The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (74 page)

The second election confirmed the close results of the first. Still the Lords refused to budge. Winston wrote Clementine: “Things are tending to a pretty sharp crisis. What are you to do with men whose obstinacy & pride have blinded them to their interests and to every counsel of reason? It would not be surprising if we actually have to create 500. We shall not boggle about it when it comes to the pinch.” Three weeks later he wrote her: “If anything goes wrong we make 350 Peers at once.” It proved unnecessary. Lloyd George had derided the upper house as “Mr. Balfour’s poodle,” and on this issue it was; they would take their cue from him. Asquith wrote Balfour, telling him the King would pack the Lords with new peers. The diehards—originally a regimental nick-name, the word entered the language at this time—were finished. Balfour resigned his post as party leader, signifying defeat, and in the sweltering summer of 1911 the upper house passed a parliamentary reform act, emasculating their powers, by the thin margin of 131 to 114. The Liberals, however, had paid a price. During the campaign Austen Chamberlain had predicted that Asquith’s government, if kept in office, would “establish Home Rule in Ireland.” Churchill later wrote of Austen: “He always played the game, and he always lost.” But this time he was right. To win the backing of the Irish MPs in the “People versus the Peers” struggle, the Liberals had agreed to introduce a new Home Rule bill, thus reviving that old and bitter quarrel.
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Winston and Jennie, 1912

W
inston’s parliamentary skills and his services to the party entitled him to a promotion—a long step toward the prime ministership which, it was generally agreed, would be his before long. Even the Tories believed it; Balfour told him: “Winston, I believe your hour has come.” Churchill never waited for recognition. When the polls closed on the first of these two elections, he wrote Asquith that “Ministers should occupy positions in the Government which correspond to some extent with their influence in the country.” He wanted, he said, “to go either to the Admiralty (assuming that place to become vacant) or to the Home Office.” He was advised that “the First Lord could not be changed… without being slighted. But if you cared for the HO, no doubt it would be at your disposal.” He cared for it, and on February 14, 1910, he was appointed home secretary. He was thirty-five. Only one home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, had been younger.
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Churchill’s salary now reached the promised £5,000, and he was working hard for it. His responsibilities included the welfare of seven million factory workers and a million miners, national security, England’s police force, immigration, and law and order. Every evening when the House was in session he had to write a longhand report on its proceedings for the King. He was answerable for conservation, the censorship of stage plays, regulations governing automobile mudguards, the licensing of Italian organ-grinders—everything, in short, which directly involved the people living in the United Kingdom. His view of the office was liberal and humanitarian. He said: “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.”
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Bills drafted by him limited the hours of shop assistants and introduced safety measures in the mines. Most important, at the outset, were his role in guiding Lloyd George’s National Health Insurance Act through the House and his penal reforms.

On his appointment he told Violet Asquith that he was less interested in his policemen than in their quarries. Memories of his POW imprisonment in Pretoria were still vivid. Prisoners, he said, must have entertainment, “plenty of books, that’s what I missed most,” and anything else which would relieve their feelings of confinement, “except of course the chance of breaking bounds and getting out of the damned place—I suppose I mustn’t give them
that!
” She said she would prefer hanging to a life sentence; he vehemently disagreed: “Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.” He soon found that the duty he liked least was signing execution warrants; after visiting him, Blunt noted in his diary that it had “become a nightmare to him to have to exercise his power of life and death in the case of condemned criminals, on an average of one case a fortnight.” One death warrant which did not trouble him was that of Dr. H. H. Crippen, who had left his wife’s dismembered remains in the cellar of his London home and boarded a transatlantic steamer with his mistress, only to be intercepted on the other side by Canadian Mounties—the first fugitive to be caught by a wireless alert. Crippen was hanged at first light in Pentonville Prison on October 18, 1910. Churchill celebrated with a champagne breakfast.
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His predecessor, in handing over the seals of office, had told him: “As regards prisons, it won’t be a bad thing to give a harassed department some rest.” Winston gave it no rest. Beginning a series of visits to penitentiaries, he abolished floggings and introduced libraries and lecture programs. Of Britain’s 184,000 prisoners, he found, a third had been committed for drunkenness and more than half for failure to pay fines. Imprisonment for debt, theoretically abolished, was still common: “We are confronted annually with an ever increasing number of committals to prison and hence of failures to recover debt. A vicious system of credit, based on no real security, is increasingly involving working class families in domestic disputes, extravagance, embarrassment and ultimate disgrace, and is sapping thrift and honesty.” Here again he could identify with the men in cells; he, too, knew the burden of debt. He instituted a “time-to-pay” program for debtors and replaced the jailing of drunkards with fines. The number of debtors behind bars dropped from 95,686 to 5,264; of drunks, from 62,822 to 1,670. At the same time, he moved to deprive suffragettes of their martyrdom. They were, he said, “political prisoners.” As such they were neither searched nor forbidden to bathe; they could wear their own clothing, receive food and parcels from outside, and talk to one another. His explanation for this leniency was that “prison rules which are suitable to criminals jailed for dishonesty or cruelty or other crimes implying moral turpitude should not be applied inflexibly to those whose general character is good and whose offences, however reprehensible, do not involve personal dishonour.”
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He had been impressed and influenced by John Galsworthy’s
Justice.
Galsworthy now wrote
The Times:
“These changes are one and all inspired by imagination, without which reform is deadly, and by common sense, without which it is dangerous.” But a penal official warned that England should not “ignore the poorer classes outside the prison walls while we do so much for the worst classes of our population,” and the Tories were delighted when one case of clemency backfired. On a prison visit, accompanied by Lloyd George, Winston met the “Dartmoor Shepherd.” This unfortunate man had been in and out of prison since 1870. Once he had been sentenced to ten years for stealing a watch and chain; another time to five years for stealing £1 6s. 6d.; and, most recently, to three years for taking two shillings from a church box. He had never been guilty of violence. At Dartmoor he tended the penitentiary’s flock of sheep. Winston described him in a minute as a man who “enjoyed a melancholy celebrity for the prodigious sentences he had endured, for his good behaviour and docility in prison, and for his unusual gift of calling individual sheep by name.” On the stump Lloyd George contrasted him with the peers, “plunderers of the poor.” Churchill ordered him released. It was a mistake. The man was a recidivist. He promptly left the job the warden had found for him and, three months later, was arrested while breaking into a house. Winston reported to the King that the incident had received its “mead of merriment” in the House. The Tories formally moved a reduction of £500 in his salary, and, Churchill wrote in another report to the King, “as the Irish members were away, half the Labour members absent, ministers at the gala and holiday moods in the air, this flagitious proposal was rejected only by a majority of 32.”
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Why weren’t all the Liberals and their allies there to save him from this humiliation? The answer lies in the letter’s date: June 27, 1911. By then MPs on the left had begun to qualify their admiration of Churchill. Actually, it had never been wholehearted. His colleagues in the Liberal hierarchy had always had reservations about him. Asquith complained that he “thinks with his mouth”; his wife wrote in her diary, “Winston has a noisy mind”; Lloyd George compared him to “a chauffeur who apparently is perfectly sane and drives with great skill for months, then suddenly takes you over a precipice.” Almeric Fitzroy thought that “his defect is that he sees everything through the magnifying-glass of his self-confidence.” Another Liberal leader came closer to the deepest source of their misgivings when he told A. G. Gardiner: “Don’t forget that the aristocrat is still there—submerged but latent.” Charles Masterman put it bluntly a few years later: “He desired in England a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to an industrious,
bien pensant,
and grateful working class.” There was an undefined feeling that his social legislation smacked of paternalism and had been a gesture de haut en bas; that, in Margot Asquith’s words, he had merely learned “the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George’s native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference.’ ” In point of fact there
was
a difference. Beatrice Webb remarked upon Winston’s “capacity for quick appreciation and rapid execution of new ideas, whilst hardly comprehending the philosophy beneath them.” But in time he did comprehend the philosophy of the extremists. And when he understood it, he recoiled. He put his trust in social evolution, not upheaval. England’s class distinctions suited him. He saw no need to efface them, or even blur them. Only when reactionaries refused to budge, as in the struggle with the Lords, would he endorse sweeping action. Rejected by Tories because he had betrayed his class, he was distrusted by radical reformers because his conversion had been incomplete. He couldn’t win.
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He was likeliest to lose in the Home Office. The first duty of the home secretary was maintenance of order, and beginning in the year he took over the ministry, organized workingmen suddenly turned to violent tactics. In the beginning the prospect of labor strife didn’t daunt him. Three weeks after taking over the Board of Trade he had settled a shipbuilding lockout on the Tyne to the satisfaction of both parties. But in the two years since then battle lines had been drawn between capital and labor, and as a moderate he occupied no-man’s-land. In union chapels his ritualistic denunciations of socialism were resented—though, curiously, Lloyd George’s, just as vehement, were not—and his attempts to be evenhanded failed. He compared irresponsible workmen to irresponsible peers and succeeded only in irking the new King, who felt he had insulted the aristocracy. Replying to the sovereign, Winston said that the home secretary had received “with deep regret the expression of YM’s Displeasure wh has reached him through the PM… with regard to the particular phrase wh has caused YM’s displeasure, wh Mr Churchill understands is ‘It should be remembered that there are idlers at both ends of the social scale.’ Mr Churchill cannot understand why this shd be thought Socialistic in character…. To say this is not to attack the wealthy classes, most of whom as Mr Churchill knows well have done their duty in many ways: but only to point to those particular persons whose idle and frivolous conduct and lack of public spirit brings a reproach to the meritorious class to wh they belong.” George was unmollified. And the left, judging Winston by his acts, found him wanting.
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In the first week of November, 1910, over 25,000 coal miners walked out at Rhondda, in south Wales. Riots followed; several mines were flooded, and the disorders culminated in the battle of Glamorgan Valley, after which the miners smashed shop fronts in the town of Tonypandy. The local chief constable, unable to cope, asked for troops. Aware that sending soldiers against strikers was bad politics, Churchill kept the number of troops to a minimum of four hundred, sent three hundred London policemen, and made sure that the commanding officer was reponsible to him. Afterward the officer said: “It was entirely due to Mr Churchill’s foresight in sending a strong force of Metropolitan Police, directly he was made aware of the state of affairs in the valleys, that bloodshed was avoided.”
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Strikers charged the bobbies, but the policemen swung rolled-up mackintoshes and beat them off. Elsewhere, however, two miners were killed, and when a unit of soldiers was stoned, they fixed bayonets and prodded the strikers into retreating.