Oblivion or Glory

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by David Stafford


  Two of the leading British cartoonists of the day were Sidney Conrad Strube of the Daily Express and Percy Fearon (‘Poy’) of the Evening News and Daily Mail. Neither had a very favourable view of Churchill, depicting him as either itching for war or hostile to the workers. But a new rival had recently entered the scene. David Low was a New Zealander of Scottish ancestry who had made his name in Australia with powerful lampoons of the country’s wartime prime minister, Billy Hughes. In 1919, aged twenty-eight, he landed in England with a contract in his pocket to produce a daily cartoon for the Star, the evening stablemate of the Liberal newspaper, the Daily News. Low was a fast and ambitious learner who was quickly in demand for his caricatures of leading figures in British society. When he wrote his autobiography in the afterglow of Churchill’s victorious Second World War premiership, Low would recall that when they first met, Churchill was ‘one of the few men I have ever met who even in the flesh gave me the impression of genius’. In 1940, in a famous cartoon entitled ‘All Behind You Winston’, Low was to depict a pugnacious Churchill as prime minister, sleeves rolled up for action, with the Labour Party and the nation marching and united behind him.22

  But in 1920–1 Low’s sympathies were firmly on the Left. In contrast to Poy, he set out to ridicule, not just amuse. He had little time for Churchill’s politics and regarded his demonization of the Labour Party and trade unions as more or less agents of Bolshevism to be absurd; far from Russian bears, thought Low, the British trade unions were little more than ‘rabbits’. With their strong lines and high contrasts of black and white, his cartoons were radical, hard-hitting, and visually dramatic. Churchill described him with admiration as the ‘Charlie Chaplin of caricature’. The fact that he was frequently a target of Low’s critique bothered him not at all. To have been ignored would have been worse. Besides, he was unable to take the New Zealander’s colonial radicalism too seriously. ‘You cannot bridle the wild ass of the desert,’ he wrote dismissively, ‘still less prohibit its natural hee-haw.’23 Low’s cartoons paint him as a warmonger and a hungrily ambitious empire-builder with a record of failure behind him. One from 1920 shows him dressed in the check-suited gear of a country squire, shotgun in hand, with his ‘bag’ of dead animals at his feet including Antwerp, Gallipoli, and Russia. Another cartoon that same year reveals Churchill peering at portraits of Lenin and Trotsky and resembling a combination of both of them. ‘Winstonsky: Horrifying effect of concentration on Russian Affairs’ reads the caption. Yet another depicts him fanning the flames of war along with a foreign capitalist, a fat and well-fed ‘patriot’, and a ‘pinhead politician’, amongst others, while blocking the road for a car labelled ‘League of Nations’. ‘Keep the Hate Fires Burning’ is its caption, playing on Ivor Novello’s famous popular song from the war. The Churchill of these images was to be the stock-in-trade of critics until the Second World War and even beyond.

  *

  ‘He will never get to the top in English politics, with all his wonderful gifts,’ predicted Asquith in 1915. ‘To speak with the tongues of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good, if a man does not inspire trust.’24 Two years later when Lloyd George proposed bringing Churchill back into the government there had been howls of protest from his colleagues. ‘They admitted he was a man of dazzling talents,’ wrote Lloyd George. But why did he have so few followers? It was because, they argued, that while his mind was a powerful machine it contained some obscure defect, ‘a tragic flaw in the metal’, which must be guarded against. This was the legacy facing Churchill as the new year began.25

  W I N T E R

  ONE

  ‘RULE BRITANNIA’

  Churchill loved singing, the good life, and the company of close friends – especially if they were rich, powerful, or influential. So the New Year celebrations to herald the arrival of 1921 found him in a jovial mood. He was staying at Port Lympne, a luxurious mansion in Kent perched on a ridge overlooking Romney Marsh with views over the English Channel. His fellow house guests consisted of some of Britain’s most powerful men: David Lloyd George, whose wily domination of the political scene as prime minister during the First World War and since, as well as his masterful handling of the Paris Peace Conference, had earned him the sobriquet of ‘the Welsh Wizard’; Baron Riddell, the influential proprietor of one of the bestselling newspapers of the day, The News of the World, who had masterminded Lloyd George’s relations with the press at Paris and now did so in Britain; Sir William Sutherland, nicknamed ‘Bronco Bill’, the political fixer and go-between who rarely left Lloyd George’s side, a Glaswegian widely mistrusted as an unscrupulous manipulator, branded by Riddell as ‘an amusing, cynical dog’, and damned by the Cabinet Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey as ‘an odious fellow, some sort of political parasite’. The Irish Secretary Sir Hamar Greenwood, a Canadian-born lawyer and Liberal Member of Parliament who had worked with Churchill at the Colonial Office before the war and now faced an Ireland in open revolt, was also amongst the company. His assigned task in the government was to exude optimism, and he was a loyal performer.

  Discreetly accompanying the prime minister was his long-standing secretary and mistress, the thirty-two-year-old classics graduate Frances Stevenson, who had fallen for his charms before the war and been at his side ever since. The only other woman present was Greenwood’s politically ambitious wife Margo. The daughter of a wealthy English vicar and seventeen years younger than her husband, she was rumoured to have enjoyed the prime minister’s sexual favours before and possibly even after her marriage; the Greenwoods were frequent guests at weekend parties organized for Lloyd George by the ubiquitous Stevenson.1

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  The male guests were in their forties or fifties. The two women were in their early thirties. Close in age to both, and hovering discreetly in the background, was their host, the unmarried thirty-two-year-old aesthete and millionaire Sir Philip Sassoon. Sleek, athletic, and impeccably dressed, he was a grandson on his mother’s side of Baron Gustave de Rothschild of Paris, the second cousin of the famous war poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the local Conservative Member of Parliament. Churchill knew him well, as did Clementine, who had spent several weeks in 1914 at Port Lympne recovering from the birth of Sarah, their second daughter. As private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western Front, Sassoon had managed Haig’s daily schedule and his relations with the press, drafted his letters, arranged visits for dignitaries, and garnered a host of influential contacts that were delivering him – and them – a healthy peacetime dividend by way of political influence. Churchill had made many visits to the Western Front as Minister of Munitions. ‘Philip sits like a wakeful spaniel outside [Haig’s] door,’ he joked to Clementine. Sassoon was now Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary and with an office next to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street he now performed a similar function as he had for Haig. Frances Stevenson quipped that he was as ‘amusing and clever as a cartload of monkeys’.

  Port Lympne was not Sassoon’s only residence. Both his grand house on Park Lane and his mansion north of London at Trent Park provided venues for an unending round of hospitality that brought together royalty, politicians, writers, stars of stage and screen, and other celebrities that was to stretch over two decades until Sassoon’s premature death aged fifty in 1939. Legendary in their day, his parties resembled theatrical set pieces that according to one of their regular participants ‘mingled luxury, simplicity, and informality, brilliantly contrived’.2

  *

  This visit was by no means the first that Churchill had made to Lympne. Just five months before, he and Clementine had enjoyed a summer weekend there when he had become absorbed in painting and sketching views across Romney Marsh, striving hard to capture on canvas the sparkling movement of the water. He appreciated Sassoon’s hospitality, his contacts, and his discretion, as well as his interest in art. The young millionaire was soon to be appointed a Trustee of the National Gall
ery of Art in London and he offered Churchill encouragement and critiques of his work, lent him paintings from his own private collection to copy, and introduced him to distinguished society artists. This was not the only weekend in 1921 during which Churchill would be one of Sassoon’s privileged guests.

  *

  Port Lympne had been built for Sassoon just before the war as a modest weekend house. But in a burst of optimism at the arrival of peace he had spent a small fortune on having it modernized and enlarged by the fashionable young architect Philip Tilden. Outwardly, the red-brick building was stylish but conservative, with terraced gardens, fountains, statues, and pavilions with classical pillars that referenced the site’s historic origins as a Roman port.

  Behind the bronze front door, however, Sassoon had let loose his own far from conventional creative ambitions and artistic tastes. An interior courtyard featured white marble columns, brilliant green pantiles, and orange trees, and was almost certainly inspired by a visit he had made to the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. The library was lined with books bound in pinkish-red Moroccan leather and sported a green and pink carpet. In the dining room the walls were decorated with marble-effect cobalt-blue lapis lazuli, the central table was surrounded by gilded chairs with arms resembling the wings of an eagle, and the ceiling was ringed with a frieze depicting a scene from ancient Egypt of half-naked black men working with animals.

  But the dramatic highlight and undoubted talking point of the house was the drawing room. Here, Sassoon had commissioned a mural by the Catalan artist, Josep Maria Sert, who had deeply impressed him with the sets he had designed for a performance of the Ballets Russes. An allegory of Germany’s defeat in the recent war, it showed France as a draped and crouching female figure being attacked by German eagles and defended by the Allies in the form of children wearing headpieces from their respective national costumes, and by the Indian Empire, represented by elephants. The story ended with the German eagles being torn to pieces, feathers flying. Charlie Chaplin, who stayed with Sassoon later this same year, described Port Lympne as ‘something out of the Arabian Nights’.3

  *

  It was in the drawing room, surrounded by Sert’s triumphal mural, that Sassoon and his guests gathered to celebrate the New Year. Churchill was in a typically ebullient mood, vying with Lloyd George to be at the centre of attention. The two had long been friends and rivals. In the pre-war Liberal government, they had formed a ‘terrible duo’ that successfully steered radical social and political reforms through Parliament which made them anathema to Conservatives and the British establishment. With his clear blue eyes and mane of raffish white hair, Lloyd George was the senior by a decade. A disruptive force himself – he was the son of a poor schoolteacher and his first language was Welsh – he was more experienced, craftier, and more ruthless than Churchill. Their friendship was distinctly political, and sharply barbed. From close experience Lloyd George appreciated Churchill’s talents. But he also knew their risks. As Chancellor of the Exchequer when Churchill was Home Secretary, Lloyd George had considered Churchill’s plan to deal with the Welsh miners’ strike ‘mad’ and its author wild and impulsive. ‘He makes me very uneasy,’ he added.4 As prime minister, however, he felt safer with Churchill inside rather than outside the Cabinet. He had brought him back from the political wilderness to the Ministry of Munitions in 1917, and after the Conservative/Liberal Coalition victory of 1918 he appointed him Secretary of State for War and Air. Churchill was acutely aware of his dependence on Lloyd George. He knew that his protector could just as easily become his political assassin. This lent their alliance a treacherous edge. At the time of Gallipoli, Lloyd George’s support had been noticeably lukewarm. ‘I assure you,’ the fiercely loyal Clementine warned her husband, ‘he is the direct descendant of Judas Iscariot.’5

  But tonight, all was bonhomie. Phoenix-like, Churchill was back in the Cabinet and at the centre of British politics – and, not least, media attention. Recently turned forty-six and just under five feet seven inches tall, Churchill had clearly crossed the line from youth into middle age. He was thickening around the waist and his face was rounding out. His pale blue eyes were as alert as ever but his sandy hair was fading and he was now almost bald on top. He was still energetic, physically active, and a keen polo player, the strenuous sport he had embraced as a subaltern in the British Army stationed in Bangalore, India, some quarter of a century before. But a serious fall playing the game a few months earlier had put him out of action for several days; injuries no longer healed as rapidly as in his youth. Until two years before he had also been an enthusiastic trainee pilot. He’d given it up after almost getting killed in a crash – and in reluctant response to a passionate plea from Clementine to think of his family and the children.

  *

  To amuse the company Sir William Sutherland had brought along gramophone records of speeches by Warren Harding, the newly elected Republican President of the United States. Churchill knew more about American politics than anyone else in the company. Some he had learned from his American-born mother, but he’d acquired most from one of her oldest friends – and former lovers – the Irish-American politician Bourke Cochran, one-time Democratic congressman from New York City and close advisor to both Presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1895 Churchill had arrived in New York on his way to observe the Spanish Army’s campaign to crush a guerrilla uprising by Cuban rebels. It was his first visit to the United States and his mother had arranged for Cochran to take her impressionable twenty-year-old son in hand. The force of Cochran’s belief in the power of rhetoric and oratory to sway politics had stayed with him ever since.6

  As Harding’s voice boomed out scratchily from the machine’s gigantic loudspeaker, Churchill and Lloyd George amused the company by shouting back irreverent and caustic comments. Given the compromise nature of American politics, Churchill told his fellow guests, platitudes such as those emerging from Harding’s mouth were inevitable. It was simply not safe for an American politician to venture much beyond promises that ‘The sun shone yesterday upon this great and glorious country. It shines today and will shine tomorrow.’

  His mimicry raised predictable laughter. But behind the mirth lay serious anxiety. The First World War had fundamentally changed the balance of world power. The US Senate had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and thus blocked America’s entry into the League of Nations. How would the new power of the United States, especially of its Navy, be contained? And what did its command of the seas, especially in the Pacific, mean for the British Empire, the Royal Navy, and for Anglo-American relations generally? When the gramophone emitted some grandiose claim by Harding about the American Navy, Lloyd George confessed that he would rather pawn his shirt than allow America to dominate the seas. His outburst struck a powerful patriotic chord and spontaneously the assembled company launched into a lusty rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’. Churchill took the lead. As a former First Lord of the Admiralty his pride in the Royal Navy ran deep. He believed passionately in maintaining British naval superiority in the new post-war world. Only two weeks before, at a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, there had been an intense discussion about Anglo-American naval relations. Lloyd George considered this the most important and the most difficult question the Committee had ever discussed. Churchill was all for close relations with Washington, and he accepted that when it came to battleships there would have to be equality – if only for reasons of economy. Overall, though, Britannia should rule supreme in ships. ‘Great Britain must remain the strongest naval power,’ he argued passionately. ‘It would be a terrible day . . . when she ceased to be this. Great Britain, since the most remote times, had always been supreme at sea. The life of the nation, its culture, its prosperity, had rested on that basis.’ Not surprisingly the evening saw him repeatedly singing out the words of ‘Rule Britannia’ and going out of his way to praise their beauty and patriotic fervour. The last two verses, he pronounced, would make a splendi
d peroration.7

  More songs followed. Lloyd George, who had been brought up as a Baptist, was known for enjoying hymns and taking part in Wales’s annual National Eisteddfod or Festival of Song and Poetry. Once, during the Paris peace talks, a junior member of the Cabinet Secretariat had gone over to Lloyd George’s flat for dinner. ‘As I came in,’ recorded Leo Amery, ‘[I] heard weird doleful sounds and found L. G. [Lloyd George] singing a Welsh hymn to Miss Stevenson’s accompaniment.’8 But in the privacy of Lympne, surrounded by trusted friends, he chose something in a markedly different vein: the popular Irish song ‘Cockles and Mussels’. Its opening lines – ‘In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone’ – undoubtedly evoked wry smiles, or at least private chuckles, as the assembled guests joined in with the chorus; the prime minister’s relaxed attitude towards his marital vows was no secret and not for nothing was he known as ‘The Goat’. In Paris he had lived openly with Frances Stevenson in a luxurious flat on the rue Nitot, quite separate from the official British delegation. After two or three more songs, and a song-and-dance routine by Hamar and Margo Greenwood, it was Churchill’s turn.

 

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