The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (68 page)

In music and art the British were less successful. Sir Thomas Beecham was a gifted conductor and the London Symphony a distinguished orchestra, but Elgar was the only memorable composer. The best native tunes were heard in London’s music halls, and the liveliest of these, “Waltzing Matilda,” was written by an Austrialian, Marie Cowan, in 1903. John Singer Sargent, an American, was commissioned to paint
The Marlborough Family; Westminster Bridge, The Houses of Parliament,
and
Port of London
were the work of France’s André Derain. London painters were indeed inhospitable to foreign genius. They jeered at the first major London exhibition of Postimpressionists, Derain among them; even Sargent said, “I am absolutely sceptical as to their having any claim whatever to being works of art, with the exception of the pictures by Gauguin that strike me as admirable in colour—and in colour only.” In literature, however, the English scene glowed. The number of books published annually soared from 5,971 to 9,541. A certain sacrifice was made for wider audiences. Before the Edwardian era, authors could assume that their readers knew Latin and the Bible. The mass-circulation newspapers had altered their vocabulary for subscribers lacking a classical education, and this was reflected in the new books, including serious fiction. R. C. K. Ensor has noted that this created “a distinct barrier of language between the modern Englishman and most of his country’s greater literature from Milton down through Burke to Macaulay.”
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Yet the gain was greater than the loss. Edwardian writers possessed a vitality unmatched in England before or since, and this is reflected in the files of the
Times Literary Supplement,
whose first issue was dated January 17, 1902. In poetry these were the years of Masefield and Alfred Noyes’s “Highwayman” (“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas…”). Drama apart, the novel was the only popular literary form, and it glittered with the works of Kipling, George Moore, Samuel Butler (
The Way of All Flesh,
1903), Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Conrad, the early Maugham, Henry James, Saki, W. H. Hudson (
Green Mansions,
1904), John Galsworthy (Soames Forsyte arrived in
The Man of Property,
1906), and Bloomsbury’s E. M. Forster, whose most fruitful years these were (
Where Angels Fear to Tread,
1905;
The Longest Journey,
1907;
A Room with a View,
1908; and his masterpiece,
Howards End,
1910). Fictive entertainment also flourished. This period saw the appearance of Conan Doyle’s
Hound of the Baskervilles;
the first Edgar Wallace thriller,
The Four Just Men;
and the debut of P. G. Wodehouse, whose
Pothunters,
astonishingly, was published in 1902.

But it was the English stage that captivated the literary world. London’s dramatic renaissance, the fruit of twenty years of brilliant criticism and experiment, reached its culmination during Edward’s reign; for the first time since Shakespeare, British plays were being translated into all continental languages, and the city’s little theaters were packed almost nightly throughout the decade. At His Majesty’s Theatre you could see Clyde Fitch’s
Last of the Dandies
and John Millington Synge’s
Tinker’s Wedding.
The Royal Court Theatre produced Galsworthy’s
Silver Box
and seven Shaw plays:
Candida, John Bull’s Other Island, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Doctor’s Dilemma,
and
The Philanderer.
Shaw’s
Getting Married
could be seen at the Haymarket, Masefield’s
Tragedy of Man
at the New Royalty. If you liked Barrie, and he was more popular then than now, you went to the Duke of York, which staged, in addition to
Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton, Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, What Every Woman Knows, Old Friends,
and
The Twelve-Pound Look.
The Duke of York also showed Galsworthy’s
Justice
and Shaw’s
Misalliance.
Quite apart from artistic merits, Edwardian playwrights dealt with the absorbing social and political issues of the time—labor unions, feminism, criminal justice, the prison system, the Irish question, imperialism, armaments, socialism, salvationism, syndicalism, property, marriage, and divorce—and they therefore found Churchill in their audiences. He met most of them and knew Shaw well. When rehearsals for
Pygmalion
ended at His Majesty’s Theatre (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Jennie’s husband’s mistress, playing Eliza Doolittle) GBS wired Winston: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill wired back: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”
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W
inston was a Liberal back-bencher for eighteen months and, most of the time, an inconspicuous one. The larger part of his time was devoted to writing and building a Manchester constituency for the coming general election. In the House he tried to steer a careful course between the left and right wings of his new party, speaking on the safe subjects of army reform and the economy. But he was never completely himself unless in the center of the firing line, and Balfour, dodging on and off the floor to avoid taking stands which would further split his Tories, was an irresistible target. Churchill mocked his “miserable and disreputable shifts” of principle and “his gross and flagrant ignorance.”
Punch
reported Balfour’s reaction: “Prince Arthur lolls on the Treasury Bench looking straight before him with studious indifference, betrayed by a countenance clouded with rare anger.” Other Conservatives were less aloof. They published an anonymous pamphlet quoting the turncoat’s past attacks on his new colleagues. It was headed: “Mr Winston Churchill on the Radical Party Before he donned their livery and Accepted their Pay.”
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Balfour decided to resign as prime minister before the country went to the polls. On December 4, 1905, dispirited, lacking in legislative goals, and unable to reestablish a working relationship with Chamberlain, AJB stepped down over a minor issue, and the King asked Campbell-Bannerman to form a new government. Edward gave C-B a free hand in his appointments. The new prime minister offered Churchill a choice of posts and Winston asked to be named under secretary of state for the colonies; the secretary of state would be the Earl of Elgin, and since Elgin sat in the House of Lords, Winston would handle colonial matters in the Commons. C-B agreed and it was announced. The Tories, predictably, were outraged. Now the truth was out, they cried. The renegade had changed his party to reach office; he stood exposed as “a political adventurer who would do anything for his own advancement.” Actually, he was something of an ingrate. Members of the government were entitled to wear the uniforms of privy councillors. In those days secretaries, having ministerial rank, belonged to the first class, others were second-class, the difference between them being marked by the gold embroidery on the collar and cuffs—a plain edge for ministers and a serrated edge for the others. Sir Herbert Samuel later recalled accompanying Churchill to the investiture ceremony. “Winston,” he wrote, “was by no means pleased at being no more than an Undersecretary, young as he was and even as a first step in office. Suddenly, pointing to his sleeve, he said to me: ‘The badge of shame!’ ”
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In his first official act he picked as his private secretary Edward Marsh, a casual acquaintance who, until now, had been a well-connected but obscure clerk in the West African department. Eddie Marsh’s life and Churchill’s would be closely intertwined for the next thirty years. Max Beerbohm caught the essence of Eddie in one of his pencil sketches: the head cocked like a bird’s, bushy eyebrows arched eagerly, monocle twinkling. He frequently removed the monocle to wipe away a tear—like Churchill, he was emotional—and his falsetto, slate-squeak voice reminded Violet Asquith of “a high-pitched chirrup.” Eddie was nervous about his new job. He wasn’t sure he liked Winston. In his memoirs he wrote that he was “a little afraid of him” and doubted “we could ever have anything in common.”
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On December 12, however, Eddie was Winston’s guest in Mount Street. The next morning he wrote Leonie Leslie: “Such an excitement. I
must
tell you. Your nephew has asked me to be his private secretary for 6 months or so. It will be the most interesting thing I’ve ever done but I’m most terribly afraid of not being the right person and turning out a failure…. I’ve just dined alone with Winston. He was most perfectly charming to me but made it quite clear what he would expect in the way of help and I almost
know
I can’t do it—it’s awful!” Churchill, however, had decided that this was his man. When he was determined to be fascinating, he could dispel virtually all misgivings. He had a way of tossing off lapidary epigrams as though they had just occurred to him, and he now flashed such a jewel before Marsh, describing the proper spirit for a great nation: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good-will.” (“I wish,” Eddie wrote, “the tones in which he spoke this could have been ‘recorded’—the first phrase a rattle of musketry, the second ‘grating harsh thunder,’ the third a ray of the sun through storm-clouds; the last pure benediction.”)
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Marsh, still anxious, awoke in the morning, presented himself to Winston, and whispered worriedly, “I’m afraid I shan’t be much use today, as I’ve lost my voice.” Churchill looked up. “What?” he boomed. “Is that resonant organ extinct?” By then they were firm friends. Jennie, however, remembering that ugly business at Sandhurst, was troubled by this appointment; according to Douglas Plummer, Marsh was known to be “the center of a large homosexual artistic colony.” But there is no evidence that his deviance was overt, and Churchill, vastly tolerant in his friendships, doubtless regarded the matter as none of his business.
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Three weeks later the two men checked into Manchester’s Midland Hotel, which would be Winston’s base for his first campaign as a Liberal candidate. That evening they toured the slums. Churchill “looked about him,” Marsh wrote, “and his sympathetic imagination was stirred. ‘Fancy,’ he said, ‘living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury,
never saying anything clever!
’ ” He meant to be clever here, but not alarming. The city had become a Conservative stronghold—all nine seats were held by Tories—and apart from ringing tributes to Free Trade, he skirted controversy just twice. Courting workingmen’s votes, he promised that the Liberals would remember England’s “left-out millions,” and, less honorably, assured Protestant Unionists that he would “support no legislation which I regard as likely to injure the effective integrity of the United Kingdom.” Hecklers distributed copies of the pamphlet quoting his past scorn for his present party; one thrust it in his hands while others cried, “Answer it!” He did: “I said a lot of stupid things when I worked with the Conservative Party, and I left it because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.” Then, amid loud cheers, he tore the leaflet to shreds and, a newspaperman reported, “flung it from him with a dramatic gesture, expressing… contempt for the cause he had once espoused.”
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He was the most exciting candidate in the city. “There is no question about it,” wrote Charles E. Hands of the Tory
Daily Mail;
“the public interest of Manchester in the General Election is centred and focussed on the personality of Mr Winston Churchill. You can hardly see the rest of the political landscape for this dominant figure.” Men discussed his alliterative rhetoric, the mammoth posters bearing his name in letters five feet high, the reviews of his new book, and the startling youthfulness of his mother, who was stumping for him every day. He was billed to speak in the Manchester Coal Exchange one afternoon at three o’clock. “At half past two,” the
Guardian
reported, “the hall was packed with a struggling crowd; a second crowd was struggling on the staircase leading to the hall; and a third crowd [was] jostling for standing room on the pavement in the street.” The
Mail
noted that he was “wearing a new old-fashioned hat, a flat-topped sort of felt hat, and already the hatters are having enquiries for articles of that pattern.” In addition, “Ladies who have been privileged to speak to him are envied of their sex.”
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Among the enviers of their sex were the Pankhursts. In late 1905, even before the campaign had begun, Christabel Pankhurst and her friend Annie Kenney had been arrested for disrupting a Churchill speech in northwest Manchester; Churchill had offered to pay their fifteen-shilling fine, but they chose a week’s martyrdom in a cell. Emmeline Pankhurst now interrupted one of his speeches repeatedly until stewards lured her into a side room and locked the door. Winston, who thought she had left the meeting, said he had voted for the one woman suffrage bill to come before the House but deplored disturbances at political rallies. Someone shouted: “That’s right, don’t be henpecked, Winston!” At St. John’s Schools, Gartside, he had to deal with Sylvia Pankhurst. She raised a sign bearing the slogan “Votes for Women,” but she had it upside down, and Churchill mildly pointed that out. She called: “Will you give us a vote?” He invited her to join him on the platform; she did, and he asked the crowd: “Will everybody please be quiet. Let us hear what she has to say.” They refused; they chanted: “We want to hear Churchill!” He tried again and failed. The hall was in an uproar. According to the
Guardian,
he then said: “ ‘We should be fair and chivalrous to ladies. They come here asking us to treat them like men.’ (Laughter) ‘That is what I particularly want to avoid. We must observe courtesy and chivalry to the weaker sex dependent upon us.’ (Hear hear.)” Sylvia, furious, stalked out. Like her mother, she had found that in one respect Churchill was like Arthur Balfour. He could adroitly avoid making a commitment under the wrong circumstances.
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