The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (79 page)

In the beginning he was right. The admiral came hopping home in response to Churchill’s summons, and they talked for three days. Winston found him “a veritable volcano of knowledge and inspiration; and as soon as he learnt what my main purpose was, he passed into a state of vehement eruption…. Once he began, he could hardly stop. I plied him with questions, and he poured out ideas.” Fisher, for his part, was so excited that he ran a fever. His chief recommendations were to arm Britain’s battleships with fifteen-inch guns, increase their speed, convert the entire navy from coal to oil, and shake up the senior officers: “The argument for a War Staff is that you
may
have a d—d fool as First Sea Lord, and so you put him in commission, as it were.” Churchill adopted all these proposals, though his attempt to put the war staff under himself failed when Haldane persuaded the cabinet that a sailor, not a politician, should head it. The fuel conversion was a difficult step. Having made it, he took another, inducing the House to invest £2,000,000, later increased to £5,000,000, in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, thus assuring adequate reserves in the event of war.
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Handling the admirals was easier, but more delicate. The war staff was established in January 1912 and Wilson was relieved of his post. Winston had considered bringing Fisher back as first sea lord, then rejected the idea because another retired admiral, Lord Charles Beresford, the old salt’s sworn enemy, had become powerful in Parliament. At Fisher’s suggestion he settled on Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman. As second sea lord—Bridgeman’s prospective successor—he chose Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, a relative of the royal family. It was not a foresighted move. Prince Louis was a naturalized British subject and proud of it; when one of Tirpitz’s officers had reproached him at Kiel for serving under the Union Jack, he had stiffened and replied: “Sir, when I joined the Royal Navy in 1868, the German Empire did not exist.” Still, he spoke with a heavy German accent, and the time was coming when that would be enough to discredit him. Winston appointed one friend, David Beatty of his Sudan days, to be rear admiral and his personal naval secretary. His key decision was naming Admiral Sir John Jellicoe as second in command of the Home Fleet and thus heir to England’s most crucial seagoing command. Jellicoe was Fisher’s candidate for Nelsonhood. The old admiral wrote Churchill: “He has all the Nelsonic attributes. He writes me of new designs. His
one, one, one
cry is SPEED!
Do lay that to heart!
Do remember the receipt for jugged hare in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book!
First catch your hare!
” After leaving London he wrote a friend: “I’ll tell you… the whole secret of the changes!
To get Jellicoe Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet prior to October 21, 1914
—which is the date of the Battle of Armageddon.” That was vintage Fisher. One moment he sounded demented and the next he came uncannily close to guessing the date of the approaching war.
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Churchill and Lord Fisher, 1913

Back in Lucerne, he wrote of Churchill: “So far every step he contemplates is good,
and he is brave, which is everything. Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness
.” He peppered Winston with letters signed, typically, “Yours till Hell freezes,” “Yours to a cinder,” and “Till charcoal sprouts.” But he was quick to turn. Three appointments offended him, and his response was savage. “I fear,” he wrote Winston, “this must be my last communication with you in any matter at all. I am sorry for it, but I consider you have betrayed the Navy.” The officers were close to the King; on no evidence whatever he blamed Clementine, saying she feared “the social ostracism of the Court,” and called the first lord, no longer his to a cinder, “a Royal pimp.” It is a sign of Churchill’s faith in Fisher that he ignored this. In reply, he sent him a stream of flattering billets-doux and telegrams. The old man boasted to his son, “I sent him an awful letter, and he really has replied very nicely that no matter what I say to him, he is going to stick to me and support all my schemes and always maintain that I am a genius and the greatest naval administrator, etc. etc…. However, there is no getting over the fact that he truckled to Court influence… and I have rubbed this into WC and he don’t like it!” Doubtless he loathed it, yet he persisted in his suit. By the spring he had decided that if Fisher wouldn’t come to him, he would go to Fisher. He, Asquith, and their families were planning a May cruise on the
Enchantress;
he asked Fisher to meet the yacht in Naples, where they could have “a good talk.”
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The voyage was one of Churchill’s working vacations. He inspected the Gibraltar defenses, conferred with his admiral on Malta, and then docked at Naples. When his quarry came aboard, Violet Asquith thought Fisher’s eyes, “as always, were like smouldering charcoals.” Then “Lord F. and W. were locked together in naval conclave…. I’m sure they can’t resist each other for long at close range.” Lord F. did. He resisted the prime minister, too. His “advice wasn’t followed,” he said, so why should he give it? Yet he stayed. Violet’s next day’s diary entry opened: “Danced on deck with Lord Fisher for a very long time before breakfast…. I reel giddily in his arms and lurch against his heart of oak.” The turning point came on Sunday. Churchill had stage-managed the church service. The chaplain riveted his eyes on the seventy-one-year-old admiral and said solemnly: “No man still possessing all his powers and full of vitality has any right to say ‘I am now going to rest, as I have had a hard life,’ for he owes a duty to his country and fellow men.” Fisher wrote his wife, “It was an arrow shot at a venture [sic] like the one that killed Ahab.” The Fisher-Churchill axis was reestablished. In letters to the Admiralty, Fisher continued to protest, “I have had my hour,” but he was slowly being drawn back from retirement, and soon the first lord would conclude that despite all arguments against it, in a crisis he would want the eccentric old prodigy at his right hand.
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Through dynamic energy and a genius that surpassed Fisher’s, Churchill mastered the Admiralty and was ready when Armageddon, as the admiral had foreseen, arrived. By then, Winston wrote, he knew “what everything looked like and where everything was, and how one thing fitted into another. I could put my hand on anything that was wanted and knew the current state of our naval affairs.” He had been appalled to find that no plan existed for transporting a British expeditionary force to France. He drew one up. England’s Grand Fleet had no sequestered wartime anchorage. He chose Scapa Flow, a remote shelter among the Orkney Islands at the northernmost tip of the British Isles, where Britain’s dreadnoughts could keep an eye on Heligoland Bight, through which Tirpitz’s
Flotte
must pass in any sortie. In Parliament he won approval of his appropriation bills by vivid, lucid descriptions of abstruse technical matters. Describing the impact of a shell upon a warship, he told the House: “If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between two great modern iron-clad ships, you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers…. really needs no clearer proof.”
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Churchill and Asquith at Camberwell Green

His inspections of ships continued to be popular with bluejackets. After his first year in office the monthly magazine
Fleet,
which echoed forecastle views, commented: “No First Lord in the history of the Navy has shown himself more practically sympathetic with the conditions of the Lower Deck than Winston Churchill.” The brass took another view. Churchill’s predecessors had given the sea lords free rein, but he regarded them as subordinates and issued them blunt instructions. When Bridgeman rebelled, he was swiftly retired, ostensibly on grounds of poor health, with Prince Louis replacing him. Tories protested in the House, and career officers were scandalized. Rear Admiral Dudley de Chair, who succeeded Beatty as navy secretary, was shocked by the first lord’s cursory judgment of men, often based on a few minutes of conversation. De Chair found him “impulsive, headstrong and even at times obstinate.” His tours of the fleet were also controversial. He encouraged junior officers and ratings to criticize their commanding officers. When a commander dared complain of this, Churchill proposed to relieve him and was dissuaded only when the second, third, and fourth sea lords threatened to resign in protest. At the end of a strategy conference, one of the admirals accused the first lord of impugning the traditions of the Royal Navy. “And what are they?” asked Winston. “I shall tell you in three words. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Good morning, gentlemen.”
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N
o profession is more wedded to the folklore of the past than the armed services. Since the last major conflict on the Continent, technology had clanked out an astonishing array of contraptions suitable for war, and the generals and admirals of Europe, regardless of national allegiance, viewed them all with deep distrust. They belonged to that generation which called electricity “the electric,” and regarded it as newfangled. Being new was enough to make a device suspect. Haig thought the machine gun “a much over-rated weapon,” and believed “two per battalion should be sufficient.” Joffre of France refused to use a telephone, pretending that he did not “understand the mechanism.” The Stokes mortar was twice rejected at the British War Office and finally introduced by Lloyd George, who begged the money for it from an Indian maharaja and was as a consequence considered “ungentlemanly” by British officers. Kitchener dismissed the tank as a “toy.” It was, in fact, a pet project of Churchill’s. Winston wasn’t always right, however; Jellicoe was impressed by a flight in a zeppelin, and at his urging Churchill approved pilot models. Then he lost interest. As he said later, “I rated the Zeppelin much lower as a weapon of war than almost anyone else. I believed that this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove easily destructible.” As a result, in 1914 the navy had no reconnaissance airships. He also failed to provide adequate submarine defenses in Scapa and the Firth of Forth, but that was because he became entangled in red tape; unlike H. G. Wells, who predicted that the “blind fumblings” of U-boats would limit them to the torpedoing of hulks in harbors, he was fully aware of their minatory potential.
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The new weapon which fascinated him most was the airplane. In 1910 General Ferdinand Foch had spoken for most professional officers when he ridiculed the idea of an air force in wartime.
“Tout ça, c’est du sport,”
he said contemptuously; as far as the French army was concerned,
“l’avion c’est zéro!”
In the British navy it was otherwise. As early as February 25, 1909, when he was still at the Board of Trade, Churchill had told the cabinet that aviation would be “most important” in the future and suggested that “we should place ourselves in communication with Mr [Orville] Wright and avail ourselves of his knowledge.” The following year he presented a
Daily Mail
check for £10,000 to two airmen who had taken off from the Dominion of Newfoundland and landed on a field in, as he put it, “the future equally happy and prosperous Dominion of Ireland”—poor political prophecy, but no other national figure had come to greet them. Arriving at the Admiralty, he had sought out the small band of adventurous officers who were the pioneers of naval aviation. In 1912 he founded the Royal Naval Air Service—a precursor of the Royal Flying Corps and, later, the Royal Air Force—to provide “aerial protection to our naval harbours, oil tanks and vulnerable points, and also for a general strengthening of our exiguous and inadequate aviation.” A larval helicopter was built; he inspected it. In tests it proved unstable, and prone to crash, after it had risen about three hundred feet. Winston proposed a hollow propeller containing a parachute. The suggestion was completely impractical, but his encouragement of experimentation elsewhere led to breakthroughs. Because of his efforts, England became the first country to equip a plane with a machine gun, and the first to launch an airborne torpedo. He coined the words
seaplane
, and
flight
to designate a given number of aircraft, usually four.
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To Clementine’s alarm, he decided to fly himself. He regarded his first ride, in 1912, as a matter of duty. Discovering that he enjoyed it, he made repeated ascents. The craft were primitive, the techniques slap-dash. On one bumpy trip, in the teeth of a gale, nearly three hours were required to cover the sixteen miles from Gravesend to Grain, and “after landing Churchill safely,” the pilot reported, “my seaplane ‘took off’ again, landing trolley and all over the sea wall, as it was being brought up the slipway, and was more or less wrecked.” The hazards whetted Winston’s appetite. In October 1913, at the Eastchurch naval flying center, he went up in three different craft. That evening he wrote Clementine: “Darling, We have had a vy jolly day in the air… it has been as good as one of those old days in the S. African War, & I have lived entirely in the moment, with no care for all those tiresome party politics & searching newspapers, and awkward by-elections…. For good luck before I started I put your locket on. It has been lying in my desk since it got bent—& as usual it worked like a charm.” She wired her dismay from the
Enchantress
and then followed up with a note: “I hope my telegram will not have vexed you, but please be kind & don’t fly any more just now.”
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It was a postage stamp wasted. Churchill with the bit in his teeth was incorrigible. Deeply as he loved his wife, at that moment he loved the excitement of flying more. To the consternation of the barnstormers who had been taking him up, he declared that he wanted to be a pilot himself. He was too old, they protested; thirty-two was regarded as the top age for a novice, and he was thirty-eight. He invoked his powers as first lord, ordered them to shut up, and began taking lessons in managing controls at Apavon. One of his instructors, Ivon Courtney, later recalled: “Before our first flight together he said to me: ‘We are in the Stephenson age of flying. Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He had already done a lot of flying. ‘I want some more instruction,’ he said.” Aircraft were not equipped with headphones then; the two men sat in separate cockpits, Churchill in the rear, and shouted at each other, hoping their voices would carry above the wind. The instruments were encased in a box, but most airmen scorned them, preferring to rely on what they called “ear.” Winston, however, was fascinated by the dials and needles. He would crouch down, peering at them, “and,” Courtney wrote, “he was right to do so. He saw that one day the box of instruments would be more important than the pilot’s ear.”
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They went up as often as ten times a day. Every officer on the instruction staff worried about their eminent student. “We were all scared stiff,” said Courtney, “of having a smashed First Lord on our hands.” Eugene Gerrard, later air commodore, said: “WSC has had as much as twenty-five hours in the air, but no one will risk letting him solo; if anything happened to WSC the career of the man who had allowed him a solo flight would be finished.” Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, later air chief marshal, remembered Winston as “a very fair pilot once he was in the air, but more than uncertain in his take-off and landing. His instructors usually took over the controls to make the final approach and touchdown.” Another future RAF marshal, Hugh Trenchard, gave him lower marks. After watching him “wallowing about the sky,” as he put it, he decided Winston was “altogether too impatient for a good pupil.”
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Churchill in pilot’s gear for a practice flight

But Churchill persevered. He spent the afternoon of Saturday, November 29, 1913, in the air with Captain Gilbert Wildman-Lushington of the Royal Marines. After they had parted, the captain wrote his fiancée: “I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15 & he got so bitten with it, I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ hour for lunch we were in the machine till about 3.30. He showed great promise, & is coming down again for further instruction & practice.” Winston himself was dissatisfied. Once he had set his mind on an objective, anything short of total conquest was unacceptable. Back in his Admiralty office that evening he wrote Lushington: “I wish you would clear up the question of the steering control and let me know what was the real difficulty I had in making the rudder act. Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself…. Could you not go up with another flying officer and, sitting yourself in the back seat, see whether there is great stiffness and difficulty in steering, or whether it was all my clumsiness.” Then he dropped Clementine a line: “I have been very naughty today about flying…. With twenty machines in the air at once and thousands of flights made without mishap, it is not possible to look upon it as a vy serious risk. Do not be vexed with me.”
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She wasn’t vexed; she was frantic. By the time this letter reached her, Lushington was dead; coming in to land at Eastchurch on Sunday, he sideslipped and crashed. F.E. wrote Winston: “Why do you do such a foolish thing as fly repeatedly? Surely it is unfair to your family, your career & your friends.” It was; it was thoughtless, the act of a supreme egoist. H. G. Wells wrote: “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and I think of him as a very intractable, a very mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.” The fact is that His Majesty’s first lord of the Admiralty deserved a good spanking. Despite his instructor’s death and his wife’s appeals, he refused to stay on the ground. At Easter Clementine wrote him from Spain, where she and Mrs. Keppel were Cassel’s guests: “I have been seized by a dreadful anxiety that you are making use of my absence to fly even more often than you do when I am there—I beg of you not to do it at all, at any rate till I can be there.” It was a shrewd guess. That very day he had not only flown; he had been shaken up when engine failure forced his new instructor to make an emergency landing. Undaunted, he took off again two days later. Clementine and the children were now staying with her mother in Dieppe, and on May 29, 1914, he wrote her there: “I have been at the Central Flying School for a couple of days—flying a little in good & careful hands & under perfect conditions. So I did not write you from there as I knew you would be vexed.”
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She replied: “I felt what you were doing before I read about it, but I felt too weak & tired to struggle against it. It is like beating one’s head against a stone wall…. Perhaps if I saw you, I could love and pet you, but you have been so naughty that I can’t do it on paper. I must be ‘brought round’ first.” She signed the letter with the sketch of a cat, its ears down. She did see him the following week; he crossed on the
Enchantress
to spend a day with her and the children. They discussed his flying, and he assured her that the airfield he was using, at Sheerness in Kent, had every modern facility. Yet in her next letter the tension was still there: “I cannot help knowing that you are going to fly as you go to Sheerness & it fills me with anxiety. I know nothing will stop you from doing it so I will not weary you with tedious entreaties, but don’t forget that I am thinking about it all the time & so, do it as little & as moderately as you can, & only with the
very best
Pilot. I feel very ‘ears down’ about it.” Her fear haunted her; she was five months pregnant with their third child—it would be another daughter, Sarah—and thought, not unreasonably, that she was entitled to more consideration from her husband. In her next letter she described a nightmare. She had dreamed she had had her baby, but the doctor and nurse hid it. Finding the infant in a darkened room, she feverishly counted its fingers and toes only to find that it was a gaping idiot. “And then the worst thing of all happened—I wanted the Doctor to kill it—but he was shocked & took it away & I was mad too.” The evening before, she had received a cable from Winston, telling her he was safely home. “Every time I see a telegram now,” she wrote, “I think it is to announce that you have been killed flying. I had a fright but went to sleep relieved; but this morning after the nightmare I looked at it again for consolation & found to my horror it was from Sheerness & not from Dover where I thought you were going first—so you are probably at it again at this very moment. Goodbye my Dear but Cruel One, Your loving Clemmie.”
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