Nothing of this episode endeared Churchill to the Foreign Office. It merely reinforced their view that he was something of a troublesome maverick. ‘[He] has notoriously relied on the advice concerning Russia of persons having no authority, and no direct connections with the centre of Russian affairs,’ wrote an irritated Sir Eyre Crowe, ‘I fear this is happening once again with Savinkov.’ Nothing in the future was to change Churchill’s preference for seeking out his own sources of intelligence to weigh against those of professional experts. As for both Savinkov and Reilly, shortly afterwards they were separately lured back to Moscow by a bogus anti-Bolshevik Front run by the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB, and were soon conveniently dead.5 Later, when his secret dealings with them became an inconvenient memory, he and Desmond Morton ensured that references to them were largely excised from his papers; Reilly’s name does not even appear in the relevant volume of the official biography. Alongside the fugitive references to Clare Sheridan, Churchill’s private contacts with the anti-Bolsheviks have left only ghostly traces in the record, remnants of what had once been a consuming passion that was already losing its heat.6
*
In the meantime, thanks to his hard-working staff, he dealt with the myriad of other small requests that land routinely on ministers’ desks. Would he, pleaded Vera Weizmann, be the patron of a fund-raising concert for the London-based Women’s International Zionist Organiza-tion at which many well-known artists had already promised to appear? Reminding him that since the Balfour Declaration, ‘the gates of the country have been thrown open to those Jews who wish to return to their ancient homeland’, she went on to explain that ‘Most of the immigrants are economically ruined, having come from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. Our organisation makes it a duty to look after the welfare of these women and children on their arrival in Palestine.’ Their specific aim was to build a reception hostel for which they had already purchased the land. On behalf of his boss, Eddie Marsh replied – a bit too hurriedly, as he addressed Vera as ‘Sir’ – that Churchill would gladly act as patron for the concert ‘on the understanding that it is purely honorary’.7 There also came a request for money from the Rector of Ardelinis Church in Carnlough, County Antrim, reminding him that Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest from whom he had inherited Garron Towers had always been a benefactor of the Parish. Aware of his new duties as the local squire, he instructed his bankers to make sure that £10 for the Parochial Sustentation Fund and a further £2 for the Sunday School Prize Fund be sent. As a reminder of the fast-approaching Christmas holidays he also wrote an open appeal to shoppers urging them to do their gift-buying as early as possible and pointing out that the Early Closing Association, of which he was President, had successfully lobbied the government to make Tuesday 27 December an additional Bank Holiday. He ended by pressing the railway companies to lay on extra trains with cheap fares for the ‘millions of toilers’ so that they might purchase their presents early, thus ensuring that ‘there will be a good prospect of a happy Christmas for every one to bring this anxious and strenuous year to a satisfactory close’.8
*
It certainly closed well for him politically. After the signing of the Irish agreement both Houses of Parliament had to approve it. Two days of heated debate took place. In the Lords, Curzon and Birkenhead defended it against bitter attacks by Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists. In the Commons, with Sir John Lavery sitting in the gallery sketching the historic scene below, Churchill followed Lloyd George in putting the government’s case. By this time de Valera had come out strongly against the treaty, as had a vocal minority on the Tory back benches. Churchill set out to demolish their objections and above all to reassure the mass of traditionally pro-Ulster Unionist MPs of the treaty’s merits. He lavishly flattered Ulster’s supporters and especially Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s prime minister, for their continued allegiance to the Crown, their willingness to seek peace, and for not blocking developments in the south. ‘Our debt to Ulster is great,’ he said. So far as the Irish Free State was concerned, he stressed its similarity to other independent Dominions that gave allegiance to the Crown and offered no threat to Britain. He admitted that the treaty was a compromise but that it was no surrender by an enfeebled Britain – a nation that, after all, had just emerged victorious from the war. On the contrary, it was ‘a manifestation of British genius’ that would echo throughout the Empire by removing a bitter grievance. ‘Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come?’ he asked. ‘It is a small, poor, sparsely populated island, lapped about by British sea power, accessible on every side, without iron or coal. How is it that she sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness?’ Here he resorted to words he had used during his speech to the Canada Club. ‘Ireland is not a daughter state. She is a parent nation . . . They are intermingled with the whole life of the Empire, and have interests in every part of the Empire wherever the English language is spoken, especially in those new countries with whom we have to look forward to the greatest friendship . . . and where the Irish canker has been at work.’ In Canada, the Toronto Globe had already expressed the same point. ‘It looks as though the vile spirit which has infected Anglo-Irish relations for centuries will be exorcised at last,’ it declared, while the Montreal Star rejoiced that the news of peace in Ireland ‘will warm more hearts and set more pulses beating than even the splendid forward step taken toward world peace at Washington’.9
Churchill continued. Did complaints against the treaty justify once again laying Ireland ‘waste to the scourge of war?’ he asked rhetorically. Clearly it was high time that the main body of Irish and British opinion asserted its determination to put a stop to ‘these fanatical quarrels’. Cartoonists relished portraying Churchill as a warmonger. But the tone he now struck was that of a committed, even militant, peacemaker and defender of the common people. After referring to Carson’s attacks on Curzon and de Valera’s on Collins, he went on to say:
Are we not getting a little tired of all this? These absolutely sincere, consistent, unswerving gentlemen, faithful in all circumstances to their implacable quarrels, seek to mount their respective national war horses, in person or by proxy, and to drive at full tilt at one another, shattering and splintering down the lists, to the indescribable misery of the common people, and to the utter confusion of our Imperial affairs.
The next day, in a speech to the English-Speaking Union, he widened his focus to bring the United States once more into the picture. By now the Washington Conference had already oiled significant points of friction in Anglo-American naval relations. Yet Ireland remained. ‘Who shall say,’ he asked, ‘how much we have suffered in our relations with the United States by the unceasing hostility of the Irish Americans, men who have emigrated from their country, carrying hatred of this island and its institutions all over the world?’ He could not foretell the future, he told his audience in Westminster’s Central Hall. ‘But this I will say. If the hopes . . . which we are entitled to hold of a satisfactory adjustment of the relations of this country with Ireland, of a union of hearts between the people of Great Britain and Ireland, if those fructify . . . then you will embark in the United States upon an era in which the work of the English-Speaking Union will find none of the obstacles which in the past have confronted the efforts to bring into closer harmony the political, social, and moral action of these two great communities.’10
Plaudits poured in for his speech. Austen Chamberlain told the King that the case for the treaty could not have been better put and had had ‘a profound effect on the House’. The Education Secretary H. A. L. Fisher wrote in his diary that ‘Winston makes one of his finest speeches in defence of the settlement’. For Freddie Guest, it was the best speech he had ever heard his cousin make. ‘Simplicity of style & fervor of advocacy won a genuine reception from all quarters,’ he told him. ‘Splendid, bless you.’ For The Sunday Times, too, he had excelled himself. The speech was ‘one of the best things he has done in this Parlia
ment . . . Towards the end . . . Mr. Churchill attained a real eloquence, and it was noticeable that he reduced the malcontents to almost complete silence.’ For Hazel Lavery, listening intently from the gallery, it was ‘very long but excellent’.11
He had brilliantly made his case as a peacemaker for Ireland. A week later Lloyd George put him in charge of a special Cabinet Committee to arrange details of the handover of power in Dublin. With typical speed and energy, he took on the task by immediately pronouncing that British troops would be withdrawn from the Irish Free State as quickly as possible. ‘Ostentatious preparations to quit should be made everywhere,’ he instructed, and on the three consecutive days before Christmas he chaired his committee to work out the details. ‘I am full of hope and confidence about Ireland,’ he told the Prince of Wales. ‘I believe we are going to reap a rich reward all over the world and at home.’12
*
Churchill spent Christmas Day with the family at home, and early the next morning left London by train with Lloyd George and Freddie Guest bound for Cannes and the prime minister’s meeting with Aristide Briand. The plan was for Clementine to join him later for a short Riviera break together. He was still working assiduously on The World Crisis and had recently consulted Foreign Office officials about the diplomatic manoeuvrings leading up to the outbreak of the war. As they rattled their way south through France, Lloyd George read two of the chapters and made some helpful suggestions. ‘I cannot help getting vy [sic] interested in the book,’ Churchill wrote to Clementine. ‘It is a gt [sic] chance to put my whole case in an agreeable form to an attentive audience.’ And, he added, the money would make them very comfortable.13
In Cannes he stayed with Adele, Lady Essex, working every morning and evening on the book and painting in the afternoons. In six days he wrote some 20,000 words. The more he wrote, the more he felt that he needed to do. The first volume was almost complete with just some ‘polishing’ left. When he sent it to the publisher, he would receive a hefty cheque. He also lifted weights every day to strengthen the elbow he had damaged during a polo accident to get it fit for action again. Predictably, he also succumbed to a temptation that rarely left him. The casino at Monte Carlo was only a short drive away, and he made several visits to gamble at its tables. ‘It excites me so much to play – foolish moth,’ he confessed to Clementine, pleading guiltily that he had earned many times what he had lost by the work he had done on his book.14
This was good news for the family finances. But back home Clementine was wandering through what she termed ‘a miserable valley’. Hardly had he stepped out of the door than one after the other the children and two of the maids started falling ill with the flu – fortunately not such a virulent or fatal strain as three years before. Bessie the maid was the first to succumb, followed quickly by Randolph. On the family doctor’s advice, Sarah and Diana were sent to stay with a relative but almost immediately Diana too fell ill and was returned to be nursed at home. Soon the nursery floor resembled a miniature hospital. Clementine called in professional nurses. But one of them proved unsuitable and only after a frantic search was she replaced. By the end of the day Clementine felt like a ‘squashed fly’, and the doctor ordered her to bed and prescribed a sleeping pill which she thankfully washed down with a glass of champagne. Twelve hours later, after a heavy night’s sleep, she wrote a lengthy letter to Winston with a detailed timetable of events. ‘Now what do you think of that?’ she asked. ‘In a small way it is like the beginning of the Great War.’
When she sent a telegram two days later reporting that everyone was on the mend, he replied that her letter was ‘Napoleonic’ and suggested that once she was recovered she should come out to the Riviera while he, back in London, would ‘mount guard in yr [sic] place over the kittens’. Meanwhile, he told her, he was sitting in his bed at night, ‘writing, dictating and sifting paper like the Editor of a ha’penny paper’. In his mind, he added, he could imagine her at the same time about to have dinner with a glass of champagne to keep up her spirits. Then, far beyond that, ‘in an outer circle of darkness ranges the wide colonial Empire and the Emerald Isle’. In ten days it would all be on top of him again. He also passed on a piece of family news. Cousin Freddie, who had by now separated from his wife Amy, was pursuing a young woman staying on the Riviera and had even mentioned marriage. ‘I replied sepulchrally,’ Churchill wrote, ‘that she was young enough to be his daughter, & that ten years would carry us both to the brink of the sixties.’15
His acute awareness of the passing of the years was also heightened by the recent death of yet another of his old acquaintances. As the Irish talks came to their climax in early December, Sir George Ritchie died at the home of his son near London. He had been taken ill in Dundee and travelled to London to consult a specialist, but collapsed with a fatal brain haemorrhage before he could keep the appointment. He was seventy-two. Churchill’s sense of loss was sincere and profound. ‘His kindness to me was boundless and unceasing,’ he wrote in a tribute, ‘he has been one of the best friends I have ever had and one of the most able and far-seeing counsellors.’ Ritchie’s wife had died earlier in the year, and he had unburdened his sorrows to Churchill in Dundee. ‘He was sustained and to some extent comforted by an absolute conviction of re-union in a happier world,’ he added, ‘and . . . spoke to me in the accents of one for whom death [was] simply a gateway beyond which all he had loved most on earth were awaiting in a serener form of existence.’ He himself had no such faith in an afterlife. What mattered was what one achieved in this life – and he was increasingly conscious of the relentless march of time.16
From his room at Lady Essex’s home he could see the Cap d’Ail Hotel, where he had stayed with his mother just ten months before. After dining on New Year’s Eve in Monte Carlo, the next morning he indulged in more melancholy reflections about the year that had passed. ‘What changes in a year!’ he lamented to Clementine. ‘What gaps! What a sense of fleeting shadows! But your sweet love & comradeship is a light that burns the stronger as our brief years pass.’17
EPILOGUE
‘HE WOULD MAKE A GREAT PRIME MINISTER’
After his return from the Riviera Churchill continued to distinguish himself as one of the heavyweights in the Cabinet, shepherding the Irish Free State Bill through the House of Commons, signing a treaty with Iraq declaring it ‘an independent Arab state’ under a League of Nations mandate, and ensuring the backing in the House of Commons for his policy in Palestine. He was later to claim that during his time at the Colonial Office he had enjoyed ‘some parliamentary and administrative success’. This was ironic false modesty clothing what he justifiably regarded as a considerable triumph. On Ireland alone, he had accomplished more than any chief secretary since the Act of Union in 1800.1
On the domestic front, he vigorously defended the Coalition as the only way of preventing the catastrophe of a socialist advent of power and of keeping the Centre and Right in government. In private, however, his views on Lloyd George grew increasingly caustic. ‘I don’t feel the slightest confidence in L.G.’s judgement,’ he confided to Clementine. ‘Anything that serves the mood of the moment & the chatter of the ignorant and pliable newspapers is good enough for him.’ By the end of the summer he was privately predicting that ‘The reign of our revered leader is, I apprehend, drawing to a close.’2
His family and social life continued along the well-trodden path of the previous twelve months. He frequently spent time with his brother Jack and Goonie, kept a close eye on his investments, and socialized regularly with friends such as Philip Sassoon, the Duff Coopers, the Desboroughs, the Montagus, F. E. Smith, and Max Beaverbrook – although Adele, the Countess of Essex with whom he had celebrated the New Year, died suddenly in her Mayfair home in July, aged only sixty-three. ‘The world thins very quickly in these days,’ he had lamented the year before on hearing of the passing of another old acquaintance. On the anniversary of Marigold’s death in August, he wrote sadly that the memory was still ‘a gaping wou
nd’. But he took enormous pleasure in his growing young family. ‘The children are sweet,’ he fondly told Clementine while she recovered from exhaustion on the Riviera early in the year. ‘Diana is shaping into a human being. Sarah is full of life and human qualities – with her wonderful hair. The Rabbit [Randolph] has got results in 3 of his subjects.’3 She shortly discovered she was pregnant and in September gave birth to Mary, the last of their children. That same month Winston finally bought Chartwell Manor, the house in Kent he had spotted the year before. With its purchase, he finally owned the country home he had long yearned for, and it became the political base and emotional haven that was to nurture him for the rest of his life.
Wider family affairs continued to collide with world events. ‘The Union Jacks are being silently stored away,’ his aunt Leonie wrote forlornly from the Leslie estate now lying just inside the Irish Free State’s border with Northern Ireland, which remained a part of the United Kingdom. ‘The [Sinn Fein] flag flies on the orange hall.’ The tempestuous Clare returned from America as a roving reporter for the New York World, and her MI5 file grew thicker as the security service became convinced that she was in the pay of the Russians. ‘She has conducted herself in a disgraceful manner in various countries adopting a consistently anti-British attitude,’ reported the Chief Passport Officer in London. But whatever she got up to, ultimately she was still family and Churchill was ready to forgive her when the time was ripe. Twenty years later, with Britain at war with Hitler and Moscow and the Bolsheviks now allies, Clare was to spend a wartime morning sculpting his head in 10 Downing Street. She found him in bed smoking a cigar and restlessly stroking his black Persian cat. Finally, he agreed to sit still. ‘I want it to be a success,’ he grunted. ‘We’ll call it Prime Minister by Obstreperous Anarchist.’4
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