‘Winston, he then added, looked up & said, “Edward, Edward, allow me to congratulate you. You have spoken better than I have ever heard you, and you have put the thing in a nutshell. I really think there is nothing more that anyone can add.” The matter was resolved accordingly and the meeting terminated.’
Recorded thirteen months after the event, Peake’s version is interesting for several reasons. It is the first to mention any silence – which is broken by Margesson. Chamberlain unambiguously declares his hand for Halifax. Margesson comes down emphatically on the side of Churchill. The matter was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction by teatime.
Is this what happened?
Churchill claimed to have been ‘neither excited nor alarmed’ when he entered the Cabinet Room.12 Yet the meeting took place only three days after he had suffered a spasm of fear in the same room, and accused Halifax of high treason. To Chips Channon, briefed by Chamberlain after the meeting, the discussion seemed to have been conducted in a spirit of strange and intense politeness, with Churchill, Halifax and Chamberlain saying to one another: ‘You must be Prime Minister’ – and each one, Channon observed drily, no doubt wanting it for himself.13
Questioned by Amery well after the war, Halifax insisted that his recollection was ‘perfectly clear as far as it goes’.14 In Halifax’s version, written up or dictated the following morning, the four men had entered the room and ‘sat down to it’ at the long table.15
The twenty-five-foot dark table was covered with a green cloth. From contemporary accounts, there were black leather blotters on it, Georgian candlesticks, water carafes and tumblers, and a green telephone with a scrambling device. Chamberlain sat in the only chair with arms, with his back to the marble fireplace, the coals unlit on that hot afternoon, and facing the tall shuttered windows that looked out over an L-shaped garden with an oak tree and the low wall onto Horse Guards Parade. Halifax, Churchill and Margesson sat in three of the eighteen red leather padded chairs. In a table plan of the daily War Cabinet sketched by Cadogan, Halifax is seated with his back to the window, directly opposite Chamberlain, and with Churchill on his left. This was Churchill’s recollection, though he makes no mention of the Chief Whip. If the traditional placements were observed, Margesson would have sat across the table beside Chamberlain, in a chair normally occupied by the Chancellor.
In Halifax’s account, Chamberlain recapitulated the situation. He had made up his mind to go. Either Halifax or Churchill must take over – though Chamberlain had no plans to vanish from the scene. ‘He would serve under either.’16 But first he needed formally to ask the Labour leaders before they went to Bournemouth if in principle they would join the government under Chamberlain, or under another Conservative leader.
Consulted for his opinion, Margesson said that unity was essential and probably impossible under Chamberlain. Following the Prime Minister’s lead, he ‘did not at that moment pronounce very definitely’ between Churchill and Halifax.
Yet interviewed by Beaverbrook in May 1960, five months after Halifax’s death, Margesson disputed Halifax’s account that he had remained neutral, and also the Halifax–Peake version in which, by contrast, Margesson had favoured Churchill. Instead, what the Chief Whip had answered when Chamberlain asked him who the House of Commons would prefer to succeed to the premiership was ‘that the House of Commons would prefer Halifax’.17 This appears to chime with Chamberlain’s declared preference – for some reason glossed over by Halifax in his diary, but not in Halifax’s summary to Peake the following June; nor, intriguingly, in the account that Halifax shared hot off the boil with his Permanent Under-Secretary on getting back to his office, and which Cadogan wrote down that night. In the Halifax–Cadogan rendition, the earliest to be recorded and for all the obvious reasons the most reliable, Chamberlain is reported as saying that Halifax ‘was the man mentioned as the most acceptable’.18
Churchill’s much later account of what Chamberlain said is not helpful. ‘I do not recall the actual words he used,’ Churchill writes in The Gathering Storm.19 But he did remember Chamberlain’s implication that Churchill’s ‘heated controversy’ with Labour at the end of the Norway Debate was ‘an obstacle to my obtaining their adherence’.
Whatever Chamberlain and Margesson said to Halifax – and the evidence points to one or both of them preferring Halifax – it caused the return of his morning’s pain, ‘and my stomach ache continued’.20
Most likely it was at this juncture that Chamberlain turned to Churchill, looking at him sharply in the version that Churchill ‘several times’ afterwards rehearsed to Colville, and said: ‘Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a Peer should not be Prime Minister?’21
This was the trap that Kingsley Wood had warned Churchill about at lunch.
In the Churchill–Colville version, Churchill felt ‘that it would be difficult to say yes without saying frankly that he thought he himself should be the choice. If he said no, or hedged, he felt sure Mr Chamberlain would turn to Lord Halifax and say, “Well, since Winston agrees I am sure that if the King asks me I should suggest his sending for you.”’
This was also the trap that Bracken had supposedly warned Churchill about, not once but three times – late the night before (Moran), yet again that morning (Beaverbrook), and a third time only a few moments earlier as Bracken walked with Churchill across Horse Guards Parade ‘& told him he must on no account open his mouth, but let the decision come his way’ (Bracken in his 1955 conversation with Amery).22
Before the myth of the great silence took hold, a number of contradictory reports sprang up about how quickly, or how slowly, Churchill had answered, and in what tone of voice. In 1942, Cadogan told Lord Killearn that Churchill ‘at once and much to Halifax’s bewilderment replied that he certainly thought he had better qualifications and should be offered the job!’ In 1946, Malcolm Macdonald insisted that Churchill’s reply was very brief: ‘In this crisis there is only one possible Prime Minister – and that is me.’23, 24 Violet Bonham Carter learned soon after the meeting that it was not Churchill who replied, nor Margesson, but Halifax – ‘I think I should be rather a fish out of water.’25 A variation on Halifax’s intercession was heard by Joseph Kennedy in October 1940, with Halifax saying: ‘Perhaps I can’t handle it being in the House of Lords,’ to which Churchill expressed blunt agreement.26 ‘I don’t think you could.’ In 1946, Randolph Churchill revealed that Halifax had said that he would not be captain of his own ship with Churchill on board. Churchill’s response: ‘I am sure you wouldn’t.’27
In Churchill’s version, published in 1948, he did not open his mouth. He remained silent, and ‘a very long pause ensued’.28
If a notable silence did follow the Prime Minister’s question to Churchill, then this was not the first provoked by Chamberlain. Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt witnessed how Hitler had sat ‘completely silent and unmoving’ when Chamberlain’s ultimatum was translated to him on 3 September.29 After an interval ‘which seemed an age’, Hitler turned to von Ribbentrop, Chamberlain’s former tenant in Eaton Square, who had remained standing by the window, and asked with a savage look: ‘What now?’
‘The Great Silence that saved Britain’ was how Beaverbrook baptised the moment in the Cabinet Room. ‘Here was the most eloquent man of his age never at a loss for the striking phrase and the resounding peroration.30 Yet he turned the tide of history on that critical occasion by refusing to speak.’ Beaverbrook remained convinced that if Churchill had spoken, he would have kept to his original decision that he was ready to serve loyally in any capacity. ‘Patriotism would have compelled him to accept a position which was certain to be difficult and might have become intolerable.’
Churchill admitted to being verbose. ‘Usually I talk a great deal.’31 Only when standing or sitting at the easel was he known to remain silent. Brush in hand, he became all-absorbed. ‘One sees everything with a different eye; the shadow cast by a lampshade; by the telegraph posts on the road; all the things
I never noticed before I took up painting.’32 This did not mean that he always recorded faithfully what he saw. In a different context, Chamberlain once wrote to his wife: ‘Accuracy of drawing is beyond his ken.’33
The scene that Churchill painted in The Gathering Storm is, as Amery pointed out to Halifax, ‘very circumstantial and dramatic’.34 He might have been composing it for posterity, ‘hamming up’ in the words of one of his researchers.35 Further details can be added from the myriad accounts. He sucks slowly at his cigar. Then swivels round in his chair, turning his back on the others; or, if he is standing, goes over to the window and gazes out at Horse Guards Parade. The only sound is the quarterly chime of the Horse Guards clock. The cracked and tinkling note prolongs the silence, for which Churchill made this claim: ‘It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day.’36
It is accepted as inconceivable that the silence lasts so long.
By exquisite coincidence at about this time a minute’s silence is being observed in a small churchyard in Herefordshire where Churchill’s brother-in-law has been buried with military honours. The two pipers have played his coffin through the churchyard to the graveside. A young bugler from the Royal Engineers has just sounded the ‘Last Post’. The bugler – named D. Coles, according to the Hereford Times – is about to raise the brass shank mouthpiece to his lips to break the silence with the ‘Reveille’.
A voice returns him to the room. Halifax is speaking, a tenor voice pleasant to listen to, according to Halifax’s Private Secretary, even if ‘one was inclined to look far above him as he spoke, as though it had been less from his mouth that one would catch his words than from an echo up in the rafters’.37
The Foreign Secretary is making his own renunciation. It is everything that he has told Baba Metcalfe at lunch – everything he has told her at dinner the previous evening, at the weekend in Little Compton, at their tête-à-tête dinners in the Dorchester – but without mentioning Baba.
‘I then said that I thought for the reasons given the P.M. must probably go, but that I had no doubt at all in my own mind that for me to take it would create a quite impossible position.38
‘Quite apart from Winston’s qualities as compared with my own at this particular juncture, what would in fact be my position? Winston would be running Defence, and in this connection one could not but remember how rapidly the position had become impossible between Asquith and Lloyd George, and I should have no access to the House of Commons. The inevitable result would be that being outside both these vital points of contact I should speedily become a more or less honorary Prime Minister, living in a kind of twilight just outside the things that really mattered.
‘Winston, with suitable expressions of regard and humility, said he could not but feel the force of what I had said, and the P.M. reluctantly, and Winston evidently with much less reluctance, finished by accepting my view.’
Chamberlain had tried to drag Halifax by the hair to take his place, rather as Mussolini two weeks earlier had accused Germany of attempting to pull Italy into the war. But as Mussolini explained: ‘Luckily, I am bald.’39 In short, Halifax said that ‘he would prefer not to be sent for as he felt the position would be too difficult and troublesome for him’.40
The meeting was over by 6 p.m. Halifax was relieved, if not yet free of the woods. He told Amery in 1954: ‘The question of the future Prime Minister was practically settled, subject to two points that were still uncertain, i.e. when the change should be made and what would be the attitude of Labour, both as regards Neville and as regards anyone else.’41 Until this uncertainty was cleared up, it obliged Halifax to remain on standby, since it was still entirely possible that Labour would refuse to serve under Churchill – ‘there were a good many forces both inside and outside the Labour Party who were not at all anxious to have Winston’.42 There was, too, the wisp of a chance that Labour would agree to serve under Chamberlain. A Junior Minister, Euan Wallace, was even now hearing reports that Labour’s negative attitude towards Chamberlain might be changing, ‘opposed by a growing body of opinion inside the Party’.43
Chamberlain had wanted to summon the Labour leaders to ask them ‘the definite question whether the Labour Party would join a Government under me or if not under someone else’.44 Their official confirmation was necessary, ‘if only to justify my resignation to my own party’. He requested that Halifax and Churchill wait for their arrival.
The two men went out into the garden and sat in the bright sun, having a cup of tea while Chamberlain kept an appointment with Lord Camrose.
Churchill’s bodyguard had noticed that ‘sitting in the sun did not suit Winston’.45 Nor was tea a Churchillian meal. He had refused it three months before, at Admiralty House in Portsmouth, on medical grounds. ‘My doctor has ordered me to take nothing non-alcoholic between breakfast and dinner.’46 Offered a cup of tea on another occasion, he spluttered: ‘Good God, I think my wife drinks that.47 Get me a brandy.’
Chamberlain’s wife Anne had not left her seat during the Norway Debate. She returned to Downing Street soon after the House adjourned at 3.49 p.m. The diplomat Lord Killearn described Anne as ‘a curious detached sort of woman … One feels that her mind is miles away all the time.’48 Had she looked down from her top-floor window on that blistering afternoon, what might she have observed? Two old men seated side by side on a painted iron garden seat. Even as her husband’s fate was being decided would Anne have recalled gazing as a child into a crystal ball with W. B. Yeats, and seeing two strange figures under an archway? Or would the ilex have drawn her attention? She associated the oak with a walk that she took with Neville on the morning that he flew to Munich. As they passed the tree, her husband had stopped and said: ‘I would gladly stand up against that wall and be shot if only I could prevent war.’49 It is impossible to know what was going through her mind because, like her husband, she published no memoirs.
Nor did the two men on the bench leave behind a record of their conversation. Discreet, polite, with the prospect of a German attack at any hour, it was a very English scene. A momentous interval in both their lives, in the history of the nation – yet neither man saw fit to record a single pleasantry that they exchanged while they sipped or ignored their tea, and talked, in Churchill’s recollection, ‘about nothing in particular’.50 The other absent voice is David Margesson’s. The Chief Whip died in the house of his mistress, in Nassau, and not even his daughter knows where he is buried.51
Behind another window, Lord Camrose finished his meeting with Chamberlain. ‘Just as I left he told me that I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I was the first person outside the three people immediately concerned who knew what his determination was.’52 On his way out, Camrose passed Clement Attlee and the tall, lithe figure of Arthur Greenwood coming down the corridor, ‘both of them rather pale and evidently in a state of tension’.
Attlee and Greenwood had come from a charged two-hour meeting with Clement Davies to agree on Labour’s position.
If Samuel Hoare and John Simon were regarded as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the government, then the Labour leader and his deputy were the opposition’s Laurel and Hardy. Meeting them together, Maisky observed that Greenwood did most of the talking, constantly addressing Attlee with the words, ‘Isn’t that so, Clem?’ while Attlee replied, ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’53 If Attlee’s habit of not saying much had earned him his nickname ‘the Clam’, then the jaunty Greenwood, by contrast, had a booming Yorkshire voice, dropped cigarettes wherever he went, and ‘drank a lot, as is his wont, while Attlee merely sipped his cherry brandy’.
The forceful Davies had summoned the pair to the Reform Club as a matter of urgency having heard that Attlee was wavering. Attlee’s hesitancy arose from a talk with the Liberal leader, Archie Sinclair, whose memories had gone back to the last war, and caused him to stammer out his doubts – which Attlee admitted to sharing. Attlee had served at Gallipoli, leaving with the last party
from Anzac in December 1915, and he had witnessed the chaos that ensued when the ‘donkeys’ in command were changed mid-river. Reports of an imminent German invasion moved Attlee and Sinclair to consider letting the Prime Minister stay temporarily in office. On this subject, Labour’s leader had become ‘platitudinous and indecisive’, according to Davies, who was very upset.54
Davies not only wanted Chamberlain to resign immediately. He also no longer believed that the Labour Party should champion Halifax, whose credentials to place the government ‘on a virile, thrusting war footing’ the Norway Debate had thrown into question.55 Davies warned: ‘The tension is increasing: the overwhelming blow may fall at any moment through Holland and Belgium on us and the French … and we are still a disorganised country, meandering along as if time were on our side with all the complacency that self-satisfaction can give.’
Mercilessly calling in a favour, Davies turned to Greenwood for help in talking Attlee out of his support for the Foreign Secretary. Davies knew that Greenwood was ‘in a bad way with drink’.56 He was also conscious that the Labour deputy leader would not be able to ignore his appeal.
A reformed drinker, Davies was sympathetic to Greenwood’s alcoholism. He told Amery how, on the eve of the war, he had found Greenwood ‘hopelessly drunk, took him home to his flat in Dolphin Square, dumped him in his bed and then came back in the morning. Looking round for breakfast he found nothing but a bottle and a half of whisky which he poured into the sink and then took Greenwood back to the Reform for a good breakfast and put his Unilever car at his disposal and so helped him to be in a condition to “speak for England” a day or two later.’
Now it was Greenwood’s turn to bail out Davies.
In the same club in Pall Mall where Clement Davies had dried him out in September, Greenwood sat and argued alongside the former barrister. For two hours, they piled pressure on Attlee. Davies used his energetic power to charm, and his formidable legal skills – which had made him the highest paid young lawyer in Britain, and after that a KC – to put the case against Chamberlain, arguing that he had lost all credibility, and pleading with the Labour leader to resist any offer that Chamberlain was bound to propose. It took until 6 p.m. to convince ‘the Clam’ that the urgency of the situation made it vital to appoint another Prime Minister. Further, this should not be the Foreign Secretary, who was too closely identified with Chamberlain’s failed policies.
Six Minutes in May Page 42