Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Meantime he moved to close one hole in his dike—the loss of earnings from the Standard. He wrote Lord Camrose, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, explaining the circumstances of his departure from the Standard and proposing to write now for the Telegraph. Attached to his letter were three lists of newspapers which carried his syndicated columns: the first list was of papers in Great Britain, the second of English-language papers around the world, and the third of papers which published them in translation. His agent, Imre Revesz, had drawn up the last list; they meant that Churchill’s views and disclosures—chiefly from his intelligence net—reached readers in seventeen languages. “As you will see it is a very fine platform,” he noted dryly, “though as Nazi power advances, as in Vienna, planks are pulled out of it.” Camrose agreed to a six-month trial, paying Winston £70 a piece. The arrangement continued for fourteen months, until the Daily Mirror offered him better terms.145

  This was an important step but in itself would not have been enough to save Chartwell. The fact is that Churchill never understood money and was awed by those who did. They in turn were captivated by him, which was fortunate, for his profligate ways would have driven him from Parliament long before he became the only man who could save England. Bernard Baruch had rescued him in 1929, but Winston couldn’t go to the same well twice. Besides, Baruch was in America. The only wealthy member of his inner circle was Brendan Bracken, and the origin and extent of Bracken’s holdings were unknown; he cultivated his reputation as a man of mystery. In any event, few men possessed the enormous liquidity Churchill needed, and Brendan wasn’t one of them.

  But he knew men who did. The day after the Daily Express story Winston told Bracken that he wanted someone to take over his portfolio for three years, with the power to buy or sell holdings, provided his debt not deepen. He expected to pay interest on the loan—about £800 a year. Afterward he wrote Bracken: “If it were not for public affairs and my evident duty I shd be able to manage all right.” He thought it “unsuitable as well as harassing” to have to follow the market “from day to day when one’s mind ought to be concentrated upon the great world issues now at stake. I shd indeed be grateful if I cd be liberated during these next few critical years from this particular worry, wh descended upon me so unexpectedly [and to] which I shall certainly never expose myself again. I cannot tell you what a relief it would be if I could put it out of my mind; and take the large decisions wh perhaps may be required of me without this distraction and anxiety.”146

  Bracken was alarmed. Austria had just fallen; Czechoslovakia lay between the Nazi jaws; Chamberlain was rejecting defense spending, which Berlin might misunderstand. To Brendan—and he knew he was not alone—Churchill was the one leader standing against the black tide, contemptuous of HMG, Cliveden, and Blickling Hall. The thought of him spending his energy on potboilers for Collier’s and News of the World, leaving his corner seat in the House of Commons to speak in provincial lecture halls—of Churchill absent from the center of action when the future of civilization hung in the balance—was unbearable. Among Bracken’s acquaintances in the City were wealthy men—many, but not all, Jews—who were outraged by Chamberlain’s policy of courting Hitler. He circulated a memorandum among them, explaining Churchill’s quandary. If Winston absented himself from public life he could pay his debts and build an estate. “But how is he to do this,” Brendan asked, “while events run at this pitch?” One man took him aside; they talked quietly and shook hands; it was done.147

  Told of the transaction, Churchill sent Brendan a note: “Enclosed is a letter wh you can show to our friend. This is only to tell you that as Hitler said to Mussolini on a recent and less worthy occasion, ‘I shall never forget’ this inestimable service.” The “friend” was Sir Henry Strakosch, an industrialist in the City, who had been mining gold in South Africa for over forty years. Winston knew him; he was part of Churchill’s intelligence net; since the Führer’s decision to rearm the Reich, the expatriated South African tycoon had been an invaluable source of facts and figures in Germany’s military budgets. Churchill’s pride prevented him from begging; therefore Bracken, his most loyal follower, had done it for him. Strakosch agreed to cover Churchill’s losses, buying his deflated U.S. securities at the price he had paid for them. He wrote Winston that he would “carry this position for three years, you giving me full discretion to sell or vary holdings at any time, but on the understanding that you incur no further liability.”148

  Chartwell had been saved (the Times advertisement was withdrawn after a single appearance) and Churchill had been granted a reprieve—not a gift, but a loan. He would have refused charity, and Strakosch had not amassed his fortune by playing the samaritan to improvident statesmen. Winston could remain a member of Parliament, provided he met his publishing deadlines—chiefly those for the last volume of his Marlborough biography and for A History of the English-speaking Peoples—and sent payments to Strakosch as they came due.

  As Europe toiled slowly toward its next butchery—never was there a war so hard to start, nor a warlord more frustrated than the Kriegsherr in Berlin—the quintessential Churchill, the Winston the public never saw, prowled his study night after night, an inner shutter drawn in a private blackout of the mind, excluding everything but the topic before him. His prose grew in intensity as though controlled by a rheostat, as he used the language to express his wrath, a fury matched only by that of Hitler, who was free to act while Churchill, who couldn’t even control his own spending, saw himself approaching senescence with no prospect of any change in his reputation as the leper of Parliament.

  Meantime, he limited his attendance in Westminster to great debates and crucial votes. While his colleagues slept in London, in Kent he paced about in his loud dressing gown, scanning précis from his researchers, dictating, sending the typed manuscript to the printer by courier, and revising the galleys in red ink—“playing with the proofs,” as he called it, a very expensive amusement, since extensive changes in the galleys were charged to the author. The grammar and spelling were subjected to a final, rigorous check by Eddie Marsh, his private secretary in earlier years, now recently knighted; then the courier reappeared and the job was done. The front bench was often critical of Churchill’s absenteeism, but had he been faithful in his attendance, what would he have accomplished? In November and December of 1937 he had been completely absorbed in writing his Marlborough biography. During that time the prime minister and his cabinet had, in the name of economy, permitted England’s military strength to lag farther and farther behind Germany’s. Yet had Churchill been in Parliament he could have done nothing; His Majesty’s Government did not need the approval of the House; it was under no obligation even to inform Parliament, and it didn’t. Much of the caviling about Winston’s truancy was disingenuous; when he was at Chartwell, they were safe from his biting wit. Writing Maxine Elliott in February 1938 he said he was determined to finish the book “by the end of the month. I am therefore not paying much attention to the House of Commons, at which I expect the Ministers will not be at all vexed!”149

  Furthermore, his was the most persuasive rhetoric in England, and while speeches in Parliament were heard only by those within earshot, the written word may reach anywhere. Years later the White House revealed that a copy of While England Slept, the American edition of Churchill’s Arms and the Covenant, had lain on President Roosevelt’s bedside table, with key passages, including an analysis of the president’s peace initiative, underscored. Churchill’s prose, so rhythmic that it can be scanned, was vibrant with the terrific energy that can hold and sway vast audiences. Its vitality is remarkable, and in the late 1930s, because of his continuing financial obligations, his output became prodigious. In late 1937 he published Great Contemporaries, which was published in a revised and expanded edition the following year, along with Arms and the Covenant and the fourth and last volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times. Step by Step appeared in mid-1939. During 1938, while working on his four-volume History of the
English-speaking Peoples, he also turned out fifty-nine magazine articles on subjects as diverse as “Would I Live My Life Again?” and “Women in War.” Two of the books—Great Contemporaries and Step by Step—were collections of pieces written for newspapers and magazines, and Arms and the Covenant presented key foreign policy speeches; but even they required revision and rewriting. After reading the fourth volume of Marlborough, Maxine Elliott wrote him from the Riviera: “It is incredible to me that one man can possess the genius to write a book like this and at the same time pursue his ordinary life which is a thousand times fuller of grave duties and obligations than that of lesser men.”150

  He paid a price. In a life crowded with incident, familial obligations, recreation, and public service, he published forty-four books, five of them during Victoria’s reign, when both his writing style and political philosophy were formed. Except for the small legacy which he had used to buy Chartwell, writing had been his sole source of income, but he had never written under such pressure, and at an age when other writers slow down or retire altogether.

  At times the sheer volume of his research notes and the goading of his agent, his publishers, and magazine editors were exasperating. “I am toiling double shifts,” he wrote Clementine, away on holiday; “it is laborious: & I resent it and the pressure.” Like any other writer, he hoped for windfalls. Now and then an unexpected check arrived, to be greeted with a radiant grin and instructions to Mrs. Landemare for a lavish spread that evening. But at least once he was cruelly disappointed. He had written Clemmie: “Tomorrow the Daily Herald begin distributing the new cheap edition of the World Crisis wh Odham’s have printed. It can be sold for 3/9 for each of two volumes—a miracle of mass production. They expect to sell 150,000! I like to feel that for the first time the working people will hear my side of the [Gallipoli] tale.” The royalty check, which would have exceeded £1,000, would have been equally welcome, but the cheap book was not an idea whose time had come. The workmen remained unenlightened and Churchill uncompensated. So he returned to double shifts. He was irked by deadlines, believing he could do a better job if given more time. He wrote Clemmie: “I should be able to do my books more slowly and not have to face the truly stupendous task like Marlborough IV being finished in 4 or 5 months,” only to face another urgent date for the History, “worth £16,000, but entailing an immense amount of reading and solitary reflection if justice is to be done to so tremendous a topic.”151

  The consequences of such a grind have not enhanced his literary reputation. His masterpiece is The World Crisis, published over a period of several years, 1923 to 1931, a six-volume, 3,261-page account of the Great War, beginning with its origins in 1911 and ending with its repercussions in the 1920s. Magnificently written, it is enhanced by the presence of the author at the highest councils of war and in the trenches as a battalion commander. “After it,” the British historian Robert Rhodes James writes, “anything must appear as anticlimax.”152

  Certainly Marlborough and A History of the English-speaking Peoples are heavy with what Philip Guedalla called “the lullaby of a majestic style.” The second Lord Birkenhead, son of Churchill’s old friend F.E., deplored “his lack of historic objectivity, of the fact that he is usually justifying a policy or a cause, and that his perception of the feelings and motives of others is dim and uncertain.” Ironically, it was Churchill himself who had diagnosed part of his difficulty when, as a young man, he had written: “Few authors are rich men. Few human beings are insensible to the value of money…. Hurried style, exaggerated mannerisms and plagiarism replace the careful toil. The author writes no more for fame but for wealth. Consequently his books become inferior. All this is very sad but very true.” In his contributions to periodicals, however, it is fair to add that he may have had a second, higher motive. Events were moving swiftly in Europe; lacking power in Parliament, he made the press his megaphone. He believed he could arouse the nation by his prose, even though it was not his best. He was right. He did.153

  After the slaughter of ten million young men twenty years earlier, a renewal of the struggle seemed incomprehensible. The German people hated war as passionately as their once and future enemies, but in the Reich public opinion was forged by the state to an unprecedented degree. The Nazi Reichskulturkammer determined what was taught in the schools, the music people heard, the content of radio broadcasts, the books they read, what was published in newspapers, the churches they attended, and the plays and films they saw. The Führer, they were told over and over, was working toward noble goals and making a supreme effort to save the peace. Those who threatened it, who hated Germans because the Aryan race was superior to their own, were unmasked each year on the anniversary of the Nazi party—the Nuremberg Reichsparteitag, held in September.

  The average Briton was better informed. To be sure, The Times was not the only paper in which rogue editors disgraced their craft by the distortion or outright suppression of the facts. Nevertheless the truth was there for those who cared to know. A majority chose to ignore it. Confronted with the prospect of another world war, they sought refuge in escapism. Londoners whose dreams were haunted by Nazi storm troopers could leave their nightmares in the checkroom at the St. James’s Theatre, while they watched Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance; or at the Duchess, where Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green was playing to packed houses; or at His Majesty’s Theatre, where the high point of the evening would be hearing a quartet sing “The Stately Homes of England” in Noel Coward’s Operette, which ran through 133 performances.

  If you wanted to forget Japanese aggression in China and mutual aggression in Spain, a smorgasbord of entertainment lay before you: Len Hutton scoring 364 runs against Australia in the Oval Test Match; or, in the book department of Harrods, P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. From across the Atlantic came new works by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Nathanael West. The United States also presented, to enthusiastic theatre audiences, Life with Father and Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse; and, on what was then called the silver screen, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  In 1938, the year of the Anschluss and Munich, the British produced a tune and a dance step that swept all Europe and the United States:

  Any time you’re Lambeth way,

  Any evening, any day,

  You’ll find us all

  Doin’ the Lambeth walk.

  Hey!

  But Britain’s greatest accomplishments in the lively arts would follow World War II. In the 1930s her entertainers remained loyal to the traditional, rollicking music hall songs. Yet the huge halls were barely half full now, relics, really; houses haunted by memories of Harry Lauder, Lillie Langtry, and George “Champagne Charlie Is My Name” Leybourne. The brash Americans rushed into the vacuum. Snow White alone provided three hit songs; other imported popular songs of 1938–1939 were “Over the Rainbow,” three inanities—“Three Little Fishes,” “A-Tisket A-Tasket,” “Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy”—and “Are You Having Any Fun?”154

  Among those not having any fun were over two-thirds of Czechoslovakia’s population. The country’s prominence in the news from May 1938 to March 1939 may explain the immense popularity of an old Czech drinking song, “Roll Out the Barrel.” In the popular view, World War II had not yet begun, but that would have been news to the Chinese, the Ethiopians, and the Spaniards. The greatest sufferers, of course, were the Jews. Nicolson, meeting an Austrian “who had just got away from Vienna,” set down the man’s account:

  They rounded up the people walking in the Prater on Sunday last, and separated the Jews from the rest. They made the Jewish gentlemen take off all their clothes and walk on all fours on the grass. They made the old Jewish ladies get up into the trees by ladders and sit there. They then told them to chirp like birds. The Russians never committed atrocities like that. You may take a man’s life; but to destroy all his
dignity is bestial. This man told me that with his own eyes he had seen Princess Stahremberg washing out the urinals at the Vienna railway-station. The suicides have been appalling. A great cloud of misery hangs over the town.155

  The situation of the German Jews was desperate. In every community, posters declared that they had been stripped of their civil rights and were forbidden to seek employment of any kind; Jewish shops and homes were plundered by Nazi storm troopers. Among the victims were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old refugee living in Paris. On November 7, 1938, after learning of this, Grynszpan murdered Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary at the German embassy in Paris. Senior Nazis, SS officers, and Gestapo agents instantly saw this as an outrageous opportunity. On November 9 Goebbels issued instructions that “a spontaneous demonstration of the German people” (“eine spontane Reaktion des deutschen Volkes”) was to be “organized and executed” that night. No one knows how many acts of murder, rape, and pillage were carried out during die Kristallnacht, as it came to be called—Crystal Night, or the Night of Broken Glass—but the pogrom was the greatest in history. Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s second in command at the SS, reported that the number of Jewish shops smashed and looted was 7,500.156