The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (77 page)

Beginning that summer of 1911, after the disappointments of Tonypandy, the siege of Sidney Street, and the railroad strike, preparation for war was never far from Churchill’s thoughts. “Once I got drawn in,” he later wrote, “it dominated all other interests in my mind.”
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He was horrified when, at a Downing Street garden party, the commissioner of police informed him that the Home Office was responsible for guarding the magazines in which all England’s reserves of naval cordite were stored. Rushing from the party to the War Office, he persuaded the duty officer to post sentries at the depots until he could organize parties of constables. In mid-August he sought peace in the country. He was sitting on a hilltop, overlooking green fields, when he realized that lines from Housman’s
Shropshire Lad
were running through his head:

On August 23 he submitted a prescient memorandum to the Imperial Defence Committee. Assuming that Britain, France, and Russia were attacked by Germany and Austria-Hungary, he predicted that on the twentieth day of the war the kaiser’s armies in France would break through the Meuse defense line. The French would then fall back on Paris. By the fortieth day, however, Germany would “be extended at full strain both internally and on her war fronts,” and with each passing hour this pressure would become “more severe and ultimately overwhelming” unless they could force an immediate decision. Denying them that would require “heavy and hard sacrifices from France.” Whether France could make them would depend on British military support, “and this must be known beforehand.” He proposed a contingency plan under which Britain would send 107,000 troops across the Channel at the outbreak of war, with another 100,000 men from India reaching Marseilles by the all-important fortieth day. General Henry Wilson told the committee that Winston’s prediction was “ridiculous and fantastic—a silly memorandum.” But three years later the Germans lost the battle of the Marne on the war’s forty-second day.
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Churchill at British army maneuvers, September 1913

By September 1911 Churchill had tired of the Liberals’ growing polarization between left and right, the internal struggle in which he was being ground up, and was again pondering the Victorian policy of Splendid Isolation. He had cherished it as part of his political legacy. But now he studied a Foreign Office paper written in 1907 by Eyre Crowe. Crowe had held that England must preserve Europe’s balance of power by forging an alliance with the second-strongest nation on the Continent. Brooding over this thesis, Winston was struck by the thought that although earlier generations of Englishmen had never put it on paper, they had in fact always pursued it. This grand strategy, he believed, had been the key to the Elizabethans’ rout of the Spaniards, Marlborough’s defeat of Louis XIV, and Wellington’s triumph over Napoleon. Following the same line of reasoning, he concluded that England must now embrace France, even hold joint maneuvers with France. As a candidate three years earlier, he had told audiences in Manchester and Dundee that the German threat was a figment of Tory imagination. After Agadir he became the cabinet’s most ardent advocate of intervention.

Another prime minister might have resented his home secretary’s active interest in military issues. Asquith didn’t. Indeed, he had good reason to encourage it. Churchill, one of his ablest ministers, was no longer comfortable or suitable in the Home Office, and the Royal Navy needed a forceful hand at the tiller. As first lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna was far too easygoing; he had been unable to overcome the resistance of his first sea lord—the equivalent of the U.S. chief of naval operations—to the formation of a naval war staff. Asquith pondered having them switch jobs. Apart from Churchill, the only other strong candidate for the Admiralty was the secretary for war, Lord Haldane, who had just completed a brilliant reorganization of the army. In September 1911 the prime minister invited both men and their wives to be his guests at Archerfield, his Scottish estate on the East Lothian coast. The Churchills would arrive late, because Winston had to visit Balmoral first. It was customary for each senior minister to spend a few days there with the King each year. Clementine passed those days with her grandmother in Airlie Castle—wives were not received at Balmoral on such occasions—and on September 25 she wrote: “I hope you are happy my sweet Pug and that you are being properly petted, & that you will secure a huge stag. I am very happy here—Granny is become much kinder with age…. She sends her love & is looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday for luncheon which is at 1.30
to the second by Greenwich time.
Afterwards we fly away to Archerfield in the new motor.” The automobile, a £610 red Napier, had been delivered to Churchill at Balmoral. He drove over to pick Clementine up, and before they left the castle he told her he was afraid Asquith would pick Haldane. She opened her grandmother’s Bible to the one hundred seventh Psalm. “I know it’s all right about the Admiralty,” she said, and read: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”
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She was right. Asquith had already made his decision. Churchill would run the navy. Asquith wrote Haldane: “The main and, in the longer run, the deciding factor with me has been the absolute necessity for keeping the First Lord in the Commons.” Clementine was absent at the great moment. After a round of golf with Asquith, Winston approached Violet, who was just finishing tea, and asked her to join him for a walk. In his face, she wrote, she saw “a radiance like the sun.” Did he want tea? she asked. He shook his head. They had hardly left the house when he blurted out: “I don’t want tea, I don’t want anything—anything in the world. Your father has just offered me the Admiralty.” He looked sea-ward, and in the fading light of evening watched the silhouettes of two battleships steaming slowly out of the Firth of Forth. It was a full moment for him. He said: “Look at the people I’ve had to deal with so far. Judges and convicts! This is a big thing—the biggest thing that has ever come my way—the chance I should have chosen before all others. I shall pour into it everything I’ve got!” Just as Clementine had opened a Bible in Airlie Castle, so, that night at Archerfield, did he. He found himself reading from the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself…. Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee.”
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The next day he and Clementine rode to London in the Napier, and in the morning he and McKenna changed guard. McKenna came over to the Home Office and Churchill introduced him to everyone there; then they crossed to the Admiralty, where Winston met his new board, senior officers, and departmental heads. That afternoon he convened a board meeting. The secretary read the letters patent confirming the new first lord’s appointment. Thereupon Churchill, in the words of the order-in-council, became “responsible to Crown and Parliament for all the business of the Admiralty.” In 1923 he would write: “I was to endeavour to discharge this responsibility for the four most memorable years of my life.”
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H
is new office was accompanied by many perquisites, in all of which he reveled. There has always been a certain panache to England’s service ministries, and because the Admiralty is the senior service, the navy, in an old expression, “always travels first class.” Among other things, the first lord decides who launches ships. Seven weeks after his appointment Clementine christened the battleship
Centurion
at Devonport, and shortly thereafter Jennie baptized its sister ship, the
Benbow.
The first lord had at his disposal a luxurious steam yacht, the
Enchantress.
In Churchill’s words, this vessel became “largely my office, almost my home.” His time aboard was mostly work time; he visited every important ship and every dockyard, shipyard, and naval establishment in the British Isles and the Mediterranean. But for Clementine it was mostly fun. There was one memorable cruise up the coast of Scotland, on which her sister Nellie and her sister-in-law Goonie accompanied them. Another took them to Venice, where the crew caught a huge turtle; the cook asked, “Which evening would madam prefer turtle soup?” and was dismayed when his mistress, as fond of pets as her husband, ordered the tortoise returned to the sea. On a third voyage, they anchored in Cardigan Bay and visited the Lloyd Georges in Criccieth, their Welsh home. Because Clementine knew that Winston hated meals at which nothing of importance was accomplished, most guests were men who could be useful to the Admiralty, and she scored a real coup by suggesting they entertain Kitchener, now a field marshal and agent-general in Egypt. “By all means ask K to lunch,” Winston said. “Let us just be
à trois.
I have some things to talk to him about.” So the long feud finally ended.
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These were golden days for Clementine. Motherhood had brought her a new tranquillity, and she had learned to suppress her objections to some of her in-laws. Winston wrote that they had received an invitation from Lady Wimborne, and asked her to accept: “I have a great regard for her—& we have not too many friends. If however you don’t want to go—I will go alone. Don’t come with all your hackles up & your fur brushed the wrong way—you naughty.” She replied: “I will write tomorrow to Aunt Cornelia—I would like to go, & I will be very good I promise you, especially if you stroke my silky tail.” She didn’t even demur when seated next to Asquith at meals, though the prime minister was a notorious peerer down Pennsylvania Avenue. Now in her late twenties, Clementine attracted many a lustful eye. After a day at Broadstairs with the Churchills, an artist friend wrote: “Winston went off to dig castles in the sands and the rest of us bathed. It was a broiling day and the water was heavenly. Clemmie came forth like the reincarnation of Venus re-entering the sea. Her form is most beautiful. I had no idea she had such a splendid body.”
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Yet she was jealous of Violet Asquith, feeling, according to her daughter Mary, “an understandable reserve toward this well-ensconced friend of Winston’s.” And soon Violet would be practically living next door. In addition to his yacht, the first lord was provided with a magnificent eighteenth-century residence, Admiralty House, with a superb view of St. James’s Park. Winston wrote Clementine: “I am sure you will take to it when you get there. I am afraid it all means vy hard work for you—Poor lamb.” Sir Edward Grey wanted to sublet their Eccleston Square house, but she fought the move, pleading economy. Because the government was providing them with a home, Churchill’s salary was cut by £500, and Admiralty House meant increasing their servants from five to eleven or twelve. Confronted with this argument, he was, as always, vulnerable. In one helpless note he agreed with her that “money seems to flow away.” A few days later he cheerfully wrote that he was “preparing a scheme which will enable us to clear off our debts & bills & start on a ready money basis. We shall have to pull in our horns.” He couldn’t do it, though. That same week she was off to visit France, and he wrote: “If you have anything left out of the £40, spend it on some little thing you like in Paris.” Finally, after she had reduced the staff to nine by sealing off the first floor of Admiralty House, the move was made. Violet rejoiced. Winston, she wrote, had now become “our nearest neighbor. Only the width of the Horse Guards Parade separated the Admiralty from the garden door of No. 10 and it was often crossed hot-foot. It was a joy to see him buoyantly engaged in his new context, tasting complete fulfillment. I remember telling him that even his brooding had assumed a different quality. He travailed almost with serenity. ‘That is because I can now lay eggs instead of scratching around in the dust and clucking. It is a far more satisfactory occupation. I am at present in process of laying a great number of eggs—good eggs, every one of them.’ ”
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