Darkest Hour

by Anthony McCarten

  The newspapers reported on his arrogant mission but still he remained unfailingly confident of his own abilities. What was to follow next is so infamous in British military history that all you need say is the name: Gallipoli.

  The Ottoman Empire’s 1914 anti-Russian alliance with Germany had thrust their territories into the forefront of the war as key battlegrounds. The proposed plan, seen by Churchill as a better alternative to chewing barbed wire in Flanders, was for Britain to carry out a joint operation between the Army and Navy to force a passage through the Dardanelles strait, landing troops on the Gallipoli peninsula before mooring a fleet of ships in the landlocked Sea of Marmara, on the shores of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Such actions, it was hoped, would induce the Turkish Government to withdraw from the war and make a peace deal, thereby opening up British access to its ally Russia via the Black Sea.

  Churchill not only pushed the campaign hard among the Cabinet War Council, but also pressured the military leaders who were given the task of executing a plan they thought shaky at best. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that planning, or the lack thereof, was a major factor in the catastrophic outcome of the Dardanelles campaign. Instead of one cohesive, well-executed plan, there were three separate plans being pursued at the same time. Churchill favoured the ‘ships alone’ option; his second-in-command at the Admiralty, First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher, preferred a joint operation between the Army and Navy; third, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, was pursuing an ‘evolving army-based plan’. Matters were made worse by what Jenkins describes as the ‘seething cauldron’ of tension that had developed between the three men.

  Used to getting his own way, Churchill was rewarded on 28 January 1915 when the War Council authorized his proposed naval attack. After several failed attempts to force through the minefield-littered Strait ended with the loss of three Allied battleships, it was decided that troops should be deployed and attempt to take the Gallipoli peninsula. Had sufficient plans for ground troops support been put in place when the naval operations failed, there would not have been such abject confusion over whether the Army or the Navy was running the operations when they landed on 25 April. Perhaps even more importantly, had the Allies been more organized from the outset, Ottoman and German forces would not have been given more than a month to prepare their defences for imminent invasion.

  From the day troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, the conflict would take more than eight bloody months to come to an end, and result in nearly 400,000 casualties: 73,000 British and Irish, 36,000 Australian and New Zealand, 27,000 French, 4,800 Indian and 251,000 Ottoman. The Allies had not been prepared for the strength of resistance put up by the Turkish Army, and by January 1916 it was decided their only option was to evacuate.

  Churchill’s fate, rather than being tied to the end of the campaign, was decided long before, when the resignation of Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, on 15 May 1915 prompted cries from colleagues who already blamed him for the fiasco for Winston’s removal as First Lord of the Admiralty. In the light of so much criticism, the Prime Minister, Asquith, proposed a wartime Coalition Government with the Conservative Party, whose one condition was the removal of Churchill. Winston was dumped, demoted to the lowly position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

  The failings of Gallipoli are impossible to lay solely upon him, but the widespread view – moored deeply in the collective need to find a scapegoat, and not dispelled by one public enquiry which found to the contrary – was that his stubborn overruling of his advisers, his bullying of Admirals, and failure to take basic safeguards were largely responsible. In his defence he was not, after all, Prime Minister, and he had put all his decisions in front of the War Cabinet, but he had pushed through his plans in spite of the objections of Kitchener and his own Admiralty colleagues. His own response was not one of contrition but of outrage: he told a friend, ‘I am finished! . . . Finished in respect of all I care for – the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans.’

  A diminished and humbled Churchill moved out of Admiralty House, and Clemmie and Winston found themselves cast adrift from the society they had enjoyed so much for five years. Clementine later told Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert that this was one of the most painful moments of her husband’s life, and she ‘thought he would die of grief’. Furious at her husband’s dismissal, she wrote to Asquith: ‘If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a War machine as the present Government.’ The Prime Minister was unmoved, and when a new War Cabinet was announced and Winston was not among its members, Churchill made the decision to resign from Government altogether and rejoin the army on the Western Front.

  Initially, Churchill returned to his old brigade, the Queen’s Own Hussars, but on arrival in France he was collected by a car and taken straight to General Headquarters in Saint-Omer. Over a champagne dinner, he was offered a cushy role of Aide-de-Camp to the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, or an active commission at the Front. It is perhaps unsurprising that he chose front-line action, but the decision reflected more than his long-held sense of adventure. It gave him a chance to distinguish himself fighting for a cause in which he truly believed, and to rinse the blood of Gallipoli from his hands.

  After only two weeks in France, Churchill requested that General French promote him to lead a brigade. With so little experience in such a role, and on the advice of the Prime Minister, who feared a backlash, French vetoed the idea and Winston was urged to take the lead of a smaller battalion instead, and so was given the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of Ninth Division, 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. At the end of January 1917 his battalion travelled to the front in Belgium, and Churchill spent three and a half months in the trenches. This was not part of any major offensive, but there was no respite, for ‘the German shell-fire was continuous, and machine-gun and rifle fire a constant hazard’.

  Back home Clementine continued campaigning for her husband’s political reputation, but with the Asquith Government in turmoil and Churchill’s failed Gallipoli campaign being debated in the Commons, she feared it might be a while before hostility had subsided. Despite her own worries about his safety, she advised her husband not to rush his return, writing, ‘To be great one’s actions must be able to be understood by simple people. Your motive for going to the Front was easy to understand – Your motive for coming back requires explanation.’ But after a disastrously received speech to the House of Commons during a week’s leave in March 1917 left him in a worse position than before, Churchill ignored the advice of his wife and returned to London on 7 May to attempt to repair his tattered reputation.

  It would take Churchill almost three years and a series of posts before he finally returned to a senior Cabinet position. In that time, the Armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany, and four days later, on 15 November 1918, Clementine gave birth to their fourth child, a girl named Marigold.

  The recently re-elected Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, placed great faith in his old friend when he appointed him Secretary of State for War in January 1919. Almost at once he began campaigning behind the scenes for Allied troops still based in Russia to provide support for the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Churchill saw Bolshevism as one of the great threats to British democracy, and, as Jenkins explains, once again made plain his ‘belief that will and optimism were more important than an adequacy of resources for the task envisaged’. His plan for an offensive in northern Russia to seize the trans-Siberian railway ended in withdrawal and total defeat, and solidified the now common view that he was a rash military adventurer not to be trusted.

  Even Lloyd George lost faith in his War Secretary and moved him to Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921. This was still a senior Cabinet post, and at least it afforded Winston the opportunity to travel with Clementine to attend the Middle East Conference in Cairo that spring. It was a glamorous colonial affair, and whi
le out there the pair made the acquaintance of none other than Colonel T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) and the explorer Gertrude Bell. When Clementine returned to London in April, however, it was to the tragic news that her brother, Bill Hozier, a charming but well-known gambler, had shot and killed himself in a Paris hotel room. Clemmie and Winston had both been close to him, and the news hit the couple hard. Then, a few months later, Winston’s mother died. After two such heavy losses, with their house already deep in mourning, Clementine received a telephone call: their youngest child, Marigold, was gravely ill with septicaemia.

  The couple rushed to be with her, and kept a vigil throughout the night. On the evening of 22 August, Marigold regained consciousness for long enough to ask her mother to sing her ‘Bubbles’, her favourite song. Clemmie grasped every ounce of courage she had and began, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles . . . ’ until Marigold put her hand on her mother’s arm and said, ‘Not tonight . . . finish it tomorrow.’ She died the next morning, with her parents at her side. Winston later told his daughter Mary that ‘Clementine in her agony gave a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.’

  It was a pain that would never leave them but was rarely spoken of. In true stiff-upper-lip fashion, Mary Soames describes how her mother ‘did not indulge in her grief, rather, she battened it down, and got on with life’. She and Winston were advised to take a holiday and so travelled to France in January 1922, where Clementine discovered she was pregnant again. A little over a year after the death of Marigold, the Churchills welcomed Mary, their fifth and final child, just in time to visit the other new addition to their family: a country house thirty-five miles south of London called Chartwell, in Kent.

  The house, which would become Churchill’s most iconic address – after 10 Downing Street, perhaps – was somewhat rundown and would need a small fortune spent on it. Clementine loathed it, but she did her best to warm to it, knowing it fulfilled Winston’s desire for a permanent country retreat of their own.

  A safe haven couldn’t have come at a better time for Churchill, for Lloyd George’s coalition had reached breaking point and in October 1922 the Prime Minister was forced to resign. A general election was called, but Churchill was struck down with appendicitis and was too unwell to campaign for his Dundee constituency seat. The result was a disaster: ‘His “life seat” of 1908 had crumbled in his hands.’

  The couple decided to take an extended six-month holiday to the French Riviera so Winston could recuperate. He had taken up painting when he was removed from the Admiralty in 1915; now, his new-found unemployment gave him ample time to reconnect with his old hobby. The Churchills returned home in the summer of 1923 to supervise the final renovations at Chartwell. Clementine still had strong reservations about the finances, but the countryside was a place of solace for Winston. He could write and paint, and enjoyed helping with the renovations.

  Winston being Winston meant he couldn’t stay out of politics for long. In the run-up to the election campaign of 1924 he failed to secure a Liberal seat, and made an unsuccessful attempt to run as an independent. He believed that the Liberals and Conservatives should be working together, not opposing one another, and in April of that year was surprised to hear there was talk among Conservatives of bringing him into the party with an unopposed seat in Epping, London. After a minor hesitation, Churchill agreed to cross the floor once more. A Conservative he would remain for the rest of his life.

  His campaign was run on a strongly anti-Soviet agenda, and he was highly critical of the Labour Party’s desire for an Anglo-Soviet treaty. His stance struck a chord with voters and he won with a large majority. The new Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, rewarded him by making him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Upon accepting the role, he reportedly said to Baldwin, ‘This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robe as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid Office.’ And splendid it was, coming with the welcome perk of accommodation at No. 11 Downing Street, a house that Clementine and the children adored, and would live in for four and a half years.

  Churchill’s ever-abundant confidence was unaffected by his time out of office and his various faux pas, but his period at the Treasury was marred by several controversies. The first was a fiscal policy that would bring Britain’s economy into recession and lead to strikes across the country. The idea of returning to the Gold Standard (Britain had abandoned it in 1914 to stop the rapid fall in value of the pound) had been circulating before the Baldwin administration took office, and Churchill initially had strong reservations. He undertook a thorough investigation and sought the advice of colleagues and academics. Among them was a bright young Cambridge economist named John Maynard Keynes, who produced a pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, in which he argued that it would be disastrous for economic growth and employment if Britain were to return to this pre-war monetary system. Unfortunately, strong swathes of support from the Conservative Party and parliamentary committees won out, and with his family watching him from the Gallery of the House of Commons, Churchill restored the Gold Standard in his April 1925 Budget.

  It is widely agreed that this was the most deeply misguided policy of Baldwin’s Government, and Churchill’s name was on the Bill. Keynes’s predictions proved correct – the pound became too strong for exporting to take place – and the impact on Britain’s industries, in particular coal, was catastrophic. At the height of the subsequent 1926 General Strike – Britain’s only national strike – 1.75 million people withdrew their labour. Winston’s response, to send in the army, was tempered by Baldwin’s insistence that the soldiers be unarmed. As barbed wire was rolled out in Hyde Park, the white-collar class went to work, restoring some services: gentlemen with Eton ties acted as porters in Waterloo Station, drove railway engines and buses, delivered newspapers. Churchill himself went down to the docks in an attempt to quell the rioting. With fear growing of an outbreak of widespread violence the unions backed down and the strike was defeated in just ten days, but accusations of heavy-handedness were levelled at Churchill’s door.

  The General Strike lingered long in the memories of the nation, and with unemployment still high the Conservatives lost their majority at the 1929 General Election. Stanley Baldwin resigned, while Churchill retained his seat in Epping, but over the next two years he became estranged from his party through diverging opinions on core issues.

  Winston retreated to Chartwell and resumed writing and painting. Without his Cabinet salary, and after suffering huge financial losses in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Churchills found themselves once more in the wilderness and – thanks to Winston’s egregious overspending on cigars and champagne – tight for cash. It was an isolation that would last for ten years.

  With his political status heavily pruned, there were subjects he felt he knew far too much about to deny the public his opinion of them, and in 1931 that subject was Indian Home Rule; but here again he was to find himself on the wrong side of history and of his own party by opposing India’s request for Dominion status, similar to that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Churchill feared that as soon as any kind of Dominion status was granted, it would be the end of the British Empire in India – the new Indian Government would seek to remove Britain and Britons from the country as soon as possible.

  On the opposing side of the argument was the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, better known to us as Viscount Edward Halifax. Despite Halifax’s connections to the King and the upper echelons of the British aristocracy, his thoughts on this subject were surprisingly progressive. He was coming to the end of his tenure as Viceroy and truly believed that, following years of violence and civil disobedience, granting Dominion status was the way to work towards a peaceful settlement. Baldwin supported the Viceroy’s proposal, and announced to the House that his party would consider it their ‘one duty’ should they return to power in the future. Having once been among the more liberal-minded of the Conservatives, Churchill felt compelle
d to resign from the Shadow Cabinet. As Roy Jenkins notes, ‘The Indian issue remained at the centre of Churchill’s politics, draining his energies, leading him further into a miasma of impotent isolation, for at least another three years.’

  Back in the wilderness, Churchill focused on his writing and made tours of the United States, giving speeches and broadcasts. He was still a frequent speaker in the House of Commons on issues like finance and international security, but his views on India had made him seem out of touch. Many saw the end of the First World War as the end of the Empire anyway, but Churchill, as a child of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, retained an unbreakable allegiance to a global British presence.

  Churchill’s belief that Germany, under Hitler’s fast-rising National Socialist Party, posed the greatest threat to Britain did come from a full understanding of the facts. Whereas he had not witnessed the present state of Indian society, he had travelled extensively through Germany, where he had seen ‘[a]ll these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland’. It was clear to him: from their national desire to reclaim lost self-esteem would come the call for weapons; from this would come the call for the return of lost territories.