Oblivion or Glory
Page 4
As an army cadet at Sandhurst during the 1890s he had used his leave to venture into central London and enjoy one of his greatest pleasures – the music hall. This boisterous and often bawdy late Victorian blend of music, words and theatricality thrilled him all his life. As a child he loved playing with his toy theatre. He admiringly talked of his father Lord Randolph Churchill’s ‘showman’s knack’ of drawing attention to himself. Given an audience, he once confessed to his mother, ‘there is no act too daring or noble’. Lloyd George neatly captured his theatrical character after observing him once in the House of Commons. ‘The applause of the House is the very breath of his nostrils,’ he observed. ‘He is just like an actor. He likes the limelight and the approbation of the pit.’9
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The drawing room at Lympne was far removed from the orchestral pit of a London music hall. But it was certainly theatrical, and it held a captive audience. Churchill seized the moment. He had an impressive memory for words and could cite great passages of prose and poetry by heart, a gift that would provide him with a lifetime’s fund of phrases and images from which he later drew to inspire the nation during the dark days of the Second World War.
But alongside the classics of literature he retained a fund of material from the old music hall. Not long before, he had dutifully accepted an invitation – although it was more like a command – to one of his mother’s fashionable lunches in London. Here, for the first time, he met Ivor Novello, the brilliant young Welsh composer of the popular and enduring First World War song, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. They immediately took a liking to each other and throughout the meal sparked each other off by reciting the titles of music-hall songs they both knew. But Novello was puzzled when Churchill cracked an obscure joke. Only the next day did it dawn on the composer that it related to the title of a long-forgotten song from ‘the old days’.10 When they first met before the war, the Canadian press magnate Max Aitken – later Lord Beaverbrook – had quickly noted Churchill’s penchant for living well, smoking expensive cigars, enjoying brandy and, in moments of relaxation, singing music-hall melodies ‘in a raucous voice, and without any instinct for tune’.11 Music-hall songs were to give him comfort for the rest of his life. During the anxious build-up to the D-Day Normandy landings in the spring of 1944, Clementine celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday with a small family gathering at Downing Street. To keep them amused while Winston worked on his papers, his private secretary ‘Jock’ Colville chose a selection of music-hall songs. These, he knew, were Winston’s prime choice of music.12
One of the most popular late Victorian and Edwardian music-hall entertainers was George (G. H.) Chirgwin, the son of a circus clown, who specialized in minstrel shows. But instead of using a fully blacked-up face he painted a large white diamond shape over one eye and was thus billed as ‘The White-Eyed Kaffir’. Churchill was clearly familiar with Chirgwin, and Margo Greenwood, who was keeping a diary, noted that ‘Winston repeated by heart verse after verse of Chirgwin’s [songs].’ George Riddell, also a diarist, marvelled at how effortless it all was, even though Churchill had not heard many of the songs in years. Even the hard-bitten and cynical Sutherland was impressed. ‘He’s an artist in words,’ he observed drily.13
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So he was. Before becoming a politician, he was a writer. First as a highly paid war correspondent, then as the author of bestselling books based on his personal exploits in the imperial wars of late Victorian Britain: the North West Frontier of India, Sudan, and the war against the Boers in South Africa. Determined to vindicate the memory of the father who had so spectacularly self-destructed, he’d also written his hefty two-volume biography. Since his own political crash after Gallipoli, he was now desperately keen to vindicate himself. Over the previous few months he had been gathering documents from his time at the Admiralty to support his case, dictating the drafts of chapters of what quickly expanded from a short book about Gallipoli into a multi-volume history of the First World War to be entitled The World Crisis. In November he had persuaded the London literary agent Albert Curtis Brown to take on the project, and they soon secured an offer of £9,000 for British Empire rights – the equivalent today of £300,000. Then, just before Christmas, he had received more excellent news: The Times newspaper had agreed to pay £5,000 for serialization rights. When he arrived at Lympne, lucrative American contract talks were also well advanced. In the end, the book was to earn him some three-quarters of a million pounds in today’s terms. Churchill held no religious belief in eternal life. ‘Words,’ he once said, ‘are the only things that last for ever.’ His writings about himself have effectively ensured him his own kind of immortality.14
The regular weekend stays at the country houses of friends and colleagues offered more than the welcome opportunity to talk, enjoy fine food, and drink champagne. He always had something creative to do as well. In good weather, this meant taking along an easel, canvasses, and an armoury of brushes and tubes of paint. At other times, he arrived equipped with pen, paper, and documents. With the generous contracts for The World Crisis in his pocket, this 1921 New Year’s Eve he was in an especially expansive mood. So much so indeed that he boasted to Riddell that he had already written a great part of the first volume, planned to produce 300,000 words, and would then cut it down in length and polish it all up. It was exhilarating, he confessed to the wealthy press magnate, to feel that he was working for half a crown a word. He then disappeared upstairs to write more. Two hours later he returned. ‘It’s a horrible thought,’ joked Riddell to Lloyd George, ‘that while we’ve been frittering away our time, Winston has been piling up words at half a crown apiece.’15
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Jokes about money were one thing, Music-hall nostalgia another, and mimicry of the Americans yet another. More serious was the talk about Ireland.
Here, British policy was teetering between repression and concession. Home Rule bills creating parliaments for both Northern and Southern Ireland had come into force just before Christmas. But the limited devolution they granted was not enough for Sinn Fein, which demanded a republic and full independence outside the British Empire. Its armed struggle, led by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), sparked assassinations and reprisals on both sides. Barely six weeks before the gathering at Lympne, on a Sunday morning in late November 1920, twelve British agents were hauled out of their beds at various addresses across Dublin and shot in cold blood, many in their pyjamas or in front of their wives; most were involved in anti-IRA intelligence work. In retaliation, that same afternoon British forces raided the Croke Park Gaelic football stadium in the city and fired into the crowd, killing twelve spectators and injuring dozens more. ‘Bloody Sunday’ was followed by more reprisals and in December the Cabinet decided to proclaim martial law in four of Ireland’s southern counties. After an IRA ambush on a British patrol a large part of the city of Cork was burned to the ground, including the City Hall and Carnegie Library. Ireland, said Lloyd George, was nothing better than a ‘hell’s broth’. In fear of IRA assassins he had started wearing a bullet-proof waistcoat and taking a fierce Airedale police dog with him on walks.16
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Churchill’s relationship with Ireland was long, close, and complex. He had spent part of his childhood in Dublin, had close Irish relatives, and the small fortune he was about to inherit came from an estate in County Antrim. Although his father had notoriously played ‘the Orange card’ in supporting the Protestant unionists of the north, since before the war he himself had supported Home Rule, although with separate provision for Ulster. Far from being an imperialist John Bull when it came to Ireland, his views were complex and nuanced. What he was bitterly opposed to, however, was the IRA’s campaign of violence. On this, his views were hawkish and his rhetoric was bloodthirsty. After Lloyd George had appointed him six months before as head of the Cabinet Committee on Ireland, he had suggested various methods of intensifying the war including aircraft to bomb or machine-gun Sinn Fein. To increase the chances of a settlement, he s
aid, it was necessary ‘to raise the temperature’ of the conflict to a real trial of strength.17As Secretary of State for War he was ultimately responsible for the troops in Ireland. The previous spring, he had proposed the creation of a specially recruited auxiliary armed force to be attached to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Known as the ‘Black and Tans’ because of the colour of their uniforms – a mix of police black belts and army khaki – it was they who spearheaded the bulk of British reprisals against the IRA, entered Croke Park with such deadly results, and set fire to Cork. The head of the RIC was Major-General Henry Tudor, a long-standing friend since their subaltern days together in India. Thanks to him, the force became increasingly militarized.
Churchill stoutly defended the Black and Tans’ campaign of reprisals. They were ‘striking down in darkness those who struck from the darkness,’ he unapologetically wrote later. Nor would there be any negotiations under duress, he told his parliamentary constituents in Dundee that October. The IRA, he thundered, was nothing more than ‘a miserable gang of cowardly assassins’. Not surprisingly, Scotland Yard soon received intelligence that Sinn Fein was planning to kidnap him and other British ministers. By the time he arrived at Sassoon’s Port Lympne, he had been given a personal bodyguard.18
The Irish crisis seemed deadlocked in a never-ending cycle of violence and bloodshed. Yet behind the scenes, things were moving. Back-channel exploration with Sinn Fein had been going on for months. Just the day before travelling down to Lympne, Churchill had backed Lloyd George at a special Cabinet meeting in arguing for a temporary truce. But the generals present were strongly opposed. ‘Terror could be broken,’ they argued, and carried the day with martial law being extended to four more counties in the south. Lloyd George and Churchill arrived at Sassoon’s nursing their defeat. Sir Hamar Greenwood was not on the original guest list. But after getting an urgent phone call from Lloyd George, he drove down in his car with Margo. As a Canadian with strong imperial instincts, he had prevaricated during the Cabinet meeting. But it was important to get him back in line and to review the situation.
General Tudor had supported the other generals in vetoing a truce. Yet Churchill was not one to nurse a grudge or take it personally. Far from it. His old friend was just standing firm as he had during the war as commander of the 9th (Scottish) Division, explained Churchill to his colleagues, and described a visit he had made to Tudor’s headquarters on the eve of the massive German Spring offensive of March 1918. Together they had toured the front line and visited the trenches. The shelling on both sides was terrific. After observing the bombardments for several minutes Tudor insisted they move on. Moments later, the spot where they had been standing was blown up. Throughout, Churchill admiringly told the gathering in Sassoon’s drawing room, Tudor had been quite unconcerned.
Implicitly, so had he. He was the only one present who had actively fought on the Western Front. Whatever criticisms that could be levied against him about Gallipoli, his battlefield experience gave him a moral advantage over many of his contemporaries. It also provided him with rich first-hand material for the book that he was working on upstairs in his room. His account of the episode with Tudor in The World Crisis is characteristically cinematic. ‘Through the chinks in the carefully prepared window,’ he writes graphically, ‘the flame of the bombardment lit like firelight my tiny cabin.’19
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Over the breakfast table that Monday morning the talk returned to Ireland. All of those there supported peace – provided Sinn Fein was prepared to make concessions. ‘Winston [punctuated] the conversation with shrewd comments,’ noted Margo Greenwood. He had already confessed that he was worried about the negative effects that British repression was having on American public opinion. In one case, Kevin Barry, an eighteen-year-old medical student, had been executed in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin for a terrorist attack that killed three British soldiers. A professional hangman was specially brought in from London to carry out the sentence and Barry’s death was quickly immortalized in a legendary nationalist ballad with its highly charged chorus words ‘Hanged liked a dog’, not shot ‘like a soldier’. More notoriously, the imprisoned Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Cork and IRA commander, Terence MacSwiney, had died in Brixton Prison after a hunger strike lasting seventy-four days. In an exquisitely choreographed show of Sinn Fein propaganda, his open coffin was carried from Brixton to Southwark’s Catholic Cathedral, where 30,000 people filed past his coffin to view the corpse. MacSwiney’s funeral continued to receive massive worldwide publicity as his body was conveyed by rail and ferry back to Cork. Britain was clearly losing the international war of propaganda over Ireland.20
Churchill, more than most of his contemporaries, was attuned to the shifting tides of transatlantic sentiment. He was also sympathetic to Irish national feelings and aware that public support inside Britain for the government’s hard-line stand, already shaky, could not continue indefinitely. Yet from intelligence reports he also knew that the IRA itself was doubting it could win the war. Was it, perhaps, time for a deal?
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Before returning to London he had one more thing to accomplish. The Lympne estate nestled in a natural amphitheatre on the edge of the sea embraced by an escarpment. Here, over a picnic lunch on New Year’s Day, he asked Lloyd George for a new Cabinet position.
The fact was that he was discontented and wanted to leave the War Office. After a promising start sorting out a mess over the demobilization of millions of men in uniform and backing the creation of an independent Royal Air Force, Churchill suffered a series of failures and disappointments. Despite all his efforts, the Cabinet had refused to intervene in Russia against Lenin’s Bolshevik regime and had agreed to start trade negotiations with Moscow. It had also failed to support Churchill’s demand that Britain should start negotiating with Mustafa Kemal of Turkey, and frustrated some of his efforts to reduce expenditures in Mesopotamia (which in the course of 1921 became known as Iraq). Within the Cabinet, he was often isolated.
Above all, however, he feared an imminent breakdown in his relationship with Lloyd George. This was the only thing keeping him in the political game. That their relationship had survived so long was something of a miracle. Now he could see it ending. Shortly before Christmas he had bluntly set out his fears in a long and emotional letter to his long-time political friend. ‘I am vy [sic] sorry to see how far we are drifting apart on foreign policy,’ he began, and ended by hinting, not so subtly, at resignation. ‘I have other new interests on [which] I [could] fall back,’ he wrote.21
Lloyd George was increasingly aware of the fragility of his Coalition government and likewise feared a break. Yet Churchill outside the Cabinet would be more of a nuisance and a danger than inside. The trick was to find him a task that would absorb his energies on an alternative grand stage. Two years before, when he was pondering where to place Churchill in his Cabinet, Riddell had suggested the Colonial Office on the grounds that the colonies would pose many problems and that the position itself needed ‘bucking up’. Besides, he added, Churchill could usefully make a tour of the Empire. Lloyd George had rejected the idea then. ‘It would be like condemning a man to be head of a mausoleum,’ he said. But Riddell’s words clearly stuck in his mind. The Empire was certainly a grand stage that would appeal to Churchill’s imperial instincts. Perhaps, too, it would be useful to have him out of the country for a while enjoying a grand tour of his new domain. Now, gazing out over the English Channel, the prime minister offered him the position.22
But Churchill did not immediately leap at the opportunity. Instead, he thought it over for three or four days. It was something of a poisoned chalice as it would include Mesopotamia (Iraq) as a British mandate. He had already struggled to reduce troop numbers there because of resistance and opposition from other ministries with overlapping interests in the country. Only if he was allowed to set up his own special Middle East Department with full powers over the issue, he told Lloyd George, would he take on the job. A few days later the two me
n hammered out its terms. He would formally take over the Colonial Office and relinquish the War Office in mid-February. Work on creating the new department would begin immediately and he would start thinking about making a personal visit to the Middle East to examine the issues at first hand. This perfectly fitted Lloyd George’s political agenda. He knew Churchill better than did Churchill himself. ‘Winston must have a stunt, he is not content to do the ordinary work that goes with his post,’ he confided to Margo Greenwood.23
The decision also suited Churchill and was more a matter of push than pull – a way of removing himself from sources of friction and conflict with Lloyd George rather than any great enthusiasm for his new task. Indeed, his experience so far with the ‘thankless deserts’ of Iraq was largely negative. ‘I am afraid this venture is going to break me,’ he despondently told Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary.24
TWO
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Brimming with ideas about his new position, Churchill returned to London from the Lympne estate after his talk with Lloyd George. Home was 2 Sussex Square, an elegant early Victorian house close to Hyde Park with two mews houses at the rear, into which he and Clementine had moved less than a year before. By now they had four children: Diana aged eleven, Randolph nine, Sarah six, and two-year-old Marigold. Randolph had just been packed off to a boarding school in Surrey and was already showing signs of the ill-mannered turbulence that would make the father–son relationship one of ‘storm and sunshine’. Diana and Sarah were attending nearby Notting Hill High School, while Marigold was mostly in the care of a nanny. Their parents had given them animal nicknames. Diana was ‘the Gold-cream Kitten’, Randolph ‘the Rabbit’ or sometimes ‘the Chum Bolly’, Sarah ‘the Bumblebee’ and Marigold ‘the Duckadilly’; collectively they were known as ‘the Kittens’. Churchill loved playing both indoor and outdoor games with his children, giving them the close parental affection lacking in his own childhood. He particularly doted on Marigold and indulged her wildly, letting her scamper round the dining table when he and Clementine had guests for lunch. She was just beginning to talk. Soon she was singing her own special tune, the hit song of the year, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’.1