The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (98 page)

He wrote that “if the Admiralty were in uninstructed or unfriendly hands” it might “lead to the abandonment of the Dardanelles operation” which “otherwise is a certainty,” and asked Asquith to “fancy my feelings if, at this critical moment—on mere uninformed newspaper hostility—the whole intricate affair is to be taken out of my hands & put in the hands of a stranger without the knowledge, or worst of all in the hands of a deadly foe of the plan.” He was “clinging to my
task
& to my
duty.
” He could not defend himself without putting England’s security at hazard. The Conservatives knew only what they had read in the press. “But
you
know. You alone know the whole situation and that it is my duty to carry this burden safely: and that I can do it. Let me stand or fall by the Dardanelles—but do not take it from my hands.” Clementine also took the remarkable step of writing the prime minister. Her husband, she told him, had mastered “every detail of naval science. There is no man in this country who possesses equal knowledge capacity & vigour. If he goes, the injury to Admiralty business will not be reparable for many months—if indeed it is ever made good during the war. Why do you part with Winston? unless indeed you have lost confidence in his work and ability? But I know that cannot be the reason. Is not the reason expediency—‘to restore public confidence.’ I suggest to you that public confidence will be restored in
Germany
by Winston’s downfall…. If you send him to another place he will no longer be fighting. If you waste this valuable war material you will be doing an injury to this country.”
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To swallow pride and crawl thus must have been excruciating for both Winston and Clementine. And it was all for nothing. Asquith wrote Venetia that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine. Bonar Law—who said privately that Winston “seems to have an entirely unbalanced mind”—replied to Churchill that his removal as first lord was “inevitable.” Asquith wrote Winston: “You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” There could be no appeal from that. Winston, who like other critics of Asquith had taken to calling him “The Block” in private, replied: “All right, I accept your decision. I shall not look back…. I must wait for the march of events at the Dlles.” On the next Saturday, May 22, Winston saw the prime minister briefly. Asquith called it “a most painful interview to me: but he was good & in his best mood. And it ended all right.” Yet there was still no place for him in the new cabinet. Two days later Margot wrote in her diary: “What a satire if the coming Coalition Government of which Winston has gassed so much should not contain him! I know Henry [Asquith] too well to suppose this but there is no doubt if Henry wanted to make himself supremely popular with every party
ours and the others
he would exclude Winston. I would not wish this, there is something lovable in Winston and he is a real pal but I should not be surprised if he wrecked the new Government.”
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How unpopular
was
Churchill in the spring of 1915? He was controversial, of course; he always had been. But he himself believed he was now friendless. Asquith’s daughter, who loved him as her father loved Venetia, came to him in tears. They “slipped away” together, she wrote, and he “took me into his room,” whereupon he collapsed in a chair, “silent, despairing—as I had never seen him. He seemed to have no rebellion or even anger left. He did not even abuse Fisher, but simply said, ‘I’m finished.’ ” She protested; he said, “No—I’m done.” Yet the day after his final dismissal Italy had entered the war, and he more than anyone else had been responsible for England’s new ally. His most loyal supporters remained steadfast. Virtually all the younger flag officers went on record as supporting him. At Gallipoli, Hamilton discovered “in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get in touch with Winston Churchill, all would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense,
touching
.”
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But Englishmen demanded a whipping boy. If they couldn’t beat the Germans, they could turn on one of their own, and Churchill, the ostentatious poseur, was the obvious choice. Sir Henry Wilson wrote Bonar Law: “A man who can plot the Ulster Pogrom, plan Antwerp, & carry out the Dardanelles fiasco is worth watching.” In some vague way Winston was held accountable for everything that had gone wrong, from the shell crisis to the hopeless seesaw in the trenches. He had lost ships. He had frequently been away from his desk—on urgent missions, though they didn’t know that. He had ignored expert advice—even the counsel of Fisher, England’s greatest admiral. He was a reckless adventurer, a man loyal only to his own ambition. The Dundee
Advertiser
reported that many of his Liberal constituents believed that he “should be excluded altogether from the Cabinet on the ground, as they contend, that he is in a large measure responsible for precipitating the present state of affairs.” Admiralty diehards, impotent during his early naval reforms, now struck out savagely. Captain Richmond called him “ignorant.” Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, who was appointed first sea lord when Balfour replaced Churchill, described the attempt to force the Dardanelles as “a mad thing to do.” The naval correspondent of
The Times
reported: “The news that Mr Churchill is leaving the Admiralty has been received with a feeling of relief in the Service, both afloat and ashore,” and commented that while he had brought a “breezy atmosphere” with him, he had also created “a sense of uneasiness lest those very qualities of his which might be of advantage to the State in other circumstances, should lead him into making some false step, which, in the case of the Fleet, upon which our all depends, would be irretrievable.” On May 24 Frances Stevenson wrote in her diary: “There is no section of the country, so far as I can see, that wishes him to stay at the Admiralty.” According to her, Winston’s private naval secretary had advised the prime minister “that on no account ought Churchill to be allowed to remain at the Admiralty—he was most dangerous there.” Even Asquith, whose punishment Winston was taking, joined the posse. Churchill, he complained, “is impulsive & borne along on the flood of his all too copious tongue,” and, further, “it is a pity that Winston has not got a better sense of proportion. I am really fond of him, but I regard his future with many misgivings. I do not think he will ever get to the top in English politics with all his wonderful gifts.” In war, losers, even more than winners, need to create martyrs. Churchill was England’s Armenian.
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H
e suffered. His Black Dog had never been so bad; he was in the pit of the worst depression of his life. After he had said his goodbyes at the Admiralty on Saturday and sent a farewell telegram to the Royal Naval Division, Eddie Marsh wrote Violet Asquith: “I am miserably sorry for Winston. You can imagine what a horrible wound and mutilation it is for him to be torn away from his work there… it’s like Beethoven deaf.” Sir George Riddell called on him and wrote in his
War Diary:
“He looked very worn out and harassed. He greeted me… and said, ‘I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!’ ” Lloyd George later said that it was “the brutality of the fall” that “stunned” Winston, and Churchill himself wrote afterward: “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure…. At a moment when every fibre of my being was inflamed to action, I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.” Clementine later told Martin Gilbert: “The Dardanelles haunted him for the rest of his life. He always believed in it. When he left the Admiralty he thought he was finished…. I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.”
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At the time she, too, was distraught. After calling at Admiralty House, Edwin Montagu wrote Venetia, now his fiancée: “I went by request to see poor Mrs Winston. She was so sweet but so miserable and crying all the time. I was very inarticulate, but how I feel for her and him.” Back in his Treasury office he wrote Clementine that “Winston is far too great to be more than pulled up for a period…. Have no misgivings as to the future; I have none, I’m sure he has none.” But Winston had many, and what cut deepest were the lost chances which had gone up in the smoke rising from British ineptitude in Turkey. One of his dinner guests at this time was Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a war correspondent who had just returned from Gallipoli. Unlike young Churchill in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, journalists covering this campaign had been heavily censored—a full month had passed before the
Illustrated London News
had been permitted to publish photographs of the fighting—and an uninformed public, susceptible to rumor, had contributed to Churchill’s ruin. Ashmead-Bartlett wanted to talk to him about that. But his host wouldn’t listen to anyone. Ashmead-Bartlett noted in his diary: “I am much surprised at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty…. At dinner the conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so.” Jennie wrote Leonie: “If they had made the Dardanelles policy a certainty, Constantinople would have been in our hands ages ago.
In confidence,
it is astounding how Winston foresaw it all.”
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His obsession with what might have been kept him in civilian clothes for six months. Asquith promised him a seat on the War Council, now renamed the Dardanelles Committee, if he would accept the lowest of cabinet posts, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. “Where is Lancaster?” jeered the
Bystander
. “And what is a Duchy?” The position was a sinecure, which, as Lloyd George put it, was “generally reserved either for beginners in the Cabinet or for distinguished politicians who had reached the final stages of unmistakable decrepitude.” The chancellor’s only duty was to appoint county magistrates. In false cheeriness Winston wrote Jack Seely: “The Duchy of Lancaster has been mobilized. A strong flotilla of magistrates for the 1915 programme will shortly be laid down.” His salary was immediately cut from £4,500 to £2,000 a year. Asquith offered to let the Churchills stay on in Admiralty House, but Clementine refused to accept charity from the man who, as she saw it, had sacrificed her husband to save his own office. Ivor Guest gave his cousin the temporary use of his house at 21 Arlington Street, behind the Ritz; then they would move in with Goonie in Jack Churchill’s South Kensington house at 41 Cromwell Road, opposite the Natural History Museum. On May 23, eight days after the crisis over Fisher’s resignation had erupted, Winston turned the Admiralty over to Balfour. One of the new first lord’s first decisions was to scrap the tank project. According to Captain D’Eyncourt’s memoirs,
A Shipbuilder’s Yarn,
the new first lord called him in and asked: “Have not you and your department enough to do looking after the design and construction of ships without concerning yourself about material for the Army?” Appropriations already in the pipeline produced a small number of tanks in 1916. To Churchill’s dismay, Lloyd George told him that the army planned to use them immediately. Winston went to Asquith, pleading against untimely use of the trench weapon which, he believed, could be decisive. He was ignored. On September 15 a handful of tanks went into action on the Somme. The British infantry was unprepared to consolidate their quick gains, and the element of surprise was squandered. “My poor ‘land battleships,’ ” Churchill wrote, “have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale. In that idea resided one real victory.” Here he, too, was premature. The tank’s time would come again, and yet again.
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In the weeks after he cleared out his Admiralty desk his depression deepened. “It is odious to me,” he wrote Seely, “to remain here watching sloth and folly with full knowledge & no occupation.” To Jack on Gallipoli he wrote: “The war is terrible: the carnage grows apace, & the certainty that no result will be reached this year fills my mind with melancholy thoughts. The youth of Europe—almost a whole generation—will be shorn away. I find it vy painful to be deprived of any direct means of action.” Beginning in late May, he took his and his brother’s families to a rental property in Surrey each weekend. “I am off to Hoe Farm,” he wrote Jack on June 19. “How I wish you cd be there. It really is a delightful valley and the garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.” Yet even here he drew apart from the others and paced endlessly between the garden and a small wooden summerhouse. He tried golf again and again and hated it; it was, he said, “like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.” Then, in a flash of inspiration, his sister-in-law introduced him to painting. Goonie painted herself; she set up her easel in the garden one Sunday, and when she noticed Winston watching her with interest, she suggested he try it, using some of the children’s watercolors. There was plenty to paint, she pointed out: the garden, the woods, the house, a nearby pond. He tried, liked it, and did it well. He had a natural visual eye, and knew it; during the Boer War he had supplemented his dispatches with sketches drawn in the field; touched up by newspaper illustrators, they had been published. Obviously, he could be good if he applied himself. It struck him that in this dark hour of life the “Muse of Painting” might have come to his rescue—“out of charity and out of chivalry, because after all she had nothing to do with me—and said, ‘Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.’ ”
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