Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Curiously, one journalist who commended Churchill’s editorial performance was the irascible Gwynne. He wrote him: “May I lay at your feet my tribute of admiration at your wonderful energy and your marvellous powers of seeing things through?” In time Winston recalled his Gazette experience with nostalgia. On June 10, 1927, he wrote Gwynne: “I shall always look back to that extraordinary ten days. They form one of the most vivid experiences of my somewhat variegated life, and were utterly different from every other episode. I am glad to think they have left behind them a better understanding between us.” He even exploited the episode in one of his quick turns of parliamentary wit. In a tense debate he faced the Opposition and said solemnly: “I have no wish to make threats or use language which would disturb the House and cause bad blood. But this I must say: make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you loose upon us again a General Strike, we will loose upon you”—angry shouts were on Labour lips—“another British Gazette.” The expected storm, Baldwin wrote the King, “gave way to an outburst of unrestrained laughter in which the House was convulsed.”213

  In a long public life clouded with misunderstandings, none was more tragic than the inexpiable enmity between Churchill and Labour. He had been a progressive home secretary; he was a humane chancellor. His record on liberal issues in many ways resembles that of Bismarck, another farsighted conservative. It was far more impressive than that of, say, Ramsay MacDonald, who waffled again and again when in power. But Winston’s visceral reaction against socialism—he was always mistaking pink for red—led him into one rhetorical excess after another. It was Churchillian bombast which had touched off the Labourites’ antagonism toward him. They took him at his word, despite the fact that his word, however prickly, was often conspicuously at odds with his deeds. The Dawsons of the Conservative party distrusted him for an altogether different reason. When the strikers had unsheathed their sword, he had lunged for his; he could never back away from a challenge. But at heart he still believed that the miners were right and the mineowners wrong. When the TUC collapsed he had written Baldwin: “To-night surrender. Tomorrow magnanimity.” He had been moved to pity by Macmillan’s descriptions of the hovels in which the miners lived, their brutish working conditions, and their sickly children. Now that members of the other unions had gone back to work, ending the threat to domestic tranquillity, he was eager to settle the grievances in the coalfields, which were still idle. To his dismay, the strike there dragged on for more than five months, and he and Amery were the only members of the cabinet who urged action. “I’m all on the miners’ side now,” he told Boothby after closing down the Gazette. Baldwin, departing for an extended holiday at Aix-les-Bains, left the matter in Winston’s hands.214

  It was a delicate, heartbreaking—and, in the end, doomed—task. The Tory ministers’ hostility toward the coal strikers was unabated. By the sheer force of will, intellect, and volubility, Winston preserved the workers’ right to picket peacefully; he throttled legislation to outlaw strikes when, in his words, “a majority of those affected are in favour of it”; he used Treasury funds, not to subsidize the mines’ proprietors, but to build miners’ homes and fund “training schemes and other forms of assistance for displaced miners”; and he saved the workers’ right to the secret ballot—the owners argued that this would increase the number of strikes—because he was “convinced that the majority of working men would adopt sound and sensible attitudes,” and because private polling, in his view, restricted the influence of the unions’ “extremist members.”215

  MacDonald, he knew, was close to Herbert Smith, the president of the miners’ union. On Winston’s initiative, Churchill and MacDonald held two long, secret meetings, first at Chartwell and then in Sir Abe Bailey’s London home on Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch. Smith had authorized MacDonald to speak for him, and the two men forged an agreement. Winston then drew up an ultimatum to be delivered to the colliery proprietors, omitting the strikers’ most extravagant demands but including those terms which were minimal for them and the Labour party. Keeping Baldwin informed, he laid this compromise before the cabinet: “Do not, I beg you, throw this chance upon the rubbish heap of so many others.” His colleagues disapproved of this proposal—they thought it gave the workers too much—but, as one said afterward, “We couldn’t repudiate Winston.” The real question, as he had told MacDonald, was whether the coal barons would bow to the ultimatum. It was “quite likely,” he had said, that they “might refuse to come, or, if they did come, might take a line that would make progress impossible.” In that event, the government “would make no secret of their opinion that they were in the wrong,” but “the powers of actual coercion that the Government possesses are very limited.” The miners now believed that Churchill was their best hope; the Evening Standard reported that both they and the TUC, asked to choose between Winston and any other member of the government, had expressed “a marked preference for Mr Churchill as mediator.”216

  It proved an impossible task. The owners, speaking through Evan Williams, the president of the Mining Association of Great Britain, refused to make any concession whatever. They knew the men were desperate, growing hungrier every day, with winter dead ahead. Thomas Jones described one meeting between Williams and Churchill as “acute and at times acrimonious,” but Williams wouldn’t budge. He fought every attempt at reconciliation. They met again at No. 10; Jones called it “a ding-dong debate” which accomplished nothing. Winston’s anger at the owners grew. He poured it out in letters to Clementine. She replied: “I fear you are having a very anxious and difficult time”; the proprietors’ position, she said, seemed “hard and cruel.” He wrote her that the talks were leading toward a “serious collision.” She hoped he wasn’t shouldering the other ministers aside and thus alienating them: “You are having an anxious but a thrilling and engrossing time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes—I suppose Steel-Maitland and George Lane-Fox [secretary for mines] are not often allowed near the trough? If the cat were Minister of Labour or Mines she would not give up her place there without a few ‘miaows.’ ”217

  But Steel-Maitland and Lane-Fox would cede the miners nothing. And Baldwin, when he returned to London, agreed with them. Churchill proposed statutory intervention. Other wealthy contributors to Tory coffers had taken an interest in the talks, however, and when Winston wrote Baldwin, “I do hope that a little employers’ agitation will not prevent H.M.G. from advancing with courage & conviction against… detractors of the public interest,” he found that the agitation of Williams’s clients had done just that. The most the prime minister would promise was a toothless appeal tribunal. After Churchill scorned “the greedy appetites of the coal trade,” two of his closest friends, Birkenhead and Lord Londonderry, reproached him. Londonderry, a mineowner and one of Winston’s cousins, argued that the owners were fighting bolshevism. Winston replied: “With those parts of your letter which deal with the necessity for combating Bolshevism I am in entire accord. But there could be no worse way of combating Bolshevism than to identify the Conservative Party and His Majesty’s Government with the employers, and particularly with a body of employers like those headed by Mr Evan Williams…. The duty of the Government is to occupy an impartial position in the interests of the State and of the whole community…. You say that the Owners are fighting Socialism. It is not the business of Coal Owners as Coal Owners to fight Socialism. If they declare it their duty, how can they blame the Miners’ Federation for pursuing political ends? The business of the Coal Owners is to manage their industry successfully, to insist upon sound economic conditions as regards hours and wages, and to fight Socialism as citizens and not as owners of a particular class of property.”218

  It was hopeless. He wanted to warn the owners that if they continued to be “unreasonable,” the government would appoint arbitrators and fix a national minimum wage. It seemed clear to him that a few rich Englishmen, and they alone, were blocking a settlement. When they refused even to participate in tripar
tite talks with the government and the union, he told the cabinet that their position was “wholly wrong and unreasonable, an attitude without precedent in recent times,” and charged that they had even influenced Tory whips in the House, who had “been at some of the Ministers, urging them to do nothing.” Certainly the cabinet’s reluctance to subject the owners to any pressure whatever is singular; the impasse, after all, was eroding the national economy. Harold Laski, after accompanying miner delegates to one meeting, wrote a friend that he thought Baldwin “quite tragic… hard and a little cynical and impatient of all criticism…. Churchill who was there was bigger and more skillful in every way—he knew how to negotiate. Baldwin merely blundering uncouthly.” Of the 1,250,000 union members, 100,000 demoralized men had returned to work by early October. Boothby, like Macmillan, went into the coalfields to talk to strikers. On October 9 he wrote Churchill from the Carlton Club: “It is the impression, growing every day, that the Government has now divested itself of all responsibility for the conduct of our national industries… that despite the promise of the first months it has become… a Government of reaction.” It would, he continued, “be difficult to exaggerate the effect of your vigorous intervention in the mining dispute last month” or “the disappointment which attended the failure of your efforts.” In the end the owners’ obduracy was triumphant. As Leo Amery wrote later: “The miners straggled back to the pits on the owners’ terms, including longer hours, a beaten and resentful army.”219

  Worse followed. In the wake of the broken strike, the parliamentary Conservatives passed a wave of antilabor legislation. All the gains Churchill had achieved for the unions were abolished. Picketing was outlawed; no worker could be disciplined for refusing to join a strike deemed “illegal”; the attorney general was authorized to seize union funds; the Trades Dispute Act of 1906, which exempted unions from legal suit, was repealed. In a blow at the Labour party, unions were prohibited from collecting money from their members for political purposes unless they had secured their written consent. For Churchill, the low point came when a delegation of miners arrived at the Treasury and charged him with betraying them. Jones wrote in his diary that this was grossly unfair; that Winston had tried “to go to great lengths in the way of legislation on hours, wages and conditions—which terrified his colleagues.” But all the workmen knew was that he had failed them. Smith, their leader, stood before Winston, trembling with rage. Gaunt and pale, he was a symbol of their deprivation; born in a Lancashire workhouse, the posthumous son of a miner killed in a mine accident, he himself had begun working in the pits on his tenth birthday. Later he would write of this meeting: “We said to Churchill: ‘We understand you were a man of courage, but you have broken down at the first fence. You have dismounted. Have you been doing wrong while the masters have been away; and got reprimanded?’ He did not like it.”220

  He hated it, and could not reply; he understood their bitterness, for he shared it. In less than two years he would grasp the magnitude of his error in putting England back on the gold standard. Writing Grigg on July 2, 1928, he dealt savagely with the financial experts who had urged him to do it: “They have caused an immense amount of misery and impoverishment by their rough and pedantic handling of the problem. In ruined homes, in demoralised workmen, in discouraged industry, in embarrassed finances, in inflated debt and cruel taxation we have paid the price.” Eleven years after the tumult of 1926 he wrote that industrial strife “has introduced a narrowing element into our public life. It has been a keenly felt impediment to our productive and competitive power. It has become the main foundation of a socialist political party which has ruled the State greatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again.”221 Churchill was not the only statesman to be baffled by twentieth-century economics. He was, however, among the very few British Conservatives who had seen the justice of the workers’ cause. It is not the least of the ironies in his career that within twenty years, when he was at the peak of his achievements, their resentment would coalesce to drive him from office.

  Today’s Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after mid-century, when the communications revolution led to expectations of instantaneity, are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the lightning of cause will be swiftly followed by the thunderclap of effect. Great political sea changes move at a testudinal pace, however. Change is preceded by reappraisals, false starts, and frequent setbacks. William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in 1831, yet over thirty years passed before Lincoln freed the slaves. The big Swede christened Joseph Hagglund and remembered as Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad on November 19, 1915. It would be another generation before organized labor was ready to test its strength. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, in 1928. Not until the later stages of World War II would it become available to physicians, and then in limited supply. The American Equal Rights Association was founded by New York feminists on May 10, 1866, but their great-great-granddaughters are still struggling to realize their dream. Even so cataclysmic an event as the First World War did not reach its maximum impact until more than ten years after the Armistice, when Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer reached audiences ready, at last, to believe what, until then, had been thought unbelievable.

  So it was with the general strike of 1926 and the career of Winston Churchill. During the three years which followed, he rode a crest of acclaim in the middle and upper classes, unbruised by the grievances of those at both ends of the political spectrum who had been angered by his performance during the nine days and the long aftermath. The strike had been broken, the government had won, the miners were back in the pits, and he had been the cabinet’s most colorful cheerleader. His mistakes were unobserved; hardly anyone understood economics anyway. But he certainly sounded as though he did. Each budget speech was more brilliant than the last. Altogether he presided over five Budget Days, a record matched only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone, each of whom became prime minister. Bets were made on when Churchill would move into No. 10. His only rival was the rising star Neville Chamberlain, and even Chamberlain wrote of him in 1928: “One doesn’t often come across a real man of genius or, perhaps, appreciate him when one does. Winston is such a man.” It was generally agreed that Churchill was mellowing. Lord Winterton wrote: “The remarkable thing about him is the way he has suddenly acquired, quite late in Parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humor and banter on almost all occasions; no one used to ‘suffer fools ungladly’ more fully than Winston; now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House, and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally—a great accretion to his already formidable Parliamentary power.”222

  His wit could still wound—“Politics are very much like war,” he said; “we even use poison gas at times”—and once he devastated a hostile woman MP who berated him during a dinner party, ending her diatribe by observing with scorn: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.” “And you, madam,” Churchill replied, “are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.” Yet his humor now was often gentle, even self-deprecating. After a small dinner at Pratt’s Club in London, F.E. proposed that Lord Melchett, the richest man in the party, should pay the bill. Winston demurred: “My dear Freddie, surely you would not deprive me of the pride and pleasure of giving a crust to Croesus?” After he had switched parties and Baldwin had made him chancellor, Churchill said: “You know, the family motto of the House of Marlborough from which I descend is ‘Faithful but Unfortunate.’ ” A gushing woman asked him: “Doesn’t it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you speak the hall is packed to overflowing?” Winston said: “It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that, if instead of making a political speech, I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.�
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  Baldwin was dazzled by him, and during these years, when there was no threat to it, their relationship approached genuine friendship. On the evening of each Budget Day the prime minister sent the King an appraisal of the chancellor’s presentation. Each was giddier than the last. In one he wrote that Churchill “has a power of attraction which nobody in the House of Commons can excel.” Another spoke of Churchill’s “masterpiece of cleverness and ingenuity.” In a third, reporting on a speech which had lasted three and a half hours, he wrote: “The House became intensely interested in watching a master in the art of oratory and tantalizing the imagination unfold his ideas in a speech packed with ideas, yet so simple and clear that there could be no possible misunderstanding.” Then he sent Winston himself a note: “I hate to use the word ‘brilliant’: it has been worked to death and is too suggestive of brilliantine: but, if I may use it in its pristine virginity, so to speak, it is the right one. I congratulate you with both hands.” Some veteran MPs across the aisle were also impressed. Lloyd George called him “the merriest tax collector since the days of Robin Hood.” And the press, for once, was on his side. Cartoonists depicted him as the “Smiling Chancellor,” and “Winsome Winston.” The Times of India commented: “In appearance Mr Churchill is almost jovial; one can imagine him, dressed in a cowl, the incarnation of the jolly monks and friars of centuries ago.”224

  Of course, there were those who saw him very differently. Ardent Labour MPs attacked him relentlessly, Snowden crying after one budget speech: “There is not one penny of relief for the wage-earning classes. Shorn of all the glamour of the Right Honourable Gentleman’s eloquence, this is his Budget. No more of a rich man’s Budget has ever been presented. It will not take long for the glamour to disappear, and then the great toiling masses will realize the true character of this Budget, and will realize, too, that the Tory Party is still more than ever what Lord George Hamilton declared many years ago: ‘A party that looks after its own friends, whether it be in office or out of office.’ ” On Churchill’s own side of the House, Conservative back-benchers had not forgotten his stands on Home Rule and Free Trade, and their wrath was rekindled in 1928, when, led by Leo Amery, they made a fresh attempt to follow the American example and introduce protective tariffs, arguing that they would put a million Englishmen back to work. Churchill blocked them; Baldwin supported him. Amery wrote angrily in his diary of “the whole attitude of the Cabinet under Winston’s influence, and the PM’s decision not to do anything”; Lane-Fox noted that the protectionists were “now very angry and a lot is going on. It is the first sign of a real party fissure that I have yet seen.” The storm was small and it passed quickly. Winston wrote Clementine: “Really I feel vy independent of them all.”225