Oblivion or Glory
Page 8
From now on his own paintings reflected their quest for light and gaiety. For the most part they are bold, bright, and well-composed. He used military metaphors to describe his method. Painting was ‘like fighting a battle’ and required reconnaissance, a plan, a knowledge of ‘the great Captains of the past’ and ‘strong reserves’ – which he defined as Proportion or Relation. Yet these belligerent images give a misleading guide to his character and state of mind. The end result of his artistic struggle with the canvas is not disharmony, dissonance, or turmoil and there is nothing violent or disturbing in his paintings. On the contrary. His landscapes reveal a profound search for tranquillity, peace, and harmony. Professor Thomas Bodkin, one-time Director of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham, once summed up the essence of his paintings: ‘Light and peace, those qualities which all wise men most value in life, are indubitably those which chiefly distinguish the scenes that he prefers to paint.’20
FOUR
A WORLD IN TORMENT
After two weeks on the Riviera, Churchill returned to London, and broke his journey with a couple of nights at the Ritz hotel in Paris to meet Lloyd George, who was discussing German reparations with the French prime minister Aristide Briand. Back at Sussex Square he took up the slack of managing the household in Clementine’s absence. Randolph was away at his boarding school, and because of a series of coughs and colds Diana and Sarah had been taken temporarily out of their Notting Hill school to the healthier climate of the coast in Kent. This left only Marigold at home. She was now a bubbly and vivacious two-year-old full of curiosity, who brought a welcome sparkle of laughter to his life. He adored her. Every morning a nursemaid brought her to his bedroom to say hello, and when a letter arrived from Clementine enclosing a photograph of herself he delighted in explaining that it was ‘Mumma’ and watched as she affectionately kissed it. He hated it when she fell sick with one of her frequent colds and had to be confined to the nursery. The other children pleased him, too. Thirteen-year-old Diana was shaping into ‘a beautiful being’, and Sarah was full of life. Twice he drove out to visit Randolph at his school, once with the two girls who were eager to see their brother. He found his son well and sprightly, although the headmaster preferred the word ‘combative’ and said he mixed himself up in fights and quarrels on any excuse.
Childish fisticuffs were one thing. Quite another were terrorist threats to life and limb. The previous November, Scotland Yard had got wind of a Sinn Fein plot to kidnap leading British politicians including Lloyd George, Hamar Greenwood, and Churchill himself. Since then Churchill had been protected by a Detective-Sergeant Hunter. But in February he was suspended from duty after becoming involved in a divorce case and was replaced by Detective-Sergeant Walter Henry Thompson, a Special Branch veteran who had previously been bodyguard to Lloyd George. From now on Thompson, armed with a fully loaded Colt 45 automatic, would sleep in the house and accompany Churchill on all his official and private journeys.1
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At the War Office he energetically continued his campaign of retrenchment by peppering his officials with probing questions about its bloated budget. Why should there be three times as many army doctors and chaplains now as there were before the war? Or more veterinary officers, even though tanks and mechanical transport were replacing horses? Why had the number of officers doubled since 1914? It was a scandal and at least three thousand of them should be discharged before the end of March. Such were some of his typical missives throughout January as he wrapped up his War Office business in preparation for taking over the Colonial Office. His cost-cutting measures contrasted sharply with contemporary cartoons depicting him as a man of war.
Yet he remained fiercely bullish in his opinions. At Cabinet meetings and in a stream of memoranda he bombarded his colleagues with his views on a wide range of international issues. In the post-Versailles world, he saw challenges for Britain on every front. Peace had not broken out when it was officially declared. Instead it had resulted in conflict across the globe: struggles for national liberation, strife over borders, rebellions and revolutions and civil wars, behind many of which he saw the hand of Moscow. It was a world in torment with shifts in the balance of power that were potentially ominous for Britain and the Empire. Prime amongst them was the extraordinary new power of the Japanese and American navies, which challenged Britain’s traditional supremacy of the seas and hence the global reach of its foreign and imperial policies. He insisted that Britain should maintain its global naval supremacy by building four battleships a year for the next four or five years. Just a decade before, he had headed Britain’s naval race with Germany. ‘I do not see,’ he now argued, ‘how the foreign or Colonial policy of our Empire can be carried out on the basis that we have ceased to be the leading naval power [and] I [would] not personally agree in any circumstances to take part in anything that [could] lead up to this.’2
Nor was he happy about Egypt, which had effectively been governed by Britain since the 1880s and was officially a British Protectorate. When nationwide riots and strikes in favour of independence prompted a committee of inquiry headed by Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, to recommend the end of the Protectorate and the granting of self-government, he was incensed. So far as he was concerned, the nationalists were little more than tools of a Moscow seeking, yet again, to deprive Britain of its rightful place in the world. His interventions on this and other issues exasperated the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, who protested bitterly to Lloyd George that Churchill was trying to be ‘a sort of Asiatic Foreign Secretary’.3
But it was affairs in Europe that particularly troubled him. For all his grandiose rhetoric about the Empire, he knew that Britain’s security depended crucially on events across the English Channel. He was unhappy about the Paris peace settlement and sceptical about the League of Nations. Relations between France and Germany were poisoned by the running sore of reparations, ‘absurd ideas’ about what Germany should pay, and the cession of wealthy Upper Silesia with its large German population to the newly created Poland. British troops still occupied parts of the defeated enemy that was torn by revolution, threats to civil order, and paramilitary violence. Growing nationalist grievances had already spawned Adolf Hitler’s radical and anti-Semitic Nazi Party. Only when a stable Germany and a secure France were reconciled, he believed, could Europe truly declare peace. Meanwhile the danger grew of an alienated Germany and a hostile Russia overcoming their ideological divide and joining forces against the Western powers – which indeed was to happen the following year when Berlin and Moscow unexpectedly signed a treaty at Rapallo. But now Churchill was eyeing an even more sinister possibility. What was there, he wondered, ‘to prevent Russia developing under German guidance enormous plans for the armament of Russia and the re-armament of Germany?’ This was remarkably prescient. Indeed, such secret feelers were already under way. A few months later, German Army officers travelled to Russia to explore the ground and soon afterwards Junkers started building military aircraft there. Such collaboration helped prepare the ground for Hitler’s massive rearmament programme of the 1930s.4 Churchill’s main source of information about Russia remained Archie Sinclair’s network of intelligence contacts and diplomatic intercepts. But during his final week at the War Office he received a letter personally addressed to him from one of Russia’s leading anti-Bolsheviks.
Boris Savinkov was a former anti-Tsarist revolutionary, political assassin, and one-time Deputy Minister of War in the post-Tsarist government of Alexander Kerensky. Churchill had first met him in Paris lobbying for Allied intervention to help the White Army. With a bushy crop of reddish-brown hair atop a heavily lined face with parchment-like skin, the forty-year-old Russian possessed charisma and a flair for the dramatic. He indulged in stylish clothes, expensive restaurants, exotic brothels, and enjoyed a string of mistresses. He mixed with poets and artists such as Apollinaire, Modigliani, and Diego Rivera. He wrote a novel, The Pale Horse, which was a th
inly disguised fiction of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, the Governor of Moscow and uncle of the Tsar, that Savinkov himself had planned. He was also the author of a youthful play about the escape from Elba of his great hero, Napoleon, in which he himself played a major role. Churchill was instantly mesmerized. ‘I had never seen a Russian Nihilist except on the stage’, he wrote later, ‘he was singularly well cast for the part . . . remarkable grey-green eyes in a face of almost deathly pallor . . . an unusual personality, of veiled power in strong restraint . . .’ Since their first meeting in Paris, he had consistently embraced him as the saviour of Russia.
Savinkov now headed the Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Liberty and was living in Paris. Despite the defeat of the White armies he still believed that Lenin’s regime could be overthrown. Continuing unrest, internal dissent, and peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks all kept his hopes alive and he pleaded for financial help to support a small army of some five thousand men. This, he told Churchill, ‘would form the nucleus of the revolutionary force and would be able to restore order after a successful revolution’. Previously, he might have received a positive response. But by this time Churchill’s endless optimism about ridding the world of Lenin’s regime was starting to wear thin. Besides, he now had other things on his mind such as Iraq. So his instructions to Sinclair were firm and blunt: for the time being at least, Savinkov should be given no sympathy or encouragement for his plans.5
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As Secretary of State for Air as well as War, Churchill keenly supported the creation of the Royal Air Force as an independent arm of warfare and had appointed as its chief of staff – effectively its head – Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, who had headed its predecessor the Royal Flying Corps in France during the war. A major post-war challenge was to balance drastic national budgetary cuts against the urgent need to place the fledgling service on a secure foundation. ‘No more complicated service has ever been brought into existence in this world,’ Churchill told the House of Commons this winter. Thirty highly skilled trades, for example, were involved in the production and repair of an aeroplane. The establishment of training schools alone posed an enormous challenge, and not just for teaching flying but for all of the air force’s unique technical needs: wireless control, air gunnery, observation, aerial bombing, and so on. ‘The training establishments are the plum-trees,’ he explained in an oddly chosen metaphor, ‘as the fighting squadrons are the plums themselves.’ Most urgent of all, however, was the need to protect the fledgling service against predatory attacks by the army and navy, above all by finding a convincing and persuasive strategic role for it. An effective air force was also a matter of Great Power politics. ‘It was vital that Great Britain should occupy the leading place as a scientific air power,’ he told the Cabinet early in the New Year.6
An effective air force did not, however, include airships. The Germans had deployed Zeppelins for bombing raids on British cities, and the air force and Admiralty had experimented with their use. But when the war ended they could see no further military use for them, and as part of the post-war cost-cutting programme it was decided to halt their construction. ‘It was a melancholy decision,’ he informed the House of Commons, although this reflected the feelings of others rather than his own, which were adamantly opposed to their value as weapons of war. It had also meant the abandonment of airship construction for civil purposes, and efforts began to find private companies willing to take over the task. As for civilian aviation in the British Isles using aeroplanes, he remained cautious. In his personal view, the country’s notoriously poor weather characterized by fog, wind, and rain, combined with an excellent and competitive rail and road network, made it a dubious commercial prospect. There was one spectacular exception, however. It was a route that he knew well and frequently used – that between London and Paris, which eliminated the lengthy and tedious sea crossing of the English Channel. ‘There is no more striking experience than to travel by air from London to Paris,’ he enthused to the Commons in visually graphic terms. ‘One really has a sense of enchantment when, in less than two hours . . . there is the beautiful city of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Dome of the Invalides, revealed in the sunlight far below.’7
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Shining light on the murky transactions of the world’s troubled affairs was another matter, however. As a senior minister he had always relied heavily on secret intelligence and was on the list of those who regularly received top secret diplomatic intercepts of foreign powers. Anxious to continue receiving these after leaving the War Office, he persuaded the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, head of the Cabinet’s Secret Service Committee, to add the Colonial Office to the list of recipients. Walter Long, the First Lord of the Admiralty, agreed to do likewise for naval intercepts.8 In the dangerous and uncertain post-war world that Britain faced, Churchill continued to see the intelligence services, whose birth he had fostered before the war, as a vital weapon, both sword and shield of the state. As a member of the Cabinet’s Secret Service Committee, he had strongly resisted post-war Treasury cuts to the budgets of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS). While it took five to ten years to build up an effective secret service, he argued, it could all too easily be destroyed by the stroke of a pen. Instead of cuts, he proposed the creation of a more cost-effective and unified intelligence service. ‘With the world in its present condition of extreme unrest and changing friendships and antagonisms,’ he told the Cabinet, ‘and with our greatly reduced and weak military forces, it is more than ever vital to us to have good and timely information.’ He had lost the argument for unification. But other weapons were added to the national security armour with the passing of a new and more drastic Official Secrets Act and the establishment of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the forerunner of the famed Second World War Bletchley Park; over the next few years, it enjoyed striking success in breaking the diplomatic communications of many countries. For the remainder of his life at the top, he was to be one of the most eager consumers of these intercepts.9
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If the world beyond Britain’s shores remained dark and troubled, at home the roaring twenties of the bright young things were well under way. No one symbolized the new era better than the heir to the throne. The unusually youthful-looking twenty-seven-year-old Prince of Wales possessed a charm and refreshingly easy manner that contrasted sharply with the House of Windsor’s stiff formality. His undisguised enthusiasm for nightclubs and nightlife was fully in tune with the spirit of the new age. ‘A dear thing, with beautiful eyes, but such a boy,’ remarked Frances Stevenson.10
In Churchill’s rarefied social circle it was an open secret that the prince had a mistress. Mrs Freda Dudley Ward was just a few weeks younger than the heir to the throne and the wife of a much older and complaisant Liberal Member of Parliament. Lord Riddell, who observed her during one sociable weekend at Lympne, thought she was ‘a clever, perceptive sort of woman, always on the move, singing, dancing, smoking, talking or playing tennis’.11 She certainly bewitched the prince. Since meeting him three years before, she had become his constant companion at private events. A man who craved being mothered, the prince doted on her. Churchill had met him in Paris during the Peace Conference and advised the palpably nervous young man on how to deliver a public speech. It was better to memorize it, he advised; but if he chose to read it he should deliver it openly and speak slowly. Thanks to this, the prince had pulled off a creditable performance. No doubt he now had a better opinion of Churchill than immediately after Gallipoli, when he had denounced him as ‘an intriguing swine’.12
Times had changed, and it was in a completely different milieu that Churchill now met the youthful prince again. The first occasion came in early February, when Sir John and Lady Lavery threw a private party for the heir to the throne in the painter’s studio in Kensington. Freda was there, as were Lloyd George and Philip Sassoon. Churchill found the whole evening an ‘amusing affair’, marred only by his misfortune in standing on the
future monarch’s foot while dancing and causing him to yelp out loud. All was forgiven, however, and a week later Churchill was invited to a party at Freda’s private residence. Again the doting prince was at her side. Dancing went on well until the early hours and this time Churchill quickly picked up on a distinct frisson in the air. Amongst familiar faces such as Philip Sassoon he also spotted Michael Herbert, the wealthy younger brother of the Earl of Pembroke whose country seat Wilton House near Salisbury consisted of some 14,000 acres of prime agricultural land. The prince was fiercely jealous of any rival, and in 1921 Herbert headed the pack. As he observed the rivals circling each other, Churchill ruminated on life’s puzzles. Even the monks must have their worries, he supposed, except in their case more disagreeable. Serve them right, he mused, and shared his thoughts in a letter to Clementine.13 He was a great respecter of the British monarchy, but not necessarily of individual monarchs. He held no high opinion of the current occupant of the throne, King George V, and as First Lord of the Admiralty had once dismissed his opinions on the Royal Navy as ‘cheap and silly drivel’. But he viewed the King’s son and his mistress with a detached and ironic eye. ‘The little prince was there idolising as usual,’ he told Clementine, capturing the essence of the royal affair and adding that he thought the prince was wearing himself out. It was also obvious that people were getting a bit tired of the affair with Freda and thought it should soon be resolved one way or the other.14