Meanwhile, he continued to nurture the personal and secret service contacts that were to remain standfast for the next two decades: Archie Sinclair was to become his loyal and dependable Secretary of State for Air during the Second World War; Duff Cooper proved an ally over Munich and was sent to Paris as ambassador to newly liberated France in 1944; Edward Spears remained a trusted source of information about France, and when that country collapsed he flew with General Charles de Gaulle to London to promote his Free French cause; and Desmond Morton soon bought ‘Earlylands’, the house from which he would frequently stroll over to Chartwell for dinners, games of tennis, and long and unrecorded discussions on secret intelligence affairs. In 1940 Churchill made this ‘Man of Mystery’ his principal intelligence advisor with an office in 10 Downing Street. Eddie Marsh served Churchill faithfully over many years and was a frequent and welcome guest at Chartwell for the next three decades.5
On the sporting front, Churchill suffered a seriously bad fall while playing polo and sold off his ponies, another milestone marking the end of youth. By way of compensation, he poured even more time and energy into his painting. During the summer he was joined in Biarritz by Charles Montag, who insisted that he learned to paint even on cloudy days in order to focus on drawing rather than on the brilliant colours that instinctively attracted him. Painting was to remain his balm at critical moments in his future life. After his crushing electoral defeat at the moment of wartime victory over Nazi Germany, he retreated again to the sun – this time to Lake Como in Italy – and immersed himself deeply in his canvases while he considered, once more, how to rebuild his career. ‘Happy are the painters,’ he once wrote, ‘for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end.’ To Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, he confessed after he finally resigned as prime minister in 1955 that ‘if it weren’t for painting I couldn’t live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things.’ He was to continue painting until physical weakness prevented him from doing so in his mid-eighties.6
He also made major progress with The World Crisis, and sent the final three chapters of his opening volume to the printers. The completed history more than fulfilled his goal and was to prove a bestseller when it started appearing in print a year later. Famously, it also provoked sarcasm from the former Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour, who described it as ‘Winston’s autobiography disguised as a history of the world’. This was a typically flippant remark from a man who delighted in the quotable quip, especially if Churchill was its target. The World Crisis deserved better than that, both as history and because it laid the groundwork for its author’s public reputation as a strategist and statesman with experience and understanding of both war and peace.
His prediction that Lloyd George’s time in office was nearing its end soon proved correct. The Coalition collapsed in the autumn of 1922 and the general election that followed produced a political earthquake. The Conservatives won a resounding victory, for the first time in history the Labour Party emerged as the nation’s principal opposition, and the Lloyd George and Asquithian Liberals were reduced to third and fourth place respectively, never again to form a British government. Churchill was also crushed at the polls and for the first time in over twenty years found himself without a seat in Parliament. Immediately before the election, he was rushed to hospital for an emergency appendectomy and missed much of the action. As he later wittily put it, he suddenly found himself ‘without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix’.7
If his own political forecast about Lloyd George proved right, so did that about his own future made in 1921 by the journalists Herbert Sidebotham and T. P. O’Connor – that the path he was taking was clearly leading him back to the Tories. Just two years after he lost his ‘seat for life’ in Dundee, and following a short-lived Labour government propped up by the Liberals, he was returned to the House of Commons as a Conservative MP for Epping in Essex in the general election of November 1924. Within days, the new prime minister Stanley Baldwin appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, the position once held by his father – and bitterly denied him by David Lloyd George.8
*
It would be extravagant to argue that 1921 and the months surrounding it instantly or even totally transformed Churchill and his public image. The ghosts of the Dardanelles lingered obstinately on. In Parliament, the ambitious young Labour politician Oswald Mosley, who was later to lead Britain’s Union of Fascists, denounced him as ‘a private Napoleon’. David Low’s cartoons continued to depict him as irredeemably bellicose. Even ardent supporters continued to harbour doubts. ‘Whether he ever comes to the very top or not, will depend upon the answer to one old question,’ wrote the veteran journalist and old ally J. L. Garvin. ‘The tendency to rush into warlike enterprises . . . has been the very bane of his life, and unless he corrects that bias all else will be in vain.’ Lloyd George felt much the same after witnessing Churchill’s reaction to a border incursion by the IRA into Northern Ireland, when he threatened to send in British troops. ‘The PM compared Winston to a chauffeur who apparently is perfectly sane and drives with great skill for months, then suddenly he takes you over the precipice,’ noted the assistant Cabinet Secretary Thomas Jones.9
Yet he had clearly crossed a watershed in his fortunes. His witticism about the loss of his seat and appendix was one of those literary tricks he frequently deployed to lend dramatic force to the ups and downs of his political life. Clearly, the loss of his seat and Cabinet position was an important setback. But it was also short-lived, and the quip obscured the enormous gains he had made over the previous year. Behind the headlines and alongside the acerbic comments of both friends and rivals, an alternative and more positive view was steadily gaining ground, as heralded by the laudatory press responses to his public speeches on Ireland. Another observer also recorded the shift. The journalist Harold Begbie was a defender of pacifists and conscientious objectors, a biographer of Lord Kitchener, and the author of an instant memoir about the great Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Under the pseudonym of ‘A Gentleman with a Duster’, in 1920 he had published a book entitled The Mirrors of Downing Street, a lament about the low moral tone of post-war politics and politicians that he saw embodied in Lloyd George and his government. Although he valued Churchill as an exception with many brilliant gifts, what he lacked, argued Begbie, was the unifying spirit of character that would give him direction. ‘You cannot depend on him,’ he pronounced. ‘He carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain, and the flag he flies is not a symbol that stirs the blood.’10 This was typical for the time. But twelve months later, struck by Churchill’s forceful stand over the child slavery issue in Hong Kong, he had radically changed his mind to declare that it had been ‘a brave, disinterested and noble act’ and that Churchill was ‘a man of the highest character and of a really sincere and moral patriotism’.
Other such startling changes of view could also be found. Clementine unexpectedly encountered one while campaigning for her husband in Dundee, where she was confronted by hostile crowds who shouted her down and even spat upon her. But amidst the vicious hostility, she ran into one of his long-time political opponents, who was clearly impressed by his achievements in Ireland. ‘Well,’ he told her, ‘I always knew that Winston was a great fighter, but I did not know he was a great peacemaker.’11
*
Character, as highlighted by Begbie, had always lain at the heart of judgements about Churchill. This had been transparent in the first biography, which appeared astonishingly early in 1905 when he was only thirty years old and had sat in Parliament for a mere four years. Its author was Alexander MacCallum Scott, a lawyer and journalist of the same age from Scotland making his way in Liberal politics in London. Electrified by Churchill’s switch from the Conservatives to the Liberals, he boldly predicted that one day he would make history for the nation and become its prime minister. Above everything else
, it was his personality and character that mesmerized Scott. His personality was marked by ‘bold and striking’ colours, while the salient features of his character were will, courage, originality, and magnetism. ‘He has mapped out his course,’ penned Scott, ‘and he pursues it with a dogged persistence [uninfluenced] either by party pressure or public prejudice.’ And to hostile critics who relished recalling that Churchill’s father had burned out early, Scott riposted bluntly that Lord Randolph’s son’s survival through many life-threatening escapades suggested a very different destiny. ‘He has out-distanced all his contemporaries,’ he wrote, ‘[and] he has ruthlessly brushed aside the mediocrities who encumbered his way.’
He had stuck to this view through Churchill’s subsequent misfortunes. After the Dardanelles, Scott updated his biography to argue that adversity had done Churchill nothing but good and whatever the future held he would have an important part to play:
Those who believe that Churchill’s public career is ended have not learned the lessons of history, and have no understanding of human nature, of the power of genius, and of the craving of the mass of the people for leadership. The men of destiny do not wait to be sent for; they come when they feel their time has come. They do not ask to be recognized, they declare themselves; they come like fate; they are inevitable. If Churchill be the man of genius and of power which his past career would indicate, he will come again, and he will be all the stronger and wiser for the bitter experience through which he has passed. This check may, indeed, be the very thing that was necessary to broaden his nature, to teach him restraint and caution, to temper his will like steel, so that it might bend without breaking, and to prepare him for greater tasks in the future. He had been too successful heretofore. He had never known real adversity. In the swift rush of his career he had never learned some lessons which others learn who climb more slowly. He was impatient; he was intolerant of restraint; he did not understand the long game and the waiting game.12
*
As demonstrated by the events of 1921, Churchill had finally learned the long game and was reaping the rewards of experience. Even those who had been seared at close quarters by his fiery temperament now believed that his record made him worthy of the highest office. Christopher Addison, who served alongside him in Lloyd George’s Cabinet as Minister of Reconstruction and Health, was one. As a newly elected Liberal MP a decade earlier, he had greatly appreciated the support given him by Churchill as Home Secretary over a difficult constituency issue. ‘Whatever happens,’ he noted at the time, ‘I shall always have a warm corner in my heart for Winston.’ His experience as a colleague had not diminished his feeling. ‘Nineteen times out of twenty he will get a grip of facts as quickly and as clearly as any man and evolve a sane and practical policy out of them,’ he wrote. And even though in the twentieth case Churchill’s judgement seemed flawed, he argued that he would be ‘a great Prime Minister’. What is noteworthy about this testimony is that when delivering it Addison was moving to the Left while Churchill was returning to the Tories, both men having been made politically homeless by the collapse of the Liberals. In due course, indeed, Addison would become an important Cabinet member of Clement Attlee’s post-Second World War Labour government.13
Addison was not the only Liberal-turned-Labour Party member who kept faith in Churchill. Alexander MacCallum Scott also transferred his political loyalties and was soon adopted as a prospective Labour candidate for a Scottish constituency. By then the great venture that Churchill had launched in 1921 was bearing fruit with the publication of The World Crisis. Scott avidly devoured each volume along with the dozens of reviews that appeared in national and regional newspapers. His thoughts on Churchill’s future provide an astute verdict on what he had achieved during the year explored here: ‘How he found time to write the book I can hardly conceive,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘To judge from the reviews this book will be an enduring monument in our literature.’ But, he added, ‘I think it does more. In the event of another war it might secure for Churchill an authoritative position in the handling of it. It is not the work of an armchair critic. It is the manifesto of a man of action.’ Churchill’s appeal across the tribal lines of party politics was to stand him in powerful stead as the obvious candidate to become the nation’s wartime leader.14
*
Admiration for his character extended beyond fellow males or politicians. Women, too, detected leadership qualities in Churchill. A man of his times, he held traditionally conservative views about their role in society and had opposed female suffrage before the war, although he had now changed his opinion about that. Yet he was no misogynist and enjoyed the company of intelligent women – in addition to Clementine – with whom he could spar intellectually. Violet Asquith was one, and historians have often mined her memoirs for insights into his character.15 Another, rarely mentioned, was Helen Vincent.
A daughter of the 1st Earl of Feversham and a wealthy beauty of her day who had served as a nurse anaesthetist on the Western and Italian Fronts, in 1921 she was in her mid-fifties and married to Lord Edgar d’Abernon, Britain’s first ambassador to the Weimar Republic. Before the war she had toured Italy by car with Churchill, and when he was en route to East Africa had lunched with him in Venice where she owned the magnificent Palazzo Giustinian on the Grand Canal. She had also lunched with him and Lloyd George at the height of the crisis over the Red Army’s invasion of Poland the previous year. Along with excited discussion about the anti-war Council of Action and the dangers of revolutionary feeling in Britain, there was some fevered speculation about the possibility of an attempt to capture the War Office. ‘Winston became rhetorical,’ she noted in her diary, ‘and talked of the War Office standing “with its back to the river in a fine strategical position”. ’ But along with such typically warlike banter, he had also urged that the conditions leading to such revolutionary feeling should be seriously addressed – especially the deplorable housing conditions in industrial areas of the country.16
Shortly after he announced his plans for the Cairo Conference, she penned some thoughts about him in her diary. Years before, she had wagered at long odds that one day he would be prime minister. Nothing since then had led her to change her view: ‘His star suffers frequent and semi-total eclipse,’ she acknowledged, ‘but I still think it will rise at length supreme.’ She went on:
He is one of those rare people who seems to gather fresh strength from every reverse. In spite of certain shortcomings, his personality is attractive and winning. He has amazing talent, spirit, and vitality, is full of expedients for every situation, and although he has sometimes shown a lack of judgement he is endowed with rare gifts of imagination and vision. On the human side he is kindly and good-natured, so long as people do not stand directly in his path. A gift for painting and sensitiveness to beauty, not only in nature but in women, are qualities which serve him well, more especially as they are coupled with a sense of humour that is witty and mischievous but never malignant or mean.17
*
With successful high office behind him, Churchill was now poised to embark on a new phase of his extraordinary life. He had surmounted turbulence and tragedy to find welcome personal equilibrium in a world still tormented and stripped of optimism by the wounds of war. His achievements in Ireland and Iraq, his eager but cautious embrace of the rising new power of the United States, his sombre insights into the poisonous forces of ideology and nationalism festering in Europe, and his patent parliamentary, ministerial, and rhetorical skills, showed him as a man who could successfully confront this unpredictable new world and lead Britain safely along its treacherous paths. There were to be stumbles and mistakes ahead. Nonetheless, he had clearly emerged from the dark days of his eclipse and was now, more than ever, a prime minister in the making.
ENDNOTES
PROLOGUE: ‘A BOLD, BAD MAN’
1. For the Abermule accident, see the Wikipedia entry: Abermule_train_collision; also, www.railwaysarchive.co.uk
2. Bonha
m Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 15; Gilbert, World in Torment, p. 912.
3. Gilbert, World in Torment, p. 430; Anon., Outlook, 22 October 1921.
INTRODUCTION: ‘A TRAGIC FLAW IN THE METAL’
1. Bell, Churchill and the Dardanelles, provides a definitive study of the topic.
2. See Bonham Carter, Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter 1914–1945, entry for Wednesday 19 May 1915, p. 53; Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, p. 16.
3. Black, Winston Churchill in British Art, p. 42.
4. Brendon, Winston Churchill, p. 10; Henry W. Lucy, as quoted in the Dundee Advertiser, 21 September 1921; Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 132, 161.
5. Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, p. 34.
6. Langworth, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, pp. 39–42.
7. Allen Packwood, ‘A Tale of Two Statesmen: Churchill and Napoleon’, Finest Hour, no. 157, Winter 2012–13, pp. 14–19. For information about the Napier, I am grateful to Richard Langworth.
8. A. G. Gardiner, ‘Prophets, Priests, and Kings’, p. 104, quoted in Shelden, Young Titan, p. 8; for the 1913 portrait, see Gardiner, Pillars of Society, pp. 152–8.
9. Gardiner, Pillars of Society, p. 121.
10. Quoted in Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness, p. 131.
11. Lord Alanbrooke Diary, 14 February 1944, quoted in Gilbert and Arnn, The Churchill Documents, Volume 19: Fateful Questions September 1943 to April 1944, p. 1,748.
12. Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 146; see also on Churchill’s ‘fierce loyalty’ to his immediate family, Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 137, 138–43.
13. Soames, Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter, p. 20.
14. Quoted in Buczacki, Churchill and Chartwell, p. 63. See also Randolph Churchill, Young Statesman: Winston S. Churchill 1901–1914, p. 69.
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