The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (72 page)

Certainly Winston needed the exercise. In 1909 newspapers noted that his stoop had grown more pronounced, and that he was getting fat. Nevertheless, the QOOH outings made Clementine uneasy. She believed that F.E. kept her husband up late and encouraged him to play poker. Winston always stayed up late and always gambled, but her anxiety was understandable; he couldn’t afford the high stakes of his rich friends. At the time of his appointment, Asquith had written him that as president of the Board of Trade he would be “on the same level, as regards salary & status,” as a secretary of state. That would have brought in £5,000 a year, on which the family could have lived comfortably. As it turned out, he was paid only half that. The money he had invested with Cassel was gone; so were the royalties from his later books. Clementine had grown up learning to live on little money, but she became haunted by the need to make ends meet. Her husband was loving but inconsiderate. On very short notice he would send word that he was bringing friends home to dinner. If she asked what she was expected to feed them, his answer was always the same: “Let’s have Irish stew with lots of onions.” She waved handfuls of bills at him and he turned away shrugging, though once he suffered pangs of remorse. At their wedding his aunt Cornelia had given her a diamond necklace; later Winston had had rubies set around the diamonds. Beset by creditors, she impulsively sold it. When she told him, he rushed to the jeweler to buy it back, but he was too late; it was gone.
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Being Winston Churchill’s wife was sometimes embarrassing and even dangerous. In November 1909 the Churchills, arriving at Bristol railway station, were leaving their car when a suffragette, Theresa Garnett, ran up and tried to lash his face with a whip. He grabbed her wrists and she tugged him toward the tracks and the path of a moving train. At the last moment Clementine grabbed his coat and pulled both of them back to safety. A few months later he faced another whip, this one in the hands of a suffragette’s male relative who cried: “Take that, you dirty cur!” Winston took evasive action instead. He warned his wife against opening “suspicious parcels arriving by post without precautions…. These harpies are quite capable of trying to burn us out.” By 1912 he would be a supporter of their cause, but as long as their assaults on public men continued, he refused to commit himself in Parliament. Clementine’s feelings were mixed. She said publicly that she was “ardently in favour of votes for women,” and privately she believed feminism needed champions willing to break the law. On the other hand, she certainly didn’t want Winston maimed or killed. No such ambiguity troubled her on other issues, however. As his advocacy of Liberal reforms grew more passionate, Tory homes were closed to the Churchills, and some die-hard acquaintances would cross the street rather than greet her. She gloried in their animosity, for in these years, when Winston’s radicalism crested, his most enthusiastic supporter was Clementine Churchill.
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E
ven before he left the Colonial Office, Winston had become a thunderer on the left. He had urged the South Africans to adopt a program of unemployment compensation, and in a letter from Africa on December 22, 1907, he had proposed parliamentary bills establishing minimum wages, insurance against sickness, and old-age pensions in England. Back in London he gave Charles Masterman, himself a reformer, the impression that he was “full of the poor whom he has just discovered. He thinks he is called by Providence—to do something for them. ‘Why have I always been kept safe within a hair’s breadth,’ he asked, ‘except to do something like this?’ ” Writing in the
Nation
of March 7, he recommended that men without jobs be “treated as if they were hospital patients” and that the economy be managed through a “network of state intervention and regulation”; he saw “little glory,” he had said, “in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.” In Glasgow he had delivered a historic speech, declaring that “the fortunes and interests of Liberalism and Labour are inseparably interwoven. They rise by the same forces, they face the same enemies, they are affected by the same dangers.” The state, he said, must “concern itself with the care of the sick and the aged, and, above all, of the children.” The government should get “the railways of this country in our hands” and become “the reserve employer of labour,” establishing public-works projects to “spread a net over the abyss.”
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All this was breathtaking in 1908. Beatrice Webb revised her early judgment of him; she wrote: “He is brilliantly able—more than a phrase-monger, I think.” But the upper classes, Churchill’s relatives and the people he had lived among all his life, were flabbergasted. This was the man who, as a Sandhurst cadet, had approved of churchgoing for workmen on the ground that “nothing can give them a good time here, but it makes them more contented to think that they will get one hereafter.” At heart he was a traditionalist who loved the Shakespearean “tide of pomp/That beats upon the high shore of this world.” Except by reading, or strolling through the Manchester slum with Eddie Marsh, he knew nothing of real poverty. Clementine’s small economies were hardly comparable to the destitution of jobless Britons. The Churchills always had servants. Winston never packed a bag; it was simpler to ring a bell. It never occurred to him to travel third-class. Eddie Marsh wrote that until he married, Winston had never even heard of such things as “lodgings.” He once told Violet Asquith: “I have always had to earn every penny I possessed, but there has never been a day in my life when I could not order a bottle of champagne for myself and offer another to a friend.”
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Why, then, had he chosen to become a tribune of the oppressed? Doubtless his resentment of the Tory hierarchy was one reason; as he saw it, they had ruined his father, driven Winston himself out of their party, and treated him viciously since he had crossed the House floor. He was an intuitive rebel. But being humane, he was also genuinely appalled by the plight of the downtrodden as he discovered it through reading and in talks with the Webbs, Shaw, and Wells. Another explanation is political. The Liberals, though apparently invincible, felt menaced by the burgeoning Labour party, which threatened to steal their thunder and their strong radical wing. An increase in Lib-Lab strength was the result. Asquith made their triumphs possible, though he himself was no ideologue. Silver-haired, with a small, thin-lipped, stubborn-looking mouth and a thick Yorkshire accent which had survived the City of London School and Balliol College at Oxford, he had displayed little political imagination in the past, but he grasped his party’s need for movement to the left, shrewdly sensing the necessity for some official response, however limited, to the outcry over the public and private exposés of working-class destitution. One of his first acts had been to provide free meals and free medical attention for schoolchildren. Winston’s combative spirit was stirred when these mild measures provoked violent Tory protests. “Party animosity,” Lord Campion wrote nearly a half-century later, “reached a degree of virulence which is hardly conceivable in the present generation.”
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Finally, all these motives for the liberation of Churchill from patrician dogma were immeasurably strengthened by the charisma and leadership of his colleague Lloyd George, his senior by eleven years.

Churchill and David Lloyd George, Budget Day, 1910

Churchill at the Board of Trade, Lloyd George at the Exchequer—this was the team which really drove the Asquith government in its first surge of reform. It was an unlikely alliance. The younger man, born to a ducal family, weaned on privilege, had been boosted to fame by influential relatives and friends, including England’s present King, and had, for all his brushes with death on battlefields, led a sheltered life. Lloyd George had been a penniless Welsh boy, raised by a widowed mother, articled to a solicitor at sixteen, and introduced to the practice of law by defending poachers in local courts. One wore a top hat in town, the other, except on extraordinary occasions, a crumpled fedora. Yet each was an impulsive political genius, fired by idealism, joined to the other by common goals. “Both,” wrote Elie Halévy, “were opposed to a policy of heavy expenditure on the Army and the Navy, both advocates of a policy of social reform which, they maintained, the Liberal Party must pursue with unprecedented daring, if the Labour Party were not to grow strong on its left. They came forward as the two leaders of the radical group of pacifists and advanced social reformers as opposed to the three Imperialists, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane.”
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If it is difficult to accept Churchill as a grandfather of the welfare state, it is even harder to picture him fighting plans to arm England against saber-rattling Germans. Nevertheless, that was his position in the summer of 1908. In this he was once more his father’s son, a co-conspirator with Lloyd George against military estimates. Reginald McKenna, first lord of the Admiralty, wanted to lay keels for six dreadnoughts; Sir John Fisher, the first sea lord, wrote:
“Six in the estimates w/o any doubt is an irreducible minimum—no qualifying statement.”
Lloyd George, who regarded the navy as a toy for the rich—and called the War Office the “Ministry of Slaughter”—thought four of the ships was enough. Winston agreed with him. Speaking to miners in south Wales on August 14, he ridiculed the notion of war with the kaiser. “I think it is greatly to be deprecated,” he said, “that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense.” There was nothing to fight about, he added, “although there may be snapping and snarling in London clubs.”
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“What are Winston’s reasons for acting as he does in this matter?” Lord Knollys later wrote Lord Esher. “Of course it cannot be from conviction or principle. The very idea of his having either is enough to make one laugh.” That is a fair sample of the kind of judgments Tories passed on Churchill then. Neither peer could see the obvious: money spent on warships couldn’t go into social programs. The militants in the cabinet wanted six keels, but Asquith complained to his wife: “Winston and Ll. G. by their combined machinations have got the bulk of the Liberal press in the same camp… there are moments when I am disposed summarily to cashier them both.” He couldn’t; his back-benchers wouldn’t have stood for it; of 377 Liberal MPs, over 200 had joined the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism—the “LLAAMs,” or “Lambs.” The issue was in doubt when Lloyd George sent Winston word “that the Admiralty have had very serious news from their Naval attaché in Germany
since our last Cabinet Committee
& that McK is now convinced we may have to lay down
8
Dreadnoughts next year!!!” The news leaked to the press; in music halls jingoes sang a new ditty: “We want eight and we won’t wait.” They had to wait, but they got them. The two radical ministers accepted an Asquith compromise: four keels were to be laid now, and another four later if the German naval program made it absolutely necessary. Berlin obliged. “In the end,” Churchill therefore wrote later, “a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four and we finally compromised on eight.” He added that “although the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I were right in the narrow sense, we were absolutely wrong in relation to the deep tides of destiny.”
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Despite this channeling of money into armaments, Churchill passed most of his program through the House. A maximum workday was established for miners. Sweated labor was attacked by establishing trade boards which fixed minimum wages. In each city he set up a labor exchange where employment would be sought for the jobless, trade-union leaders could meet, and all visitors would be provided with “facilities for washing, mending, and non-alcoholic refreshments.”
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He also drafted an unemployment-insurance bill. At the same time, Lloyd George, as chancellor, was introducing a measure providing for old-age pensions and an expanded National Health Insurance Act—his slogan was “nine-pence for fourpence,” the difference between the two figures being the contributions from employers and the government. The latter bill didn’t become law until 1911, because the House of Lords balked at it. The solution which broke the legislative impasse, and which was designed by Lloyd George and Churchill, altered the historical balance between the two Houses of Parliament.