Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Two other significant figures emerged out of the political snowstorm that from Monday battered Westminster. One was a pedantic ex-Minister, the author of copious diaries, memoirs and letters, who had helped to bring down Lloyd George’s coalition in 1922 – and before that had been the ‘very soul’ of ‘the horrible intrigues against Asquith’.17 The other was an Independent Liberal MP, a strong-minded and fearless Welsh-speaking lawyer with a brilliant brain, once described by another barrister as having ‘more presence than anyone I’ve ever known’, but who remains strangely absent from popular accounts of this period.18

  Since September this pair had worked tirelessly to press the government into taking a more aggressive approach to the war. When Chamberlain failed to act, they decided to mount an assault on his leadership should the opening present itself. Convening in secret, they recruited supporters from all parties. Composition was fluid. Members from one group attended meetings of the other, and in April they merged with a third band of dissident Parliamentarians, Lord Salisbury’s Watching Committee, made up of senior Conservatives from both Houses. All three groups sought the same end: to organise the discontent that was spreading, and force a change in government as had occurred six weeks earlier in France.

  Leo Amery was the ex-Minister and the leader of the first group.

  Just how wounding was Amery’s subsequent betrayal must be understood in the light of his enormous debt to Chamberlain. The sixty-seven-year-old Conservative MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook had for thirty years been a colleague of the Prime Minister, whose constituency of Ladywood was adjacent to his. Largely thanks to Chamberlain, Amery had been elected to Parliament in 1911. Amery wrote to his wife of a year: ‘I gather I owe it nearly all to Neville Chamberlain who saw and persuaded a number of people …’19

  Since then, how many times had Amery and Chamberlain walked home together to their respective houses in Eaton Square, dined at the Carlton Club, sat beside each other on the train to Birmingham? When his only son Francis was born, Chamberlain asked Amery to be godfather. Yet Leo Amery’s relationship with Neville never grew beyond a certain level. When Amery boasted of ‘knowing my Neville’, it was not from any knowledge founded on intimacy.20 They were good friends who gradually over the course of working together had become old friends, with less and less faith in each other’s judgement. Since the outbreak of war, their relationship had cooled further. By May 1940, they regarded each other with positive distrust.

  Amery’s strongest feeling of connection towards ‘poor Neville’ lay, as did Churchill’s, in his admiration for Chamberlain’s father Joseph, who had filled a father-shaped gap in Amery’s political development. Amery was one of thirty members of the Chamberlain Club, which dined annually at the Mayfair Hotel on Joseph Chamberlain’s birthday. In 1936, Amery created the Chamberlain Centenary Movement – laying a wreath on Chamberlain’s grave, and giving a talk at the Albert Hall to 8,000 disciples of ‘old Joe’. One of several things that irked Neville Chamberlain about Amery was the way that he adopted Joseph Chamberlain’s protectionist principles as though Leo Amery were his true heir and not his sons.

  Amery was cranky and pugnacious because he had had to fight his way up. His own father had been an English forestry conservator in north-west India who disappeared with his mistress after Amery was born, and died penniless prospecting for gold in British Guiana, leaving Amery’s mother, a Hungarian Jew, to bring him up. She took Amery first to Cologne, where his teachers beat him, then to England. To hide his Jewish ancestry, Amery changed his middle name from Moritz to Maurice. Boys at school called him ‘Pocket Hercules’. One of these boys was W. S. Churchill.

  The House of Commons benches were crammed with MPs who had attended the same school and university. A disproportionate number went to Harrow – like Margesson and Hoare – but by no means all. Lloyd George once took Geoffrey Shakespeare back to his school near Criccieth, where they came across an elderly red-faced tramp with a bulbous nose. Lloyd George produced a pound note from his wallet and said to Shakespeare: ‘Give this to that poor fellow.21 He used to be an old school friend of mine.’

  At Harrow, Amery was a year ahead of Churchill, standing out from him as much cleverer, routinely coming first in exams; and as a prize-winning athlete and gymnast. But neither Amery’s brain nor his muscular physique was what drew him to Churchill’s attention. Rather, it was down to Amery’s small size – never growing beyond five foot four – that he received from Churchill, then a new boy, his bullying baptism.

  What occurred in the summer of 1889 became a dinner party story that was recounted by Churchill with glee, and set the template for their long, tense, always complicated relationship. Amery was ‘standing in a meditative posture’ on the edge of the school swimming pond when a ‘red-haired, freckled urchin’ mistook him for a fellow new boy and pushed him in.22 Churchill afterwards explained: ‘How could I tell his rank when he was in a bath towel and so small?’fn1 23, 24 A furious Amery got out, hared after Churchill, seized him ‘in a ferocious grip’ and hurled him into the deepest part of the pool. They made up, but the incident was not forgotten, and was on Amery’s mind forty-five years later when he humiliated Churchill in the Commons during the India Bill, giving him ‘the best ducking he has had since he first pushed me into Ducker in 1889’.25

  The prize-winning prefect in Amery never fully accepted being overtaken by his cheeky, opportunistic junior. After Ducker, there was an incident in Natal when as war correspondents together they shared a tent on the rain-sodden veld near Estcourt. Amery asked Churchill to wake him up if the armoured train was sent down the line next morning to conduct a reconnoitre inside Boer territory, and then fell into a deep sleep. When he woke, Churchill had gone – the train, too. Amery heard firing in the distance as the Boers galloped down to ambush it. Churchill liked to tease Amery that had he accompanied Churchill that morning, Amery would have been taken prisoner as well, and so shared in the scoop without which Churchill would never have had the materials ‘for lectures and a book which brought me in enough money to get into Parliament in 1900 – ten years before you!’

  When, twenty-five years later, Churchill re-crossed the floor to join the Conservative front benches, Amery detected a pattern in which Ducker, Natal, and the circumstances of Churchill’s escape from the Boer prison camp all fitted together.26 Churchill’s behaviour was that of a man out for himself, happy ‘to desert his Liberal colleagues with the same swift decision that led him to climb over the railings at Pretoria’.27 If Amery felt a residual gratitude to Chamberlain, then towards Churchill he never relinquished his earlier feelings of suspicion, envy, irritation and resentment. Almost to the last, Amery was ‘at sixes and sevens’ over whether he wanted Halifax to succeed Chamberlain, or Churchill.28

  A loquacious perfectionist, Amery spent the next decade before he entered Parliament in editing the seven-volume Times History of the South African War. He brought with him into politics the same attention to detail, plus some fairly mountainous ambitions. He mused about his political future on the day that Chamberlain arranged for him to stand as an MP, in the seat that he went on to represent until 1945. ‘What I shall achieve in it, I cannot tell.29 I know I have great weaknesses, but also great strength, and if I really grow in inner and outer stature during the next five years, and if fortune is not unkind, I may really play my part in getting big things done.’

  As to achieving those ‘big things’, Amery trusted in a characteristic that he appeared to have shared with Chamberlain: his near-clairvoyant ability to read a situation correctly where others might not. It was ‘an immense advantage’, he wrote to his wife, to have ‘the absolute conviction of being in the right’.30 To be right for Amery was even more necessary than to be liked. Decades passed before he intuited that what he understood as his divine gift was also, politically, a mortal flaw. By the time of the Norway Debate, thirty years on, he had discovered that ‘being right, and still more having been right, are tremendous obstacles to securing the
places where it really matters being right!’31

  Not that Amery was on the ball every time. Rather as Churchill had been impressed enough to commend Mussolini as ‘the greatest law-giver among living men’, so, after meeting Adolf Hitler at Rosenheim, Amery had found the Führer ‘a bigger man, on the whole, than I had expected … We got on well together, I think, owing to the fundamental similarity of many of our ideas.’32, 33

  A passionate skier and mountaineer, there was something Sisyphean about Amery; always plummeting down slopes and anxious to scale the next peak, yet for all his ‘alpinising energy’ never satisfied with the summit conquered.34 Even when he made the first ascent of a 10,940-foot mountain in the Canadian Rockies that had been named after him – ‘a steep snow-crowned tower soaring gracefully into the the sky’ – a blizzard prevented him from taking in the view.35

  His wife Bryddie was Canadian. When someone once asked her Amery’s whereabouts, she replied: ‘Oh, Leo’s on the executive.’36 If the position of chief executive eluded him – the only presidency he achieved was President of the Alpine Club – then he had form as a kingmaker, and in the 1920s was an active participant at two turning points in the nation’s political life.

  Amery was instrumental in preventing Baba Metcalfe’s father from assuming the leadership from Bonar Law, ensuring that Baldwin did: ‘I … made him P.M. in 1923.’37 A year before that, Amery had taken part in ‘the revolt of the Under-Secretaries’ which overthrew Lloyd George’s coalition and brought in Bonar Law.

  At the time, Amery occupied Geoffrey Shakespeare’s position as Financial Secretary to the Admiralty. Bonar Law rewarded Amery with the Admiralty itself, to the outrage of Chamberlain and of Churchill, who thundered unselfreflectingly that it was ‘a reward of successful mutiny which is certainly an unwholesome spectacle’.38 Almost Amery’s first act on becoming First Lord was to march over to the mark on the Board Room wall which recorded Nelson’s height, and measure himself. Amery was pleased to discover that though shorter than Nelson he stood taller than Napoleon.

  Chamberlain’s half-brother Austen remarked of Amery that ‘if only he were half as big again he would before now have reached a much higher place’.39 It was not his height alone that held him back. Amery’s ponderous and long-winded manner was a compelling restraint, his earnest sub-editorial pedantry earning him a reputation in the Commons as one of its two or three most boring speakers. In the crisis of 1931 Chamberlain wrote to Halifax in Simla to say that Amery was ‘listened to with undisguised impatience and in the House he does not seem to carry much weight.40 Why? No doubt if he were bigger ’twould be better. But lots of little men have been impressive enough … I think it is because he has no sense of proportion and insists on little points with the same exasperating pertinacity as on big ones.’ In Cabinet, Amery’s fellow Ministers were constantly looking round for someone to ‘pull his coat’ and stop him talking.41

  It became a tedious refrain: were Amery a half a head taller and his speeches half an hour shorter he would have become Prime Minister by now. His diaries show that he never renounced that possibility. Since the ‘moral collapse’ of the party leadership, he wrote in December 1931, ‘I have been much freer and have increasingly asserted my authority and been increasingly looked to as a leader.’42 Seven years on, he listened to a speech by Violet Bonham Carter, and thought that ‘with such gifts of eloquence I might easily have been Prime Minister long ago …’ Meanwhile, he pawed the ground, believing that ‘I shall be justified one of these days’.43, 44

  Yet when Neville Chamberlain, his former patron, took over in May 1937, the new Prime Minister declined to invite Amery into his Cabinet, giving as excuse that ‘there are always more horses than oats’.45 Amery was despondent. ‘What a difference I would have made to his Government both in fact and in public estimation.’46 In July 1939, Amery reported that the Manchester Guardian ‘spoke of my “persistent exclusion” as one of the minor mysteries of politics’.47

  It mystified Amery, though not many others. Balfour described him as ‘the cleverest bloody fool alive’ who was ‘frequently most devastatingly right, but never knew how to play his cards in the game of politics’.48 His biographer David Faber says: ‘He had the most incredible thick skin, never letting friendship get in the way of speaking his mind.’49 What Amery discovered to his political cost was that whenever he spoke his mind it got in the way of friendships. Colleagues perceived him in not quite human terms. To Hankey, he was ‘a scheming little devil’.50 To Macmillan, he was ‘combative and persistent, like a well trained terrier’.51 To Spears, he resembled ‘a wise and benevolent beetle’.52 Even to Field Marshal Wavell, as reported by Amery, ‘I had the best brains in the country and the heart of a lion.’53 Such a combination was not congenial to Chamberlain. The Prime Minister preferred merlins to griffins.

  Amery had the highest hopes that the war would give him a chance, but when the idea of including Amery in the Cabinet was put to Chamberlain he dismissed it with an ‘irritated snort’.54 Amery had been a truculent critic of some of his policies, and on 2 September 1939 had caused Chamberlain to turn around ‘as if stung’ when, following Chamberlain’s statement, the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood rose, saying that he spoke for his party – whereupon, to loud cheers, Amery shouted: ‘Speak for England!’ implying that Chamberlain had not.55 Amery was correct to predict that his ‘most insulting’ intervention, as Chamberlain afterwards called it, though not recorded in Hansard (and sometimes remembered as ‘Speak for Britain!’), ‘killed off all chances of Neville asking me to join his Government’.56, 57 Chamberlain perceived Amery from now on as one of ‘the smaller fry’ who, disappointed at not getting office, were ‘really traitors just as much as Quisling’.58

  Out of office for so long, Amery found it ‘very hard not to be critical or contemptuous of the brains and courage of the crowd in office’.59 With dismay, he had watched the promotion of men like Inskip and Stanhope and Stanley (‘he has not been a success in any office that he has held hitherto’) – even Churchill.60 They had disagreed on many aspects, and not only over tariff reform which had caused Churchill to leave the Conservative party in 1904. Amery was Churchill’s most constant opponent intellectually in the 1920s, and in the 1930s he took opposite positions over India, the League of Nations, and the Abdication, and had little sympathy for Churchill’s proposal of a Grand Alliance with Russia. While Amery was ‘just senior to Winston in actual years, I am, I think, a good deal his junior in body, and not yet fossilised in mind’.61 Still convinced that his contribution ‘would make a real difference to the winning of the war’, he wrote to Geoffrey Dawson: ‘It is absurd that I should not be being made use of today.’62 Hurt and frustrated, Amery lapsed back into the role of fearless prophet, the self-appointed Cassandra who told unpalatable truths, regardless of the consequences, ‘always seeing further ahead or deeper into problems than my colleagues and contemporaries’.63

  On a shelf in his Eaton Square library where he had plotted Lloyd George’s downfall, intrigued against Asquith, and scuppered Curzon, among the novels of Proust and histories of the English Civil War, was a thin volume entitled Notes on Forestry. Written by Amery’s father before he absconded, the book offered advice on the best way to fell ‘distorted or damaged trees which although they may dominate, will not make good timber’.64 Fretting for a role to justify his ambitions, Amery dedicated himself to toppling Chamberlain according to the tenets of his forester father. ‘Every tree threatening to interfere with the healthful development of trees of the more valuable classes should be remorselessly cleared off.’65

  A tree-felling team was in place already – an informal group of dissident Conservative backbenchers who had congregated around Anthony Eden after his stunning resignation as Foreign Secretary in 1938 in protest at appeasement. When Chamberlain drew their sting by bringing Eden and Churchill into the government, Amery took over as leader. Originally nicknamed ‘the Glamour Boys’, the twenty or so members included H
arold Macmillan, Louis Spears, Duff Cooper, Paul Emrys-Evans and Ronald Tree. Another member was the National Labour MP Harold Nicolson.

  The Amery Group, as it now became known, dined every Wednesday at a round table in a back room of the Carlton Hotel’s restaurant in Pall Mall, and made it their aim ‘to harass the Government until it conducted the war as though it meant it’.66 Out of them all, Amery was the most suspicious about the War Cabinet’s resolve. His father had visited forests in Germany and had written instructively about their ‘yield of fuel’. When Amery tackled Kingsley Wood, then the Air Minister, about bombing the Black Forest to spark off a huge conflagration, Wood’s stuffy reply made Amery incandescent: ‘Are you aware it is private property? … Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next.’67 Wood’s ‘insane ban’, Amery later railed, would prevent ‘our airmen even bombing German aeroplanes on Norwegian aerodromes during the first days of the invasion of Norway’.68

  Amery had been at this miserable point before. With Churchill in Natal, he witnessed the same picture of ‘helplessness and vacillation’ – which he had then written about in the second volume of his Boer War history.69 Forty years on, not much had changed.

  With the Boer War in mind, Amery outlined his group’s revolutionary motives to South Africa’s Prime Minister, Jan Smuts. Amery wrote that he wanted ‘not merely to upset the Government, but to make possible a National Government including all Parties.70 I have pleaded for this ever since Munich, as well as for a small War Department free of departmental duties.’ What was essential was a proper structure of government – which Chamberlain did not have.