Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Halifax was one of the few people not overawed by Churchill, ever since marching into his office in March 1921 to say that he had no more wanted to be Under-Secretary to him than Churchill wanted Halifax appointed. Experience had taught Halifax that the best way of dealing with Churchill was to stand up to him. Although too often yielding to Churchill’s temperament, Halifax did ‘butt into’ Churchill’s tirades on a regular basis.44 ‘The latter does not really mind, but grunts a bit over his cigar, and is as friendly as ever afterwards.’

  They were two people as different in habits as it was possible to be, divided irreversibly by India and Munich, and by their physical, spiritual and mental attributes – Churchill, small, fat, and a massive imbiber, who twice failed to get into Sandhurst; Halifax, lean, towering and abstemious, and a Prize Fellow of All Souls. In Valentine Lawford’s phrase, they spoke ‘different languages’.45 For all Churchill’s proclaimed respect for Halifax, he viewed him very suspiciously, and vice versa – Halifax protesting in his diary: ‘I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks.’46 Diana Holderness says: ‘Halifax didn’t like Winston, and Winston didn’t like him.’ Yet as opposites, they had pedalled in tandem surprisingly well, as Baba Metcalfe observed. ‘Edward and Winston are a very good combination as they act as a stimulus and brake on each other.47 The former is able to check the times when Winston desires to stampede into action.’

  Rab Butler had waited in Halifax’s room at the Foreign Office to hear about the meeting with Chamberlain. After Halifax came back up in the lift, he told Butler that the issue boiled down to this: ‘Could that restraint be better exercised as Prime Minister, or as a Minister in Churchill’s Government?’ Even if Halifax chose the first role, Churchill’s qualities and experience ‘would surely mean that he would be “running the war anyway” and Halifax’s own position would speedily turn into a sort of honorary Prime Minister’.48

  Halifax’s opinion remained remarkably constant. He may have wanted to be Prime Minister, but not this sort of Prime Minister, and not at this moment, with Churchill breathing down his neck. Halifax had admitted on 2 May that he was no military strategist, and not competent to say whether Trondheim should have been attacked; he was a ‘layman’ in all things military, he later told Peake.49 He very probably realised that he himself did not have the qualities of a Prime Minister conducting a war in such grim circumstances; and if he did so reason, he was correct, says David Dilks, ‘for, while quick in the uptake, he was slow to make up his mind about big issues, and frequently referred to the fact’. Alexander Cadogan saw Halifax every day and was never convinced of his boss’s suitability. ‘I think he is not the stuff of which a P.M. is made in such a crisis.’50

  On the other hand, Halifax recognised the value, militarily, of Churchill’s energy and belligerence. Back in February, Halifax had predicted that a Churchill premiership would arise only if the war was going badly, ‘and he would in those circumstances be exactly what the nation needed’.51 It was Halifax’s ‘cool altruism’, wrote another of his biographers, which made him decide that he was not the man for this hour, and why he felt, as he told Butler, ‘W. had better run it all’.52, 53 In this respect, too, he was like Lord Curzon, of whom Curzon’s daughter Irene wrote: ‘My father put his duty to his country and his Party before all petty personal disappointment.’54

  Briskly, Halifax explained his decision in the letter that he wrote to Baba Metcalfe four days later. ‘I simply don’t think it would have been at all a tolerable position for me to get into.’55 As for why not, there were, he insisted, ‘many reasons’ which enticingly he promised to ‘go into’ when they next met. ‘When will that be? I hope soon. Let me know.’

  Probably the greatest power that Halifax ever exercised was to rule himself out. Umpteen arguments can be advanced to explain his refusal. His peerage; his emotional entanglement with Curzon’s youngest daughter; his innate aversion to ‘unnecessary activity’; his genuine conviction that Churchill would be a better leader at this dangerous time; his pragmatic calculation that if Churchill failed quickly, as the Norway Campaign suggested was likely, and as Halifax may ultimately have believed, then Churchill could be swept clean away, leaving Halifax sole heir. (‘I don’t think WSC will be a very good P.M.,’ he wrote to Baba in the same letter, ‘though I think the country will think he gives them a fillip.’) All of these considerations in varying degrees played their part in Halifax’s reckoning. But perhaps the most convincing proof of his reluctance was his stomach ache.

  In April 1916 in Ypres, Chamberlain’s cousin Norman had felt a sinking in the stomach which caused him to understand the expressions ‘having cold feet’ and ‘having no stomach for a fight’.56 He wrote: ‘My poor tummy did feel as if it had retired and got the most awful indigestion for a time! I never realised the real literal connection of such slang before!’

  The same sort of physical manifestation appears to have afflicted Halifax towards the end of his Thursday-morning meeting with Chamberlain. ‘The conversation and the evident drift of his mind left me with a bad stomach ache.’57

  Halifax wound up their talk by repeating that if Labour said they would only serve under him, as he knew now from Butler was their position, then he would tell them that he was still not prepared to do it, ‘and see whether a definite attitude would make them budge. If it failed we should all, no doubt, have to boil our broth again.’

  With the obduracy of the planter who is damned if his crop won’t grow, Chamberlain left it open for Halifax to change his mind, to re-boil the broth as it were. He told Halifax that ‘he would like to go over the ground again’ in the afternoon with ‘Winston and me together’.58 Obedient to his stubborn nature and to his occult faith in ‘the Chamberlain touch’, the Prime Minister had not accepted Halifax’s position. When the meeting ended at 11 a.m., there was still lodged in a corner of Chamberlain’s head the possibility that all it needed was one more push, one more appeal to Halifax’s sense of civic duty. Chamberlain held fast to this belief for the rest of that day, though only to close advisers like Kingsley Wood and John Simon did he confide these thoughts. When Chamberlain saw Simon at 4 p.m., he maintained that his inclinations ‘were to resign and advise the King to send for Halifax’.59

  20

  THE LIMPET

  ‘Politics are an uncertain career.1 A man who one year is hailed as the epitome of all that is best in England or even as the saviour of the country, may be execrated the next as an example of lethargy or surrender. But that is our system.’

  VISCOUNT MERSEY, 9 May 1940

  ‘The sooner some of these damned Labour people are made to join the Cabinet the better it will be.’2

  CUTHBERT HEADLAM MP, 5 May 1940

  Even as he coaxed Halifax into his shoes, Chamberlain was laying separate plans for a coalition with Labour. Since 3 September he had made two unsuccessful overtures to the opposition, whose official view until 8 May had been ‘complete non-cooperation’.3 He now reached out a third time, and requested that Clement Attlee and his tall, bibulous deputy Arthur Greenwood ‘come into the administration and take their share of responsibility for the war’.4

  Chamberlain was on the telephone to the Labour leaders when, early on 9 May, the King’s Private Secretary rang No. 10 anxious to know the Prime Minister’s position following the division, and spoke to David Margesson. The Chief Whip had been analysing the votes: 481 MPs had voted out of 615, with 41 of its supporters voting against the government, including 33 Conservatives, of whom nearly half were in uniform. 88 Conservatives had not voted; of these, up to 60 were deliberate abstentions.fn1

  Parliament’s protest would not be ignored, Margesson assured Hardinge. All were agreed that ‘the Government would have to be constructed on a broader basis’.5 To this end, Chamberlain was even now contacting the opposition parties, and proposing a fundamental reshuffle to include the dismissal of his most unpopular Ministers. According to Labour’s foreign affairs sp
okesman Hugh Dalton, Chamberlain ‘was telephoning personally from 8 a.m. that morning, trying to conciliate opponents of yesterday.6 He seemed determined himself to stick on – “like a dirty old piece of chewing gum on the leg of a chair” one Tory rebel said to me. He was offering to sacrifice Simon or Hoare, or even Kingsley Wood, if that would propitiate the critics.’

  Chewing gum was not the most insulting epithet used to describe Chamberlain’s adhesive behaviour over the next thirty-six hours. Dalton likened the Prime Minister to an old limpet, ‘always trying new tricks to keep himself firm upon the rock’.fn2 7, 8 To Ellen Wilkinson, he clung to office like ‘an old widow in a boarding-house, jabbing at critics with knitting needles’.9 Brendan Bracken had long recognised his tenacious grip. ‘To me Chamberlain appears a tough old gentleman who will fight with all his might against any “real national government” in which he will not hold the first place.’10

  Chamberlain’s manoeuvres can be seen in the context of his overnight change of heart. He had gone to bed having made up his mind to resign. Yet to resign was to ignore one of the most vital lessons of his upbringing: ‘Remember,’ his dominating father would say, ‘never withdraw.’11 On Andros more than forty years before, a sense of despair had assailed Chamberlain after the failure of his first crop – before the strict reminder came from Birmingham that his family motto was Je Tiens Ferme. Early on 9 May, a transformation like the one in his thatched hut on Mastic Point seems to have taken place in the Prime Minister’s bedroom at the top of No. 10. Almost from the moment that Chamberlain woke, Dunglass recalled, he ‘fought like a tiger to keep power’.12

  Chamberlain had slept on Churchill’s reassurance of the night before that the division was not fatal. Chips Channon was another who believed this. ‘I think, with a majority of 81, Neville could still make minor changes and remain.’13 Chamberlain’s sister Ida added her uncritical support. ‘The only comment I have heard on the debate so far was a Mr Beckett recently come to Odiham who meeting Hilda in the Post Office hurried up to congratulate her on the result of the debate! So he at any rate considers the Govt.14 had a triumph.’ In short, there is evidence that Chamberlain was tempted by the siren chorus of Churchill, Channon, Colville, the example of ‘the good British public’ like Mr Beckett, and the voices of the party faithful. And what he concluded after listening to their seductive message was that the prospects of restoring confidence in his administration were not so negligible as Halifax believed.

  Another motive for fighting on was to keep the government’s reins away from Churchill, whose conduct in the Norway Campaign had stirred up fresh worries about how he might behave were he ‘loose’. From first light on that Thursday morning, Chamberlain was bombarded with letters urging him to stay put for this very reason. Lord Hankey wrote a handwritten plea from the Treasury Chambers. ‘You are the only man who can hold Winston, who is amazingly valuable, but whose judgement is not 100% reliable.15 You are also the most resourceful member of the Cabinet, bar none.’ The chairman of the 1922 Committee, Sir Patrick Spens, wrote to say that Chamberlain alone had the confidence of the great mass of moderate Conservative opinion, and his removal from office would lead within weeks to ‘a grand National disaster’ – i.e. Churchill – a sentiment with which Sir Auckland Geddes, Commissioner of Civil Defence for the South-West Region, was in total concurrence.16 ‘So far I have met no one in the Region who would like to see Winston Prime Minister.’17 A letter even more flattering came from Sir Robert Gower, MP for Cheltenham. ‘There is no member here who is more in touch with his fellow backbenchers than I am, and I can assure you that you have personally the fullest confidence and the great affection of almost without exception the whole of your Party colleagues in the House, including the large majority of those who voted in the Opposition Lobby last night.’18

  If the feeling at the Beefsteak, where Harold Nicolson had lunch, was unanimous ‘that Chamberlain must go’, then opinion within Downing Street tugged in the opposite direction.19 Back in the saddle, Chamberlain told his sisters that he was inclined to take his guidance from those letters he had received from MPs who ‘had nothing against me except that I had the wrong people in my team’.20 A telegram from his chief agent in Sheffield spurred him in his new resolve: ‘SHEFFIELD STRONG FOR CHAMBERLAIN NO RESIGNATION OR PANDERING TO SOCIALIST FAILURES AND CONSERVATIVE NITWITS’.21

  The most poignant request for Chamberlain to stay on and fight was a letter from a Sidmouth auctioneer whose nineteen-year-old pilot son had died over the North Sea during the early stages of the Norway Campaign. The auctioneer had observed ‘with utmost detestation’ the attacks made on Chamberlain.22 ‘Our boy went out to meet his end, I believe, with unflinching courage. You, I know, will meet and destroy all attacks made upon you with the same high spirit and the like noble object in mind.’ No appeal seemed more calculated to arouse Chamberlain’s renewed sense of patriotic duty, vanity, and determination not to roll over and die.

  Chewing gum, limpet, old lady, tiger. Chamberlain’s manipulations on 9 May more resembled one of the writhing native octopuses which as a young plantation owner he had landed on the deck of the Pride. By mid-morning, his tentacles had uncoiled in every direction, to independent and contradictory ends. With one tentacle, Chamberlain wrapped his suckers around Halifax to take over should he resign. Still hoping that he might not have to resign, Chamberlain put out feelers to bring in Attlee and Greenwood. He would extend another tentacle to loyalist MPs like Herbert Williams and Victor Cazalet, reassuring them of his radical plans to reconstruct the Cabinet along purely Conservative lines.

  There were also reports that Chamberlain had thrashed out, humiliatingly, to reel in Leo Amery and his dissidents.

  Many of the records of these days of tumult are deeply unreliable. A prime example is Ivan Maisky’s account of the Prime Minister’s overture to Amery. ‘At nine in the morning, Chamberlain summoned Amery and told him that he thought a serious government reshuffle was in order.23 Measures should be taken, however, to prevent Labour from coming to power. The government must remain in Tory hands. The Prime Minister went on to offer Amery any portfolio he wanted (except the P.M.’s), including those of Chancellor of the Exchequer or Foreign Secretary.’

  The notion that Chamberlain was peddling Halifax’s job one hour before he summoned Halifax to vet him for the premiership strains the imagination, even if Maisky’s account was corroborated by Dalton who had heard it from Macmillan. In a slightly different version, the not always trustworthy A. L. Rowse claimed that Amery did not meet Chamberlain face to face, but received a personal telephone call. ‘A fact that Amery himself told me … is that the morning after the debate Chamberlain rang him up, expressing regret that no place had been found for him hitherto, would he now join the government.’24 It would have been their first communication since the debate. Yet it is quite incredible that the graphomanic Amery would not record such an approach. The sole mention in his diaries is a second-hand rumour emanating from the Cabinet Office that Horace Wilson ‘was proposing … that Neville should offer me some office’.25 Amery dismissed this as ‘truly typical of the Horace Wilson methods,’ and there is no further evidence that Amery and Wilson met, or even spoke. At any rate, Amery ‘categorically refused the offer’ according to Maisky.26

  Rumours that Amery might have gone to see Chamberlain fed into a much wilder scenario that echoed Greenwood’s description of the House on the outbreak of war. ‘If someone had come along and told me “Jo Stalin has gone to Rome and is kissing the Pope’s toe”, I should have believed him!’ On 9 May, the tension and suspense reached the same pitch of frenzy.27 When the Cabinet met at 11.45 a.m. in the Commons, a peevish Alexander Cadogan wrote that ‘the air was full of rumours of impending resignations’ and ‘we had to wait about, as that blasted H of C was sitting and wrangling and intriguing’.28, 29

  In this hectic atmosphere, charged with plots and counter-plots, there was talk that a third candidate would be the solution.

 
His speech telling the Prime Minister to go had suddenly made Leo Amery a credible successor in one or two people’s minds. He was not tarred with the Munich brush. His record was even cleaner than Churchill’s, having been out of office since 1929. He was one of few contemporaries whom Churchill could not browbeat; and he had a reputation for honesty. Amery had long regarded himself as a potential leader. As S. J. D. Green has summarised it, for a few hours on 9 May ‘anything – even this strange outcome – seemed plausible’.30

  Amery’s ambition for the top job reached back to his first day in the House in 1911. His hopes had recently mounted as the editor of The Times grew more critical of the government. When in January Dawson alluded to the untapped skills of ‘ex-ministers’, Amery had no doubt that his All Souls comrade ‘was referring to me’.31 (He was not.) Then, on the morning after his speech on 7 May, Amery’s name appeared in the Daily Herald as someone who ‘according to some prophets may be in the next reconstituted Government’. Twenty-four hours later, when Leslie Hore-Belisha took a self-interested look at the ferment in the Commons, he concluded that ‘the turn of the wheel’ might bring none other than Leo Amery ‘into Downing Street’.32

  Amery was a man of extraordinary abilities and courage, but frequently a nightmare to deal with. It is scarcely conceivable that Churchill, Halifax and Eden would have wished to serve under him. On that particular Thursday, however, Hore-Belisha divined that all certain bets were off.