Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  After the Mail bombshell, Churchill was among the most vehement ministers—the others were Amery, Neville Chamberlain, and “Jix” Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary—in vowing not to capitulate. But there were no dissenters. The vote to break off talks was unanimous. Baldwin later told the House that the cabinet interpreted the phone call as a sign that “the first overt move in the General Strike was being actually made, by trying to suppress the press. We felt that in those circumstances the whole situation was changed.” One wonders why. It would have been easy to learn the truth by placing a few more calls. The fact was that the printers’ action had been impulsive and in no way reflected a larger strategy. The TUC leaders had been unaware of it and disowned it the moment they read Baldwin’s letter. The attempt to intimidate a free press outraged as many Labour MPs as Tories; more, perhaps, because some Tory back-benchers had been praying for a casus belli. Nevertheless, at 1:00 A.M. Monday reporters in Downing Street were given a brief announcement that negotiations had been discontinued. A few hours later a TUC delegation arrived at No. 10, bearing a written repudiation of the Mail printers. Ramsay MacDonald told the House “they found the door locked and the whole place in darkness.”203 That was inexcusable, but so was the TUC’s action Saturday in raising the specter of a general strike—for which the unions were completely unprepared—and the cloudy understanding between the miners and the TUC. The miners had authorized the unions’ national leadership to negotiate for them, but not to bargain. Thus, though sporadic attempts to resume talks continued through Monday, the TUC’s inability to compromise without the miners’ sanction hardened the cabinet’s position. And as the evening wore on Churchill, facing the imminent rupture of British order, grew increasingly defiant. He would be the most visible leader on one side; Bevin, on the other.

  Bevin at that time was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, a merger of twenty-two unions, and at 11:59 P.M., as commander in chief of the general strike, he pushed the button. Six million Britons were thereby committed to walking off the job. Iron and steel foundries closed down. Bus drivers abandoned their buses. Newspapers ceased publication. No trains moved, no trucks; the tubes were silent. Building-trade workers, dockworkers, workers in the chemical industry, stayed home. Gas, sanitary, health, and food services deemed “essential” were supposed to be spared, but many gas and electricity works came to a standstill. The government was not unprepared, however. In 1920 Churchill had devised a plan against just such a contingency. The country was divided into nine areas, each with a central controller and staff. Troops would be dispatched to convoy vehicles carrying food and fuel. The police were fully mobilized; Hyde Park became a military post; the Welsh Guards were billeted on the Victoria Embankment. Joynson-Hicks appealed for volunteers, and thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen of the upper and middle classes drove trucks, trams, taxis, and even locomotives. Some members of the House of Lords served as railway porters. It was a peculiarly British emergency; there was little or no violence, and in many places volunteers, strikers, and policemen mingled with civility and even gaiety. Churchill, however, was not among the skylarkers. He felt grim. The miners’ strike had been legitimate, even admirable, he said, “but that is an entirely different thing from the concerted, deliberate organized menace of a General Strike in order to compel Parliament to do something which otherwise it would not do.” He wanted to intimidate the strikers with a show of force; at his suggestion, territorials were encouraged to enlist as civil constabulary reserves, and only after a long argument did his colleagues persuade him that the recruits should wear, not military uniforms, but mufti with armbands, and their weapons be limited to truncheons. Some ministers worried about costs. Churchill rumbled: “The Exchequer will pay! If we start arguing about petty details, we’ll have a tired-out police force, a dissipated army and bloody revolution.” He was embattled, and wondered why the country didn’t share his mood. He said: “One of the great difficulties of the situation is that large numbers of working people feel quite detached from the conflict; and they are waiting, as if they were spectators at a football match, to see whether the Government or the Trade Union is the stronger.” His provocative comments, friends warned him, were deepening labor’s resentment of him. He replied that he rejoiced in their hostility: “People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and to defy clamour are not fit to be Ministers in times of stress.”204

  That would have ruled out the prime minister. “Baldwin,” in the words of one British historian, now “adopted a policy of masterly inactivity.” Churchill’s delight in battle puzzled him; essentially gentle, he himself shrank from discord almost as a matter of principle. Yet he snorted when told that Beaverbrook had remarked: “Churchill is the real power in the Government.” He knew this to be quite untrue. Beyond casting his vote, Winston had played no role in the severance of negotiations after the Mail episode. Later, Baldwin had excluded him from the select cabinet council which met daily to discuss supervising strikebreaking tactics. But Winston kept trying to intervene, and his combative stance loomed ever larger in the public view. Baldwin didn’t want to offend him—Churchill was now next in line for the prime ministership, and his militancy was winning grudging converts among some Tory diehards—but he did want him out of his hair. Then a solution presented itself. H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post approached John Davidson, a senior civil servant. If his premises were protected, he said, he would put his presses at the disposal of the government. The Tories could have their own newspaper. In a week, he predicted, he could build a circulation as high as 400,000 copies. Sir Samuel Hoare, told of the offer, proposed publishing a government paper to be called the British Gazette. The prime minister agreed but did not want Gwynne as its director. Instead, he appointed Churchill editor in chief. It was, Baldwin later said, “the cleverest thing I ever did.”205

  He may have been right. In his long career Baldwin did few clever things, and this decision prevented the chancellor from playing a major role in determining the outcome of the strike. Winston himself savored a delicious irony. For twenty years Gwynne had been his most savage press critic, and now the Morning Post’s perennial target would be running the Post’s shop. He announced that the paper would be written, edited, and published by volunteers. Printers were a problem. On instructions from their union, Gwynne’s compositors stayed out. Beaverbrook said he could send a printer’s foreman at once. Given time, he could find other willing hands among his idle Daily Express employees, and the Daily Mail thought some of their men might pitch in. Winston wouldn’t wait. Beric Holt, who had agreed to serve as one of the Gazette’s editorial assistants, recalls joining a small procession of men who, in the early hours of Tuesday, May 4, “filed up the narrow back stairs of the Morning Post building just off the Strand.” In the composing room Sydney Long, night superintendent of the Daily Express, was already sitting at a Linotype machine, setting copy. Irish Guards and bobbies restrained an angry crowd of strikers on the street below. Churchill, in shirt sleeves, was peering down at large enamel mugs on the floor. He asked their purpose. Holt, who had been there before, replied: “Beer, sir.” “Have they got enough?” asked Winston. A man answered: “Oh yes, sir, plenty.” “Nonsense!” boomed Churchill, producing a pound note. “There is no such thing! Send out for some more.”206

  The presses ran all night, and by 6:00 A.M. they had printed 232,000 copies, all of which were sold within an hour. The entire issue had been set single-handedly by Long. The lead article, unsigned but written by Churchill, set the tone: “This great nation, on the whole the strongest community which civilisation can show, is for the moment reduced in this respect to the level of African natives dependent only on the rumours which are carried from place to place. In a few days if this were allowed to continue, rumours would poison the air, raise panics and disorders, inflame fears and passions together, and carry us all to the depths which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate.” On the second day the cir
culation rose to 507,000. A week later, on the last day of the general strike, it soared to 2,209,000. The cabinet had been under the impression that the Gazette’s contents would be limited to public notices, official statements, and indispensable information. Winston had assured British newspaper publishers: “I do not contemplate violent partisanship, but fair, strong encouragement to the great mass of loyal people.” No one who knew him believed that—Beaverbrook had burst into laughter when told of it—for he was incapable of impartiality. When push came to shove, as it now had in England, he believed that the standards of traditional journalism were anemic. “The field of battle,” he now wrote grandly, “is no longer transport but news.” Then: “The State cannot be impartial between itself and that section of subjects with whom it is contending.” And, most memorably, when reproached in the House for his ringing editorial denunciations of the strike: “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”207

  That was defensible. The paper’s pretense of objectivity in its news columns was not. Under the heading FALSE NEWS appeared the notice: “Many false rumours are current. Believe nothing until you see it in an authoritative journal like the British Gazette.” Yet readers of the Gazette were led to believe that the country was in the grip, not of an industrial dispute, but of incipient revolution. The strike was described as “a direct challenge to ordered government.” Strikers were “the enemy.” A specious claim from a French paper that Bolsheviks were behind the TUC was reprinted in full. Gazette accounts of House debates were outrageously distorted, one Labour MP being described as “a wild Socialist, passionate and shouting.” An MP’s conviction that a settlement was at hand was denied by an unidentified “Cabinet Minister.” Heavy coverage was given to Sir John Simon’s irresponsible statement that each TUC leader could be successfully sued to “the utmost farthing of his personal possessions.” At a time when the walkout had virtually paralyzed Britain a headline reported that the strike was NOT SO COMPLETE AS HOPED BY ITS PROMOTERS. All Englishmen were “calm and confident” that it would fail—the six million strikers, apparently, were no longer regarded as English. Strikebreakers were reassured: “No man who does his duty loyally to the country in the present crisis will be left unprotected by the State from subsequent reprisals”—a pledge, involving forces of the Crown, to which the King took strong exception. Patriotic poetry appeared frequently: Kipling, and, in three issues, Tennyson’s “Soul of England.” While Baldwin’s speeches and statements were bland, offensive to no one, the Gazette repeatedly blared that until the TUC surrendered unconditionally, “there can be no question of compromise of any kind.”208

  The Gazette’s belligerence troubled many of Churchill’s old friends and allies. Lloyd George disapproved of the strike, but, as he told the House, “I know a great many of the people responsible. They are as little revolutionaries as any men in this House. They have fought the rebellious ones in their own Party.” He accused Winston of sabotaging a TUC attempt to reach an agreement and called his paper “a first-class indiscretion, clothed in the tawdry garb of third-rate journalism.” Churchill replied: “It is not the duty of the British Gazette to publish a lot of defeatist trash.” Gwynne, of course, was sharply critical. Thomas Jones noted in his diary that the Morning Post editor “has sent several messages begging that Winston should be kept away from that office where the ‘British Gazette’ is being printed. He butts in at the busiest hours and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious.” But the heaviest protests naturally came from the strike leaders. They countered with a paper of their own, the British Worker. Winston was its chief target; the idea of calling an industrial dispute a revolutionary movement, the Worker declared, “was mainly Mr Churchill’s. It is a melodramatic ‘stunt’ on Sydney [sic] Street lines…. The nation has kept its head in spite of the alarming tricks played upon it. Mr Churchill has failed again, and everybody knows… that ‘revolution’ exists nowhere save in Mr Churchill’s heated and disorderly imagination.” The following day the Worker observed that “day by day in the Cabinet’s newspaper, Mr Churchill, acting as its super-editor, publishes articles by prominent men. These are suspiciously like one another…. The reference to the Strike being directed by a ‘relatively small body of extremists’ again betrays Mr Churchill’s hand. It is mere violent, headlong, foolish propaganda—foolish because no sensible person will believe it.” They only wished that were true. Winston’s articles were believed; his flaming prose was being read in millions of upper- and middle-class homes, which was why the unions, too, had turned to journalism. They failed. Their editorials were dense and dull. Their greatest circulation was 713,000 for a single edition. In desperation, one firebrand slipped into the Post building and threw a steel bar into a press. Holt recalls: “Suddenly there was a horrible shattering jar. Power was turned off.” Workers at the Hoe Company, makers of the machine, refused to repair it. Churchill called the Chatham Dockyard, and Royal Navy ratings arrived in an impressive convoy, departed, and returned with mended parts wrapped in a Union Jack. Winston then issued each member of the staff a mauve pass. Nobody could enter the building without one.209

  Not all Gazette critics lay outside the Establishment. The British Broadcasting Company was struggling to keep its news reports impartial, but Winston, according to John Reith, then its managing director, tried to treat the BBC as “an offshoot of the British Gazette.” Reith appealed to Davidson, Joynson-Hicks, and Baldwin, and when Churchill asked the cabinet to let him run the BBC he was turned down. Reith did permit him to address the radio audience, however, and Beatrice Webb, perhaps the first to appreciate his mastery of this medium, described the talk as “a vividly rhetorical representation of his own case…. Except that his voice is harsh, he is a first rate broadcaster.” He vexed London’s press lords that week, though not over a matter of principle. As the Gazette’s popularity rocketed, he began commandeering all the newsprint in London. Dawson remonstrated, then Rothermere, and finally Beaverbrook wrote him that the two hundred tons of paper at the Daily Express would be needed the moment the strike ended. Impossible, Winston replied: “We are expecting to publish over three millions tonight, and we shall probably have to requisition every scrap of newsprint which is available and suitable.” They met. Beaverbrook liked to tell friends that Winston had two moods, “Winston Up” and “Winston Down.” Down, facing defeat, he was magnificent, but “in a position of uncontrolled power and authority,” as he was at this point, he could be frightening. Of the newsprint confrontation Beaverbrook later recalled: “If any other man living had used such outrageous language to me as he did on that occasion I should never have forgiven him. Churchill on top of the wave has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made.”210

  This “terrible scene,” as Beaverbrook thereafter called it, turned out to be unnecessary. Early the following morning—Wednesday, May 12, the ninth day of the crisis—the unions capitulated. Their treasury was empty, the government’s attrition policy was working, and public opinion, fired by the Gazette, was hostile. Arthur Pugh, the TUC chairman, called at No. 10 to surrender. Accompanying him was the TUC’s general secretary, who wrote in his diary that evening: “While we were talking, Churchill, Baldwin, and Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland [minister of labor] were pacing rapidly up and down the garden, talking animatedly. There was no sign of jubilation amongst them, and Pugh muttered to me: ‘I saw Churchill a few minutes ago, and he said, “Thank God it’s over, Mr Pugh.” ’ ” That afternoon Winston announced that the next issue of the Gazette would be the last. Its final headline was unfortunate. It gloated: SURRENDER RECEIVED BY PREMIER IN DOWNING STREET. In an envoi Churchill told his readers: “The British Gazette may have had a short life, but it has fulfilled the purpose of living. It becomes a memory; but it remains a monument.” That evening he took a large party to see Adele and Fred Astaire in Lady Be Good, then playing at the old Empire Theatre. As he entered, the audience rose and gave him a standing ovation.211

 
Labor’s intellectuals now singled him out for attack. Kingsley Martin, a young leftist writer, studied the columns of the Gazette, noted its incendiary style, found certain striking omissions—Churchill had suppressed an appeal from the church which had blamed both sides—and concluded that Winston had been “discredited.” The New Statesman, then as now a journal of eccentric opinion, perpetrated a fraud. On the night of May 10, it reported, Churchill had led a “war party” of ministers who threatened to resign at once unless talks with the union leaders were broken off. The Churchill faction, it continued, had been “in favour of war at all costs.” This piece of outright fiction declared: “Mr Churchill was the villain of the piece. He is reported to have remarked that he thought ‘a little blood-letting’ would be all to the good.” Winston considered pressing charges of criminal libel against the editors. Sir Douglas Hogg, the government’s attorney general, advised against it. He would certainly win, Hogg said, but in court the defendants could discuss cabinet deliberations “in detail,” which would offend Baldwin Tories. Winston reluctantly let the matter drop, though it was already clear to him that run-of-the-mill Conservatives viewed him with little more favor than the Labourites. Dawson of the Times, in a widely read account of the strike, concluded that “Winston seems to have been the only minister who rather lost his head. He was excitable, provocative, and a great trial to his colleagues. They tried to divert his energies at an early stage to the editing of the British Gazette, an official propagandist organ, in which he became a similar trial to us.”212