Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  No account survives of Churchill’s 5 p.m. appointment with General Paget, assuming that it took place. But Paget would have felt hardly more optimistic about the situation in central Norway than Fleming or Lindsay. The night before, Air Marshal Charles Portal, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command since April, had sent nine Wellingtons against Stavanger. Only one had managed to locate the airfield and bomb it. The following night, Portal would try again with nine Whitleys: they would be recalled without fulfilling their mission.

  All hinged on Cork’s operation 400 miles north. A victory at Narvik in time for his speech: that was what Churchill had hoped for. He had been drumming his fingers for news of this ever since 9 April.

  Narvik was the one constant. ‘My eye has always been fixed on Narvik,’ Churchill would tell the House that evening.57 For the next three days, his fixation to seize Narvik shadowed his capture of the premiership.

  The War Cabinet had finally given the go-ahead for the Narvik operation the day before, after Churchill pleaded that if Admiral Cork decided to attack then ‘nothing should be done to stop him’.58

  Later that evening a signal arrived from Cork reaffirming his willingness to make the assault. ‘It is as a symbol of victory before the world that I have understood occupation of Narvik was desired and why I have urged that we should take a risk to occupy the place.’59

  Logistical problems remained. On the same day, 7 May, Colonel Faulkner had made another reconnaissance and chosen a beach on which the battalion was to land. But the navy told him that ‘they could not provide craft to land there’, so the whole operation was again postponed.60

  ‘In the brown hours, when baffling news comes, and disappointing news …’ The message that Cork was forced to put back the invasion of Narvik to 10 May left Churchill helpless and fuming.61 Then Cork had postponed the operation again until after General Auchinleck’s arrival on 12 May. Churchill would have no triumph to break to the House.

  Suddenly, the continuing stalemate in the Arctic weighed heavier than it had the previous evening. Even then, Halifax had believed that Churchill would need ‘all his time’ to recover from the effect of Roger Keyes’s assault.62 The attacks by Amery and now by Lloyd George had complicated Churchill’s dilemma still further, and intensified the pressure on his forthcoming speech.

  In having to make the closing case for the government, Churchill was required to act as the supreme apologist for an administration that he had criticised until being invited to join it eight months earlier. John Reith wondered ‘if any speaker had ever been in a more equivocal position’.63 In the debate in the House of Lords on that Wednesday afternoon, the opposition spokesman Lord Snell made the acerbic observation that everyone knew – ‘at least until recently’ – Churchill’s opinion of the government, but ‘today he is put up to save them from shipwreck, and we are tonight to witness the strange sight of both the horse and its rider apparently going the same way – temporarily’.

  Yet Narvik was not Omdurman, when Churchill had shouted to an NCO as he drew rein: ‘I hope you enjoyed that!’ Over in the Commons, the American reporter Ed Murrow had earlier observed Churchill slumped in his seat, ‘playing with his fingers, and watching the House and its reactions with great interest’.64, 65 It had prompted Murrow to reflect that the future of the government rested in the First Lord’s rather pudgy hands. ‘If he should openly blame the political leadership of the country for the reverse in Norway, Mr Chamberlain’s government might be forced to resign.’66 But how could Churchill blame anyone? As Conservative MP Quintin Hogg pointed out, this was a naval operation for which Churchill was himself ‘departmentally and in fact personally largely responsible’.67 Churchill’s dilemma was characteristic and self-defining, wrote Alan Campbell-Johnson, Political Secretary to Archie Sinclair. ‘A peculiar spirit of irony, which seemed resolved always to distort and confine Churchill’s splendid genius, operated once again in this the most critical moment of his career.’68

  As Big Ben struck off another hour, Churchill waited with fading expectations to hear some redeeming news from Norway that he could work into his speech, and so conclude the debate on the uplifting note that he had looked forward to rehearsing with Clementine.

  Once before, feeling vulnerable, he had written to his wife: ‘I have been sometimes a little depressed about politics and would have liked to be comforted by you.’69 His valet described how husband and wife shared ‘the almost telepathic understanding which one finds very occasionally between brother and sister’.70

  Colville noticed that Clementine’s judgement ‘often saved her husband from unwise acts on which he had impetuously determined’.71 On this afternoon, Halifax had Baba Metcalfe to turn to; Chamberlain had his wife Anne, who sat in a seat in front of Baba. Without Clementine there to advise and support, Martin Gilbert wrote, ‘Churchill was lonely and felt he had no ally with whom to share his deepest worries and concerns.’72 At this most vital time, Churchill’s isolation was the deepest that it had been since the start of the war.

  On the other hand, says Andrew Roberts, ‘thank goodness Clementine wasn’t there.73 She was a Liberal. She hated all his best friends, like Beaverbrook and Bracken, who were working so hard to get him a job.’

  It is not known how much of his speech, if any, Clementine had vetted before she caught her train to Hereford. Churchill wrote notes for some of it on the back of an envelope. His routine would have been to have had the rest typed out on octavo sheets and then retyped in large print on smaller sheets, eight inches by four, in short separate lines, in what Halifax called ‘Psalm form’. The words were short, too. Halifax once sat with Churchill to prepare the King’s speech to Parliament, and noticed that he used ‘monosyllables wherever possible, and always Anglo Saxon derivatives in preference to Latin’.74

  Unlike Lloyd George, who was able to deliver his speech impromptu, from a few key words, not having written it out, Churchill seldom spoke in public without a text, or without having rehearsed what he was going to say. He could easily spend eight hours preparing a forty-minute speech, before memorising it in front of a mirror. The fear of drying up haunted him.

  What Leo Amery called the ‘Winstonian diction’ was not a spontaneous phenomenon.75 In December 1900, Churchill delivered one of his earliest speeches, about his escape from the Boers, to an audience in Canada. ‘He evidently does not make any pretensions to oratory,’ decided the critic of the Ottawa Evening Journal. ‘As a lecturer he is somewhat handicapped by a lisp.’ A defect in his palate gave Churchill’s voice an echoing timbre which was mocked by Conservative backbenchers in Churchill’s maiden speech, and caused him to admit to the Duke of Devonshire at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, two years later, how nervous he was of talking in public. ‘Quite unnecessary,’ harrumphed the Duke.76 ‘When you get to the hall, march in boldly, take your seat confidently on the platform, sit down and look around you calmly, stare people in the face and when you have had a really good look at them all, say to yourself, “I’ve never seen such a crowd of damn fools in all my life.”’

  Small, tongue-tied, with a speech impediment, Churchill was not constructed to be an orator, which was why he took no performance for granted. He told his doctor, Charles Moran, that whenever he rose in the House ‘he was always fearful that he might blurt out something that would get him into trouble, and that he would wake in the morning to find that he had blighted his prospects’.77 Either that, or he would break down in the course of a speech like his father, who was suddenly struck with aphasia while speaking. This had happened once before to Churchill in the Commons in 1905, wrote Moran. ‘He had found himself on his feet, with his mind a complete blank, while the awful silence was broken only by friendly encouraging noises; he stood his ground until he could bear it no longer; back in his seat, he could only bury his head in his hands.’78

  He made several more disastrous speeches. In March 1933, Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s impetuous ‘acolyte’ as Robert Bernays called him, had ‘scampere
d’ about the House telling Bernays that he had already heard Churchill’s speech ‘and what a thundering indictment it was going to be’.79 Bernays then witnessed the House dissolve into ‘a contemptuous cascade of laughter, and from that moment Winston was done. The theatricality went out of the atmosphere, the electricity went out of his voice. He floundered bravely on. He had lost the House. Members began to chatter to one another and one by one they drifted out … The rest of the debate he sat in his corner seat scowling, crumpled-up by the magnitude of his failure.’ The Churchill Flop was the topic for days afterwards, wrote Bernays. ‘Men are really saying that Churchill is done for … Of course, Winston will come back. That is the essential greatness of the man, that you knock him down and everybody says he won’t get up again and then he is back in the ring as fit and fierce as ever.’

  Churchill suffered another flop in 1934, after Leo Amery skewered him during the India Bill; and again in 1936 during the Abdication crisis, when Churchill, loyally supporting Edward VIII, was stopped in mid-speech by savage cries of ‘Drop it!’ and ‘Twister’, and stormed out of the Chamber in tears, convinced that his ‘political career was finished’.80

  Yet it was not, and the era of his best speech-making had hardly begun, when he would discover what Lord Woolton called ‘his quite extraordinary capacity – which is probably the greatest national asset that we have in Government – for expressing in Elizabethan English the sentiments of the public’; when, as the Rector of Oslo University afterwards put it to him, his speeches ‘broke like sunshine through the dark clouds of German oppression to warm and cheer our hearts’.81, 82

  Later, Churchill liked to visit an eminent throat specialist called Punt who squirted his vocal cords with a mysterious spray. Churchill would sing a brief scale and depart. After his controversial broadcast on the BBC in January 1940 attacking the neutrals, he told Halifax: ‘Asking me not to make a speech is like asking a centipede to get along and not put a foot on the ground.’83

  Even so, he preferred a live audience in the Commons to a microphone. As Maisky astutely perceived, ‘Churchill sees the world in terms of the effect of a parliamentary performance.84 And is it any surprise? Parliament is in the blood of every Englishman, and Churchill has been warming the benches of Westminster for more than 40 years.’ If Lloyd George was the House’s father, Churchill was its son. He spoke from the heart when, in 1950, he addressed MPs in their new Chamber, telling them ‘I am a child of the House of Commons.’85

  The Commons was more than its Chamber, though. All morning and afternoon, dissident and opposition groups had hurried together in upstairs committee rooms and offices, to discuss what action to take.

  An orderly transfer: that was what Lord Salisbury had hoped for at the Watching Committee’s first gathering at 11.00 a.m. in Arlington Street. He had ‘begged’ Nicolson, Amery, Macmillan, Spears and the others not to vote against the government if a division came, ‘but to abstain from voting’.87 Their mood changed when Margesson sent Conservative MPs a telegram underlined with three thick black lines, the most urgent summons a Member could receive. Emrys-Evans made his way to the Lords after Salisbury had spoken in the debate there, and told him that the position had gone too far ‘and that abstention was really impossible’.88

  At 6 p.m. Harold Nicolson joined members of the Watching Committee for a meeting with Davies’s All Party Action Group. ‘We agree that we must vote against the Government.’86 A second emergency meeting was organised for 9 p.m., shortly before Churchill’s speech, to adopt this position formally.

  The debate in the Commons was still going on downstairs when Amery took the chair for what, in effect, was a get-together of all three dissident groups. Boothby had persuaded Amery to assume control, flattering him that he was the obvious choice following his triumphant speech the evening before.

  What fascinated Nicolson was to see who were the Conservative MPs marching into Committee Room 8. The most rebellious were dressed in military uniforms. Nicolson was heartened by the spectacle of this ‘unexpected mutiny on the part of all those who had always been regarded as the firmest supporters of Mr Chamberlain’.89

  There were sixty-two government backbenchers on active service in the army, with a further sixteen in the RAF, and seven in the navy. Like Fleming and Lindsay, these men had first-hand experience of the inadequate state of Britain’s armed forces.

  Discontent had spread to all ranks. When the Conservative MP Somerset de Chair asked his colonel in the Household Cavalry for leave to travel up to London for the debate, Lord Weld-Forester questioned him, suspicious. ‘Which way are you going to vote?’

  ‘Against the Government,’ de Chair replied.90

  ‘You can certainly go in that case.’

  Another uniformed MP was the ‘baby of the House’, John Profumo, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant with 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry. He had never voted before in a debate, and his torment was made worse by the fact that David Margesson had been one of his sponsors.

  Margesson had sent a special Whip to MPs serving with the military overseas. Already that afternoon, fourteen members of the Service Members Committee had met, with thirteen declaring that they would vote against the government. A handwritten letter to Amery from Commander Stephen King-Hall, a National Labour MP, expressed their collective anger. ‘I regard the war situation as so serious that I want you to know that I am being driven to the conclusion that if this goes much further, it will be necessary in the National Interest for those who believe that a radical change in the Government is necessary, to go into open opposition to the present administration.91 I want you to know that is how strongly I feel.’

  It was when Nancy Astor with hands on hips told Harold Nicolson of her intention to vote against the government that he realised he had no alternative but to follow suit.

  Between the Watching Committee, Amery’s group and Davies’s All Party Group, Nicolson calculated that they might achieve Boothby’s figure of forty no-votes. By now, news had leaked out of a fourth group of some thirty disaffected Conservative MPs led by Herbert Williams. In Margesson’s office the alarm bells were springing off the walls from all directions. Harold Nicolson told his Canadian readers: ‘Feverishly did the Whips try to split these groups, and Private Secretaries scurried backwards and forwards making promises and offering compromises and suggesting reconstructions.’92

  The most active scurrier was the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary Alec Dunglass, who accompanied Chamberlain to both days of the debate. On 8 May, Dunglass arranged for Chamberlain to meet Herbert Williams the following afternoon, and any other Members that Williams cared to bring with him. The promise of a face-to-face talk with the Prime Minister had the desired calming effect. Williams advised his associates that ‘it was our duty to support him’.93

  Another potential rebel MP who required Dunglass’s pacifying skills was Quintin Hogg, a serving officer like Profumo, and for nine months in a unit with no equipment, training or transport. Hogg spilled out his fury in a letter to Margesson. ‘The fact is that there is no young officer whom I know who can wholeheartedly support the Government so long as our men are neglected and betrayed by the Administration for which the Government are responsible.’94 Hogg accused the Speaker of discriminating against ‘men in khaki’ – as FitzRoy, himself a former soldier, referred to Hogg’s fellow servicemen. Hogg went on: ‘Do you seriously want the P.M. to be supported by nobody but fools & rascals? Or that the voice of serving men should never be heard?’

  Hogg was temporarily neutralised when, on what must have been one of the most overloaded days of his premiership, Chamberlain carved out time to see this troubled young officer to allay his fears. Half-expecting Chamberlain to haul him over the coals, Hogg ‘only found a man of affectionate nature, courtesy and great humility.95 He asked me my particular complaints. I found them difficult to specify and blurted out some relatively trivial matters … I was unable to get it across that what was wrong was not detailed, b
ut the whole spirit of Parliament and the nation and that the thing I wanted was a change. I remember now the gentleness, courtesy and generosity with which the doomed man treated his inarticulate and presumptuous young supporter who ventured to question his authority and make his task more difficult. I went out in greater agony than I had entered.’

  While Hogg battled with his conscience, Dunglass fought to mollify an increasingly seditious Watching Committee. At some moment late in the afternoon, he tracked down Emrys-Evans and asked whether his senior Conservative friends would vote for the government if they could see the Prime Minister the following morning and place their demands. Dunglass gave the strongest hint yet that the Prime Minister was prepared to carry out ‘a drastic reconstruction of the Government’.96

  But Emrys-Evans was unimpressed. ‘I told him that it was too late.’97 The government should have been reconstructed at the beginning of the war. The Watching Committee, he went on, was ‘thoroughly dissatisfied with such Ministers as Simon and Hoare, and with Sir Horace Wilson and his intolerable interference in politics and his evil influence on policy. I also explained that the attitude of the Whips’ Office had been disastrous and that we did not think the Prime Minister had the right temperament for a Head of Government in wartime. I nevertheless promised to put his proposal before my friends, and a meeting was summoned for 9 o’clock that night.’

  News that Herbert Williams’s group had decided to support Chamberlain did not deter a single dissident MP who assembled under Amery’s chairmanship. Harold Macmillan recalled how they all then unanimously agreed to vote – ‘and to vote against the motion.98 So the die was cast.’ Amery deputed Emrys-Evans to inform Dunglass of their ‘fateful decision’. To Amery’s satisfaction, Emrys-Evans did so by explaining that their view had been summarised in the closing sentence of Amery’s speech the night before – ‘In the name of God, go.’