Oblivion or Glory

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by David Stafford


  The move to Sussex Square ended a period of chronic domestic chaos caused by Churchill’s political misfortunes and his own innate restlessness. More than once the burden of finding a home for the growing family and its required retinue of servants and nannies had threatened to overwhelm him. He survived thanks only to the willing help of friends and relations. After his forced departure from Admiralty House, his aunt Cornelia was the first to come to his aid. She had long been an ardent supporter of his political ambitions and a treasured confidante. His father’s sister, she had married Ivor Guest, a wealthy steel magnate who enjoyed the title of Baron Wimborne. Now a widow, she owned a town house at 21 Arlington Street lying just behind the Ritz Hotel with magnificent views over Green Park. It was there that the Churchills had briefly moved during the summer of 1915, along with Goonie and her two children, Peregrine and Johnny. But the stifling domesticity and noise of it all soon became too much for Churchill, and he fled to live with his mother in her nearby Georgian house on Mayfair’s Brook Street. Later, Clementine and the children moved back to Goonie’s Cromwell Road house, and here he rejoined them after returning from his soldiering on the Western Front.

  But by now the dreams of owning a more peaceful, rural, retreat had taken hold in his mind and he was actively seeking a place outside London. ‘I wish to find a place to end my days amid trees and upon grass of my own,’ he confessed. Shortly afterwards he found the haven he sought, one that also removed his children safely away from the increasing hazards of German bombing attacks on London. Lullenden was a Tudor-built mansion house set in some 70 acres in Surrey, and over the next two years he spent as many weekends there as he could. During the week he ‘camped’ in various government-owned houses or flats in Whitehall near his Ministry of Munitions office. One of Lullenden’s advantages was its large barn, where his boisterous young children and their cousins could be housed away from the main house, leaving him in peace and quiet for his writing. It also gave him the opportunity to try his hand at farming, although not very successfully.

  By the end of the war, however, this rural idyll was proving far too expensive to run and he and Clementine began the search for a house in central London. Once again, family and friends volunteered to help. Sir John and Lady Frances Horner were long-time friends of Clementine, and their country home at Mells in Somerset frequently lent her peaceful respite from the strains of everyday family life. They also owned a town house on Lower Berkeley Street in Mayfair, and for a while they let the Churchills live there. Then Aunt Cornelia again stepped forward and they moved briefly to another house she owned in Mayfair, just off Hanover Square. Finding a permanent home in London suitable for the whole family proved tricky. After a plan to rent the house in Pimlico owned by Clementine’s sister Nellie unexpectedly fell through, he was forced to move quickly and rented a small house on Dean Trench Street in Westminster, within easy walking distance of Parliament. As it was too small to house the children as well, they were left at Lullenden with the nannies while their parents visited them at weekends.

  This could only be a makeshift arrangement. Unlike her husband, Clementine worried obsessively about money and knew that they were badly over-extended. Reluctantly, the hard decision was made to place Lullenden on the market, which added extra urgency to their search for a permanent home. Then in July 1919 Churchill impetuously made an offer on a large early Victorian house overlooking Hyde Park but typically failed to have an initial survey done. The bad news quickly emerged. It required extensive and costly repairs and he tried to back out of the contract. An unpleasant legal wrangle followed, from which he was rescued by his long-time friend and benefactor Sir Ernest Cassel, who purchased the lease. Meanwhile, they kept searching for the right house. Finally, they spotted 2 Sussex Square.

  But this was not the end of the domestic upheaval. The house required extensive improvements and the renovations would not be finished for months. Having finally sold Lullenden to the wife of an old friend of Churchill’s from South Africa days, Sir Ian Hamilton, who had also commanded the British land forces at Gallipoli, they temporarily moved in with yet another family member.

  Freddie Guest was the third of Aunt Cornelia’s five sons and Churchill’s favourite cousin. Close in age – they were only six months apart – they had been polo-playing friends and political allies for years, and were to remain so until Freddie’s premature death from cancer aged only sixty-one. Like Churchill, he had quit the Conservatives over the issue of free trade and was a Liberal Member of Parliament; for a short while before the war he had even served as his cousin’s private secretary. Thanks to a distinguished military career in both the Boer and First World Wars, he was usually referred to as ‘Captain Guest’, although to Churchill he was always just ‘Freddie’. Genial and sociable, he was sometimes wrongly dismissed as no more than a lightweight, a snob, and a playboy. His real importance lay behind the scenes. During the war he had headed the National War Aims Committee whose goal was ‘to resist insidious influences of an unpatriotic character’, for which it received money from the Secret Service to disseminate anti-socialist and anti-pacifist propaganda.2

  More significant now was Freddie Guest’s role as the Coalition Liberals’ Chief Whip, a fierce promoter of Lloyd George, and a cunning and ruthless backroom fixer. This made him a fund of useful knowledge for Churchill about internal Coalition politics, and a useful go-between when Winston and the prime minister were at odds. Guest was also in charge of raising money for Lloyd George’s political fund. This relied mostly on the selling of honours, a murky business that was to erupt the next year into a major scandal that would see him fiercely denounced as Lloyd George’s ‘evil genius’. Already, during this first week of 1921, the Conservatives were bitterly complaining that he was unscrupulously poaching on their own financial terrain. Freddie was also a keen aviator and like his cousin fought fiercely for the institutional independence of the Royal Air Force. When Churchill moved to the Colonial Office, Lloyd George rewarded Guest for his loyalty by appointing him Secretary of State for Air. This made him more useful to Churchill than ever.3

  Freddie’s marriage was as fragile as Churchill’s was secure. His wife was Amy Grant, a fellow aviation enthusiast and the daughter of Henry Phipps Jr, a wealthy Pittsburgh iron master and business partner of Andrew Carnegie, the great American steel magnate and philanthropist. Templeton, their house in Roehampton, to which the Churchills moved while waiting to occupy Sussex Square, lay some six miles from central London and had its own tennis court. For Clementine, an avid player, this was a delight. It was not the first time the two couples had ‘bunked’ together. After their marriage in 1908 the Churchills had stayed with Freddie and Amy while their first London house was being renovated, and at Templeton they now had several children between them. It was with relief, however, that Clementine was finally able to move out. She disliked what she termed ‘the Guest tribe’, and sometimes found Amy infuriating – ‘Suffragetty, Christian Sciency, and Yankee Doodle,’ she complained to her husband. Once, while the Churchills had been staying as guests before the war, Amy became so furious that Freddie was staying up late playing cards with Winston that she locked him out of their bedroom and ignored the resounding blows on the door delivered on Freddie’s behalf by his cousin – who, in ‘family solidarity’, was demanding to be let in. By 1921 the Guests’ marriage was fraying visibly at the edges. Before the year was out, Freddie was openly talking about marrying another woman.4

  Once installed in his new home Churchill immediately began dreaming up even more improvements. These included the conversion of the two mews houses into a library and a painting studio for himself. Typically, this cost more than anticipated. But armoured with his aristocratic sense of entitlement, he rarely let expense be a barrier to his lifestyle. Visits to his bank manager were frequent, and he relied heavily on loans secured against his shareholdings or guaranteed by dependable friends such as Freddie. When the war ended he had debts of £16,000 (more than £600,000 in
today’s terms). His post as Secretary of State for War gave him an annual salary of £5,000. Yet this fell short by at least £300 per month of what he was spending, and he was running a substantial overdraft. The sale of Lullenden had somewhat eased his position. But the building works at Sussex Square quickly overran the budget. Simultaneously, his portfolio of shares was losing its value thanks to a general weakening in the stock market. The only thing keeping his bank manager happy was the promised contracts on The World Crisis. When he returned to London from his New Year’s stay at Lympne, the debts were relentlessly piling up.5

  *

  Back at the War Office, he launched on a frenzied bout of action readying himself to take over the Colonial Office the following month. As its Under-Secretary for two years before the war, he had been mostly concerned with Britain’s colonies in Africa. But the institutional responsibilities added since that time had vastly expanded to take in territories across the Middle East formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire but handed over to Britain as mandates by the League of Nations. At their core lay Palestine and Mesopotamia – the latter consisting of the old Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, the former an ill-defined area both to the east and west of the River Jordan. Victory over the Turks had ended with a million British and Indian Army troops in occupation of territory that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean shore to the Persian Gulf. To a government pledged to cutting the budget back to peacetime levels, the cost of maintaining them was unacceptable. During his two years at the War Office, Churchill had already forced through massive reductions in expenditure. But with drastic cutbacks in personnel, how was the peace to be maintained amongst simmering ethnic and religious conflicts and political rivalries? How were these territories to be governed?

  His first priority was to set up the new Middle East Department he had agreed on with Lloyd George. He consulted with civil service mandarins in Whitehall, fired off telegrams to Baghdad, and kept the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, informed since Mesopotamia had been a Foreign Office responsibility. Above all, Churchill made sure that Lloyd George remained on board. The immediate administrative details apart, the outline of a longer-term political solution was already forming in his head. To help him, he sought out the views of someone with his own unique and first-hand experience of the Arab world.

  *

  On the morning of Saturday 8 January 1921 a slight, fair-headed thirty-three-year-old man with piercing blue eyes and untidily dressed was ushered into Churchill’s office by Edward Marsh, the civil servant who had served as his private secretary through his various ministerial posts since 1905. With his lispy voice, upturned eyebrows, and quizzical regard, many people found Marsh a cold and distant figure, a marked contrast to the hot-blooded Churchill. But the two of them fitted comfortably together, and the fastidious Marsh – always known affectionately as ‘Eddie’ – had even survived the gruelling challenges of accompanying Churchill in his pre-war tour of East Africa. With a double first-class degree in Classics from Cambridge, he possessed strong literary interests and was a ruthless proofreader for many distinguished writers. As an intimate friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, who had died of sepsis en route to Gallipoli in 1915 aged twenty-seven, he was also his literary executor. Later this year, Marsh would present to the British Museum the manuscript of Brooke’s most celebrated sonnet, ‘The Soldier’, with its moving opening lines:

  If I should die, think only this of me

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  Brooke had died in the Aegean and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.6

  ‘Tactful and patient,’ one historian remarks, ‘Marsh translated the furious energy of his demanding superior with his own quiet and meticulous administrative skills.’ The two men enjoyed a good, joking relationship. Once, when Marsh drafted a skilful letter smoothing over a ruffled personal friendship for his signature, Churchill appended a few appreciative words. ‘You are a good little boy & I am vy [sic] fond of you. W.’ Clementine felt the same way. ‘I am so glad you will let me be your friend too,’ she told Marsh after first meeting him.7

  The man he now showed into Churchill’s office was Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who was already being widely celebrated as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. After the failure at Gallipoli, British attention had turned towards subverting Turkey by promoting an Arab uprising. Lawrence, an Oxford-educated archaeologist-turned-wartime intelligence officer based in Cairo, had been sent to Jeddah to support a revolt already hatched by Hussain, the Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Hashemite family. In Hussain’s third son Faisal and his army of Bedouin warriors, the romantically inclined Lawrence found the ideal personification of the legendary ‘noble Arab’. During the last two years of the war he and Faisal spearheaded increasingly successful guerrilla raids. Their targets included the all-important Hejaz railway and supply line linking Medina to Damascus, and key centres on the fringes of the main British advance. In October 1918 General Allenby had marched triumphantly into the Syrian capital. During the Paris Peace Conference, frequently dressed in his flowing Arab robes, Lawrence passionately promoted Faisal’s claim to the Syrian throne. But he was thwarted by the French, who considered Syria their own special domain. Just months before Lawrence appeared in Churchill’s office, they had driven Faisal out of the country into exile. Ever since, Lawrence had been promoting the alternative idea of making him King of Iraq.8

  The heroic image that clung to Lawrence was a complex mix of truth, rumour, and invention. Some of this was due to Lawrence himself. Most of it, however, was thanks to an enterprising American journalist and war correspondent named Lowell Thomas, who had met Lawrence in Jerusalem after its capture by the British. Dressed in full sheik’s costume including robe, headdress, and dagger, the barefoot Lawrence had instantly bewitched the youthful American. The mud and mechanized slaughter of the Western Front trenches offered nothing heroic. Keen to find a positive story about the war for Americans, Thomas forged instead a powerful and emotional story about the adventures in the desert of the man he described glowingly as Britain’s modern ‘Coeur de Lion’ – Richard I, or Richard the Lionheart – the king who had led the Third Crusade in Palestine to victory over the great warrior Saladin. Ironically, Lawrence had once himself compared Faisal to the same medieval English monarch.9

  Using coloured slides and dramatic live film footage shot from the air, Thomas skilfully crafted a two-hour-long multi-media extravaganza accompanied by a symphony orchestra playing Arab-inflected music. Entitled With Allenby in Palestine, and presenting Lawrence as the liberator of the Arabs, the show opened in New York early in 1919 and in August transferred to London and the Royal Opera House, where the words and Lawrence in Arabia were quickly added to the title. On most evenings Thomas himself would stride onto the stage to introduce the spectacle. ‘This blue-eyed poet,’ he would tell the enraptured audience, referring to Lawrence, ‘succeeded in accomplishing what no caliph and no sultan had been able to do in over a thousand years. He wiped out centuries-old blood feuds and built up an army and drove the Turks from Holy Arabia.’ The show was a huge hit. Its originally scheduled two-week run was extended to six months and from the opera house it moved on to the Royal Albert Hall and after that to the Queen’s Hall. Some million or so people flocked to see it including Queen Mary, celebrity writers such as Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, and dozens of school groups. Allenby himself even turned up one night, to considerable fanfare. The show arrived in the British capital with the blessing of the English-Speaking Union, an organization dedicated to promoting a sense of a common Anglo-American destiny. At a luncheon it hosted in his honour Thomas said that from the moment he first met Lawrence he had known that he was a man destined to go down in history as ‘one of the most remarkable characters of modern times’. Both fascinated and appalled at the extravaganza, on several occasions Lawrence himself anonymously slipped in to view the show. Lloyd George also went to see it and echoed Tho
mas in declaring that Lawrence was one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times. In one of the British press’s most over-the-top reviews of Thomas’s show, the Daily Telegraph lauded it as a celebration of ‘British grit’ and ‘British resourcefulness’.

  Churchill was predictably swept away by the spectacle. Seizing on its power as propaganda, he urged Thomas to prolong its life in London and even extend it to other British cities. ‘It would be of great public advantage,’ he told him, ‘that this impressive tribute from an impartial quarter to some of the most striking achievements of the British Army should be as widely known as possible.’10

  By his own confession, he knew little about the Middle East. But, as always, he was determined to be on top of his brief. Seduced by the Lawrence legend, he turned to its hero as his principal advisor on Arab affairs. Reluctant at first, Lawrence was soon enthusiastically playing the part. Each man saw in the other something to admire. Both were brave, energetic, visionary, and enjoyed reputations as being brilliant but wayward. After Lawrence was killed many years later in 1935 while riding his motorbike, Churchill declared that he had possessed the ‘full measure of the versatility of genius’. Thanks to Lowell Thomas, he was also an American hero, and the New York Herald Tribune hailed him as ‘the most romantic figure that the world has brought forth in modern times’.11

  *

  Three days before Lawrence was ushered into his office, Churchill found a file in his in-tray. Classified ‘Most Secret’, it consisted of intercepts of Bolshevik telegrams, reports from British agents keeping an eye on the Reds’ activities around the world, the diplomatic communications of various countries including the United States, and some of the Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS) own evaluations of the Russian scene.

 

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