The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  An early Dictaphone was installed at Chartwell to aid the Great Man in the production process. Churchill gave the machine a test run one day after allowing all the typists the day off. But he failed to press the start button. When it failed to record anything, he banished it. Instead, he dictated his work to the typists, a total of almost one and a half million words over seven years. When critics later demeaned the effort as being carried off more by The Syndicate than by Churchill, Denis Kelly replied with words to the effect that a master chef cannot be expected to prepare each course for a grand banquet. The Syndicate indeed furnished Churchill with official documents, letters, telegrams, and the recollections of some of the principals, but Churchill dictated the narrative and assembled the entire work. The first volume, The Gathering Storm, was published in mid-1948, and the final volume, Triumph and Tragedy, came out the United States in late 1953, and in Britain in April 1954. Though in places factually incorrect—by commission as well as omission—the memoir “is an invaluable record,” wrote parliamentarian and Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins, who also called it “the ultimate literary achievement of the outstanding author-politician of the twentieth century.” Churchill’s attitude toward the work, as recalled by Deakin, was “This is not history, this is my case.”79

  He prepared his case not only at Chartwell and 27–28 Hyde Park Gate, but on the shores of Lake Léman in Switzerland (August 1946); in Marrakech (New Year’s 1947 and winter 1950–51); at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo (December 1948); at Lake Garda and Lake Carezza for a month; at Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina, at Cap d’Ail (summer 1949); at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira (January 1950); and in Annecy and Venice (1951). He also took time to slip across to America in 1949 in order to promote his book, visit with Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman, and address the students at MIT. With draconian British currency restrictions in place during these years, Churchill and his party often traveled as the guests of his American publishers (who often paid Churchill’s expenses with French francs rather than British pounds) in order to avoid a breach of British currency law.

  Churchill’s easel and paints always went along on these trips, but Clementine often did not, although she and Lord Moran hastened to Marrakech when Churchill came down with bronchitis during his 1947 visit there. He enjoyed his painting and basking and swimming on these jaunts, although in a letter to Clementine written from Marrakech before the onset of the bronchitis, he wrote of bleak weather and his fear of catching a cold, adding: “England and politics seem very distant here. I continue to be depressed about the future. I really do not see how our poor island is going to earn its living when there are so many difficulties around us.” He was back in the wilderness, but with two critical distinctions. He now led the opposition, whereas in the 1930s he had been in opposition to his own party. And he believed he would play a vital role as the future played out, if not in Downing Street, then in his beloved House of Commons. Yet, in response to a 1946 birthday toast raised by Bracken, Churchill, after expressing appreciation at having his friends and family by his side, added: “But we are the past.”80

  The bronchitis crisis of early 1947 passed without effect, but the taps on Churchill’s shoulders grew more frequent, more varied, and more serious. His brother, Jack, six years his junior and long afflicted with a bad heart, died in February 1947. “As you get older these things seem less tragic,” Churchill told Moran. “In any case there is not much time left.” Jack was buried next to his parents in the little churchyard at St. Martin’s, in Bladon, just a mile south of Blenheim Palace. Later that year, Churchill underwent a hernia operation, in preparation for which and on the advice of his surgeon, who feared a pulmonary crisis might occur while the Old Man was under anesthesia, he promised to quit cigars. He did not. He then promised the surgeon to reduce his alcohol intake by half. This, too, he failed to do, yet apparently to no ill effect. The surgery went well. By 1948, Moran believed Churchill’s arteries were hardening, and the Old Man by then complained regularly of feeling tightness in his shoulders. In August 1949, he lost feeling in his right arm and leg. Moran was summoned from London. He diagnosed a minor stroke, telling Churchill that he had not suffered a hemorrhage but that a “very small clot has blocked a very small artery.” A year later, Moran detected a “disturbance of cerebral circulation.” If hardening of the arteries is a sign of old age, Moran later wrote, “Winston was an old man before he began writing The Second World War.” Churchill believed he should not look too far forward; however much of a future he was to have, it could not be long. But he could always look back, to the days of honor. When asked by Moran’s wife which year of his life he’d want to live over, he replied, “Nineteen-forty every time. Every time.”81

  As Churchill’s financial fortunes improved during the late 1940s, those of Britain continued their descent. “Victory,” Churchill told Moran in 1946, “has turned into sack cloth and ashes.” When the Attlee government sent John Maynard Keynes to the United States in 1946 to negotiate a $3.75 billion loan to finance reconstruction, the great economist secured his loan, but on hard terms. Interest was pegged at 2 percent over fifty years (with the proviso that London could skip annual payments in times of economic duress, which it did six times in the coming two decades). This was generous on America’s part. But Washington also insisted that London leave the gold standard and make the pound fully convertible in accordance with the Bretton Woods agreement. * This proved a calamity when in 1949 the Attlee government—under continuing economic pressure, and despite months of denials that it would do so—devalued the pound by 30 percent, from $4.08 to $2.80.

  A devalued currency results in that nation’s products becoming cheaper in foreign markets, but Britain had little to export, and very little that Americans wanted. Of Britain’s plight, Churchill told the house in 1950: “Owing to their [the Attlee government’s] follies and wrongful action, a great part of all the loans and gifts we have received from abroad has been spent not upon the re-equipment of our industry, nor upon the import of basic foodstuffs: instead much of this precious aid was lavishly frittered away” on socialist programs. He excoriated Attlee for “[raising] our taxation until it is the highest in the world, and even stands higher today than in the worst years of the war.” Between the loans “and the unparalleled sacrifices exacted from the taxpayers” there was no reason why Britain should not have attained “solvency, security and utopian independence. This has been denied us not only by the incompetence and maladministration of the Socialist Government and their wild extravagance, but even more by the spirit of class hatred which they have spread throughout the land, and by the costly and wasteful nationalization of a fifth part of our industries.”82

  That U.S. products were made more expensive in Britain by the pound’s devaluation was of little concern in America: Americans were buying American—GM, Studebaker, Ford, Packard, and Chrysler automobiles, and electric clothes dryers, radios, and televisions. American children rode bright-red Schwinn bicycles, sales of which—as with all American products—benefited from tariffs slapped on European imports. Now that Parker Pen could make pens instead of bomb fuses, it rolled out the Parker “51” pen—the latest in writing tools—which sold out at Gimbels in New York. Housewives who had been forced through war rationing to buy the Hormel company’s Spam—“the taste tickler”—kept buying it. After all, it was easy to prepare as a suitable and delicious main course for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.83

  In America, consumption was now a way of life; in Britain, consumption was still a disease that took off old people. Other than shipping their best scotch whisky and linen to America, Britons were not exporting much, not producing much, and not buying much, including British-made Fords or even squat and cheap little Morris Minors. Daimler, Austin, Rolls-Royce, and Humber still produced machines that were virtually handcrafted (Churchill always preferred a Humber), but most Britons could not afford them, and little else for that matter. Ford U.S.A. produced more than 1.1 million motor cars in 1949
; Morris Minor produced only 250,000 between 1948 and 1953. Londoners did not experience traffic jams because few Londoners owned automobiles, and those who did found petrol to be in short supply and expensive. Britons stayed home and, as they had for decades, found their entertainment via gramophones and little Bakelite wireless sets.

  Americans went on a spending spree while Britons banked their sallow coal fires and pulled on another sweater. Most could not even commiserate over the telephone: fewer than 10 percent of British homes contained one.

  When Harold Nicolson attended a January 1947 meeting of the Historic Buildings Committee of the National Trust, he did so wrapped in a greatcoat because there was no heat. Lighting, too, was a matter of chance after Attlee’s government imposed rolling blackouts between 9:00 P.M. and 12:00 A.M. and 2:00 and 4:00 P.M. That winter was one of the worst in memory. Its “most crushing blows fell on Britain,” Dean Acheson later wrote, with blizzards regularly battering the island, with six million out of work, and with rations below wartime levels.84

  “Gloom reigned in the bomb-devastated streets of London and the provincial cities,” Jock Colville later wrote of those winter months. “London was grey; life was grey.” By then Colville toiled as private secretary to the Heir Apparent, Princess Elizabeth, just twenty-one. It was a post he accepted with reluctance, spurred on by Churchill, who told Colville, “It is your duty to accept.” Britons depended for sustenance upon millions of food parcels that arrived from the United States and the Commonwealth, including several thousand sent to Buckingham Palace. Princess Elizabeth organized a group of more than one hundred women volunteers who wrapped each parcel and dispatched them to shops and homes throughout the land. Even the royal family carried their clothing ration books that year. Elizabeth had to use her coupons to procure the material for her wedding gown in order to walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in November with Philip Mountbatten, her second cousin once removed (and Dickie’s nephew). The currency stringency grew so severe that year that the Attlee government slashed the importing of foods and essential commodities, even going so far as to slap a 75 percent import duty on Hollywood films. Hollywood responded by ceasing all shipments of movies to Britain. England found itself now a pale moon eclipsed by the blazing sun of the United States. “My God!” Nicolson proclaimed to his diary in late 1947. “What the poor people of this country have had to suffer in the last seven years.” Clothing rationing did not end until 1949. Food rationing had fully seven more years to run. Londoners dwelled now in pea-soup fogs—smog, really, a poisonous, stinking by-product of hundreds of thousands of fireplaces burning soft coal and coal gas. Day was almost as dark as night. Britons called it “austerity,” but conditions were not much different from what Americans knew during the Great Depression.85

  On November 30, 1947, Colville, after dining with the Churchill family in celebration of the Old Man’s seventy-third birthday, told his diary: “Winston is in a sombre mood, convinced that this country is going to suffer the most agonising economic distress.” The Battle of the Atlantic, Churchill had claimed, was but “a mere pup in comparison.” Had Franklin Roosevelt lived just a few years more, he would have witnessed the complete fulfillment of his strategic vision for imperial Britain and its role in the world. The United Kingdom had been reduced to debtor status, and the Empire, with the departure of Burma, Ceylon, and India by 1948, was vastly reduced in geographical scope. King George remained King, but he had to scrub “Emperor” from the royal stationery.

  “Never in his [Churchill’s] life has he felt such despair,” Colville wrote, “and he blamed it on the Government whose ‘insatiable lust for power is only equalled by their incurable impotence in exercising it.’ ” Colville took heart from Churchill’s “phrases and epigrams [that] rolled out in the old way, but I missed that indomitable hope and conviction which characterized the Prime Minister of 1940–41.” For this misery Churchill held Attlee accountable. Over drinks with Chips Channon one evening at Claridge’s, the Old Man said of Attlee: “Anyone can respect him, certainly, but admire—no!”86

  In the House Churchill registered his displeasure with the Attlee government regularly and with increasing vehemence. He told Britons that it was not the government’s management of unfolding events within the diminishing empire, but its mismanagement. Of the continuing need of rationing, he said: “What the German U-boats could never do to us has been achieved by our own misguided fellow countrymen through their incompetence, their arrogance, their hordes of officials, their thousands of regulations and their gross mismanagement of our affairs, large and small.” On at least seventeen occasions between 1945 and 1950, he delivered addresses wherein he spoke (with a snarl) of “socialism” and “utopia” in the same breath, often tossing in a “feeble,” “foolish,” “squalid,” or “fantasy” for good measure. He just as consistently reminded his listeners that he had been Lloyd George’s loyal lieutenant when the great Welshman overhauled British social services earlier in the century. Making his case required a nimble performance; here was Winston Churchill—the leader of the Conservative Party—championing the philosophical underpinnings of Labour’s social programs. He was up to the task. It was the heavy-handed implementation of programs, not the programs themselves, he objected to. In July 1946, he told Britons (and three years later told MIT students much the same):

  It is 38 years ago since I introduced the first Unemployment Insurance Scheme, and 22 years ago since, as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, I shaped and carried the Widows’ Pensions and reduction of the Old Age Pensions from 70 to 65. We are now moving forward into another vast scheme of national insurance, which arose, even in the stress of war, from a Parliament with a great Conservative majority. It is an essential principle of Conservative, Unionist, and Tory policy—call it what you will—to defend the general public against abuses by monopolies and against restraints on trade and enterprise, whether these evils come from private corporations, from the mischievous plans of doctrinaire Governments, or from the incompetence and arbitrariness of departments of State.87

  Later that year he recycled a line he had used during a March 1945 memorial service for Lloyd George (who had died that month): “We do not seek to pull down improvidently the structures of society, but to erect balustrades upon the stairway of life, which will prevent helpless or foolish people from falling into the abyss. Both the Conservative and Liberal Parties have made notable contributions to secure minimum standards of life and labour. I too have borne my part in this.” Indeed, he had done so, when he had “ratted” to the Liberal Party four decades earlier. By the late 1940s—long after “re-ratting” back to the Tories—he was one of very few Conservatives who could honestly say that he had been in favor of social reforms from the beginning, albeit while sitting on the opposing bench at the time.88

  Winston is happy at Chartwell,” Moran told his diary in 1946, “as happy as he can be when the world has gone all wrong.” Churchill could only bear witness from the opposition bench between 1946 and late 1951 as Britain’s knights and castles—India and Burma, its influence in Egypt and Palestine—were swept from the chessboard.89

  In early May 1946, Attlee announced his government’s intent to remove all British forces from Egypt, including the Suez Canal Zone. This was a policy Churchill could not consent to, telling the House on May 24: “I assert that it is impossible to keep it [the canal] open, unless British personnel are permanently stationed in the Canal Zone. There may be doubts about our ability to keep it open in the air age, even if we have garrisons and fighter aircraft in that zone. But at any rate without that personnel there is no chance of keeping it open whatever.” Especially galling to Churchill was the fact that Britain owed Egypt £400 million for services rendered during the war when, as Churchill told the House, Egyptian troops did not fight and “the debt which Egypt owes to us is that in two world convulsions she has been effectively defended by Great Britain and not only by this island. The Australians and New Zealanders and South Afr
icans have shed their blood freely to prevent Cairo and Alexandria being looted and ravished, ground down and subjugated, by Italian and German hordes.” To safeguard the Suez, Attlee proposed using one hundred thousand British troops then in Palestine, from where they could respond to a crisis in the Suez. But guarding the canal with troops bivouacked three hundred miles away struck Churchill as ludicrous. As well, British troops in Palestine made easy targets for Zionist terrorists.90

  In the House of Commons on August 1, with the Suez and Palestine debates ongoing and civil war likely in India, Churchill delivered something of a valedictory for the British Empire:

  Take stock round the world at the present moment; after all we are entitled to survey the whole field. We declare ourselves ready to abandon the mighty Empire and Continent of India with all the work we have done in the last 200 years, territory over which we possess unimpeachable sovereignty. The Government are, apparently, ready to leave the 400 million Indians to fall into all the horrors of sanguinary civil war—civil war compared to which anything that could happen in Palestine would be microscopic; wars of elephants compared with wars of mice. Indeed we place the independence of India in hostile and feeble hands, heedless of the dark carnage and confusion which will follow. We scuttle from Egypt which we twice successfully defended from foreign massacre and pillage. We scuttle from it.91