Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Churchill wanted the figures for a piece he was scribbling, propped up in bed, on “My New York Adventures.” In it he wrote: “I certainly suffered every pang, physical and mental, that a street accident or, I suppose, a shell wound can produce. None is unendurable. There is neither the time nor the strength for self-pity. There is no room for remorse or fears. If at any moment in the long series of sensations a grey veil deepening into blackness had descended upon the sanctum I should have felt or feared nothing additional. Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come, dread naught; all will be well.” He telegraphed this to the Daily Mail three days after Christmas with a note to the editor: “Am now able to crawl around fairly well…. Good wishes for New Year and love to your pets Ramsay and Baldwin.” Harmsworth cabled back £600.318

  Pickardt prescribed a rest, and back at the Waldorf, Clementine packed for Nassau. On their return he would need a secretary, and she hired Phyllis Moir, a young Englishwoman who had worked in the British Foreign Office. Thompson met Miss Moir at the door of Apartment 39 A and said softly: “You’ll find him pretty weak and tired. That accident gave him a nasty jolt and he only came out of the hospital a few days ago.” She recalls that her first impression of Churchill was of “a humpty-dumpty sort of figure reading a letter.” He was wearing a brown pin-striped suit, a matching polka-dot bow tie, and “black buttoned boots with odd-looking cloth tops.” She was particularly impressed by “his small, delicate, beautifully shaped hands—the hands of an artist.” He was smoking “a huge cigar,” which he laid aside to say, rather distantly: “I understand you are willing to accompany me in my peregrinations.” Miss Moir confirmed it, and when the Churchills sailed for the Bahamas on New Year’s Eve, she set about converting a maid’s room in the apartment into an office for herself. It had been her impression that he would soon be fit and ready to work. That had been his, too, and his American lecture agent urged him to be back by January 15, 1932, pointing out that every week’s delay meant the loss of engagements and thousands of dollars.319

  It proved impossible. In Nassau he suffered from severe aftershock and depression. “Vitality only returning slowly,” he wired the agent on January 3. Five days later a nervous reaction struck. He wrote Pickardt that he had experienced “a great and sudden lack of power of concentration, and a strong sense of being unequal to the task which lay so soon ahead of me.” Clementine and the physician dealt with the agent while Winston, attended by a night nurse, fought insomnia with nightly sedation, and forced himself to exercise a few minutes each day. His easel was there, but did not attract him. He wrote his son: “I have not felt like opening the paint box, although the seas around these islands are luminous with the most lovely tints of blue and green and purple.” Clementine wrote Randolph: “Last night he was very sad & said that he had now in the last 2 years had 3 very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the crash, then the loss of his political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible injury—He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from the three events.”320

  On January 15 his spirits began to return. He outlined two lectures: another call for closer ties between Washington and London and an analysis of the Depression’s impact on Europe. But he warned his agent that he was still “astonishingly feeble” and that “you will find me, I am afraid, a much weaker man than the one you welcomed on December 11. I walk about five hundred yards every day and swim perhaps one hundred and fifty. But I tire so quickly and have very little reserve.” A few days later, reporting that he was “steadily improving and gaining strength,” he agreed to a formidable schedule: fourteen lectures, moving to a different city almost every day. Pickardt had rescued him from the hardship of Prohibition with a note on his stationery: “This is to certify that the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters [slightly over eight ounces].”321

  Churchill leaving Lenox Hill Hospital

  Thus fortified, and accompanied by Miss Moir, to whom he dictated a constant stream of notes and observations—she had yet to master his lisp, and was disconcerted by “his curious habit of whispering each phrase to himself before he said it aloud”—he spoke to two thousand people in the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 28, picking up momentum as the evening progressed. They were enthusiastic, and so was Churchill. He was all business now, granting interviews, writing Boothby to suggest that they both attend the American political conventions in the summer, and visiting Washington for long talks with key senators and a short one with Hoover. In the capital he stayed with the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay. Miss Moir remembers that “these two made the oddest contrast, the immensely dignified diplomat standing ill at ease at the foot of the old-fashioned four-poster and the Peter Pan of British politics sitting up in bed, a cigar in his mouth, his tufts of red hair as yet uncombed scanning the morning newspapers.” Diana used the embassy for a party, inviting all her young American acquaintances. One morning Winston approached his new secretary, grinning mischievously. “I’ve done something really dreadful, Miss Moir. I’ve just asked the Washington exchange operator for a glass of sherry, thinking I was speaking on the house telephone. I’m afraid I gave her rather a shock.”322

  His lecture tour was a success; the Daily Telegraph called it “a triumphal progress.” He liked Americans, and they sensed it. As a foreign politician he could not support any presidential candidate, but his admiration for Roosevelt was obvious, and that, too, was popular that year. During a radio interview the announcer told his audience that, next to the King, Churchill was “probably the best-liked man under the Union Jack.” Winston solemnly told them: “War, today, is bare—bare of profit and stripped of all its glamour. The old pomp and circumstance are gone. War now is nothing but toil, blood, death, and lying propaganda.” Peace would be assured, he continued, provided France kept a strong army and England and the United States remained masters of the seas. The interviewer asked: “I take it that you haven’t a high opinion of these disarmament conferences?” Churchill said vehemently: “No, I have not! I think that since the Great War they have done more harm than good.”323

  Before sailing home on the Majestic—he had Bought British after all—Winston conferred with Charles Scribner over future books, planned an investment program with Baruch, and visited the Collier’s office to discuss further ideas for magazine pieces. Outwardly he seemed to have recovered from his accident. It was an illusion. His euphoric spells alternated with periods of weakness and gloom. The trip was “drawing wearily” to a close, he wrote Randolph, and he had missed his Daily Mail deadlines. “I have been terribly remiss in my articles,” he wrote Harmsworth, “but, although I have got several very good ones in my head, I have not had the margin of life and strength to do them while travelling and speaking so many nights in succession.” To Thornton Butterworth, his British publisher, he wrote: “I am much better, but I feel I need to rest and not to have to drive myself as hard. You have no idea what I have been through.” His friends realized he had suffered an ordeal, however. While he was still in Nassau, Brendan Bracken had approached them, suggesting that they show their affection by buying him a new car. Among the contributors were Harold Macmillan, John Maynard Keynes, Lindemann, Lord Lloyd, Austen Chamberlain, Charlie Chaplin, Beaverbrook, Rothermere, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, the painter Sir John Lavery, and the Prince of Wales, whose romantic involvement would presently become interwoven, and then knotted, with Churchill’s political future. The gift—a £2,000 Daimler—awaited him at Paddington Station. Several of the donors were there, and they sang: “For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Winston tried to smile, then bowed his head and wept.324

  At Chartwell he toile
d on the grounds, roughed out articles, and slowly worked his way back into the Marlborough material with the help of F. W. D. Deakin, a young don from Christ Church, Oxford. Like all Chartwell guests, Bill Deakin was expected to work with his hands from time to time. One day, in the middle of building a wall, Churchill looked up and gloomily asked him: “Do you suppose that in five hundred years these bricks will be excavated as a relic of Stanley Baldwin’s England?”325

  His life, Virginia Cowles wrote, had “apparently ended in a quagmire from which there seemed to be no rescue.” Reith of the BBC, believing his fangs drawn, at least on fiscal issues, permitted him to discuss monetary policy in his first radio broadcast to the United States. “Believe me,” Winston told the Americans, “no one country, however powerful, can combat this evil alone.” The audience listening at their Philcos and Atwater Kents was estimated at thirty million, but in Britain the event passed almost unnoticed. In Moscow, Stalin was receiving a British delegation led by Lady Astor. He inquired about politicians in England. “Chamberlain,” she said, “is the coming man.” Stalin asked: “What about Churchill?” Her eyes widened. “Churchill?” she said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied, “Oh, he’s finished.”326

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  David (now Sir David) Pitblado introduced me to Winston Churchill (himself still unknighted) in the Verandah Grill of the Queen Mary, that greatest of Cunarders, on January 24, 1953. The prime minister, or “P.M.,” as his entourage called him, was returning home with his family after a holiday and a series of meetings in Washington. As a young foreign correspondent on my way to the Middle East and India, I was delighted to discover that my cabin, M 101, was adjacent to Churchill’s suite. Even better, Pitblado, then the prime minister’s principal private secretary, had read the British edition of my first book and thought it commendable. He graciously arranged for me to see the P.M. from time to time during our five-day voyage to Southampton. It would be inaccurate to say that Churchill and I conversed. Alone with him I was mute, having, in fact, nothing to say. He had everything to say, and like Gladstone speaking to Victoria, he addressed me as though I were a one-man House of Commons. It was superb. I was enthralled, and eagerly accepted an invitation to tour the rooms of No. 10 Downing Street, with a Scotland Yard inspector as my guide, during my layover in London.

  Thus began my accumulating debt to British hospitality. It is now immense. While researching this work I took a flat in Mayfair, but I seldom dined there alone. The “Churchillians,” as Sir John Colville calls them, entertained me in their homes, answered all my questions, suggested other sources, and provided me with valuable introductions. Lady Soames, DBE (Mary Churchill), packed a picnic lunch and drove me to Chartwell, where we spent the day wandering through the mansion and its grounds and examining scores of her father’s canvases. It was in the flat of Jane Williams, who is triply qualified as an observer of the English patriciate—she worked with Churchill and is the niece of both Lord Butler (“Rab”) and Lord Portal of the RAF—that I first found myself at a table with “Jock” Colville, Churchill’s assistant private secretary during most of World War II and joint principal private secretary during the P.M.’s second premiership in the early 1950s. Butler himself received me in his country home shortly before his death. So did Lord Head at Throope Manor; General Sir Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet from 1939 to 1945, at Woodridge; and Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove House in Sussex. It was typical of Macmillan’s gallantry that although he felt too ill to eat, he had laid out a champagne lunch for me.

  Such graciousness can lead to pleasant embarrassment. When my London hack drew up outside the Oxford studio of Oscar Nemon, sculptor of Churchill, Nemon raced out of the house, his smock flying behind him, and insisted, to the point of physical pummeling, on paying the cabby. At No. 1 Eaton Square, Lord Boothby broke out a shining bottle of prime bourbon although it was only 2:00 P.M. Sir John Martin in Watlingham, Martin Gilbert on Oxford’s Harcourt Hill, and R. L. James on Oxford’s Blenheim Drive clearly assumed that I would arrive with an enormous appetite. Sir William Hawthorne, Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, expected me to be both omnivorous and omnibibulous; when we rose from his high table and left the room I felt sheathed in an alcoholic mist. But as it cleared, I met two meticulous Churchill scholars: Captain Stephen Roskill, RN, and Correlli Barnett, keeper of the Churchill Archives. Remarkable shortcuts were disclosed in social situations. Over biscuits in Twisden Road, for instance, A. J. P. Taylor guided me toward Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Beaverbrook papers. Churchill himself was never a clubman, but in exploring the web of his friendships I found those last bastions of male chauvinism invaluable. Holding honorary membership in three London clubs, I could entertain and then interview, sotto voce, men who would have been reticent in other surroundings. But here, once again, I was guest more often than host—of Sir David Hunt at the Athenaeum, for example, and Sir William Deakin at the Oxford and Cambridge, and George Malcolm Thompson at the Garrick. It was from the Reform Club that Graham Norton and I sallied forth one glistening evening for a nightlong exploration of Victorian London’s architectural relics, winding up near Covent Garden.

  Others who welcomed me or visited me for taped sessions were Cecily “Chips” Gemmell, Lord Soames, Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Selkirk, Lord Hailsham, John Griggs, Malcolm MacDonald (son of Ramsay and himself an MP), Lord Strauss, Sir Fitzroy MacLean, Mark Bonham Carter, Mrs. Kathleen Hill, Grace Hamlin, A. A. Montague Browne, Richard Hill, Velma Salmon, Lady Avon, Noel Mander, Lord Geoffrey Lloyd, Julian Amery, Denis Kelly, Sir Charles Martin, Lord Southborough, and, in his delightful Sussex cottage outside Robertsbridge, Malcolm Muggeridge. Not all my respondents were British. Virginia Cowles is undeniably American, though in her Belgravia home she evokes the presence of Mrs. Miniver. Averell Harriman is a triumph of the English-Speaking Union; he seems at home in either London or New York, provided the background is expensive and in exquisite taste. His wife, Pamela, though active in U.S. politics, will never pass as American. She was born a Digby in Dorset, Thomas Hardy country, and you know it from her every gesture. Her first husband was Randolph Churchill; their son, born during the Battle of Britain, is the second Winston Spencer Churchill, MP, who was my thoughtful host at lunch in the House of Commons.

  Documents of contemporary history are less accessible in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Britain has no Freedom of Information Act. All Churchill papers in the Royal Archives are reserved for the official biography. The seal cannot be broken on other sensitive government documents—cabinet, War Office, Foreign Office, Admiralty, Colonial Office, and Air Ministry—until fifty years after the event. Moreover, the papers of prominent public men are more scattered than those in U.S. presidential libraries. By far the largest single source of evidence for this volume is in the Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge University, the repository of 215 collections of private papers, including those of McKenna, Bridgeman, P. J. Grigg, Bevin, Bracken, Carson, de Robeck, Fisher, Crewe, Keyes, Rawlinson, Shane Leslie, E. L. Spears (partial), Beatty (partial), and Hankey (partial).

  Documents left by other public men are frequently found beneath different roofs. Balfour’s papers are in Scotland’s National Register of Archives, the Public Record Office, the Reference Division of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library), and in the private collection of Lord Rayleigh. Asquith’s are in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (“Bodley”), in the Smuts Archive, and in the collection of Mark Bonham Carter. Halifax’s are filed in the India Office Library, the Public Record Office, and the estate of his heir. Some of Lord Esher’s are in the Bodleian and some at Churchill College. Northcliffe’s are dispersed among the Times Archive, the British Library, and the Bodleian. T. E. Lawrence’s may be found in the Bodleian, the British Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the University of Texas Library. One would expect all of Beaverbrook’s to be in the Beaverbrook Library, but no; some are there and some in the Hous
e of Lords Record Office. Because Lloyd George decided to take a peerage in the last weeks of World War II, some of his papers are in the House of Lords. (At about the same time he married his mistress, who became the Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor; her extraordinary diaries, covering the years 1912 to 1949, are in the Beaverbrook Library.) Other valuable Lloyd George material is on the shelves of the Lloyd George Archive in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire; the National Library of Wales; and the Beaverbrook Library. Bonar Law’s papers are in the Bodleian, the Beaverbrook Library, and the Lords. Hankey’s war diary (1912–1938) is in the Public Record Office, the diaries of Prince Louis of Battenberg in the Milford Haven Collection. Samuel’s papers are in the Lords, as are Churchill documents on the founding of Iraq and his anti-Bolshevik years after Versailles. The Cecil, Jellicoe, and C. P. Scott papers are in the British Library. Milner’s and H. A. L. Fisher’s are housed in the Bodleian; Haldane’s, Rosebery’s, Haig’s, and Margot Asquith’s in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Hamilton’s and Robertson’s at King’s College, London; Cockran’s and some of Marsh’s in the New York Public Library; Joseph and Austen Chamberlain’s in the Birmingham University Library; most of Sir Henry Wilson’s, including his microfilmed diaries, in the Imperial War Museum; those of Mottistone and Cherwell (“the Prof”) in the Library of Nuffield College, Oxford; Curzon’s in the India Office Library; Derby’s at Liverpool University; and Baldwin’s in the Cambridge University Library. Amery’s, some of Spears’s, Philip Sassoon’s, some of Marsh’s, Ponsonby’s, and Asquith’s letters to Venetia Stanley Montagu—probably the most valuable single source for the government’s prosecution of the war between 1914 and 1916—remain in private possession. The cabinet and War Council minutes, the Dardanelles Commission evidence, and imperial conference minutes are filed in the Public Record Office. Verbatim accounts of all proceedings in the House of Commons and the House of Lords between 1881 and 1932 may be found in the Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).