Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Meanwhile in Bournemouth, the Labour leaders went downstairs to put Chamberlain’s questions to their party’s National Executive.

  The discussion did not take long, even though many delegates were more talkative than usual. As anticipated, the Executive Committee refused categorically to serve under Chamberlain, but agreed to be a part of a government under another Prime Minister, on condition that Labour was ‘sufficiently represented’ in the key positions. The meeting ended at about 4.30 p.m. In Downing Street, the third and last War Cabinet of 10 May was getting under way.

  Still not having heard from Attlee, who had promised to try and telephone the result by 2 p.m., Chamberlain had told a secretary to ring the Highcliffe Hotel and ask whether the Labour leader was in a position yet to answer the two questions that Chamberlain had written down for him the previous evening. Attlee was preparing to leave with Greenwood to catch the 5.15 p.m. train to Waterloo. He dictated his reply from one of the public telephone boxes in the hotel lobby. ‘The answer to the first question is, no.78 To the second, yes.’ He then read out the resolution which the National Executive had approved, he stressed, unanimously. Labour, Attlee slowly dictated in his quiet, clipped voice, were prepared ‘to take our share of responsibility in a new Government which, under a new Prime Minister, would command the confidence of the nation’. Dalton had inserted the phrase ‘under a new Prime Minister’. Attlee, dithering to the last, had doubted whether the words were necessary, but Dalton in his booming baritone had insisted. ‘If you don’t make it absolutely plain, the Old Man will still hang on.’79 It was 4.45 p.m. when Attlee put down the receiver.

  Neville Chamberlain had had a hunch that the war would end in the spring of 1940. It ended for him shortly before 5 p.m. when a secretary entered the Cabinet Room and handed Attlee’s typed-out answer to Horace Wilson, who read it and without comment slid it along the green cloth to the Prime Minister.

  Every one of the eighteen people around the table knew the significance of that sheet of paper, what it portended. Intently, they watched Chamberlain’s lean face as he took in its contents, his hair white over the ears, in one description, as if he had laid a palm covered with powder on his temples.80

  Was Labour prepared to serve under Chamberlain, as recent feverish reports were suggesting? Or was Labour still refusing to serve under him, but declining to accept Churchill as Prime Minister? And that being the case, would Halifax be pleaded with at this eleventh hour, which history had taught was his favourite moment, to fulfil his duty and step in?

  The scrutiny of the Prime Minister’s face by the First Lord was unusually keen. Seated opposite Chamberlain, between Halifax and Pound, Churchill had by now sketched out the nucleus of his War Cabinet, ‘in anticipation of the decision’, as Halifax later wrote to Amery, ‘but feeling quite sure in his own mind that the decision was inevitable within an hour or two’.81 Amery had been to see Churchill after lunch ‘when he told me something of his plans for the Cabinet and indeed suggested to me that I might take on Supply’.82 Churchill then told Amery ‘under the pledge of strictest secrecy that he meant to keep Neville in the Government as leader of the largest party’.83 These plans were dust if Labour decided not to back Churchill.

  Not Winston, Attlee had told Harold Wilson. He was too old. Now he had Norway on his back. Then there was his long and hostile history with Labour, an antagonism unchanged since 1922, when as Secretary of State for War, Churchill had accepted an invitation from the President of the Cambridge Union, Geoffrey Shakespeare, to oppose the motion That this House considers the time is now ripe for a Labour Government. ‘Labour was a class party,’ Churchill had informed the undergraduates.84 ‘Labour made and kept men equal.’ To cries of ‘No’, he retorted: ‘It is no good saying “no”, it is so; dead equality except for the political bosses.’ Churchill had won that debate by 651 votes to 265, going on to stand as an ‘anti-Socialist’ candidate in the 1924 election. Since then, Colin Coote had observed, there had been ‘not one injurious epithet in the English language which the Socialists had not applied to Winston’ – and Churchill had retaliated in kind, right up to his recommendation to Chamberlain, immediately following the Division, that the government required no help from the Socialists.85 Less than forty-eight hours later, could Churchill succeed in winning over Labour’s political bosses by bringing them into government? Out of all the men around that Cabinet table trying to read Chamberlain’s face, Churchill had shown perhaps the least interest in forging a coalition with Attlee and Greenwood.

  Professional chairman to the end, Chamberlain impassively put aside the piece of paper and carried on with the War Cabinet. Operation ‘Royal Marine’ was fixed for 9.00 that night. The Allied bombing of the Ruhr was postponed until the following evening. It was agreed to warn British troops stationed in Britain about parachutists attempting to land.

  The final item concerned the political situation at home. Chamberlain said that he had thought matters over, and since Labour had said yes to service under another Prime Minister, he had decided ‘in the light of this answer’ not to wait, and he proposed to see the King that evening and tender his resignation.86 All members of the War Cabinet were expected to offer their resignations to the new Prime Minister. Immediately afterwards, at 5 p.m., Chamberlain told a gathering of Ministers not in the War Cabinet ‘that he would be willing to serve in the new Government, but could not indicate the name of his successor since it would be for the King to decide who to send for’.87

  Colville voiced the squeals of the Downing Street staff. ‘We at No. 10 had hoped so much that the King would send for Halifax.’88 Their hopes were kept flickering by the highly unlikely possibility of George VI, who ‘is understood not to wish to send for Winston, being able to persuade Halifax to recant his determination not to be P.M.’89

  But it required prompt action if the Foreign Secretary was to pip Churchill to the post. For a small inner gang of hangers-on led by Dunglass, and including Colville, Butler and Channon, the fact that Chamberlain lingered in Downing Street – having at first promised to go ‘at once’ to the Palace – was the spur for them to act. Channon wrote: ‘Neville hesitated for half an hour, and meanwhile Dunglass rang me – could not Rab persuade Halifax to take it on?’ Dunglass then suggested to Colville that they walk over to the Foreign Office and talk to Butler.90

  Rab Butler at once expressed doubts when approached by this posse from No. 10. ‘Easier said than done,’ he remarked thirty years later.91 Urged on by Rucker at Hardinge’s request, Butler twice already – that morning and the day before – had had earnest conversations with ‘the Pope’, as he called Halifax. But the Foreign Secretary was steadfast in his decision not to enter the lists: ‘He would not be Prime Minister.’92 Even so, when egged on by Dunglass, Colville and Channon, Butler consented to go and speak personally to Halifax ‘for one last final try’. Butler rang through to Valentine Lawford to let Halifax know that he was on his way.

  Butler’s father, a member of the Indian Civil Service, had passed on this advice to his son: ‘You can do a great deal by getting to a meeting ten minutes early.’93 Butler’s weakness was his unpunctuality. When he arrived at Halifax’s room, he was told by Lawford, ‘the rather “Second Empire” secretary’ as Channon called him, that the Foreign Secretary had slipped out to the dentist.94 By neglecting to warn Halifax in time that Butler was coming to see him, Channon suggested that Lawford ‘may well have played a decisively negative role in history …’ Yet a handwritten note by Lawford in the printed edition of Channon’s diary states the following.95 ‘I am not sure of this! E[dward] didn’t want to see Rab again, obviously.’96

  Along with his stomach ache, Halifax’s dental appointment has since become a motif of his determination not to be Prime Minister. Lawford wrote in another note: ‘It was H who insisted on going to the dentist – and didn’t want to be P.M. anyhow, at all.’97 To a disappointed Colville, Halifax’s behaviour was ‘true to form’.98

  A peculiar featu
re of Friday 10 May is the number of politicians affected on that day by dental issues. After lunching at the Beefsteak, Harold Nicolson had travelled down to Sissinghurst. ‘It is all looking too beautiful to be believed, but a sort of film has obtruded itself between my appreciation of nature and my terror of real life.99 It is like a tooth-ache.’

  Even as news came in of Germany’s invasion of Holland and Belgium, Lord Sankey was having ‘two teeth stopped’ by his dentist, Mr Brown.100 ‘He says they ought to be all right for a time now, thank God.’

  It is not known whether Halifax shared the same dentist as Sankey – or as Chamberlain, who in February ‘had to bolt off to my dentist! A tooth had been worrying me for several days & was showing signs of flaring up.’101 But Halifax was regarded in the Foreign Office as something of a dental expert. A month before, Britain’s Ambassador to Brussels told Cadogan that he wanted ‘to stay 2 or 3 days for his Dentist! Referred him to H!’ Plus, it is perfectly possible that Halifax did need dental treatment, and this was not a variation of his psychosomatic stomach ache earlier.102 He wrote in his diary on the eve of the Blitz, three months later: ‘Having been tormented with toothache for about a week I was persuaded to have it out last Friday with a local anaesthetic.103 The sequel has been that it ached worse than ever, and has just begun to abate. Very bad for the temper.’

  With Halifax in the dentist’s chair, the road was clear. Hardinge arrived at Downing Street shortly after the reply from Bournemouth had been received. Chamberlain had resigned and was preparing to go to the Palace.105 An audience had been arranged for 6 p.m. ‘I was informed that in the event of the King asking his advice as to his successor, he would without hesitation recommend Mr Churchill.’104

  A single word is scrawled in pencil in Chamberlain’s pocket diary for 10 May: ‘Resigned.’

  Forty-four years earlier, Chamberlain had written an anguished letter to his father. ‘The plants don’t grow … All the order & discipline that I have worked up will be lost … this is my failure.’106 And two months later: ‘No doubt a sharper man would have seen long ago what the ultimate result was likely to be.’107

  He was now seventy-one. Once again a venture had failed into which he had ploughed so much, and the outcome of which many had predicted. ‘All my world has tumbled to bits in a moment,’ he wrote to Hilda.108 For one of the last times in his life, he credited a force greater than himself. ‘Perhaps it was providential that the revolution which overturned me coincided with the entry of the real thing.’109

  Accompanied by Dunglass, Chamberlain drove to Buckingham Palace. His audience with George VI lasted half an hour. They had not spoken since the first night of the Norway Debate, when Chamberlain had declined the King’s offer to tell Labour’s leaders that they must pull their weight and join a National government.

  George VI wrote this famous diary entry about his conversation that evening with Chamberlain: ‘He told me that Attlee had been to see him & had told him that the Labour Party would serve in the new administration of a new Prime Minister but not one with himself as P.M. He then told me he wished to resign … I accepted his resignation, & told him how grossly unfair I thought he had been treated & that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened.110 We then had an informal talk over his successor. I, of course, suggested Halifax … as I thought H. was the obvious man, & that his peerage could be placed in abeyance for the time being.’

  Significantly, the King had not waited to ask for Chamberlain’s recommendation. Aside from revealing his definite preference, the immediacy of George VI’s reaction hints at his continuing hope that the new Prime Minister could somehow, even now, be Halifax.

  The monarch still had political power, thanks to the unwritten British constitution. It was George V who decided that Bonar Law was the best person to form a government in 1922. A year later, Baba’s father had been rejected in place of Baldwin – a straight result, Curzon wrote to his wife, ‘of the step taken by the King’.111

  If the King had exercised his prerogative to ask Halifax directly, and if Chamberlain had recommended the King to send for the Foreign Secretary, as Churchill was aware lay within his power – ‘I owe something to Chamberlain, you know,’ Churchill later told the Manchester Guardian.112 ‘When he resigned he could have advised the King to send for Halifax and he didn’t’ – then it is possible that George VI might have been able to persuade one of his most dedicated public servants ‘whose wisdom and urbanity had often dispelled the depression of the last few months’.113

  At the final moment, after learning that Labour had ‘changed their minds and were veering towards Winston’, Chamberlain did not make this recommendation.114 The King wrote in his diary: ‘… he told me that H was not enthusiastic, as being in the Lords he would only act as a shadow or a ghost in the Commons where all the real work took place.115 I was disappointed over this statement.’ Fascinated though Halifax was by ghosts, he was not interested in becoming one. The King could do little more than stutter his regret next day when he came across Halifax in the Buckingham Palace gardens, saying: ‘I was sorry not to have him as P.M.’ – to which Halifax replied, as he wrote in his diary: ‘with suitable expressions of gratitude, but also of hope that he had thought my reasons for judging differently were sound.117, 116 On the whole he did not contest this.’

  With Halifax ruling himself out, and the outgoing Prime Minister not expected to volunteer an alternative, it was for the Sovereign to decide whether to ask Chamberlain for advice about his successor. Because of the party’s large majority, the Prime Minister had to be a Conservative, which precluded Attlee and Lloyd George.

  Eden? Wood? Amery? Hoare?

  ‘Then I knew that there was only one person I could send for to form a Government who had the confidence of the country, & that was Winston.118 I asked Chamberlain his advice & he told me Winston was the man to send for.’

  The King thanked Chamberlain for all his help to him, and repeated that he would greatly regret losing Chamberlain as his Prime Minister, but he would make it ‘a condition that he should remain in the Cabinet and be the Leader of the House’.119 Then, according to Hardinge, ‘after further thought, Mr Churchill was asked to come to the Palace’.120

  Hardinge’s choice of the words ‘further thought’ deserves lingering over for the lack of enthusiasm it reveals. There is no record of what the King said to his Private Secretary, yet it is extremely hard to believe that their conversation did not touch on the hazards of a Churchill administration. The opinion which Hardinge had held until recently – that a Churchill premiership was ‘very undesirable’ – coincided with the King’s own.121 On 6 April 1955, George VI’s biographer Jack Wheeler-Bennett let slip to Harold Nicolson, in a diary entry not published, how ‘according to his research, the King “was bitterly opposed to Winston succeeding Chamberlain” … the adverb employed is instructive’.122 There was no personal spark between the two men, as between Churchill and the King’s elder brother. Halifax recorded in his diary how George VI ‘was funny about Winston and told me he did not find him very easy to talk to’, and ‘was clearly apprehensive of Winston’s administrative methods’.123, 124 In a private conversation with another Minister, George VI said that Churchill had no understanding ‘of the mind of the people’.125 The King was on record as telling President Roosevelt that only in exceptional circumstances would he consent to Churchill being made Prime Minister. The Queen, too, thought Churchill brash, and according to a Palace official was ‘very anti-Winston’, not having forgiven him for his support of Edward VIII at the time of the Abdication.126 It would have been extraordinary if these reservations had not jittered through George VI’s mind while he sat waiting in his room on the first floor, in his striped morning dress trousers, black waistcoat and jacket, to receive the First Lord of the Admiralty.

  Chamberlain’s sister Hilda believed that Winston Churchill was not an empathetic character. ‘I doubt if any Churchill has been made to realise what is meant by considerat
ion for others.’127 Yet oddly no one would have respected the King’s qualms at this moment more than Churchill, whose prominent role in the Norway Campaign had inspired that morning’s editorial in the Daily Worker. ‘Now the veil has been torn aside, revealing the crime of the Norway adventure in all its horror; reckless adventurism, ill-equipped troops sent to their death, colossal military and naval blunders … He now has two Gallipolis to his credit.’ Lord Woolton succinctly observed of him: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise.’128

  Afterwards, Churchill called his elevation ‘a marvel’ – and really did not know how he had survived in the public’s esteem ‘while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr Chamberlain’.129 On his last visit to Chamberlain, when he was dying of stomach cancer, Joseph Kennedy remarked that the Norway failure had made Churchill Prime Minister. ‘True,’ said Chamberlain, smiling sadly.130 Churchill, who only four days before the debate had ‘come round to the view that it was providential we didn’t succeed’ in Norway, was still ruminating on the events which had brought him to power when he visited Oslo eight years later.131 He told his Norwegian audience at the banquet in his honour: ‘In my long life, very long life … I have noticed the way in which human judgement is falsified.132 You may do a very wise thing and it may turn out most badly. You may do a foolish thing and it may save your life.’

  Clementine had taken the afternoon train from Hereford. One reason given for cancelling the Whitsun holiday was not to place any unnecessary demand on public transport. In the event, her train was on time. She arrived back at Admiralty House shortly before Churchill climbed into the Humber with his bodyguard for the short drive to Buckingham Palace. Minutes later, another impatient telephone call was put through to Churchill’s secretary who, on being asked if there was any news, was able to reply to Randolph: ‘Only just to say that your father has gone to the Palace and when he comes back he will be Prime Minister.’133