Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  Even after he had become the captain of the ship, he was viewed by the traditionalists as being – at best – a necessary and temporary expedient in the exigencies of the times. Nancy Dugdale, the wife of a junior whip, wrote to her husband, now in the army, ‘I could hardly control myself … W.C. is really the counterpart of Goering in England, full of the desire for blood, “Blitzkrieg”, and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.’ In reply her husband referred to his Prime Minister’s colleagues in terms that he might have been applying to Hitler’s: ‘All those reptile satellites – Duff-Cooper – Bob Boothby – Brendan Bracken, etc. – will ooze into jobs they are utterly unsuited for. All we are fighting for will go out of public life. I regard this as a greater disaster than the invasion of the Low Countries’.10

  But greatly as Churchill was hated by the Chamberlainites and the rank and file, he was far from warmly regarded by the anti-appeasers. His little group of supporters was not part of the mainstream of opposition to the government. To an extent he stood away from that opposition, partly because he had hoped for office from Chamberlain early in 1939, and then, after the outbreak of war, because of loyalty to the head of the government of which he was part.

  But, more importantly, the anti-appeasers did not want him even if he were available. The main group of anti-appeasers, ‘the glamour boys’, was led by Eden. In the course of time Eden sometimes seemed to be Churchill’s favourite son, but that was far from the case. For political reasons that were not of Churchill’s making, it seemed clear for perhaps fifteen years that Eden would succeed Churchill, and Churchill did nothing to undermine that assumption, but the older man had no great enthusiasm for the younger, whom he thought weak and of limited ability. He and Eden got on well enough, and Eden married his niece, but Churchill was much more warmly disposed to others – for instance Macmillan and, strangest of all, that most enthusiastic former appeaser, Rab Butler. The Prime Minister frequently disagreed with Eden when the latter was Foreign Secretary, particularly over France and Russia, and some of Churchill’s rebukes were fairly stinging.

  Eden for his part was entirely loyal to Churchill, although there were times during the war when he might just have displaced him, but the relationship was not an easy one. Eden had been Baldwin’s protégé. He had benefited from Churchill’s eclipse and as a contender for the succession to Chamberlain kept at a distance from the older man, his rival.

  The glamour boys were vastly more numerous than the handful of Churchillites, and there was little common membership of the two groups. The mainstream anti-appeasers were also much more substantial in terms of political weight. They included Leo Amery, Ronald Tree, Bobbity Cranborne, Edward Spears, Duff Cooper and Macmillan. Macmillan was the only one of the group who was also close to Churchill.

  Although Eden’s personality was associated with the group, and it was probably he who lent it glamour, he was not always present at its meetings and offered little leadership. He was always willing to wound, but not to kill. Repeatedly he appeared to gear himself up for a major assault, only to back down at the last moment. Amery was a more effective leader, but collectively the group feared to bell the cat. In the period between the beginning of the war and the Norway Debate, innumerable opportunities for the anti-appeasers to ambush Chamberlain were lost, and the culture of loyalty to the leader was such that even when the Norway vote took place many Conservative members, some of them veterans of the Great War, went into the opposition lobby in tears.

  The men who voted against their party at the cost of such emotional pain were all the more appalled that the man for whom they had made such a sacrifice rewarded not them but their opponents when he took office. He had never been one of them before, and he continued to stand apart. Thus Churchill entered office hated and despised by the appeasers and without the affection of their critics.

  3

  Domestic Support

  Many regarded the rackety friends whose company stimulated Churchill as distasteful: Clementine Churchill was frequently a critic and often absented herself from the dinner table when she disapproved of the company, dining from a tray in her room.

  Churchill married Clementine Hozier on 12 September 1908. He was thirty-three and Clementine twenty-three. He had proposed unsuccessfully to two other women and Clementine had been courted by another man for two years and was twice secretly engaged to him. She had also been left in a maze with Lord Bessborough in an unsuccessful attempt to prompt a proposal.1 During her short engagement to Churchill, Clementine hesitated, apparently because of her fiancé’s commitment to public life. Churchill sought to reassure her; and her brother Bill wrote to her to say that she could not be seen to break-off a third engagement and humiliate Churchill.

  Churchill wonderfully wrote of his wedding that he ‘lived happily ever after’. So he did at one level, but his use of the fairy-tale formula is revealing: he certainly loved Clementine for the rest of his life, but rather as an idealised romantic creation. The fact that so much of their communication is preserved in a vast body of correspondence points up a certain contrivance in the relationship. The correspondence is often ineffably touching. Churchill’s last letters to his wife are very moving, like one of 1 April 1963 written in the frail hand of an 88-year-old husband to Clementine on her seventy-eighth birthday:

  My Darling One,

  This is only to give you

  my fondest love and kisses

  a hundred times repeated

  I am a pretty dull and

  paltry scribbler; but my stick as it writes carries my heart along with it.

  Your ever & always

  W.

  Some of the later letters are poignant in other ways too. There is one in which Churchill, the most generous, often too generous, of men, defends himself with dignity and pain against the charge that he was being mean to Clementine. Even at a much earlier stage she could be thoughtless and hurtful. When Churchill was in the trenches in 1916, Clementine wrote to him saying that she hoped she would see a little more of him alone when he was next home: ‘We are still young, but Time flies, stealing love away and leaving only friendship which is very peaceful but not very stimulating or warming.’ Churchill, the romantic, was upset: ‘Oh my darling do not write of “friendship” to me – I love you more each month that passes and feel the need of you and all your beauty. My precious charming Clementine …’

  During this spell in the trenches in the aftermath of the Dardanelles, Churchill frequently talked of abandoning the military life and coming back to London where he felt his future lay. Although he could perfectly honourably have done so, and in so doing leave a situation in which he was in constant danger from which he made no effort to shelter himself, Clementine told him, again and again, that it would be better that he stayed in France. She seemed curiously able to appear more concerned for his place in history than his place in the domestic circle.

  Throughout the course of their marriage she repeatedly felt it incumbent on her to give him advice that he did not want to hear and which on occasions he found distressing. We cannot know whether or how often she bit her tongue or put away her pen; what can be seen is that she frequently proffered advice and information that he would rather not have had. As he rarely paid any attention to her advice, it might have been thought that she would have realised that it would have been kinder to remain silent.

  At the end of 1934 Clementine took an extended break and went on a cruise with Lord Moyne (formerly Walter Guinness), who was going to Indonesia on an improbable quest to capture a large reptile known as a komodo dragon. Churchill had been invited but could not go, and they were apart for five months. He devotedly kept in touch with her, sending an unbroken stream of letters to tell her of events at home. Far away, Clementine fell in love with one of her companions, a handsome art dealer named Terence Phillip. They were constantly together. Mary Soames, in her biography of her mother, very properly does not tell
us whether the relationship was consummated, and indeed she may not know. Her mother described the episode to her with the words, ‘C’était une vraie connaissance de ville d’eau’, which does not take us very far forward.2

  But Churchill cannot have been unaware of what had happened. It is impossible to imagine him allowing himself to be in a similar situation. When Mrs Reggie Fellowes made a determined assault on his marital fidelity at the Ritz in Paris he had stood firm,3 and he must have been very deeply pained that Clementine was not equally resolute. There is no hint in the correspondence of any recrimination or reproach.

  Throughout her life she remained a committed Liberal. She hated the Conservative Party, except for Churchill’s constituency association.4 But her attitude was a little confused. On 1 September 1940, Colville recorded in his diary, ‘It amused me slightly that Mrs C., who does nothing but profess democratic and radical sentiments, should put off inviting any of the officers to dine until the guard consists of the Coldstream. The Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry were never invited inside.’5

  The list of her husband’s friends of whom she approved would be shorter than the list of those of whom she disapproved. Just a few of the latter were F.E. Smith, Churchill’s cousin, ‘Sunny’, Duke of Marlborough, Frederick Guest and Beaverbrook. She could be very rude even to people who were not on the disapproved list if she thought their behaviour unacceptable. When Montgomery, for example, made a typical, disparaging remark about politicians, he was flayed and told to leave her house: he was only allowed to stay after abject apologies. Even Jock Colville, though he became a warm admirer and was to find many complimentary things to say about Clementine, acknowledged that ‘She could … display an acidity of tongue before which the tallest trees would bend, and she would occasionally give vent to uncontrollable temper. The storms were terrifying in their violence …’6 Or from his diary for 22 October 1940: ‘Mrs C. considers it one of her missions in life to put people in their place, and prides herself on being outspoken’.7

  Many of Churchill’s friends were arrivistes, a trifle shady, not serious, undesirable in her eyes. But in some cases her objections are difficult to understand: it is not easy to see what damage could have been done to his career when, in old age, he enjoyed some distraction from his increasing frailty in the hospitality and thoughtfulness of Onassis and of Emery and Wendy Reves on the Mediterranean and in the South of France. Wendy Reves, his publisher’s wife, took enormous pains to make Churchill happy at La Pausa on the Côte d’Azur, when spells of happiness were becoming rare. He was fond of her: ‘She is young, she is beautiful, she is kind’. There was inevitably talk, but it was foolish, uninformed and absurd. Yet Lady Churchill refused to allow Wendy Reves to attend her husband’s funeral. Wendy Reves described Church-ill’s marriage as ‘a myth’ and in the lengthy periods apart, and in the correspondence, moving though it is, much of it written when both spouses were under the same roof, there is something about the relationship that seems artificial, though nurtured by romance and idealisation.

  The ‘lived happily ever after’ description of his marriage hints at Churchill’s capacity for romanticising, and the same idealisation occurs in relation to his mother. In My Early Life, in which he recorded her ‘brilliant impression upon my childhood’s eye’, he said, ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’ That was not the fullest description of a glittering and remarkably predatory female. It is understandable that he failed to mention her reputed 200 affairs (‘a suspiciously round number’, said Roy Jenkins) and her various husbands, one a contemporary of her son and one younger still. But he drew a veil equally over the fact that she was a distant and neglectful mother and that his only exposure to love as a child was from his nurse, Mrs Everest.

  It would be a wonderful understatement to say that marriage to Churchill was not easy. He was improvident, reckless and unpredictable. Clementine did not know how the story was to end: it could have been in bankruptcy and disgrace. Without the stimulation and excitement of her husband’s career, she was perhaps more aware of their children’s serious and sometimes tragic problems. She was acutely conscious of the perilous household finances. Throughout her life she suffered from debilitating and distressing periods of fatigue, anxiety and depression, for which the only treatment in these days was prolonged holidays for rest and recuperation. In other respects too her health was not strong. The index to the biography by her daughter, Lady Soames, contains references not only to nervous exhaustion, but also to miscarriage, operations, neuritis, streptococcal infection, shingles, broken shoulder and broken hips.

  4

  The Political Landscape

  His wife felt that in the matter of his companions, and in other respects too, Churchill’s judgement could be poor, and indeed the most frequent criticism, even from people who admired him in other respects, related to his judgement. Rab Butler, although a cerebral Tory, spoke for many when he described Churchill in 1940 as ‘the greatest political adventurer of modern times … a half-breed American … The good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history … the sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one’.1 Beatrice Webb had earlier said that he had ‘more of the American speculator than the English aristocrat’.

  Many of his own party saw him as Butler did, and in the Commons Chamber, it was the Labour benches which cheered his early appearances as Prime Minister – largely simply because they liked him better than Chamberlain. For many weeks Churchill was received in embarrassing silence by the Tories. It was not until 4 July 1940, when Churchill had to give the news of the Royal Navy’s destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir that the Chief Whip, Margesson, decided to set an example. He stood up, turned and waved his order paper and his well-drilled minions joined him on their feet. Thereafter the Tories joined the Labour Party in cheering their chief.

  His political position was extremely weak and he was aware of it. There were press campaigns against the retention of the Municheers. The News Chronicle and the Daily Herald, for instance, criticised Chamberlain and Kingsley Wood in particular (‘No room for Dead-weight.’2), and reported open discussion of resignations. But Churchill was not a free agent, and to the annoyance of the press and of some of his own small band of supporters, he retained most of his colleagues in the government, tainted though they were with appeasement. He represented this as a deliberate policy of conciliation and unity. To an extent it may have been, and he put the case against indicting the guilty men in a major speech to the House on 18 June 1940, in which he directly addressed the desire in the press and among the public for retribution against those who had left Britain so unprepared for war:

  There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments – and of Parliaments, for they are in it too – during the years which led up to this catastrophe … Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. Therefore, I cannot accept the drawing of any distinctions between Members of the present Government.

  The retention of the men of Munich was certainly not entirely a voluntary gesture of magnanimity. He had no real choice. He privately asked the press to stop the campaign for the removal of the ‘Guilty Men’, explaining that given their strength in his party in the Commons, he had to rely on them. If he ‘trampled on these men, as he could trample on them, they would set themselves against him, and in such internecine strife lay the Germans’ best chance of victory’.

  After making his key Cabinet appointments Churchill was very fully occupied in trying to stiffen French resistance, and he allowed Margesson, the personification of Chamberlain’s policy of discipline and control, to allocate junior appointments, restrained with little obvious success by Bracken as the representative of the new regime. Overwhelmingly the administration was dominated by
the Municheers. Churchill’s hands were so tied that not only did he have to keep most of them in the Cabinet, but he had also little to offer his own loyal supporters: those who toppled Chamberlain received scant rewards. Amery, who had done more than anyone else to engineer the defenestration, was in the lowly India Office. Eden did receive the War Office, but that meant less than it sounds, as the real decisions were taken by the Minister of Defence: he was not even in the War Cabinet. Duff Cooper might have expected to do better than Minister for Information, although he did not make much of a job of it. He proved to be unpopular; sending his son, John Julius, to Canada was not a good political signal, however humanly understandable it may have been. Churchill told his old friend that he was said to be spending too much time at home and ‘trying to run the Ministry of Information from Bognor’. Butler soon reported that the ‘political stockbrokers’ were ‘selling Duff Coopers’; he was replaced by Bracken (Churchill told Bracken that Cooper ‘had failed completely. It just shows that it doesn’t do to harness a thoroughbred to a dung-cart.’3 Neither man seems to have been upset by this reflection.)

  Boothby and Macmillan were disappointed not to be given offices of consequence. Bracken was only a PPS. On the other hand, even the Whips, notably Margesson and the Scottish Whip, James Stuart, the dark and oppressive enforcers of the unedifying Chamberlain days, remained in office. Boothby thought that Churchill resented those who had put him in power.

  The under-rewarded supporters were far from happy. At a personal level they were disappointed, but more altruistically they were also aghast that having finally nerved themselves to dispose of an administration they thought incapable of winning the war, they now saw the same inadequate personalities continuing in office. The message seemed to be that there had been no real change of regime. They agonised about whether to accept what they were offered, until Amery counselled them to make the most of what they had. They even dared to voice their concerns to Churchill, but were told to get on with things in their menial roles. He could do nothing else. He still had no real power base in a party which did not generally like him. He knew that he was only tolerated for the moment because he might deliver results. If he did, real power might eventually come his way.4