The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (75 page)

In light of the fact that the wrecked stores in Tonypandy were looted during what
The Times
called “an orgy of naked anarchy,” the use of force does not seem excessive. The troops had been sent in response to an appeal from the Glamorgan law-enforcement official, and Churchill had had no part in that decision. But the fact that they had been called out, and had unsheathed bayonets, infuriated union leaders. Churchill firmly told them that the soldiers now in position would remain there until he judged that troops were “no longer necessary.” They then blamed the two deaths on him. He called this “a cruel lie,” which it was. Keir Hardie, maddened beyond reason, declared that the Liberals “will give you Insurance Bills, they will give you all sorts of soothing syrups to keep you quiet, but in the end your Liberal Party, just like your Tory Party, is the Party of the rich and exists to protect the rich when Labour and Capital come into conflict.”
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The Conservatives turned this inside out. If troops had been sent in earlier, they said in the House, there would have been no looting and no property damage. An appeal from Winston, urging the strikers to renounce violence, was ridiculed by
The Times
as showing “a somewhat maudlin tone…. Mr Churchill hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen, which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place, but its place is not in the face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction.” The
Daily Express
was even harsher: “Nothing was ever more contemptible in childish and vicious folly than Mr Churchill’s message to the miners…. It is the last word in a policy of shameful neglect and poltroonery which may cost the country dear.” To the King, Winston reported: “The insensate action of the rioters in wrecking shops in the town of Tonypandy, against which they had not the slightest cause for animosity, was not foreseen by anyone on the spot, and would not have been prevented by the presence of soldiers at the colliery itself.” Nevertheless, the two myths endured. Tories thought he had acted spinelessly. Labor believed he had overreacted, and for more than forty years he would be heckled by workingmen who were convinced that he had led a bloody massacre of miners at Tonypandy.
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L
ess than two months later he was in his bathtub—it is extraordinary how many crises found him bathing—when he was summoned to the telephone, “dripping wet and shrouded in a towel,” as he later recalled, to be told that members of a gang of Latvian anarchists had been trapped at 100 Sidney Street in Whitechapel. This was welcome news, exciting and important. Churchill wanted these men badly. They were not only criminals; the Liberal government was responsible for their presence in England. The city’s East End, inhabited by nearly two million poor Londoners, had always seethed with crime. But since the abortive Russian uprising of 1905 and the Liberals’ refusal to restrict immigration, Whitechapel, Stepney, Shadwell, and Bethnal Green had also become asylums for political refugees from the czar’s Okhrana, or secret police. Joseph Stalin had briefly lived in Whitechapel in June 1907, sharing a tiny room with Maxim Litvinov. In their homeland these anarchists—today they would be called urban guerrillas—had supported their causes by robberies, and they continued to do so here, treating bobbies as they treated the Okhrana. Among them was a band of Letts led by Peter Piaktow, alias “Peter the Painter,” so christened because when not ambushing bank messengers or holding up shopkeepers at pistol point, he worked as a house painter. The men trapped in the Sidney Street house were part of this gang. Heavily armed, they had already murdered three policemen; Winston and Clementine had attended the funerals in St. Paul’s ten days earlier. Now the bobbies holding them at bay wanted the assistance of troops; hence the phone call to the home secretary. “Use whatever force is necessary,” he said, promising that a detachment of Scots Guards from the Tower would be there within the hour. Then, dressing and donning his top hat and astrakhan-collared coat, he hurried by cab to the Home Office in search of more information. There was none there, so at noon he decided to take an official car to the scene because “I thought it my duty to see what was going on myself…. I must, however, admit that convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check.”
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In Whitechapel he found high drama. Spectators and men in uniform were crouching behind buildings on both sides of the street while the killers and their besiegers blazed away at one another—the anarchists in their hideout firing Mausers; the Scots Guards, Lee-Enfields; and the sixty policemen, obsolete Morris-tube rifles. A
Daily Chronicle
reporter perched on the roof of the Rising Sun pub estimated that in the past hour and a half several thousand bullets had been exchanged without result. Churchill realized that he had made a mistake in coming: “It was not for me to interfere with those who were in charge on the spot. Yet… my position of authority, far above them all, attracted inevitably to itself direct responsibility. I saw now that I should have done much better to have remained quietly in my office. On the other hand, it was impossible to get into one’s car and drive away while matters stood in such great uncertainty, and, moreover, were extremely interesting.” Crossing the street for a better view, he sheltered in a warehouse doorway. Senior officers believed the house should be stormed, and he agreed; his “instincts,” he later wrote, “turned at once to a direct advance up the staircase behind a steel plate or shield, and a search was made in the foundries of the neighborhood for one of suitable size.” None was found, but the idea had lodged in his mind. In Sidney Street his concept of the tank was born.
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At one o’clock thin wisps of bluish smoke curled upward from a garret window of the embattled hideout, and within a half hour it was burning fiercely. The London fire brigade clattered up. Firemen and policemen argued. The bobbies refused to let the men with hoses approach the building; the firemen insisted that extinguishing the flames was their duty. At this point Churchill intervened. “I thought it better to let the house burn down,” he explained afterward, “than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.” So it blazed for an hour. “Then at last,” reported the
Daily News,
“Mr Churchill stepped to the middle of the street and waved his arms… firemen appeared and regardless of possible bullets poured water on the burning house… and policemen led by Mr Churchill rushed forward to the door.” Inside they found nothing but charred bodies.
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All this was recorded by cameramen. Eddie Marsh, dropping into the Palace Theatre, saw flickering newsreels, captioned “Mr Churchill directing the operations,” and heard them greeted by boos, hisses, shouts of “ ’E let the bastards in the country!” and “Shoot ’im!” More embarrassing, Balfour rose in the House to ask caustically: “We are concerned to observe photographs in the illustrated newspapers of the Home Secretary in the danger zone. I understand what the photographer was doing, but why the Home Secretary?” The Conservative press agreed that it was absurd. Churchill noted that “
The Times
blamed me for stopping the soldiers going to Tonypandy and now blames me for sending them to Sidney Street. Their doctrine is now apparent, that soldiers should always be sent to put down British miners in trade disputes but never to apprehend alien murderers engaged in crime. This is on a par with Tory thought in other directions.” It was not only Tory thought, however. Liberals were equally troubled; his recent conduct seemed inconsistent with their serene slogan: “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” A. G. Gardiner wrote in the
Daily News:
“He is always unconsciously playing a part—an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator. He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle—triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed in thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain…. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in this fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot, with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. Hence that portentous gravity that sits on his youthful shoulders so oddly, those impressive postures and tremendous silences, the body flung wearily in the chair, the head resting gloomily in the hand, the abstracted look.” Thus, Gardiner accounted for his “tendency to exaggerate a situation” and dispatch “the military hither and thither as though Armageddon was upon us.” Other Liberals believed that he had shown he lacked a sense of proportion, using “a steamhammer to crack a nut.” Charles Masterman, returning from holiday, demanded: “What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?” Churchill, lapsing into his lisp, replied: “Now, Charlie. Don’t be croth. It was such fun.”
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The “Siege of Sidney Street,” as the press called it, was followed by the hottest summer on record, and, with it, a wave of industrial unrest. The disturbances began in June, when dockers walked out in Southampton, and swiftly spread to other ports. Then transport workers struck to show that they sided with the longshoremen. Churchill observed that “a new force has arisen in trades unionism, whereby the power of the old leaders has proved quite ineffective, and the sympathetic strike on a wide scale is prominent. Shipping, coal, railways, dockers etc etc are all uniting and breaking out at once.” The head constable in Liverpool reported to the Home Office that rioters had built barricades of dustbins and wire entanglements in side streets, lured policemen there, and stoned them from windows and housetops. The King wired Churchill: “Accounts from Liverpool show that situation there more like revolution than a strike…. Strongly deprecate half-hearted employment of troops: they should not be called on except as a last resource but if called on they should be given a free hand & the mob should be made to fear them.”
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The immediate threat was famine. On August 9 the London meat and fruit markets shut down; they had nothing left to sell. Then, a week later, the railwaymen gave notice of a national strike. The railway companies had refused to recognize their union as a bargaining agent. Food shortages were imminent in the great quadrilateral of British industrialism, from Liverpool and Manchester in the west to Hull and Grimsby in the east, from Newcastle down to Birmingham and Coventry. Asquith offered the trainmen an inquiry by a royal commission. When they turned it down on the ground that such a commission would take too long, he reportedly said: “Then your blood be on your own head.” That night every member of the union received a wire from its leadership: “Your liberty is at stake, all railwaymen must strike at once.” Churchill told the House that “no blockade by a foreign enemy” could be so perilous. If unchecked it would lead, he said, “to the starvation of great numbers of the poorer people.”
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Violence erupted in Llanelly when rioters stormed a train and two were shot. The lord mayor of Liverpool telegraphed Churchill, asking him to requisition a warship and bluejackets to man the Mersey River ferries. H.M.S.
Antrim
was dispatched. But the larger issue was the railroad strike. Until August 17 the home secretary, though goaded by Tories and his sovereign, clung to the same position he had held at Tonypandy. Law enforcement was the responsibility of policemen, who were encouraged to enroll special constables. This attitude was not unappreciated; Ben Tillet, the leader of the London longshoremen, called Winston’s influence moderating and responsible. In his “History of the London Transport Workers’ Strike,” a leaflet published by the transport workers’ union in 1911, Tillet wrote that before the crisis he had thought of Winston as a “ferocious man of blood and iron,” but when they met in the lobby of the House he found him “as amiable as the gentlest shepherd on earth,” a man who “in quite convincing manner assured us he heartily agreed with all our views.” Tillet added: “If patience and courtesy, if anxious effort and sincerity count for respect, then Winston Churchill is entitled as a man to gratitude…. We found an urbane young Cabinet Minister apparently fully alive to the duties and responsibilities of his office.”

Unfortunately, Churchill’s approach had produced no results. He was in a dilemma. Liberal politicians, including every member of the cabinet except the chancellor of the Exchequer, shied away from the use of force, and soldiers could not be legally used in any domestic dispute without specific requests from local authorities. On August 19 Winston decided to break this precedent. He alerted fifty thousand troops and announced: “The Army Regulation which requires a requisition for troops from a civil authority is suspended.” Asquith remained silent. Lloyd George acted; he persuaded the railroad employers to recognize the union, and the men went back to work. Churchill believed his own order had cut the knot because it proved “that any Government must exert itself to prevent… catastrophe, and because it was certain that in taking such action they would be supported by the good sense and resolution of the whole mass of the people.” King George concurred; he wired him: “Feel convinced that prompt measures taken by you prevented loss of life in different parts of the country.”
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