‘I am no good as a conspirator,’ Churchill would say in old age.165 ‘I talk too much.’ At a lunch for lobby journalists in February, he had pledged himself loyally to stand by his ‘captain’ for the duration of the voyage, ‘till we bring this ship of ours however battered she may be through all the gales that blow into the harbour of our heart’s desire’.166 Chamberlain had bowed his thanks. In the same month, Cadogan and Halifax witnessed Churchill saying to Chamberlain with tears in his eyes: ‘I’m proud to follow you!’ His loyalty was confirmed by one of his supposed co-plotters, Labour’s former First Lord A. V. Alexander, who spoke with Churchill on 29 April – when ‘Winston had made it quite clear that Chamberlain was behind Winston and Winston was behind Chamberlain’.167, 168 Lord Camrose had the definite impression after meeting Churchill on 3 May, that despite toxic stories to the contrary, ‘Churchill was on excellent terms with the P.M., better than ever before’.169
Their rapprochement had taken more than a decade to mature. Chamberlain and Churchill had first worked together in Cabinet in 1924, when Churchill, to everyone’s astonishment including his own, became Baldwin’s Chancellor. This was largely thanks to Chamberlain passing up the job for the Ministry of Health – to achieve the social reforms which had engrossed his cousin Norman.
Ever since, Chamberlain had regarded Churchill through his pince-nez with mingled admiration and horror. ‘What a brilliant creature he is! … But not for all the joys of Paradise would I be a member of his staff! Mercurial! A much abused word, but it is the literal description of his temperament.’170 Churchill was a man of multiple talents, but no judgement. Working with him was ‘like arguing with a Brass band’.171 He reminded Chamberlain of Hore-Belisha, another mauvais coucheur. ‘Winston is very amusing but a d——d uncomfortable bedfellow.’172 In 1928, Chamberlain declared to Sir Douglas Hogg his disinclination to ‘see W. Chu Prime Minister’, and in 1936 he opposed his half-brother Austen’s view that Churchill be made Minister of Defence.173 Churchill always backed the wrong horse, had a new idea every hour, floundered in the details, and did not stand by his decisions, which were ‘never founded on exact knowledge nor on careful or prolonged consideration of the pros and cons’.174 On top of everything, there was his intolerable verbosity. If Chamberlain took Churchill into the Cabinet, then he would dominate it. ‘He won’t give others a chance of even talking.’175
Chamberlain’s mind was hard to change once made up. Yet in respect of Churchill, his distrust was a fluctuating, petulant thing. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland compelled him to bring Churchill into the Cabinet, there is evidence that as the war progressed a solid and genuine trust did spring up between the two men, much to the surprise of them both.
Lord Beaverbrook later told Halifax that Churchill ‘had behaved with complete wisdom when the time came for him to replace Chamberlain, and no-one could find any fault with his comportment!’ Beaverbrook’s explanation for Churchill’s success was simple.176 ‘If you want to supplant the Prime Minister, you must always be on the most friendly and loyal terms.’
Too much has been made of their blatant differences, not least by the protagonists themselves. Not sung enough is how well Churchill got on with Chamberlain. On the day after the Norway Debate, the Chancellor John Simon wrote this in his diary about Chamberlain: ‘He has throughout got on very well with both Winston and Halifax.’177
Not long after the Chamberlains dined at Admiralty House in the autumn of 1939, the American journalist Virginia Cowles had lunch at the same table, and was startled by Churchill’s reaction when his children attempted a mild jest at Chamberlain’s expense. A scowl appeared on his face. ‘With enormous solemnity he said: “If you are going to make offensive remarks about my chief you will have to leave the table.178 We are united in a great and common cause. I am not prepared to tolerate such language about the Prime Minister.”’
Churchill had favourably revised his opinion of ‘Monsieur J’aimeberlin’ after learning about his past on Andros. Five months on, there is evidence that a naturally inflexible Chamberlain had shifted in his attitude towards ‘the wild man’. Chamberlain wrote to Ida on 30 March: ‘To me personally he is absolutely loyal and I am continually hearing from others of the admiration he expresses for the P.M.’ Inhaling Churchill’s cigar-scented flattery, Chamberlain suspended the misgivings that he had expressed earlier, writing on 27 April about how the First Lord ‘was profuse in his protestations (which I believe to be quite genuine) of his desire to help and his complete loyalty to me’.179, 180 A grudging Hilda accepted her brother’s statement with a caveat. ‘I do believe that Churchill was loyal to you – up to the standard of Churchill loyalty, but that is not & never has been the Chamberlain standard.’181
Reassured for whatever reason that Churchill stood solidly behind him after all, Chamberlain calculated that it was in no one’s interest to advertise the First Lord’s prominent role in the Norwegian debacle. In the long confessional which he wrote to Hilda over the weekend, Chamberlain emphasised: ‘I am extremely anxious not to have any breach with him for that would be disastrous to the Allied cause and I am sure he does not want one.’182 Instead of hanging Churchill out to dry, Chamberlain now planned to keep Churchill firmly within the Conservative camp, and take shelter behind him. The survival of each man had come to depend on the survival of the other.
To break his impasse with Churchill, and also to neutralise him, Chamberlain had decided not to move him from the Admiralty, but instead to give the First Lord further responsibilities – more rope. At the end of April, under the guise of a major reconstruction, he had made Churchill responsible for the Chiefs of Staff Committee, in effect appointing him Minister of Defence, with the right to direct and guide the Chiefs of Staff without consultation with the Military Coordination Committee. Churchill was thrilled. He jumped up and down before the editor of the Manchester Guardian: ‘Now I’ve got more power – I’ve got more powers!’
Yet Channon suspected the Prime Minister of ‘playing a deep game’.183, 184 Aside from the advantage to be gained from a satisfied Churchill, Chamberlain’s move was designed to spike the guns of those Conservative dissidents like Tree, Emrys-Evans, Cooper and Macmillan who might have looked to a disaffected Churchill as a leader. Chamberlain told Hilda how he had drafted a paper which ‘set out & defined Winston’s new functions’, and that Churchill had ‘accepted the whole thing at once … and thanked me very warmly for the efforts I had made to meet him’.185 The new measures were to be announced on Monday 6 May.
As a final precaution, Chamberlain had asked Churchill to defend the government in the debate on Tuesday. ‘I shall have to lead off & leave Winston to wind up.’186
One of Chamberlain’s strongest Conservative critics, Lord Cranborne, thought that the Prime Minister was ‘quite convinced that, like the Pope, he is infallible’.187 Chamberlain’s character was to believe what he wanted and ignore the rest. He wrote in a diary that he had started in December 1939: ‘My reasoning power is too strong to allow of my being seriously disturbed by worried thoughts’.188 Adverse press reports, opinion polls and rumours of cabals were to be swatted away like horseflies on Andros. He had learned from his stableman on the island that ‘it no use to wex w’en tings humbug you, cos’ if you wex dey on’y humbug you worser!’189
On Andros, Mr Chimblin’s men had called him ‘strong as de debble’.190 When he finally did speak in Cabinet, Chamberlain generally knew his own mind, and he tended to treat bothersome colleagues as he had his sisal planters (‘I keep tightening the rein of discipline on the people and though they grumble a good deal to each new rule they begin to understand that they have got to work according to my ideas and not according to theirs.’191). Leo Amery perceived Chamberlain to be ‘a much stronger man than any of them, rightly or wrongly’, and that ‘where he is interested in anything, it moves’.192, 193 To another rebel MP, Ronald Cartland, Chamberlain’s often dictatorial habits had made him ‘a Führer now in the Conservative party�
��.194 When push came to shove, complained Macmillan, it was Chamberlain’s word that counted. ‘If Chamberlain says that black is white, the Tories applaud his brilliance.195 If a week later he says that black is after all black, they applaud his realism. Never has there been such servility.’
Black at the end of April, Churchill’s standing with Chamberlain had whitened as the Norway Debate approached. If not yet the hue of the snow around Narvik, then it ensured that the two men would work together to defeat the government’s critics. These critics, Chamberlain told his sister, were ‘not malevolent at all, but merely not very intelligent, and it should be possible to answer them effectively’.196
After the debate, Chamberlain proposed ‘to try and get a week himself at Whitsuntide’ and go fishing, ‘and forget the war’.197, 198 At Whitsun the year before, he had fished the Great Weir at Alresford. ‘More & more I am convinced that much of the art of statesmanship lies in accurate timing, as the fisherman knows when he is trying to get a long cast out.’199
Chamberlain had had to reel out extra line to keep Churchill on the hook, but he maintained his providential belief in what he once described to Hilda as ‘the Chamberlain touch’.200 He dismissed the anecdote in Walker-Smith’s book, how someone remarked after Chamberlain had landed an exceptional fish: ‘Yes, it must be nice to catch something after having been caught himself so often.’201 On that sunny Sunday afternoon in May, despite being momentarily cast down by the newspapers, Neville Chamberlain gathered strength from the fresh colours and scents of the garden that he could see from his writing desk, and he believed that the government would survive the debate.
He ended his letter to his sister: ‘It is a vile world, but I don’t think my enemies will get me down this time.202 I should be sorry if they did because I should then have to leave this lovely place. You couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than it is today. But I must work at my speech.’
12
THE MASTER OF GARROWBY
‘We human beings are the creatures and the subjects of personal relationships.’1
LORD WOOLTON, handwritten note, 1940
‘What a different world it would have been if Hitler and Goering had been to Oxford.’2
LORD HALIFAX, quoted by STUART HODGSON
‘I have a stomach ache.3 I have had it for a week and nobody has asked after it.’
LORD HALIFAX to CHARLES PEAKE, 28 June 1941
On Saturday, Lord Halifax cancelled an early-morning appointment at the Dorchester with the editor of The Times and ‘motored off’ with his wife Dorothy and their dachshund Max to Baba Metcalfe’s new home in the country – ‘which, thanks to her description, we found quite easily about six miles the other side of Chipping Norton.4 A most delightful house of regular Cotswold stone. We were the only guests, and had a thoroughly peaceful evening, seeing ponies, garden etc.’
This was Halifax’s first visit to Baba’s Tudor mansion in Little Compton. Her recently acquired estate, with its horse paddocks, croquet lawn and deer park, had belonged in the seventeenth century to Bishop William Juxon who accompanied King Charles I to the scaffold, not to die but to pray. Over the next five days, Baba performed a comparable role for the Foreign Secretary.
Dining alone with Baba at the Dorchester two nights earlier, Halifax had paused over a meal of rabbit and carrots to tell her that the withdrawal from Namsos was to be announced the next day. ‘It was no good going on,’ he said, ‘the Norwegians offered no co-operation and did not want to fight.’5 This was privileged information. In her diary that night, Baba wrote of Halifax’s fears about Hitler’s next move. ‘A landing by Germans is seriously considered a possibility.’
Shrugging off any pressure to remain in London, Halifax had brought his red boxes with him to Little Compton, in order to compose his speech for the Norway Debate. He had looked forward to seeing Baba’s manor house since the previous July. A collector of ghost stories, Halifax was intrigued by the legend that Bishop Juxon’s spirit continued to haunt an oak staircase on the ground floor, causing Baba’s corgis to bark every time they saw it.
Baba’s daughter Davina was ten years old at the time, and remembers Halifax coming to stay. She says: ‘He should have been knees under the desk.’6
The weekend flight of Ministers from London appalled at least one Junior Minister, Robert Bernays. ‘There still seems to be a most unfortunate, indeed lamentable, failure on the part of the Cabinet to grapple adequately with the situation.7 This is Friday afternoon and they have all disappeared to their country houses.’
Halifax was more culpable than Chamberlain in wanting to leave Westminster behind him. His Private Secretary Valentine Lawford wrote in an unpublished memoir that ‘Halifax might sometimes have to put in weekend appearances at Chequers.8 But he would happily escape into the Chilterns for an afternoon alone with Lady Halifax … and I doubt whether he was anything but relieved to hear on returning that his absence in the hills had coincided with a number of telephone calls from his Private Secretary in London.’
However dangerous the situation confronting Britain, a weekend in the country was, for Halifax, an institution as sacrosanct in its way as his Anglo-Catholic Church. He once wrote to his friend Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, who owned Langliffe Hall in North Riding: ‘There is nothing I should like so much as a weekend at Langcliffe if it was possible.’9 Cadogan complained that ‘even in times of crisis, H goes off to Yorkshire on a Friday afternoon’.10
Halifax in his memoirs had only praise for ‘the well-assorted week-end party in pleasant surroundings and with plenty of scope for easy conversation’.11 He abominated any disturbance. Staying at Garrowby, Halifax’s Yorkshire estate, Baba’s oldest sister Irene had found the telephone system ‘inconceivably incompetent for a Foreign Secretary.12 A private phone rings in the Tower, which is seldom heard, or Halifax is too bored to go up to it, and suggests when he talks on the phone that he fears it is being tapped.’ It was Halifax’s bugbear that ‘the material of the historian is shrinking all the time, as telephones destroy with ruthless thoroughness all value but their own’.13 In this, as in other respects, Halifax shared the prejudice of Baba’s father, who did not wish to be contacted unless for an exceptional reason. When informed at Kedleston by telephone – ‘a disastrous invention’ – that a foreign statesman of the first rank had died, Lord Curzon snorted: ‘Do you realise that, to convey to me this trivial information, you have brought me the length of a mansion not far removed from the dimensions of Windsor Castle!’14
At Garrowby, Halifax preferred nothing more than to button on his oldest clothes, lie out on a rug in the garden, or help with the haymaking. Fox hunting was another obsession: Halifax was Master of the Middleton Hounds. When a mere MP, he had tried with his brother-in-law, George Lane-Fox, ‘to order my life as to reconcile the claims of the House of Commons with as much hunting as we could fit in’.15 In India, Halifax had hunted with the Delhi Hounds whatever the level of political turmoil, and he had not tailored his habits since returning to England. As acting Foreign Secretary when Parliament went into recess, he proposed, according to an incredulous Times journalist, ‘to direct affairs from Yorkshire’.16 Once the war started, Halifax’s weekend absences were manna to Nazi propagandists, who broadcast on German radio how ‘he was wasting time on his Yorkshire moors’.17
Over a Whitsun bank holiday weekend, while cutting his lawns in his shirtsleeves, Lord Curzon, Baba’s father, believing his succession inevitable, had waited for a telephone call to ask him to take over the premiership from Bonar Law. Seventeen years on, Halifax braced himself for a similar summons. Chamberlain was known to view the impeccably credentialled Halifax as his natural heir. Halifax ‘was now generally trusted and would be thought of if anything happened to me’, Chamberlain wrote to Ida. ‘I would rather have Halifax succeed me than Winston.’ This was the opinion of most of the 416 Conservative Members of Parliament, a majority of the 169 Labour Members, and the powerful preference of the King and Queen.
The Prime Minister had not broached the subject to his Foreign Secretary, but Halifax was aware of the clamour.18 His friend Geoffrey Dawson had used his position on The Times to argue since March for a reorganised government, but he doubted ‘if Halifax would make a suitable P.M. even if he would take it’.19 Neither man trusting the telephone, Dawson had hoped to learn more of Halifax’s intentions early on that morning of 4 May. They had arranged to meet at the Dorchester for a walk in the park.
The editor of The Times was an All Souls confrère and shooting companion, whose Langcliffe estate lay eighty miles from Garrowby. Although not the Foreign Secretary’s poodle to the extent that he has been painted, Dawson was in regular touch with Halifax during the Norway Campaign. In the course of a single week, Halifax took the influential journalist to Grosvenor Chapel, walked with him to the Foreign Office, lunched with him at the Dorchester, and they had gone together to ‘a roaring farce’ called Good Men Sleep at Home.20
That Saturday, Dawson was anxious to alert Halifax to a development in the drama to supplant Chamberlain: a letter, which Dawson had rejected for publication, from ‘a leading member of the House of Commons’, in which an alternative Cabinet was proposed, listing Halifax as Prime Minister.21 Dawson had learned that this letter, written by Stafford Cripps, was to be printed on Monday on the front page of the Mail. He hoped in the course of their early-morning stroll to discover Halifax’s response.
Halifax had cancelled at the last moment.
By now, the Foreign Secretary knew that Cripps was not the only advocate for a small, Halifax-led War Cabinet. Cripps’s letter would be followed by one from A. L. Rowse, sponsored by the Labour Party, which Dawson did decide to print. Both letters came on the heels of an approach to Halifax from the former leader of the House of Lords, the Marquess of Salisbury.
Six Minutes in May Page 22