The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (70 page)

Nevertheless, the measure was a triumph. Botha became prime minister, first of the self-governing Transvaal, and then after 1910 of the new Union of South Africa. When they met as fellow statesmen, he recognized Churchill as his armored-train prisoner, whereupon Winston complained that the reward for his recapture had been stingy. In 1914 Botha and his followers chose to fight side by side with the British, something not foreseen only a few years earlier, and Churchill’s fellow Liberals, among others, recognized the wisdom and generosity of his terms. His “shame” was past; he was appointed a first-class member of the Privy Council, a rare honor for a man below cabinet rank. Now he stood in the party’s front echelons. The next vacancy on the government’s front bench would be his. Meanwhile, he decided to have some fun and possibly make money, too. In the summer of 1907, after a colonial conference at which he beat back appeals for imperial preference by arguing that tariffs would lead to “a deep feeling of sullen hatred of the colonies and of colonial affairs among the poorer people in this country,” he left England for five months. He and F. E. Smith attended French military maneuvers, joined Sunny for a partridge shoot in Moravia (now part of Czechoslovakia), and then separated, Winston making his way in easy stages, by Vienna and Syracuse, to Malta, where he rendezvoused with Eddie Marsh, George Scrivings, and a distant Churchill relative. The four of them boarded the cruiser
Venus,
which, Winston wrote, was “lying obedient and attentive in the roads.” The Admiralty had put it at his disposal for a tour of the east African domains.
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On Cyprus they were greeted by a mass demonstration favoring Enosis, complete union with Greece. That was the last flicker of controversy on the journey. The rest was an idyll, impossible now and possible then only because of the unchallenged might of the Empire. The party “threaded the long red furrow of the Suez Canal,” as Churchill wrote afterward, and “sweltered through the trough of the Red Sea” to Aden. Pausing in Mombasa, they traveled up-country on a special train provided by the Uganda Railway; two of them, he told his mother in a long letter home, sat “on a seat in front of the engine with our rifles & as soon as we saw anything to shoot at—a wave of the hand brought the train to a standstill & sometimes we tried at antelope without even getting down.” They found zebras, lions, rhinoceroses, antelopes of every kind, ostriches, and giraffes. He wrote: “On the first day I killed 1 zebra, 1 wildebeeste, two hartebeeste, 1 gazelle, 1 bustard (a giant bird),” and he had also sighted “a vy fine kind of antelope with beautiful straight horns.” He was nearly run down by a rhino, “a survival of prehistoric times,” whose charge was halted when he fired “a heavy 450 rifle & hit her plumb in the chest.”
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Everywhere Africans waited to pay the bwana tribute: “I was presented by the various chiefs with 108 sheep, 7 Bulls, about £100 worth of ivory, an ostrich egg, many fowls & some vy good leopard skins.” A glimpse of “the mighty snow-clad peak of Mt Kenya” was followed by stops at Nairobi, Lake Victoria, Kampala, the Ripon Falls, Gondokoro, and, after a leisurely journey by train and steamer, Khartoum, where, to Churchill’s dismay, his manservant fell ill with choleraic diarrhea and died. The Dublin Fusiliers, at Winston’s request, gave Scrivings a military funeral; “we all walked in procession to the cemetery as mourners, while the sun sank over the desert, and the band played that beautiful funeral march you know so well.” That put a damper on the rest of the trip; they hurried to Wadi Halfa, Aswân, Cairo, and home. But on balance the expedition had been a great success. Churchill felt fit and was in fact wealthier. After the last election he had left Mount Street and rented a small house at 12 Bolton Street, just off Piccadilly, two blocks from the Ritz, and during his absence his brother had sublet it for him. The
Strand
paid him £750 for four articles on his tour; Hodder and Stoughton advanced £500 against royalties for a book,
My African Journey.
Solvent and radiant, he was guest of honor on Saturday, January 18, 1908, at a dinner given by the National Liberal Club to welcome him home. He told them: “I come back into the firing line in the best possible health, and with a wish to force the fighting up to the closest possible point.”
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That wish was swiftly granted. During his absence Campbell-Bannerman’s health had deteriorated alarmingly. Aware that he had only a few weeks to live, C-B resigned on April 3. Asquith succeeded him—he crossed to Biarritz for his sovereign’s permission to form a new government; Edward let nothing interrupt his holidays—and on April 8 he wrote Churchill: “With the King’s approval, I have the great pleasure of offering you the post of President of the Board of Trade.” Thus Winston, at thirty-three, reached cabinet rank. Since the Restoration in 1660, custom had required newly appointed ministers to stand for reelection in their constituencies. The seat Winston had won two years earlier was traditionally Conservative. Now he had to run for it again. The Tories were elated. They had been waiting with red-baited breath for this chance to humiliate the “bounder,” the “opportunist,” the “traitor to his class.” The suffragettes also had him in their sights. His provocative wit was partly to blame. Although he had become an ardent social reformer, he said: “I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb.” And when a militant feminist asked him what should be the role of women in the future, he replied: “The same, I trust, as it has been since the days of Adam and Eve.” She glared. Swiftly moving to recover lost ground, he assured her and her sisters that he was a convert to their cause. “Trust me, ladies,” he begged. They refused. They would campaign against him, they said, unless he could guarantee Asquith’s support of votes for women. He tried to explain that he could hardly speak for the new prime minister. They jeered; they didn’t believe it; they vowed to give him no peace.
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And they did. “Painful scenes,” he wrote, “were witnessed in the Free Trade Hall when Miss Christabel Pankhurst, tragical and dishevelled, was finally ejected after having thrown the meeting into pandemonium.” This continued to be their most dramatic stratagem. His speeches were interrupted by hisses and even physical assaults, his rallies thrown into turmoil by women hurling rotten eggs and ripe fruit. Sometimes they waited until he was approaching his peroration, or the most intricate point in his argument. Then feminine voices would shriek: “What about the women?” “When are you going to give women the vote?” He wrote: “It became extremely difficult to pursue connected arguments.” He toiled eighteen hours a day, organizing canvassers when he wasn’t on the stump, and when the feminists allowed it, he gave the opposition as good as he got. He pictured himself arrayed against “all the forces of reaction” and “every discontented irresponsible element in the community,” notably “old doddering peers, cute financial magnates, clever wirepullers, big brewers with bulbous noses… weaklings, sleek, smug, comfortable, self-important individuals.” The situation was complicated by a third candidate, representing the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. In an open letter, H. G. Wells, whom socialists trusted, urged workingmen to back Churchill, but the Liberal vote split. Winston lost by 529 votes. As he left the town hall a suffragette grabbed his arm and cried: “It’s the women who have done this, Mr Churchill! Now you will understand that we must have our vote.”
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The real victors, of course, were the Tories. In what passed for humor in Balfour’s set, an ill-wisher wired him: “What’s the use of a W.C. without a seat?” The
Morning Post
rejoiced that Winston, “though a Cabinet minister, is a political Ishmaelite wandering around as an object of compassion and commiseration. Manchester has washed its hands of him. The juveniles have for days past been singing to a popular air ‘Good-bye, Winnie, you must leave us,’ and Winnie has gone. On the whole Manchester appears to be taking the sorrowful parting with composure.” So was Churchill. Even before he left the city, telegrams had arrived offering him eight safe Liberal seats. He chose Dundee, one of whose MPs had just been elevated to the peerage. To his mother he wrote: “It’s a life seat and cheap and easy beyond all experience.” The Manchester defeat didn’t rankle. He wrote a woman friend, not a militant feminist, who mourned his loss: “It was a real pleasure to me to get your letter & telegram. I am glad to think you watched the battle from afar with eyes sympathetic to my fortunes…. How I should have liked you to be there. You would have enjoyed it I think. We had a jolly party and it was a whirling week. Life for all its incompleteness is rather fun sometimes.”
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T
he friend was Clementine Hozier, whom he had disconcerted with his rude, silent stare four years earlier. Now twenty-three, Clementine was at the height of her beauty. Violet Asquith, seeing her for the first time, thought she had “a face of classical perfection” and “a profile like the racing cutter in George Meredith’s novel
Beauchamp’s Career,
” or “the prow of a Greek ship.”
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Her social credentials were acceptable, if not spectacular. She belonged to one of those landed gentry families which lived on tight budgets. Descended from Scots whose lineage could be traced back to the twelfth century, she was a granddaughter of the Countess of Airlie. Jennie had once known her mother well; Winston’s uncle Jack Leslie had been one of her godfathers. Men said she was a good hunter for a woman; women said that she had rightly decided her hair was her crowning glory, and on formal occasions she always wore it up. But there was much more to Clementine than that. The child of a shattered marriage, educated at the Sorbonne, she was a strong-minded young woman of firm likes and dislikes (she did not like Jennie), and her politics were rather to the left of the Liberal establishment. Although she never invited arrest or shouted down cabinet members, she believed women were entitled to the vote and was prepared to say so anywhere, to anyone, at any time. She was not, in short, a paradigm of an upper-class Englishwoman. Most youthful patricians would have found her a difficult wife, and she had already broken an engagement she knew was unwise. Yet there were deep reservoirs of love in her. For the right husband, she would be magnificent.

“Where does the family start?” Winston once asked rhetorically. “It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl. No superior alternative has yet been found.” But first they must be thrown together, and both he and Clementine almost missed their second meeting. It came in March 1908, two months after his return from Africa. They had been invited separately to a dinner being given at 52 Portland Place by her aunt, Lady St. Helier, formerly Lady Jeune, who had been Winston’s benefactress when he wanted to ride with Kitchener to Khartoum. At the appointed hour, however, he was in his bath. Eddie, bursting in on him, said: “What on earth are you doing, Winston? You should be at dinner by now!” Churchill said he wasn’t going, that it would be a great bore; Eddie told him he couldn’t do that to Lady Jeune, and, grumbling and scowling, Winston emerged from the tub, dressed, and caught a cab. Meanwhile, at 51 Abingdon Villas in Kensington, Clementine and her mother had exchanged similar words. Clementine had spent the afternoon giving French lessons at a half crown an hour. She was tired and didn’t want to go out, but Lady Blanche scolded: “That is very ungrateful of you. Your Aunt Mary has been extremely kind to you. Let’s have no more nonsense; go upstairs straight away and get dressed.”
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So the two unwilling guests arrived late. Seated next to Clementine, Winston was all courtesy this time, though as usual he wanted to talk about himself. He asked her if she had read his biography of Lord Randolph. She hadn’t. He promised to send her a copy and then forgot. But he didn’t forget Clementine. He asked his mother to invite her and her mother for a weekend at Salisbury Hall, the Cornwallis-West country home. Clementine was impressed with him; in her letter thanking Jennie, she wrote of his “dominating charm and brilliancy.” Maddeningly, Lady Blanche, who couldn’t afford it, chose this spring to take her daughter abroad for six weeks. Winston’s letters pursued her. Having just called on the King to “kiss hands”—receive royal sanction for his new office—he seized “this fleeting hour of leisure to write & tell how much I liked our long talk on Sunday and what a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment.” He wrote her of his brother’s marriage to Lady Gwendeline Bertie, or “Goonie,” as everyone in the family called her; he wrote of politics and the fire at Burley-on-the-Hill. To this last, Clementine replied: “I have been able to think of nothing but the fire & the terrible danger you have been in…. My dear my heart stood still with terror.”
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Clementine Hozier at the time of her wedding