Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  Beaverbrook had added some spice to the evening by inviting a sprinkling of celebrities. From his wide and diverse circle of friends, he had picked the novelist and playwright Arnold Bennett, one of the highest-paid literary journalists in England, as well as a fellow member of The Other Club. A devotee of the Riviera and its grand hotels, the fifty-four-year-old Bennett had spent the previous summer sailing round the Mediterranean in his private yacht with its crew of eight. Thanks to Beaverbrook’s post as Lloyd George’s wartime Minister of Information, he had been appointed Director of Propaganda to France and become a close friend to the press magnate. Bennett’s talk that night might have lacked sparkle. Just hours before, his wife had told him she wanted a separation. As he had been expecting this for some time, however, Beaverbrook’s champagne might have given him cause to celebrate rather than drown his sorrows.

  But the undoubted main celebrity of the evening was a youthful star of the silver screen. Beaverbrook controlled Britain’s largest chain of cinemas, and it was a fellow Canadian who joined Churchill and others round the table. Aged twenty-nine, the Toronto-born and newly minted American citizen Mary Pickford was the undisputed queen of the silent film, her Hollywood contracts worth millions. In her latest film, Little Lord Fauntleroy, she had masterfully played the role of both mother and son. She was slim, petite, and undoubtedly pretty. Across the Atlantic she was dubbed ‘America’s Sweetheart’ and ‘the Girl with the Curls’. Her husband, seated beside her, matched that fame. Their marriage the year before had been the first movie-star celebrity wedding. In London for the honeymoon, they had been mobbed by enthusiastic crowds and only the quick-witted response of her husband hoisting her onto his shoulders as they stepped from their Rolls-Royce had saved her from serious injury by their fans. But that was a role natural to Douglas Fairbanks. His appearance in The Mask of Zorro had already marked him out as a pioneer of the Hollywood swashbuckler role. Along with Charlie Chaplin, both Pickford and Fairbanks had toured the United States during the war promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds to wild success.

  What kind of performance this Hollywood royalty couple put on for Churchill is unclear. But the evening surely piqued further his powerful fascination with the world of the moving image, one already made evident in his 1898 description of the Battle of Omdurman as flickering before his eyes ‘exactly like a cinematographic film’. When the press magnate William Randolph Hearst later gave him a tour of Hollywood studios, he pronounced it ‘a strange and amazing world . . . It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre magnified a thousandfold.’ Soon after that, he tried writing a screenplay of his own entitled The Reign of George V, which he described to his film producer friend Alexander Korda as ‘an imperial film embodying the sentiments, anxieties and achievements of the British people all over the world’. Unlike many of his more conventionally minded political colleagues, he eagerly grasped the propaganda power of film, and especially so after the arrival of the talkies. ‘With the pregnant word, illustrated by the compelling picture,’ he told Korda, ‘it will be possible to bring home to a vast audience the basic truths about many questions of public importance.’ He saw films as essentially celluloid versions of great public speeches.8

  His friendship with Max, which was to last a lifetime, always blew hot and cold. Yet at the very end of his life Beaverbrook had generous and revealing words to say about Churchill: ‘[He] is essentially a man without rancour. He has been accused of being bad-tempered. It isn’t true. He could get very emotional, but after bitterly criticizing you he had a habit of touching you, of putting his hand on your hand . . . as if to say his real feelings for you were not changed. A wonderful display of humanity.’9

  *

  There was little to comfort him, however, in his ministerial duties dealing with regular Colonial Office affairs. Shortly after returning from Dundee, he spoke grandly at the inaugural dinner of the Gold Coast Service Club at the Connaught Rooms in London about the vast potential of British colonies around the world. ‘Here,’ he pronounced, ‘are assets in which you could sink two hundred million pounds in the next ten years with the certainty of getting back every penny you invested.’ Yet there lay the insuperable problem – who would take the risk? Already this year he had protested to Lloyd George that the Treasury was starving his Colonial Office budget. But he was certainly not ready to have a row in Cabinet over the issue, especially given his own cost-cutting policies in Iraq. Once again, it was a matter of ‘Imperialism-lite’.

  Over Africa he gave obligatory ministerial attention to Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. Just the year before, Kenya had become a separate colony with its own governor, and controversy swirled around the part that immigrant Indians should be permitted to play in its affairs. Some 30,000 Indian indentured labourers had worked (and 2,500 had died) to build the Uganda Railway that crossed over 600 miles of Kenyan territory from the sea to Lake Victoria and the Ugandan border. After its completion many chose to settle with their families and by 1921 their demands for greater participation in the colonial legislature could no longer be ignored. Racial tensions were also rising.

  He knew Kenya at first hand. As Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies over a decade before he had made an official visit there in company with Eddie Marsh. Disembarking from their ship at Mombasa, he had taken the Uganda Railway into the interior. ‘One of the most romantic and wonderful railways in the world,’ he had described it with youthful imperial fervour, ‘a sure, swift road along which the white man and all that he brings with him for good or ill, may penetrate into the heart of Africa . . . one slender thread of scientific civilization, order, authority, and arrangement, drawn across the primeval chaos of the world’. Nairobi, the colony’s capital, was at the time little more than an overgrown assembly depot for the railway with a population of about 500 Europeans, 3,000 Indians, and 10,000 Africans. His stay there was long enough for him to grasp the toxic racial and other complexities that now faced him as Colonial Secretary. ‘There are already in miniature,’ he wrote, ‘all the elements of keen political and racial discord, all the materials for hot and acrimonious debate. The white man versus the black; the Indian versus both; the settler as against the planter; the town contrasted with the country . . . all these different points of view, naturally arising, honestly adopted, tenaciously held, and not yet reconciled into any harmonious general conception, confront the visitor in perplexing display. Nor will he be wise,’ he concluded, ‘to choose his part with any hurry.’10

  He was no more inclined now than before to hasten to judgement about Kenya’s affairs. While he urged greater partnership between the white colonists and Indians, including a ban on residential segregation in urban areas and the creation of a common electoral role that included both Indians and Europeans, he was unwilling to cause a confrontation. He even described the Indians as ‘mainly of a very low class of coolie’, and insisted that the reservation of the Kenyan Highlands for white settlers was ‘an agreed fact’ that could not be changed. This prompted a bitter row with his more liberal-minded friend Edwin Montagu. ‘How angry you make me,’ complained the Secretary of State for India. Still, as in other cases, political disagreement failed to dent a personal friendship and a bare three weeks later he was enjoying his Guy Fawkes evening at Montagu’s home.11

  Elsewhere in Africa, Jan Smuts was dreaming of absorbing Southern Rhodesia into the Union of South Africa. But the settlers demanded autonomy and in September Churchill agreed to a referendum, although he personally preferred the Smuts option. Here, too, he was not prepared to raise the ire of local whites and kept officially neutral. In the event, union was rejected and Southern Rhodesia became an independent Crown Colony. In both cases he pursued an essentially ‘hands-off’ policy that revealed once more the essentially pragmatic nature of his imperial commitment. In any case, in his own mind Colonial Office affairs remained distinctly second rank to those of the Foreign Office. In speaking to the Overseas Bankers’ Association at Claridge’s Hotel in late November,
he made his standard encomium on the potential of the British Empire. Yet his simultaneous and powerful call for reconciliation between Germany and France made clear that his urgent concern was Europe and relations between Britain’s neighbours across the Channel. That same month, Curzon complained yet again about Churchill’s meddling in Foreign Office affairs but he would hear none of it. ‘There is absolutely no comparison between the issues in Foreign affairs and . . . those which arise in ordinary departments,’ he wrote in an acerbic minute to the Foreign Secretary. ‘I have never known Foreign Affairs treated as if they were merely a departmental matter.’ On second thoughts he decided not to send it. But his feelings never changed. He remained the same Winston Churchill who before the war had prompted Earl Grey of Fallodon, the Foreign Secretary, to remark wearily that ‘Winston, very soon, will become incapable from sheer activity of mind of being anything in Cabinet but Prime Minister.’12

  *

  Nor did the Middle East offer much comfort. November saw the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which sparked violence in Jerusalem between Arabs and Jews and caused several deaths. Since his frustrating encounter in August with the Arab delegates in London, he had struggled to chart a path forward that would placate both sides. He also remained heavily committed to cutting the costs of maintaining the British garrison in Palestine, just as he was doing in Iraq. One idea he floated was to transfer the Black and Tans from Ireland as soon as they could be spared. In mid-November he repeated his familiar mantra to the head of his Middle East Department: ‘Do please realize that everything else that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense.’13

  In wrestling to find a middle ground, he angered both Zionists and Arabs. He pleased the former by approving an ambitious hydro-electric scheme for Palestine known as the Rutenberg Plan after the Ukrainian Jewish immigrant entrepreneur promoting it, but he simultaneously angered Chaim Weizmann by refusing to endorse the claim that Palestine would become ‘as Jewish as England is English’. Once again, he tried to persuade Arabs and Jews to sort out their own differences, and arranged a joint conference that he would chair at the Colonial Office on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 November. But the day before, at a lunch given by the Arab delegation, Lord Sydenham of Combe, a former Governor of Bombay, delivered a fiery anti-Zionist speech and Churchill promptly cancelled the meeting using the excuse that he was unwell. He then delegated two subsequent meetings with Weizmann at the Colonial Office to senior officials. Richard Meinertzhagen was scathing. ‘Winston is prepared to relegate Zionism to the same policy of drift which has characterized the policy of the Government since the Armistice,’ he fulminated in his diary.14 This was typically intemperate, and inaccurate. Churchill was struggling with currents of history that no single person could halt or divert, and he was tiring of dealing with opponents who appeared unwilling to compromise.

  *

  In addition to his private tragedies, there remained public griefs and memories of war to assuage. As Chairman of the English-Speaking Union, he soon had a front-row seat in Westminster Abbey at a ceremony that was rich in symbolism. Preparations for the Washington Conference were well advanced and the British delegation was readying to cross the Atlantic. Watched by large crowds that had been assembling for hours, shortly before eleven o’clock on the morning of Monday 17 October General John (‘Black Jack’) Pershing, the man who had commanded American troops on the Western Front, stepped out of his carriage in front of the Abbey. A band struck up ‘The Stars and Stripes’. By the door stood the Dean of Westminster, Lloyd George, and the Duke of Connaught representing the King. Inside, American soldiers and sailors in their khaki and blue lined the nave. Near its west end, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was surrounded with wreaths. A Union Jack lay at its foot. The band of the Scots Guard began to play a selection of classical and modern music. The packed congregation watched as a succession of dignitaries filed into the Abbey.

  Churchill was one of the first to arrive. He walked slowly the length of the nave and took his seat. The choir and the clergy in their scarlet cassocks assembled around the Tomb. Pershing, along with the American ambassador, Lloyd George, and other government ministers including Freddie Guest as Secretary of State for Air and Lord Lee of Fareham, the donor to the nation of the American-funded Chequers, joined them.

  The American ambassador spoke first. By Act of Congress, he announced, President Harding had been authorized to bestow the Medal of Honour, the highest military award that could be granted by the government of the United States, upon Britain’s Unknown Warrior. It was not just a military tribute, he declared, it was also a message of fraternity from the American people to the people of the United Kingdom. He was followed by Pershing. In a crisp and clear voice, the general lauded the soldier in his tomb as the latest in the long line of men and women already lying within the Abbey who had given their lives and service to Great Britain. ‘His was ever the courage of right,’ he declared, ‘the confidence of justice.’ After solemnly laying the medal with its long ribbon of watered blue silk on the tomb’s grey stone, he stepped one pace back and gave a salute. The Dean also spoke a few words. ‘Saxon and Norman, Plantagenet and Tudor’ also lay in the Abbey, he reminded the congregation, and were part of the Anglo-American heritage. Then came the turn of Lloyd George to thank the American people for their gesture. ‘The Empire to its remotest corners will not miss the deep significance of this deed,’ he pronounced. ‘We feel we are taking part in no idle pageant . . . the homage laid today on this grave will remain as an emblem of a common sacrifice for a common purpose. It will be a reminder, not only for this generation but generations to come, that the fundamental aim of these two democracies are the same. These two mighty peoples,’ concluded the man who had so recently dominated the Paris Peace Conference, ‘who were comrades in the Great War have resolved to remain comrades to guarantee a great peace.’

  Churchill then joined in The Lord’s Prayer, and the choir sang the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. From the far end of the Abbey the ‘Last Post’ sounded its melancholy notes. The ceremony closed with the singing, to the same tune, of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘My Country ’tis of Thee’ – the British and American National Anthems. Many of the congregation joined in. General Pershing and the Duke of Connaught shared an Order of Service, and the King later sent a telegram to President Harding announcing that he would confer Britain’s equivalent military medal, the Victoria Cross, on America’s Unknown Warrior, who was to be ceremoniously interred at Arlington National Cemetery on the approaching Armistice Day.15

  Churchill placed great store on ceremony and political theatre. Music and ritual moved him deeply. He had an instinctive feel for the potency of symbolism as a lubricant of power. Twenty years later he was to draw on his experience of this October day as he master-minded a ceremony of his own in the cause of Anglo-American relations. In August 1941 he braved the U-boat infested North Atlantic for his first face-to-face meeting as prime minister with President Franklin D. Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland. Their summit climaxed with a Sunday morning service on the deck of the British battleship, which he had carefully rehearsed beforehand. Seated side by side in the centre of a hollow square, and with ranks of British and American sailors on each side and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes draped together on the pulpit, he and Roosevelt sang together the hymns they had selected. ‘If nothing else had happened here,’ pronounced the American President, ‘the joint service would have cemented us.’16

  *

  The Westminster Abbey service was not the last of the year’s events to bring back memories of the scars of war. Shortly afterwards, he was the guest at the annual dinner of the Tanks Corps to celebrate the Battle of Cambrai fought on the Western Front four years before, when British tanks had accomplished a significant breakthrough at relatively little cost in lives. He had strongly pushed for their use. Soon, in The World Crisis, he would be accusing ‘without exception all the great ally offensive
s of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost’. Instead, more and better use of tanks and other mechanized weapons should have been used. ‘If only the Generals,’ he lamented, ‘had not been content to fight machine gun bullets with breasts of gallant men, and think that was waging war.’ His pen was at work not just to vindicate his own wartime years. He was also setting out his stall as an expert on tactics and strategy for the future.17