Dunrobin we found that Winston had reserved a compartment in the railway train for himself and for his big tin case of papers. He shut himself up there, and during that long journey read and wrote and worked as if a Highland railway train were the natural and convenient laboratory in which literature of a high order was to be distilled.”
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Yet this view of Churchill may have been exaggerated. Like most men of affairs, he had learned to use his time efficiently, and in London he was all business. But he was not what today would be called a workaholic. Many of his leisured friends, it must be remembered, did not work at all; very little dedication was necessary to impress them. His appetite for statecraft did not prevent him from playing when he chose. He followed the races—at a Warwick Castle house party he astounded his fellow guests by reciting the names of the last fifty Derby winners and their breeding—and he always found time for polo, boar hunting, duck shooting, and holidays abroad. In Egypt he sailed up the Nile on a dahabeah with his aunt Leonie, Hicks-Beach, Sir John Gorst, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, and Alice Keppel. In Switzerland he was the guest of Sir Ernest and Lady Cassel, and at Balmoral he stalked stages with His Majesty. (“You will see the King on Weds when he comes to Invercauld,” he wrote his mother; “mind you gush to him about my having written to you saying how much etc etc I had enjoyed myself here.”) After observing German military maneuvers as the guest of another personage, HM’s nephew the kaiser, he traveled by stages through Breslau, Vienna, Venice, Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Urbino, San Marino, Perugia, Siena, and Eichorn. “Such a lot of churches we have seen and saints and pictures ‘galore,’ ” he wrote. “It has been vy pleasant.”
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Similar expeditions were always available to him; indeed, he had difficulty avoiding them. He knew so many members of society, and was such an eligible bachelor, that he had to go into hiding to finish his father’s biography. Sunny, not yet troubled by his growing radicalism, turned Blenheim over to him for three or four months each year. The book was completed in the palace and, when published, was well received, though Balfour found the passages mentioning him objectionable. In the first four months the set sold 5,827 copies. An American edition, and then a one-volume British edition, were equally successful.

Churchill was the most active member of every social gathering, and to the annoyance of other young men he never hesitated to take charge. As a guest at the seaside, one hostess wrote, he “flung himself with zest into our favorite and most perilous pastime of rock climbing, reveling in the scramble up crags and cliffs, the precarious transition from ledge to ledge, with slippery seaweed underfoot and roaring seas below. Though we considered ourselves salted climbers of four weeks’ experience and he was a raw novice, he always took command of every operation, decreeing strategy and tactics and even dictating the correct position of our arms and legs. He brought to every ploy the excitement of a child and, like a child, he made it seem not only exciting but serious and important.” Even more revealing was his response to a terrible fire which followed his brother’s wedding. The bride and groom having departed, the rest of the party stayed in Burley-on-the-Hill, an ancient country home near Oakham famous for its paneling, tapestries, and priceless Elizabethan manuscripts. In the middle of the night a newly installed heating system burst into flames. Awakening to screams, in smoke and darkness, the guests fled to the lawn. There, Eddie Marsh wrote, “Winston commandeered a fireman’s helmet and assumed the direction of operations.” F. E. Smith’s wife remembered Churchill on the roof, shouting down orders, trying to quench the blaze with a tiny fire engine which had been brought from Oakham. Unfortunately, nothing could be saved. The owners were in tears.
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Churchill wasn’t. He wrote Miss Hozier: “The fire was great fun & we all enjoyed it thoroughly. It is a pity such jolly entertainments are so costly. Alas for the archives. They roared to glory in about ten minutes…. It is a vy strange thing to be locked in deadly grapple with that cruel element. I had no conception—except from reading—of the power and majesty of a great conflagration. Whole rooms sprang into flames as if by enchantment. Chairs and tables burnt up like matches. Floors collapsed and ceilings crashed down…. Every window spouted fire, & from the centre of the house a volcano roared skyward in a whirlwind of sparks.” As descriptive writing, this is splendid, but as a response to tragedy it is neither pleasant nor wholesome; that the others “enjoyed it thoroughly” is doubtful—Marsh, for one, had lost his Perceval gold watch, gold chain, and three tiepins, all heirlooms. One can understand why many men distrusted Churchill. “It is no disparagement of Winston’s extraordinary qualities,” wrote Almeric Fitzroy, “to say that his judgement is not quite equal to his abilities.” Destruction, like war, enthralled the mischievous boy in him, and he would never entirely outgrow that fascination. Yet he alone had climbed to the roof and tried to extinguish the flames.
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England in those years, “lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace,” as he wrote, was like Burley-on-the-Hill before the fire: precious, deeply loved, apparently safe, unaware of its deadly peril.
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The world’s diplomats still set their clocks by Big Ben. Because the British government permitted it, Turkey ceded the Sinai to Egypt and Greece annexed Crete. Little importance was attached to the decision, made the year after Victoria’s death, to end her policy of “splendid isolation.” Actually, it was a move of enormous consequence. From Canning to Salisbury, isolationism had served Britain well, keeping it aloof from a whole series of continental wars. The Royal Navy was its mighty shield; for a century after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar no nation had attempted to build a competitive fleet. In 1870 Gladstone’s announcement that England would intervene if Belgium’s neutrality were violated had kept both the French and the Germans from crossing Belgian frontiers.

The first break with isolationist policy was made by Lord Lansdowne, the Tory foreign secretary from 1900 to 1905. Armed forces had grown all over the world, he pointed out, and at the very least England should have understandings and defined friendships with other great powers. The United States was his first choice, but America had its own isolationist tradition. Moreover, millions of new U.S. citizens were refugees from European conflicts, and this alone made an Anglo-American alliance a political impossibility. So Lansdowne signed up Japan and, in 1904, joined France in the Entente Cordiale, an agreement to settle colonial differences between the two countries. No one, not even his fellow cabinet ministers, was informed in 1906 when Sir Edward Grey, Lansdowne’s successor at the Foreign Office, assumed a “moral obligation” to defend France should it be attacked by Germany, thus adding a military dimension to the Entente. Grey had been provoked by Germany’s Wilhelm II. The previous March 31 the kaiser had appeared in Tangier, the chief Moroccan port on the Mediterranean, to declare that he regarded the local sultan as an independent sovereign, thereby offending the French, who had colonial designs there. Knowing the strength of British isolationist sentiment, Grey kept his pledge from his colleagues for five years. By then the Anglo-French relationship had, with the inclusion of Russia, ripened into the Triple Entente. No promises had been made to Saint Petersburg. Still, the links had been forged, if not joined. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had been united in central Europe’s Triple Alliance since 1882. The implications of this are clear now. They weren’t then. An open rupture was considered inconceivable. Indeed, the balance was regarded as a guarantee of peace. The nations, Churchill wrote, “were fitted and fastened, it seemed securely, into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze. A polite, discrete, pacific, and on the whole sincere diplomacy spread its web of connections over both. A sentence in a dispatch, an observation by an ambassador, a cryptic phrase in a Parliament seemed sufficient to adjust from day to day the balance of the prodigious structure.”
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London had never seemed so secure, or so prodigious. The city’s population had reached 6,600,000; New York, its closest rival, had 3,440,000; Tokyo, 1,450,000; and Los Angeles, just 103,000. Although its architecture was largely Victorian (it still is), the inhabitants believed they were leading the world into the future, literally lighting the way—the city’s Inner Circle rail lines were electrified in 1905. Businessmen who wanted their firms to become household words came to London. The Italian Auguste Oddenino, determined to own the finest restaurant on earth, built it in Regent Street. In 1902 the Ritz had opened in Piccadilly, followed by Dunhill’s in Duke Street, near Piccadilly Circus, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street, and, in the last year of Edward’s reign, the 2,500-seat London Palladium. Lord Northcliffe was Britain’s most exciting press lord. Having transformed the
Daily Mail,
he turned the
Daily Mirror
into a halfpenny picture paper, drove its circulation to a million, and bought
The Times.
He introduced sports pages for a nation of innovative sportsmen. The world’s affluent became small-boat enthusiasts; an English publisher gave them
The Riddle of the Sands.
Leisure time increased in industrial countries; their sportsmen turned to lawn tennis and football, both invented in Britain. A wave of nostalgia for an idealized childhood spread across Europe and North America. English writers quickly took it over. On December 27, 1904, James M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up
opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre with Maude Adams in the lead, and it has been playing in one hall or another ever since. Kipling wrote
Kim
and
Just So Stories for Little Children;
Beatrix Potter,
Peter Rabbit;
Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows;
and Sir R. S. S. Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking, published
Scouting for Boys
in 1906 and founded the Boy Scout movement with the motto “Be Prepared,” based on his initials. Boys around the globe enrolled, 11,000 of them coming to convene in the Crystal Palace.