Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  This was vintage Churchill, but though the words were the words of Winston, the voice was the voice of a party representative in Dundee. The incumbent was still confined to his bed in Dorset Square. His being hors de combat, a supporter wrote him, “has really been a disaster… in these critical days.” The press, here and throughout the country, was hostile to the coalition. Beaverbrook, an admirer of Bonar Law, was bankrolling Tory candidates in many constituencies where Lloyd George men were unopposed, thus splitting the anti-Labour vote and boosting the socialists’ chances. In Dundee the two local newspapers, owned by D. C. Thompson, had come out against Churchill. Moreover, he was not the only Liberal candidate. Ever since Lloyd George’s eviction of Asquith in 1916 the party had been divided into Asquithians and Georgians, and Asquith was fielding his own national slate. To Churchill’s dismay and indignation, his old ally C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian supported Asquith’s man in Dundee. Winston wrote Scott, protesting “wrecking and splitting candidatures between Liberals” and “the pursuance of personal vendettas,” adding: “I expect you are pretty well ashamed in your heart of hearts at the line your caucus is taking in its bitter malevolence.” But the Guardian continued to trumpet the virtues of the “Independent Liberal,” although it became increasingly clear that he had no chance of winning.128

  Winston asked his wife to stump the district for him during the last ten days of the campaign, and off she went, carrying her last baby—an “unbaptized infant” as the Dundee Courier maliciously put it. Among the Churchill friends who had come to do their part was the former Edward Spiers, now Spears; he had changed the spelling of his surname in 1918. Spears watched women spit on Clementine and wrote: “Clemmie’s bearing was magnificent—like an aristocrat going to the guillotine in a tumbril.” Her first meeting was bedlam. In an unusual dirty trick, rival partisans filled the hall with sneezing powder, and both speaker and audience were convulsed. “The meeting,” the delighted Courier reported, “was in a state of uproar almost from the beginning to end.” Outside, as Clementine fled, a taunting mob waved red flags and green IRA banners. Putting a bright face on it, she wrote Winston, “Every rowdy meeting rouses sympathy & brings votes & will especially as you have been so ill. Even in the rowdiest foulest place all of the people tho’ abusive were really good-natured.” The newspapers, she said, were “vile.” He was being called a warmonger, “but I am exhibiting you as a Cherub Peace Maker with little fluffy wings round your chubby face.” She thought “Smash the Socialists” was the wrong line to take. The Labour line was very convincing in Dundee, especially among the destitute, who were many: “My darling, the misery here is appalling. Some of the people look absolutely starving. Morel’s Election address just out very moderate & in favor of only constitutional methods. So one cannot compare him with Gallacher.” She felt “the minute you arrive the atmosphere will change & the people will be roused…. I am longing to see you & so is Dundee—I shall be heartbroken if you don’t get in.” Clemmie gamely remounted the stump, was hissed, heard her husband described as the head of England’s “Fascisti party”—Mussolini had seized power in Rome the week before—and left, head high, a reporter wrote, when a meeting “broke up in disorder.” Birkenhead arrived to help. She wished he hadn’t. He assailed Morel on the peculiar ground that he was French. “France is a very great country,” he said, “and, on the whole, I like a man to stick to the country, particularly if it is a great one, in which he was born.” Clementine commented tartly: “He was no use at all. He was drunk.”129

  A very shaky Churchill arrived four days before the election and checked into Dundee’s Royal Hotel. Sitting in a padded chair, he spoke that evening at the Caird Hall, defending the coalition, the Irish Free State, and Britain’s “unshaken and unshakable” position in the world. At the end he rose painfully and asked the voters to send “a message which will resound far beyond the limits of this small island and carry its good cheer to the suffering, struggling, baffled humanity the wide world o’er.” This, according to one journalist, was followed by “loud cheers.” But the Caird Hall audience was friendly; it had been carefully picked. Two days later his reception was very different. “As I was carried through the yelling crowd of Socialists at the Drill Hall to the platform,” he later wrote, “I was struck by the looks of passionate hatred on the faces of some of the younger men and women. Indeed, but for my helpless condition I am sure they would have attacked me.” They booed, hissed, and refused to let him speak. He managed to say: “The electors will know how to deal with a party whose only weapon is idiotic clamour”; then, according to the Courier, “pandemonium broke out anew.” His voice rose in brief snatches: “… if about a hundred young men and women in the audience choose to spoil the meeting—if about a hundred of these young reptiles…. We will not submit to the bullying of the featherheads, we will not be ruled by a mob….” But in the end he did submit, telling the appalled platform party: “I am finished.” Detective Thompson slept by his hotel door that night, pistol in hand. A champagne party was in progress across the hall. Spears later remembered that each time a cork popped, “We thought it was Winston being shot.”130

  In the morning Churchill was grim. Only a desperate candidate attacks the press, and it is a measure of his plight that he lashed out at the Dundee publisher, holding him up “here in the district where he lives to the reprobation of his fellow citizens.” D. C. Thompson, he said, had subjected him to “ceaseless detraction, spiteful, malicious detraction” and was “narrow, bitter, unreasonable, eaten up with his own conceit, consumed with his own petty arrogance.” The poll was held on November 15, 1922. That morning Thompson managed, as publishers always do, to have the last word. His editorial described Winston as a man “in a vile temper. He takes on pains to conceal the fact. Like the disappointed man on the station platform he kicks out at anybody who happens to be near him. He has sprayed Labour with invective, has sprinkled many doses of it upon his fellow candidates… and now he has turned the full blast of his vituperation upon the Dundee newspapers. Whose turn it will be tomorrow God only knows.”131

  Dundee elected Morel-de-Ville and a Prohibitionist. Of 151,701 votes cast, Churchill received 20,466—less than 14 percent of the total. For the first time in twenty-two years, nearly thirteen of which had been spent in the cabinet, he was out of Parliament. He left Dundee at once, explaining that he “was far from well.” In London he found himself, as he put it, “without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.” Replying to Stamfordham, who conveyed the King’s regrets, he wrote: “It was very trying, having to do three days of electioneering with a wound so newly healed. It was quite impossible for me to defend myself in so short a time. I have always held Dundee by speeches and argument and at least three weeks are required to deal with such a large number of electors.” T. E. Lawrence wrote Eddie Marsh: “I’m more sorry about Winston than I can say.” Lord Esher wrote Sir Philip Sassoon: “The women put Winston out. When he loses his temper, he looks so damned ugly.” A fellow guest at a dinner party, Lloyd George’s former private secretary, noted that “Winston was so down in the dumps he could scarcely speak the whole evening. He thought his world had come to an end—at least his political world. I thought his career was over.” The Daily Mail crowed: “Mr Churchill has had as many lives as the proverbial cat, but the indictment against him is a long one.” The Daily Telegraph, although never his admirer, had a more charitable word: “The House of Commons loses, for a time, its most brilliant and dazzling speaker…. His is perhaps the most sensational defeat of the whole election.”132

  That was saying a great deal. Nationally, the repudiation of the coalition had been overwhelming; 81 percent of the electorate had gone to the polls, most of them to register disapproval of the government. The Tories had swept the country, winning 345 seats. Labour, with 142, was now the principal Opposition party. Lloyd George’s “National” Liberals had carried only 62; Asquith’s Liberals, a mere 54. Neither man would eve
r hold office again. Asquith wrote Venetia Montagu that he was “inclined to gloat over the corpses on the battlefield,” but five-sixths of his candidates had gone down to defeat. Churchill was far from through; on the morrow after the returns he was offered a dozen seats, among them that of Spears, who had just been elected member for Loughborough. Winston replied that he was “greatly touched by the extreme kindness of yr offer & the willing sacrifice that it involves. It is a splendid proof of yr friendship. I cd not accept it from you. I want you to enjoy yr seat in Parliament & I shall like to feel I have one or two friends there…. The Whips will find me a seat if I want one; but what I want now is a rest.” Margot Asquith advised him to “lie low” for a while, to “do nothing in politics, go on writing all the time & painting; do not join yr former colleagues who are making prodigious asses of themselves in every possible manner: Keep friends in every port—lose no one…. If you have the patience of Disraeli with your fine temper glowing mind & real kind unvindictive nature you cd still command a great future.” It was sensible advice, and Churchill took it. He decided to recuperate on the Riviera, renting a villa, Le Rêve d’Or, near Cannes, for the winter. The whole family joined him there for Christmas and New Year’s. He worked on his Admiralty memoirs. Paul Maze, the painter, encountered him on a beach and said: “Well, Winston, I’m painting hard, trying to forget all about the war. What are you doing?” Churchill said he was writing a book on the war. Maze said that was “like digging up a cemetery.” Winston replied: “Yes, but with a resurrection.”133

  His political resurrection was to be delayed again and again. But Margot had been right: this was a good time to be publicly invisible. Two years later he would write in the Weekly Dispatch that when the coalition government was dismembered “it was already perfectly clear to many of us that a period of political chaos would ensue. To the best of my ability, I warned the public of what was in store. But nobody would listen. Everyone was delighted to get back to party politics. Dear to the hearts of all the small politicians were the party flags, the party platforms, the party catchwords. How gleefully they clapped their hands and sang aloud for joy that the good pre-war days of faction had returned!” He was glad to be out of it. In February 1923 he wrote: “The weather here has been indifferent, but I am getting much better in myself.” His friends in the House missed him. One advised him the following month: “Don’t lie low too long. Things are in the ‘melting pot.’ L.G. is playing what looks like a good game but it isn’t. Nobody trusts him…. There can only be two parties. That is the line of country to ride. There are hundreds of thousands who won’t vote at all at present. They have no party. But they are anti-labour…. The passivity of the present Govt is beyond belief. They settle nothing.”134

  Bonar Law, who had waited so long for power, was proving inept at No. 10. He had become prime minister, Philip Guedalla wrote caustically, “for the simple and satisfying reason that he was not Mr. Lloyd George. At an open competition in the somewhat negative exercise of not being Lloyd George that was held in November 1922, Mr. Law was found to be more indubitably not Mr. Lloyd George than any of the other competitors; and in consequence, by the mysterious operation of the British Constitution, he reigned in his stead.” Ill, he resigned after less than six months in office. After the fall of Austen Chamberlain, Curzon had been the favorite to succeed Law, but Baldwin, who was emerging as a master of intrigue, outmaneuvered Curzon’s supporters and moved into Downing Street in May 1923. The country’s chief domestic problem was a million jobless Englishmen. The solution, Baldwin believed, was Joe Chamberlain’s old nostrum—high tariffs. Law, however, had campaigned against them; his pledge could not be dishonored. Therefore Baldwin dissolved Parliament and went to the country again in November. Free Trade was the one issue which could reconcile the two wings of the Liberal party. It also brought Churchill back into public life. The Times had observed that he “has latterly become more conservative, less from conviction than from a hardening of his political arteries. His early Liberal velleities have dried up, the generous impulses of youth throb more slowly, and apart from some intellectual gristle his only connections with Liberalism are personal.” That was close to the mark, but for Churchill a call for Free Trade was a summons to the colors, to the blazing idealism of his early years in the House. In a statement to the press he called it “vital to the British people and indispensable to the recovery of their prosperity.” The future of a reunited party, he said, would know “no limits.” On November 19 he accepted an invitation from the West Leicester Liberal Association to run as their candidate. The National Liberal Club removed his portrait from its cellar, dusted it off, and restored it to its place of prominence upstairs.135

  West Leicester, east of Birmingham, was known for its manufacture of hosiery, boots, and shoes, and his Labour opponent, F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, was formidable. Pethick-Lawrence had proposed a “Capital Levy,” a surtax on all Britons worth more than £5,000. Workmen thought it an excellent idea. Clementine was anxious; Winston had been offered several safe seats and—unwisely, she thought—had turned them down. Equally unwise, in her opinion, was any affiliation with Lloyd George. Churchill had accepted an invitation to dine with George at Beaverbrook’s home. On the morning of the dinner she left a note on his dresser: “I want to appeal to you again before you go to Max’s this evening. Ll. G. is not in the same position as you—He is in not out & he shares or practically shares the throne with Asquith.” Word might get around, she wrote, that Winston was working toward a new coalition. She also wished he weren’t running against a Labour aspirant. It would be much better, in her view, “to be beaten by a Tory (which would rouse Liberal sympathy) than by a Socialist. My Darling it is important—I shall say nothing if you go, but consider the imprudence of losing the offer of a good Wee Free Seat (as opposed to extinct Nat[ional] Liberal) for the sake of a pleasant evening.” He went. Also, to his subsequent sorrow, he lunched with Beaverbrook at London’s Embassy Club, where he wagered that Labour would not reach power within a year and that Asquith would move back into No. 10. The club menu survives, with their handwriting: “I bet £5 against Winston’s £4 that Labour forms a government in 1924. M.B.” and “I bet £15 against Winston’s £5 that Asquith is NOT P.M. in 1924. W. Churchill. M.B.”136

  In West Leicester, Churchill again faced a hostile press and wild, disorderly meetings. At one of them, the Leicester Mail reported, Winston and Clementine were “greeted by groans and hoots, not a single cheer being heard in the building.” A gang of hecklers accompanied him wherever he went; he christened them the “Socialist travelling circus.” One of Churchill’s recent acquaintances, young, redheaded Brendan Bracken, scouted halls in advance and told him what to expect. The expectations were almost always the same—more trouble. Cecil Roberts, the prolific writer, afterward remembered how “hatred of him [Churchill] was aflame. No insults were too gross to hurl at him. One, of course, the Dardanelles fiasco, regarded as his particular crime, was always brought up.” Toward the end of a frustrating evening he shouted back: “What do you know about that? The Dardanelles might have saved millions of lives. Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.” Douglas Jerrold, the official historian of the Royal Naval Division, arrived in Leicester on his own initiative to confirm him. Jerrold told a mocking mob: “I venture to say that had the campaign been prosecuted as it should have been, with enthusiasm, courage, and energy, in the same spirit in which it was begun by Mr Churchill, the war would have ended in 1917.” Few listened; fewer believed him. It seemed Winston would wear that albatross around his neck for the rest of his life. An American publicist wrote that it was “doubtful if even Great Britain could survive another world war and another Churchill,” and an English critic declared: “The ghosts of the Gallipoli dead will always rise up to damn him anew in time of national emergency. Neither official historians, nor military hack writers, will explain away or wipe out the memories of the Dardanelles.”137

  New bullyragg
ers appeared when he spoke in London. As he left one rally, a newspaperman reported, a “vast crowd closed round the car hooting and jeering. Despite the vigilance of the police, one man broke through and smashed one of the windows of Mr Churchill’s car. The police took him into custody. When this fact became known more booing ensued, and many people spat upon the car as it drove away.” At another meeting, in Walthamstow, “What about the Dardanelles?” was joined by “What about Antwerp?” A youth eluded mounted police and threw a brick at Winston. Others stood shaking their fists in impotent rage. Winston told an Evening News reporter that the Walthamstow mob was “the worst crowd I have ever seen in twenty-five years of public life. They were more like Russian wolves than British workmen—howling, foaming and spitting, and generally behaving in a way absolutely foreign to the British working classes.” Meanwhile, Clementine, keeping the flame alight in West Leicester, answered a pest who shouted that her husband was unqualified to represent workmen. Except for Lloyd George, she said, Churchill had done more “for the benefit of the working classes than any other statesman,” and she cited his Shop Hours Act, Coal Mines Regulation Act, Unemployment Insurance Act, and Sweated Industries Act. She added for good measure: “A great many people think he is essentially a military man, but I know him very well, and I know he is not like that at all. In fact one of his greatest talents is the talent of peacemaking.”138