Neither did it help that his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an extravagant American socialite, tainting him as it did with the dreaded New World stigma of being money-grabbing, vulgar, and populist. The political alliance he forged with the radical Chancellor of the Exchequer and Welsh schoolmaster’s son David Lloyd George, author of the tax-raising ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, only deepened misgivings. ‘It is dreadful to think that we have such men in the Cabinet as Winston Churchill and Lloyd George,’ complained Sir Spencer Ewart, the Director of Military Intelligence. ‘The one a half-baked American politician, the other a silly sentimental Celt.’ His support for Irish Home Rule further damned Churchill in the eyes of traditionalists.5
To Churchill’s ‘betrayal’ of the Tories was added the unforgivable charge of being a traitor to his class. After all, he was the grandson of a duke and was born in Blenheim Palace, the ancestral seat of the Marlboroughs. His support for the reform of the House of Lords, stripping it of the power to block legislation, raised fury amongst the wealthy and the privileged. Some neither forgot nor forgave and King George V denounced him as ‘irresponsible and unreliable’. Meanwhile, the Left had its own special bones to pick. As Home Secretary he took energetic measures against strikers in the coalfields, and during the national railway strike of 1911 he mobilized some 50,000 troops to stand by. Moreover, he never disguised his dislike of socialism. For the next several decades he was to remain the bête-noire of Labour. Hostility even extended to the myth, which still lingers today, that he ordered troops to fire on striking miners at Tonypandy in Wales in November 1910.6
*
Tory and Labour mistrust of Churchill came naturally. But to what degree was he even a genuine Liberal? Being true to the cause meant valuing peace. Yet there was plenty to suggest that he actually rejoiced in war. He was a graduate of Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy. He fought enthusiastically in – and wrote vividly about – several of the late Victorian wars on the fringes of Empire. It was his dramatic escape from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War that had first propelled him into Parliament as a ‘hero of the Empire’. As First Lord of the Admiralty he demanded more and better battleships. His delight in dressing in naval uniform was undisguised. His rhetoric, whatever the subject, was invariably belligerent. Nor did he ever forget, or let it be forgotten, that he was descended from the great 1st Duke of Marlborough whose armies had won legendary victories across Europe two centuries before – and whose exploits he was to chronicle in his massive multi-volume biography written during the 1930s. ‘Sunny’ Marlborough, the ninth duke, was a first cousin to whom he remained close throughout his life. Churchill frequently stayed at Blenheim Palace, and when he bought a Napier car in 1911 the first thing he did was have it custom-painted in the Marlborough blue; it was at Blenheim, too, that he proposed marriage to Clementine Hozier, the young woman who became his wife. He was also fascinated by Napoleon. He avidly collected books about the French Emperor, considered him ‘the greatest man of action ever known to human records’, and hoped at one point to write his biography. He even kept a bust of him in his office. Whenever he moved, it travelled with him.7
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One of the closest observers of Churchill at this time was the essayist and editor of the Liberal newspaper, the Daily News, Alfred George (A. G.) Gardiner. As early as 1908, when Churchill was at the Board of Trade, Gardiner nicely captured the disruptive impact he made on the staid Edwardian House of Commons. His dashing style, penned Gardiner, brought to mind ‘the clatter of hoofs in the moonlight, the clash of swords on the turnpike road . . . The breath of romance stirring the prosaic air of politics.’ Five years later, with Churchill at the Admiralty, Gardiner published a collection of biographical portraits entitled The Pillars of Society featuring individuals as diverse as the industrial tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin. One of his subjects was Churchill. ‘He is the unknown factor in politics . . . [who will] write his name big in the future,’ pronounced Gardiner. ‘ “Keep Your Eye on Churchill” should be the order of the day.’ But Gardiner also issued a warning. They should be aware, he told his readers, that ‘he is a soldier first, last, and always . . . Let us take care he does not write [his name] in blood.’8 Only a year later, during the opening shots of the First World War, Gardiner’s forebodings about Churchill’s natural belligerence were to seem ominously prescient.
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In October 1914 the Belgian coastal fortress of Antwerp came under bombardment by the Germans. When the Belgian government appealed for help Churchill dashed off to the city, took personal charge of the defences, and called in reinforcements from the Royal Marine Brigade and the Royal Naval Division, both of which were under his Admiralty control. Clearly exhilarated by the crisis, he sent an impetuous telegram to the prime minister Herbert Asquith offering to resign his office and take over official command of the defences. The offer was rejected out of hand and he returned to London. Yet within hours Churchill was claiming that, having ‘tasted blood’ at Antwerp, he was eager for more and hoped that sooner or later – and the sooner the better – he could be relieved of his Admiralty tasks and given some kind of military command. Asquith’s acerbic response was to be shared by many critics. ‘He is a wonderful creature,’ the prime minister concluded, ‘with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity . . . And what someone said of genius – a zig-zag streak of lightning in the brain.’9 When he read out Churchill’s telegram to the Cabinet it was greeted with mocking laughter and the Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law remarked that Churchill had ‘an entirely unbalanced mind’. Even his close ally, David Lloyd George, believed that he was becoming a danger. ‘Winston is like a torpedo,’ he declared. ‘The first you hear of his doings is when you hear the swish of the torpedo dashing through the water.’10 Thirty years later, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War, was to express similar exasperation about Churchill’s impulsiveness. After one of the many furious rows over strategy he was to have with Britain’s wartime leader, Brooke scribbled in his diary the following words: ‘He lives for the impulse and for the present, and refuses to look at the lateral implications or future commitments. Now that I know him well episodes such as Antwerp and the Dardanelles no longer puzzle me. But meanwhile I often doubt whether I am going mad or whether he is really sane.’11
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Two things saved Churchill at this time of mid-life crisis. The first was his family. Its role in his life has often been underestimated. The constant and loyal support of his wife Clementine has certainly been well recognized, and the lives of their children, especially his tempestuous only son Randolph, are relatively well known. But there also existed the extended family of his mother, brother, sister-in-law, aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as Clementine’s own many relations, all of whom formed a large private clan on which he could rely throughout his life for support and comfort. He also inspired devotion from a network of friends to whom he remained profoundly loyal. One of these was Violet Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Asquith, who remained close to him until the end of his life. Shortly after he died, she published her memories (as Violet Bonham Carter) of their relationship under the title Winston Churchill as I Knew Him. ‘His friendship,’ she wrote, ‘was a stronghold against which the gates of Hell could not prevail. There was an absolute quality in his loyalty, known only to those within its walls . . . This inner citadel of the heart held first and foremost his relations – in their widest sense.’ It was to Violet that he confessed that he was ‘done’ as a result of the Dardanelles.12
Thanks to this wider family network Churchill was introduced to his second great source of solace after the psychic wounds of Gallipoli. The loss of the Admiralty meant that he and the family had to leave Admiralty House, and they moved in with his younger brother’s family at 41 Cromwell Road, London, almost opposite the Natural History Museum. Behind the scenes, brother Ja
ck was a constant source of advice and support to him throughout his life. Ironically, Jack was just then serving with the British forces at Gallipoli. So it was left to his wife Gwendeline (fondly known as ‘Goonie’) to look after their two young children and run the household. That summer, the two families jointly leased a property in the country known as Hoe Farm, near Godalming in Surrey, to which they would retreat for weekends. One day, Churchill was wandering disconsolately through the garden when he came across Goonie sketching with watercolours. After watching her for a few minutes he borrowed his nephew Johnnie’s paint box and got to work. Soon he began to experiment with oils, opened an account with an artists’ supply company in Covent Garden, and started making regular purchases of canvases, paints, and other artistic paraphernalia. It was the beginning of what would become a lifetime’s passion for painting, with some five hundred completed canvases to his credit. This was more than the amusing hobby of a great man, deserving perhaps of a footnote. On the contrary, it was a vital thread in the tapestry of his life that reveals much about his character.13
It was at Hoe Farm, too, that the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt encountered him that same summer. Ten years before, he had been struck by Churchill’s sparkling wit, intelligence, and originality and by how much he resembled his father – only with more ability. ‘There is the same gaminerie and contempt of the conventional,’ noted Blunt, ‘and the same engaging plain-spokenness . . . ’ But at Hoe Farm, Blunt found a very different and more subdued Churchill, sitting under an old yew tree surrounded by members of the family while attempting to sketch his sister-in-law, Nellie. ‘There is more blood than paint on these hands,’ he abjectly told the poet. ‘We thought it [the Dardanelles] would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way and now all these lives lost.’ ‘Poor Winston,’ reflected Blunt, ‘I imagine that but for his wife’s devotion and his domestic happiness with his children and the support of a few relatives, he might have gone mad.’14
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Churchill’s hopes of finding a position of high command in the war were thwarted and eventually he arrived on the Western Front early in 1916 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. For a hundred days he served on the front line near the Belgian village of Ploegsteert (‘Plug Street’), where he proved a successful commanding officer and won the respect of his men. Then he resigned his commission, returned to London, and began to rebuild his political career. Later in the year Lloyd George became prime minister, and in the following May an official inquiry into the Dardanelles Expedition cleared Churchill of principal blame for the disaster. The way was now open for him to return to high office and Lloyd George appointed him Minister of Munitions, and he embraced the task with his usual high energy. When the war was won Lloyd George’s Coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives was returned to power with a large majority and Churchill became Secretary of State for War and Air with a seat in the Cabinet.
As the year 1921 opened, this was the position he still held. Once again he was a major national figure, his name constantly in the headlines and his future regularly a matter of feverish speculation. Brilliant he was, most critics agreed, but what to make of him? ‘Restless, boundlessly ambitious, with quite wonderful gifts as a Parliamentarian,’ one observer noted, ‘there is no knowing what he will ever do or to what position he may ultimately reach.’15 Few observers denied his intellect. But what about his character and temperament? The doubts sown by Antwerp and Gallipoli lingered powerfully on. Churchill’s period in office had begun well. The demobilization of millions of men was a herculean task threatening chaos, but he pulled it off with aplomb. The larger world beyond British shores, however, proved more intractable. The Versailles settlement of 1919 established peace with Germany. But the war also unleashed violent and unpredictable forces of nationalism and revolution. The entire world order he had known since childhood had been uprooted, in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Territorial awards from defeated Germany and the Ottoman Empire had made the geographical reach of the British Empire greater than ever before; but in India, its Jewel in the Crown, the rising tide of nationalism would sweep away the Raj forever within a generation. Asia, he complained, had ‘gone maggoty’.16 The Victorian certainties were dead. In his portrait of the thirty-nine-year-old Churchill on the eve of the First World War, A. G. Gardiner had described him as ‘a typical child of his time’, who plunged into the world ‘with the joy of a man who has found his natural element. A world of transition is made for him.’ Neither man could have imagined the earthquake that was about to come. When the dust settled, Churchill emerged as a man no longer embracing change but appalled and sobered by the world he now faced. ‘For the most part,’ he lamented about the aftermath of the First World War, it was ‘a chronicle of misfortune and tragedy . . . Events were crowded and turbulent. Men were tired and wayward. Power was on the ebb tide, prosperity was stranded; and money was an increasing worry.’17
These words were written later in his multi-volume history of the First World War, The World Crisis. At the time, however, Churchill’s rhetoric was even more apocalyptic. This was especially true about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. ‘Of all tyrannies in history,’ he thundered, ‘the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.’ During his two years at the War Office, he strained every nerve and tried every trick to destroy Lenin’s regime by supporting the anti-Bolshevik armies fighting in the catastrophic Russian Civil War. Lloyd George, who frustrated all his efforts, believed that at the root of Churchill’s hostility to the Revolution lay his ‘ducal blood’ that was horrified at the wholesale slaughter of the Grand Dukes in Russia. This surely was part of it. But he was also appalled by mob rule, by the breakdown of society and social norms, and by the pitiless nature of Lenin’s unforgiving regime. Across Russia, starvation was rife, and millions of the desperate and impoverished were fleeing the country. Churchill also saw Bolshevism as a dangerous form of international disorder that threatened the British Empire.18
These feelings he laid bare in a confrontation with Lloyd George in Paris. In Britain there was serious concern about imminent strikes and the dangers of civil violence, and Lloyd George summoned an urgent Cabinet meeting in the French capital. Churchill arrived by train in a rage about Russia. By now he bitterly accepted that the White, anti-Bolshevik, armies were finally finished. Just two days before, their leader in Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, had fallen into Bolshevik hands, his fate clearly sealed: he was shot on the banks of a nearby river and his body shoved under the ice. Over lunch, Churchill launched into a furious tirade about the world’s disorder. ‘Winston waxed very eloquent on the subject of the old world and the new,’ noted Lloyd George’s secretary and mistress Frances Stevenson in her diary, ‘taking arms in defence of the former.’ Above all, he was livid that the Paris peacemakers had decided to open trade talks with revolutionary Russia. Discussion became heated and according to Stevenson he became ‘almost like a madman’. That night, the discussion continued over dinner at the fashionable Ciro’s Restaurant. Situated on the ground floor of the Hotel Daunou in a quarter of Paris especially favoured by the growing flood of American post-war visitors to the city, it was the smartest place to be seen. Stevenson again kept a brief record. ‘Winston still raving on the subject of the Bolsheviks, & ragging D [Lloyd George] about the New World. “Don’t you make any mistake,” he said to D. “You’re not going to get your new world. The old world is a good enough place for me, and there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s going to sit up & wag its tail.” ’19
This was no idle threat designed simply to rile Lloyd George. As soon as he was back in London, Churchill met with close friends over dinner at Wimborne House, the principal London home of his aunt Cornelia. Amongst them was the young diplomat Alfred Duff Cooper, who during the Second World War was to serve as his representative in North Africa with the Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle. ‘Winston
was splendidly reactionary,’ noted Cooper in his diary. Not only did he swear that his one object in politics was now to fight Labour. He also declared that he was a monarchist, that he hoped to see all the deposed European monarchs back on their thrones – including the Prussian Hohenzollerns – and claimed that the ‘calamitous state’ of central Europe was thanks to the new and corrupt republics. ‘Thank God,’ Churchill told his friends, ‘that he was in no way responsible for the Peace Treaty which he would have been ashamed to put his name to.’ Churchill also admitted that he was becoming more disillusioned and discontented. If he had the choice between immortality and being blown out like a candle, he confessed, he would choose the latter.20
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Cartoons of the day succinctly capture the controversial public image Churchill enjoyed in the press. From his earliest appearance on the public stage he had possessed the magical quality of ‘news value’. This was caught brilliantly before the First World War by a cartoon in Punch magazine depicting him on the Admiralty yacht the Enchantress, seated comfortably on a deckchair. Next to him is the prime minister Herbert Asquith. The daily newspapers have just been delivered. ‘Any home news?’ asks Churchill. ‘How can there be,’ replies Asquith, ‘with you here?’21
Churchill fully grasped the power of such imagery. As a child he gained his first impressions of historical events from the volumes of Punch kept at his private school: Britannia kneeling with an unsheathed sword before the Crimean War; the British Lion leaping down on the Bengal Tiger during the Indian Mutiny; France defeated after the Franco-Prussian War, portrayed as a prostrate and beautiful woman with a broken sword in her hand.
By 1921 Churchill himself was one of the most caricatured of British politicians, resigned to the fact that cartoons invariably depicted him with a nose like a wart and wearing a variety of ill-fitting hats. The legend of his penchant for hats that were too small sprang from a single incident during the General Election of 1910, when he had unthinkingly picked up a small felt hat that he found on a hall table before going out for a walk. The scene was snapped on camera by a reporter, and since then hats had featured as one of Churchill’s consistent cartoon ‘props’, a not so subtle hint that politically he was unpredictable and opportunistic, ready to change hats on a whim, and too big-headed for most. Only later did the cigar, the signature mark for which he now remains famous, regularly enter the cartoonists’ repertoire – and it was happily pandered to by their appreciative target.
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