Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  At a group dinner on 11 January at the Reform Club, a resolution was passed to fight for a coalition government, ‘Neville giving place to Halifax with Winston leading in the House’.71 The evening was significant for one other reason. Also present was the Independent Liberal MP Clement Davies.

  In an article headlined ‘Clem the Giant Killer’, Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express went on to describe Davies as ‘a pale-faced Welsh lawyer of fifty-six with thin, sandy hair smeared flat to his scalp, and an everlasting expression of gloom’.72 Broad-shouldered, with huge physical energy, never sleeping more than four hours a night, and blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, Davies was an unlikely David. Because he was not self-promoting, never spoke on the two main days of the Norway Debate, and failed to leave behind any memoirs or journals, he remains a little-known backbencher. His most dedicated supporter, Bob Boothby, felt that Davies was too modest to tell the story himself, but one day it would be told. ‘I have no doubt myself that Clement Davies played the principal part in making Churchill Prime Minister.’73 When a Beaverbrook employee ejaculated: ‘Thank God’ – after Beaverbrook told him: ‘We’ve got a new Prime Minister’– the press lord allegedly replied: ‘Don’t thank God, thank Clem Davies.’74

  Even to the two leading players, the narrative of what they were about to achieve was less than straightforward. Davies wrote to Amery fourteen years later, when they were both puzzling out the chronology: ‘I do deplore the fact that I did not keep a diary.’75 But Amery did keep a journal. With the help of this, plus Davies’s commanding memory and the input of Emrys-Evans, Halifax, Reith, Attlee, Hore-Belisha and Bracken, they pieced together their putsch.

  One of his ancestors had voted for the Reform Bill, but Davies, a director of Unilever, was more at ease with margarine and soap than with plotting a revolt against a Prime Minister cemented in power by a majority of 213. A Welsh farm boy who had won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he gained the best first-class degree in law that Trinity Hall then had on record, Davies’s gift was for friendship and not subversion. Originally a National Liberal, Davies had been a loyal supporter of the government for eight years. Then, on 29 September 1939 his son David was found dead in the office where he worked as a solicitor’s clerk, after an epileptic seizure – one of three of Davies’s four children who would die young, all at the age of twenty-four. The shock numbed Davies, who had earlier struggled with a drink problem. Alcohol made him forgetful, but also aggressive, and when roused, said his wife, the good-natured Davies had a ‘devil of a temper’. He had been dry for two years at the time of his son’s death. He coped with this immense family tragedy, not by retreating into alcoholic binges, but by turning his fighting spirit and fury against the government. His chosen vessel: the All Party Action Group that he had founded a fortnight before.

  Sometimes also known as the Vigilantes, this ‘ginger group’, as Amery called it, gathered for the first time in a committee room in the Commons on 13 September. Thereafter, it met on Tuesday evenings, usually at the Reform Club. A Conservative MP – Boothby – was its secretary, and members of Amery’s group attended, as well as the Labour leader Clement Attlee and his deputy Arthur Greenwood.

  Amery viewed Davies as ‘a very live wire and very anxious to get a move on’.76 The Welsh-speaking radical supplied what Amery outstandingly lacked: the ability to befriend and cajole MPs irrespective of their political make-up. By way of a character reference, Lord Wolmer wrote to Lord Salisbury that Davies was ‘an able and successful businessman.77 Any statement of fact that he makes should be treated with respect.’ A definitive list of membership is hard to compile, but by Christmas, Davies’s All Party Action Group numbered about sixty MPs.

  Clement Davies’s blazing temper found a target in the Prime Minister – who in turn came to regard Davies as a ‘treacherous Welshman’.78 On 14 December, Davies crossed the floor to the opposition benches, the decision forced on him, he wrote scornfully to Chamberlain, by so many instances of failure ‘to take the measures necessary for the vigorous prosecution of the war’.79 Davies likened Chamberlain’s ‘lethargic’, ‘complacent’, ‘smug’ administration to ‘an orchestra without a conductor’, and he argued that ‘the country could not be properly organised until the Government went’.80

  If only Davies and Amery between them could persuade sixty supporters of the government to abstain or better still to vote against it, then the pair believed that they might inflict irreparable damage on the leadership. Chamberlain’s shocking interim statement on 2 May about the withdrawal from central Norway gave them their chance. Norway, Amery wrote to Smuts, ‘brought things to a head with a rush’.81

  The House adjourned at 8.35 p.m. Immediately, Amery telephoned Hoare. ‘The Government must go.’82 He then hurried off to join an emergency conclave convened by Davies to discuss the line for the promised debate.

  Davies wanted to table a motion to stop the House dissolving for the ten-day Whitsun break: it was ‘almost criminal’ that the government should adjourn in such a time of crisis for a holiday.83 Boothby was confident that forty Conservative MPs would vote against the government, which might then collapse. Using ‘big words’, he ‘built new Cabinets’ with Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and a War Cabinet formed of Lloyd George’s son Gwilym, Harry Crookshank, Duff Cooper and Amery.84

  Although flattered, Amery advised caution. He chafed no less than did Davies and Boothby ‘at the complacent methods of the little governing circle’.85 But Amery warned that a confidence motion risked playing into Chamberlain’s hands. It might even reunite the Conservatives, and herd wavering backbenchers to the Prime Minister’s side, giving him a renewed mandate (not unlike that which the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn received in September 2016). Already, Amery had learned that Margesson was plotting to isolate the government’s critics and put down such a motion in order ‘to scotch the Opposition’.86

  Amery’s priority was to present a united front in order to gain a change of government, and not become mired in premature discussions about who might lead it. He pleaded for both groups to bang their heads together and combine with Lord Salisbury’s Watching Committee and, ‘without bothering for personalities’, press for the Lloyd George model of a National government and a small War Cabinet – and no Whitsun holiday.87 Once more, he cited his experiences in the Boer War. ‘I urged that the essential thing was change and if necessary change and change again till the right men emerged – “always swap mokes [donkeys] crossing a river till you find one that won’t founder.”’

  This plan was too cautious for Davies. In full gallop, he hurried off to see Attlee later that evening, and begged the Labour leader to force a division and turn a bland procedural motion into a vote of no confidence.

  The leader of the Labour Party was a small, slight, undemonstrative man of few words, known by his colleagues as ‘Clam Attlee’ – ‘and worthily he sustained the reputation’, said one.88 Even a loyal MP like George Strauss admitted that it was difficult to get Attlee to open up on any subject other than bishops and cricket. Although Attlee and Chamberlain did not get on, they were hobbled by the same reticence. After Attlee became Prime Minister in 1945, he told a Junior Minister: ‘If I pass you in the corridor and don’t acknowledge you, remember it’s only because I’m shy.’89

  In May 1940, Attlee had only recently returned to Westminster after recuperating in North Wales from two prostate operations, and he was not in good health. A full-on fight with the government at this dangerous time for the country would strike the public as unpatriotic, he felt. England required its political classes to continue the electoral truce that they had made on the first day of the war, or unite – not to divide further.

  Attlee’s response to Davies that night was identical to the response given to George Orwell, at about the same time, by two of Attlee’s MPs. George Strauss and Aneurin Bevan had just come from hearing Chamberlain’s statement on the evacuation from Namsos when they met Orwell, who asked them what hope there was o
f ‘unseating Chamberlain’.90

  ‘None at all,’ they replied.

  The Labour leader liked Davies. He had attended what Chamberlain later called Davies’s ‘sordid gatherings at the Reform Club’.91 But he did not believe in his figures. Attlee was on the side of Violet Bonham Carter who had rolled her eyes at Boothby’s claim of forty Conservative No-voters – ‘He has told us that so often & up to now it has usually resulted in 3 abstentions.’92 Not one Conservative had voted against Munich. Experience told Attlee that Tory dissidents huffed and puffed, but scampered back into the fold as soon as Margesson and his ‘Iron Guard’ of Conservative Whips lashed them with the threat of deselection or exposure in Truth magazine. ‘Again and again they will vote against what I believe in their hearts they desire.’93

  As well, Attlee was not much encouraged by Davies’s mutating choice as to who should succeed Chamberlain. In the event that his ‘dear chief’ Lloyd George could not be persuaded, Davies had opted for Halifax, writing to Lord Salisbury on 15 April: ‘To my mind the man who would command the respect and confidence of the nation is Lord Halifax, and I fully expect that if he were Prime Minister he would change the team and reorganise the Government of the nation so as to put it on a virile, thrusting war footing.’94 But a fortnight on, Davies had changed his mind again: he now wanted Churchill for PM. Attlee was against Churchill for a host of reasons which he did not need to enumerate to Davies, the politest being his age. ‘Not Winston,’ Attlee had told Harold Wilson at a recent dinner in Balliol.95 ‘65. Too old for a Churchill.’

  Unless Attlee could be convinced that a division would be followed by action, he was not going to press for one. Out of government for so long, since 1931, he lacked information on the specific causes of the misdirected military expedition. In his clipped sentences, he told Davies that it was really quite impossible to arrive at any trustworthy judgement until Parliament had had the opportunity of hearing what the government had to say. Everything depended on how the House took the Prime Minister’s opening statement.

  Rebuffed, Davies did not give up. The following morning, he visited the ringleader of the 1916 revolt against Asquith.

  When Clement Davies turned up at Stornoway House on 3 May, Max Beaverbrook half expected him. The owner of the Express, a man described by a rival proprietor as a ‘gollywog itching with vitality’, had that morning received a letter from the Liberal peer Lord Davies, most likely written at Clement Davies’s request.96 The letter was an appeal for Beaverbrook to ‘plump for Winston’, and it invoked the fall of Asquith and the rise of Lloyd George in which Beaverbrook had played a significant role.97 ‘Dear Kingmaker, Why have you given up your job? You did the trick in 1916 and, by getting rid of old Squiff at the right moment, you enabled us to win the war which we should probably have lost if he had remained in office. Now, even more than in 1916, we are up against it … My dear Kingmaker, come forth from your tent and put an end to the drifting, muddle and tom foolery of the present crowd.’

  But Beaverbrook refused to intercede for two reasons. First, he did not share the appetite of the Davies’ for Churchill, towards whom Beaverbrook expressed an attitude that was also ‘very changeable’, as Ivan Maisky had noticed.98 ‘One day he might praise him as Britain’s greatest statesman, on another he might call him a “swindler”, “turncoat” or “political prostitute”.’ Second, much as Beaverbrook deprecated Chamberlain, and looked on Halifax with ‘a mixture of scorn and envy’, he did not believe that the Prime Minister could be unseated from outside his own party.99 He told Clement Davies what he had told Leo Amery two days before, and what he wrote in reply to Lord Davies. ‘In every case the revolt that broke the Government came from within.100 The same applies this time. Those who try to do it from without are simply wasting their ammunition.’ No. It would have to be a ‘palace revolution’, or no revolution at all.

  Signals from within the ‘palace’ indicated a united front for the Norway Debate. ‘We have this situation in hand,’ the Chancellor John Simon declared in a bullish address on Saturday.101 ‘You may dismiss from your minds the idea that this is going to be material for some exciting political controversy or combat.’ When the facts were laid before the public, these would show that the action in Norway had been taken on the best advice. Simon repeated his message of solidarity on Monday. It was no good looking for culprits. The Cabinet were collectively responsible. ‘We’ll all swing together.’102

  Inside No. 10, Colville recorded that Margesson, Dunglass and Butler felt that the position was ‘good politically’ and that Chamberlain, though ‘very depressed’ by the hostile press coverage, would carry the House.103 ‘Obviously the Government will win through tomorrow.’

  Chamberlain believed this – the Daily Herald reporting that he had been ‘assured by the intelligence service of the whips department that defection in his ranks has not gone far enough to be dangerous’.104 Halifax believed this – his chief source of news, Charles Peake, told Baba Metcalfe on Monday evening that ‘no one expected anything to happen’.105 So, too, did Churchill, who ‘thought they would get through the Debate all right’.106 By Tuesday morning, the same view had come to be held, grimly, by all three groups of dissenters and by the opposition Labour and Liberal Parties. The government was impregnable, even if it did not mean that MPs were satisfied.

  After the lunch to vet Lloyd George, Tom Jones made his way with Lloyd George and Nancy Astor to the Commons where MPs were gathering to hear Chamberlain’s statement. Jones believed that the ‘P.M. is expected to survive this crisis’, and he held out little hope for a Lloyd George intervention.107 A. J. Sylvester had made a final plea, writing to Lloyd George: ‘I think there is only one thing that is likely to upset the P.M. And I think you can do that.108 That one thing is to make him lose his temper. When he loses his temper he does and says foolish things. He loses his poise.’ Yet even Sylvester felt that the chances of Lloyd George stirring himself to goad Chamberlain had faded. ‘P.M. expects to have a rough time, but both he and his friends think they will weather the storm.’

  One of few observers to scent which way the storm winds were blowing was a political and cultural outsider, Ivan Maisky. The wily Soviet Ambassador belonged to no English group, cabal or set. On that memorable Tuesday, Beaverbrook was having lunch with Maisky at the Soviet Embassy. Before they left to watch the debate, Maisky closely questioned Beaverbrook on the state of the government.

  ‘Should one expect any changes?’

  With a dismissive wave of his arms, Beaverbrook confidently asserted that the government would of course be criticised during the debate, but no serious consequences would follow.109 ‘Chamberlain’s position is secure. The Cabinet will be unchanged … the P.M. is not in danger.’

  Beaverbrook’s certainty surprised Maisky. Brendan Bracken had spoken to him the day before in equally confident terms, convinced that nothing much would happen. Maisky wrote: ‘And he, after all, is Churchill’s alter ego, with an excellent knowledge of all the goings-on in the kitchen of politics. It’s strange. Beaverbrook and Bracken are by all appearances exceptionally well-informed individuals. And yet, I have the feeling that England has approached a crucial boundary; that these debates ought to yield something; that change is in the air …

  ‘We’ll see.’

  The three-day cocoon of radio silence in which Fleming and Lindsay had lived since their departure from Namsos was broken when HMS York berthed at Gourock. The dazed survivors of ‘Maurice Force’ were welcomed back by General Ironside inside the transit shed. Ironside read out a message from the Secretary of State for War, Oliver Stanley, who praised the withdrawal as an operation worthy of the British army’s ‘highest traditions’. Then, in a speech that was listened to with mute astonishment, Ironside commended the Infantry Brigades for their achievement in getting away. ‘Remember the good things: how you beat these people when they came at you – you with none of the implements that they had.’110 He urged them to take pride in all that they had ach
ieved. ‘Don’t think you were driven out of Norway: you were ordered out of Norway, and the great thing is that your discipline brought you out.’

  Underpinning Ironside’s instructions for Tom Fowler and Frank Lodge to keep their heads up and tell people how well they had fought was panic that the Territorials might pass on a different message. Churchill took the line that returning troops had to be regarded ‘as heroes’, yet should not be permitted contact with soldiers embarking for further operations.111 Reith pressed for action ‘to prevent all sorts of stories emanating from uncontrolled interviews in Gourock’, and the question was raised of forbidding members of the armed forces to board trains over the Whitsun weekend.112 It was vital that these heroic ‘Norway veterans’ did not lend substance to the claim of the Daily Mirror columnist ‘Cassandra’ that it was the Germans who had ordered them out of Norway.

  News that the Norway Campaign was to be discussed in Parliament had a galvanising effect on ‘Flea’ and ‘Louse’. As Fowler and Lodge dispersed to their homes only to talk about the bright side, the two Intelligence captains headed for London, ferocious in their determination to cause maximum irritation to the body politic. The errors which they had witnessed had to be communicated and acted upon – or else Britain was never going to win the war.

  On 6 May, Fleming called on Geoffrey Dawson at The Times. The editor had only days earlier recovered from the ‘shattering rumour’ that Fleming was dead.113 Elated to see him, Dawson invited Fleming home to lunch. In private, they discussed the military situation, Dawson hearing the details for the first time. He wrote that Fleming was ‘v interesting and v depressing about the muddles of the Norway expedition’. Afterwards, Dawson asked him to come back to the office and ‘look over’ the Times leader before it went to bed. Fleming’s contribution was to nudge the government into the cross hairs. The paper’s leading article next morning emphasised how Carton de Wiart’s lack of success at Namsos, and Paget’s failure at Åndalsnes, ‘was not their fault or that of their troops’.