Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  At his fine valediction to Chamberlain, made in this Chamber, Churchill had likened history to a flickering lamp that stumbles along the trail of the past, ‘trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days’.48 In point of fact, Ziegler says: ‘Churchill’s writing of history was totally dishonest.49 He would admit as much. It was a propaganda exercise.’ Although aided by a team of extremely able and experienced researchers, he was putting his own case, as only he knew how to do.

  The relationship between history and propaganda was whisky and soda to Churchill. He immersed himself in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples right up to the Norwegian expedition. Before that, he had published four volumes on his seventeenth-century military ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough – the Churchill equivalent, as it were, of Norman Chamberlain.

  The horrible circumstances of Norman’s death had moved Chamberlain with every particle of his being to prevent another war. The reverse was true of Churchill. Having spent four years and 2,128 pages on vindicating Marlborough’s reputation, he strove when at the Admiralty to emulate his military victories. As someone remarked who worked with him during this period: ‘He sees himself as another Marlborough.’50

  Churchill staked out his partisan purpose in a letter to Professor Lewis Namier: ‘to defend effectively Marlborough’s early career … by contrasting the true facts with the odious accusations which have so long reigned’. In the same letter, Churchill described his method:

  ‘One of the misleading factors in history is the practice of historians to build a story exclusively out of the records which have come down to them. These records in many cases are a very small part of what took place, and to fill in the picture one has to visualise the daily life – the constant discussions between Ministers, the friendly dinners, the many days when nothing happened worthy of record, but during which events were nevertheless proceeding.’51

  Applied to his own biography, Churchill’s call ‘to visualise the daily life’ is not always easy to achieve, especially when examining the days leading up to his accession. Anyone wanting to build a story that deviates from Churchill’s own will discover that important records are missing, like the memorandum which tilted Attlee into calling for a division; or consumed by the incendiary bomb that hit the House of Commons on 10 May 1941; or deliberately destroyed, as were the papers of Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s main promoter in the leadership stakes, which Bracken instructed his chauffeur to burn; or simply not written. Churchill never kept a daily diary, fearing, in Dilks’s words, that ‘it would reveal his frequent changes of opinion and, when published, make him look foolish’.52 Many conversations have escaped the record, particularly on topics which Ministers felt unable to discuss in public, and where these exchanges are reported it is often hard to judge their context. Compiled in secret and afterwards adjusted, Ivan Maisky’s London journals catch familiar faces at bracing, fresh angles, yet it must be remembered that the Soviet Ambassador, a clever and charming but sometimes unreliable witness, penned each entry in fear that it might be discovered by the NKVD, who had already rooted out two of Maisky’s staff for execution.

  Even when something is written down uncensored, the essential point can be overlooked. Diaries are not infallible. A frustrated Leo Amery admitted: ‘They often get written up in a hurry a day or two later, and what turns out of the first importance twenty or thirty years afterwards gets left out.’53

  Nor is being present at an occasion any guarantee that it will be remembered with fidelity. In Churchill’s own description of the meeting at No. 10 Downing Street on 9 May 1940 at which Providence stretched out its hand to offer him the premiership, written eight years after the event, he mistakes the date, the time of day, even the identities of those in the room.

  Halifax was in the room. Yet his account, probably dictated the following morning, differs from the one that he gave at the time to his Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and also from the version which he offered up a year later to his Private Secretary, Charles Peake.

  As for Halifax’s relationship with Baba Metcalfe, this is scarcely mentioned in contemporary narratives, any more than is the extent to which Chamberlain used the Intelligence Services to monitor the telephone conversations of his political adversaries.

  There are other significant absences. Supremely hard to judge, and therefore to use judiciously in an historical account, is the emotional frame of mind of political figures like Churchill. ‘He is a very emotional man,’ Lloyd George told Maisky.54 Fatigue, infatuation, grief, hurt – these are some of the feelings that governed not only Churchill’s behaviour but the actions of his closest Cabinet colleagues during this all-important span of days. Even so, emotion is a factor that too often is left out of the picture, by historians as well as by diarists, so that Chamberlain, Halifax and Churchill can appear to operate as if they reached important decisions inside an isolated bubble in which the circumstances of their personal lives were irrelevant to a degree that is unrealistic.

  For example, the puzzle over why Churchill continued to be obsessed with Narvik only begins to make sense when one takes into account that his nephew Giles Romilly was captured there. Yet the impact of Romilly’s arrest on Churchill, and on Clementine and her family, is rarely given attention by historians, any more than is the absence from Churchill’s side of his chief adviser and confidante – that is to say, Clementine – during the three critical days of 8, 9 and 10 May.

  Last but not least is the danger to anyone contemplating a rival narrative. Three months after Churchill took over as Prime Minister, Leo Amery wrote to a friend in a state of anxiety about the plight of Stuart Hodgson, a former editor of the Liberal campaigning newspaper the Daily News, and author of The Man Who Made the Peace: Neville Chamberlain (1938). The sixty-three-year-old Hodgson was well known to Amery: a ‘good anti-Nazi who after writing a sympathetic life of Chamberlain has suddenly found himself interned while completing a life of Halifax, on which he cannot continue while in prison, incidentally, too, leaving newly married wife expecting child and completely stranded’.55 Not much else has come to light about this dramatic and intriguing incarceration of a good-tempered, trenchant biographer who liked chess and cricket and was famous for never having lost his temper. Still, it is tempting to draw the inference: when dealing with Churchill, ‘who wrote history, lived history, and made history’, then woe betide any competitor – even one blessed with Hodgson’s ‘keen sense of justice, tolerance and humanity’.56, 57

  Brief though Hodgson’s internment seems to have been, since he went on, in 1941, to publish his portrait of Halifax, it is an illustration of why old assumptions, assertions and fashionable opinions need to be constantly tested. David Dilks does well to remind us that we should not accept without deep reflection any version of the past, no matter how secure it appears – and further, that ‘the irrational or the unpredictable elements … are crucial’.58

  Regarding the Norway Debate, there is a popular narrative about how events unfolded, in large measure established by Churchill, which is unsatisfactory and which, when tested, is clearly found wanting. Hold the picture to the light and another outline emerges.

  In this competing tableau, Churchill, an ex-Liberal who had twice crossed the floor, assumes the shape of a divisive outsider, tainted by the Tonypandy riots of 1910 when he sent troops to South Wales to resolve a mining dispute, the Dardanelles, his opposition to the General Strike and the India Bill, his support for Edward VIII, and, more immediately, by the capitulation in Norway, one of the great failures of his career, and a campaign in which he alienated every Cabinet colleague. The likelihood of Churchill’s political advancement from First Lord of the Admiralty was negligible; nor did he appear to do anything to promote it, remaining steadfast in his loyalty to Chamberlain. Indeed, he rounded angrily on supporters like Bracken who plotted without Churchill’s knowledge on his behalf.

  Lord Halifax’s contours
are no less divergent. Once it had become obvious that Chamberlain would resign, Halifax was the most favoured candidate for the premiership, supported by Chamberlain, the War Cabinet, a majority of Conservative and Labour MPs, the press, and George VI, who had given Halifax the unique privilege of a key to the garden of Buckingham Palace. Even at the eleventh hour, King, Prime Minister and Rab Butler were pressing ‘the Holy Fox’ to accept. Why did he not? Historians and biographers do not tally in their speculations. Then there is his secretive relationship with Baba Metcalfe, referred to in his surprisingly passionate letters as ‘my dearest Baba’ and ‘my darling one’.

  History has cast Chamberlain as a feeble and colourless prevaricator with ‘a lust for peace’, yet there are moments when he reveals himself to be a ruthless schemer, determined to use his majority, the Whips’ Office and the Intelligence Services to cling on to power ‘like a limpet’. Tight-furled in public like his umbrella, he expands in private as a cigar-smoker, a wine connoisseur, a brilliant mimic and a generous-hearted family man. On top of everything, he gets on remarkably well with Churchill.

  Under closer scrutiny, no one behaves true to type.

  The Norway Debate is an improbable example of the darkest spot being under the lamp. A very interesting transfer of power occurred within a short time, but how this occurred remains unresolved. What happened and what is thought to have happened turn out not to be the same thing.

  ‘When the clamour of the guns dies away, the clamour of the history writer begins,’ noted the Finnish historian C. L. Lundin. Three quarters of a century has passed, and an untold number of books repeat the story, yet there are wide discrepancies in the memoirs of contemporaries, and in the accounts of historians.59 As one historian puts it, no two of them agree ‘on the precise order in which events happened, on the reliability of the sources, or on which were the decisive moments’.60 This is a week of incalculable historical significance, but in spite of the vast literature on it, the leading players remain hazy, still tantalisingly out of focus.

  Instead of being ejected from the Commons for his illicit snapshots, Moore-Brabazon was made a Minister in the next administration. If anyone might have lent his expertise at interpreting ‘barbed-wire, holes and paths and camouflage’, and used it to decipher the faces that reach us today as small blobs of light, then it would have been this tall and ponderous ex-aviator, who once flew with a pig at his side to illustrate a popular saying.61

  In vain, I scan his inadequate photographs for other players in this compelling drama. Clement Davies, the Independent Liberal MP who, with Amery, galvanised the rebels. Lloyd George, whom Davies had to drag out of his room to make one of his most effective speeches. Nowhere do I find the face of my great-uncle, the National Liberal MP Geoffrey Shakespeare. A friend of the Chamberlains, Uncle Geoffrey had served as Lloyd George’s Private Secretary in the 1920s; and in 1937 was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty where he was the official to greet Churchill on the outbreak of war, ‘so as to introduce to him the members of the Board’.62 Churchill was reoccupying the position that he had left in disgrace twenty-four years earlier, following the catastrophe of Gallipoli. It was to Geoffrey, his ‘indefatigable second in command’, that he gave his first order on that Sunday evening in September 1939 – asking for a bottle of whisky.63

  As a child, I knew that Uncle Geoffrey had mixed with senior politicians. He did not talk about it a lot. I would have asked, and he would have told me, but I was not interested then; not even in how he secretly ‘saved from the waste-paper basket’ pencilled notes which Lloyd George had flung away.64 These personalities had little bearing on a boy growing up in the tropics. They were as remote and anonymous-sounding as the voice on the tannoy above a Singapore swimming pool which one humid afternoon announced the death of Sir Winston Churchill. Only later on have I felt the pull to read their memoirs, diaries and letters; to go back through the records, and speak to historians and to descendants of the politicians involved, as well as to combatants who fought in Norway, in an attempt to answer a simple, but still baffling question: how did a Minister who advocated, planned and directed one of the most disastrous campaigns since the Crimean War become Prime Minister?

  A glint of light in one of Moore-Brabazon’s photographs is not the face of an MP, but represents the Victorian sandglass on the Table of the House in front of the Speaker’s Chair.65 At about 5 p.m. on 8 May, it had become clear that the opposition would, in fact, vote on the motion for the Whitsun adjournment as a means of – as Churchill described it in his winding-up speech – having a vote of censure on the conduct of the government. At 11 p.m., the Speaker, Captain Edward FitzRoy, put the question: ‘That this House do now adjourn’. The division began, the sandglass was flipped over by one of the Clerks at the Table, and the fine grey granules started trickling down through the wasp-waist. Out of a possible total of 615 MPs, more than 550 were present in the Chamber on that Wednesday evening. They had six minutes to file into the Aye or the No Lobbies before the oak doors were locked. The government had begun the debate the previous afternoon in a reasonably confident mood. Now, no one could be certain of the outcome.

  PART TWO

  THE CAMPAIGN

  2

  ‘NAR-VIK’

  ‘My eye has always been fixed on Narvik.’1

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, 8 May 1940

  ‘Who will want to know about Giles Romilly?’2

  GEORGE WEIDENFELD

  The Norway Debate was about a military campaign. For a few intense weeks in the spring of 1940, the attention of everyone in Britain was fixed on a snow-bound coastline 1,300 miles away across the North Sea. After months of aggravating inactivity, during which an assumption formed that some important move to frustrate the enemy was being put into action, British forces were fighting for the first time in a land battle with the Nazis, and winning.

  My nine-year-old father was one of millions who listened up to four times a day to a brown Bakelite wireless – ‘the focal point of the room as the TV is now’ – and followed reports of successful landings in Norway to oust the Nazi invaders. ‘It was a ray of hope. We’d had seven months of Phoney War, there’d been nothing. I remember thinking, “Jolly good, first action of the war and it’s been a success.” Most vividly, I recall the names. Narvik, Trondheim, Namsos …’

  Between 8 April and 10 May, these names were repeated on the lunchtime and evening bulletins, in newspaper headlines, on people’s lips, in the air they breathed. On the Wiltshire Downs, the writer Frances Partridge thought that even the plovers seemed to be shrieking ‘NAR-vik’ into her ears.3

  ‘And then,’ my father says, ‘it all went dead for a few days and it never really came back.’ As April wore on, so did the sinister lull in the news. Fewer victories were announced. There were rumours that something had gone wrong, but no details. A strange anxiety took hold. Looking back a year later, after the names Dunkirk, Boulogne and Saint-Malo had been added to the roster of Allied defeats, Partridge believed that ‘no time has been harder to bear, it seems to me, than the Norwegian campaign’, because of the uncertainty of not knowing what was happening and ‘the struggle to maintain hope’.4

  My father says, ‘We didn’t know it had been a disaster.’5

  Everyone knows what happened next, when Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium and France in the early hours of 10 May. Yet how many of us can repeat with certainty a fraction of what occurred before that fatal Friday, at Narvik, Trondheim, Namsos, Åndalsnes, Lillehammer, Bergen, Harstad, Stavanger? Those names on the map, which my father is able to recite seventy-five years on, were more than mere fjords and fishing villages and ore-towns. These were the places where Neville Chamberlain was toppled, out of which Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.

  April in Narvik, a cold, unsung outpost hidden away up in the Arctic. The small north Norwegian port – population, 10,000 – lay forty miles inland from the Norwegian Sea at the end of Ofotfjorden, below Fagernes mountain. In winter months, the
sun never climbed above Fagernes. Narvik’s pine houses and dark streets banked high with snow were lit by bronze lamp posts purchased second-hand from a town in the south. In February, the sun returned, and now – early spring – it gave twenty hours of daylight, even if the dominant colours remained white and grey. Twice the distance from Westminster as Chamberlain’s faraway example of Czechoslovakia, Narvik was, one historian observed, an outlandish place in which to wind up an era.6

  The town’s name was taken from a remote homestead enclosed in the half-moon bay. Before Narvik, it was called Victoria Harbour, the creation of a British company, Pen & Miller, which built a railway to exploit iron-ore deposits from the Swedish mines at Kiruna, over a hundred miles away. Iron, of which the Nazis could not get enough, was the continued reason for Narvik.

  The trains trundled every few hours down to the raised loading quay, and tipped their high-grade cargoes into the holds of up to thirty waiting merchant ships, most of them flying German or British flags. Until the outbreak of war, 4.5 million tons of this crushed ore had sailed every year to Germany – providing two thirds of the iron essential for Hitler’s armaments. The Swedish ore was of cardinal importance also for Britain’s war effort: since September, more of it had sailed to Britain (798,000 tons) than to Germany (763,000 tons). Giles Romilly, a twenty-three-year-old journalist sent there by the Daily Express, wrote that ‘a battleship could be made out of one day’s work in Narvik’.7

  It is customary to see the Phoney War ending when Hitler launched his Western Offensive on 10 May. In fact, it ended one month earlier, on 9 April, a Tuesday, with the unprovoked invasion of Denmark and Norway. ‘That day lightning struck and our world broke into pieces,’ remembered Narvik’s mayor, Theodore Broch.8