Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  The subjective strain in Churchill’s remarks makes them the more lovable. It is often difficult for him to censure a miscreant without presenting himself in contrast. This was especially true concerning Hitler, who was driven to a belated grave by Churchill’s sharp tongue. “Then Hitler made his second great blunder,” said the latter in discussing the German Army’s round trip to Moscow. “He forgot about the winter. There is a winter, you know, in Russia. For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow, there is frost, and all that. Hitler forgot about this Russian winter. He must have been very loosely educated. We all heard about it at school, but he forgot it. I have never made such a bad mistake as that.”

  From the start, it has been understood that Churchill gets as much enjoyment out of his parliamentary antics as his colleagues do. When it was decided to hold secret sessions in wartime, he showed up for the first one in high humor. Arising and looking around at the austere, spectatorless chamber, he led off by saying, “Isn’t this fun?”

  Oddly enough, while being pretty generally busy breaching the rules, he is by far the most furious Member when somebody else departs from them. On one occasion, badgering an Opposition orator by jumping up every few seconds to interpolate “supplementaries,” he was astounded to hear the presiding officer, known as the Speaker, call out, “Really, you know, we simply can’t have this gate-crashing by the right honorable gentleman.” Churchill stopped and swung around slowly, frozen by the unaccustomed slang from a dignitary of normally impeccable diction. Moreover, the Speaker, Clifton Brown, was a Conservative and had rebuked his own party boss. Churchill executed a stiff but savage bow, made a few formally apologetic remarks that sounded peculiarly like curses, and sat down. But he was cool to Brown for weeks.

  There has always been some dispute about the aside that Churchill tacked onto his famous speech in which he promised that “We shall fight on the beaches,” and in other local spots. After crying out the now familiar repetitions, accenting the “We shall fights” like hammer blows, he finished, then added a half-whispered comment as he sat down. The best authorities say that his words were: “But God knows what we’ll fight with.” The version of the speech that he broadcast carried a positive amplification of this aside. One of England’s highest clergymen, who was present in the studio, reports that Churchill ended his speech, placed his hand over the microphone, and added, “And we will hit them over the heads with beer bottles, which is about all we have got to work with.”

  Chapter 17

  CHURCHILL’S reputation as a wit in Commons began in connection with one of his departures from Tory principles. He had not been seated a month before it was evident that his tastes were frequently to run counter to those of his party leaders. Not only did he advocate a soft peace for the Boers, who were doggedly holding out against the best military brains Britain could muster, but he created an uproar by savagely attacking a proposed high military budget. It was no wonder that Brodrick, the War Minister, confused Churchill with his father, for this last measure was the very one against which Lord Randolph had shattered his best lances. But it was the question of Free Trade that separated Churchill with real emphasis from his fellow Conservatives. When Joseph Chamberlain abandoned the historic laissez-faire policy for tariff protection, with particular reference to Birmingham industries, Churchill arose in the House and said, “Mr. Chamber-lain loves the workingman, he loves to see him work.”

  As his father had done, the hero of Pretoria steered a small group of dissidents away from the official party course. They included Ian (later Sir Ian) Malcolm, Lord Hugh Cecil, and Ivor Guest (later Lord Wimborne), Churchill’s cousin, and were much relished by the press, which referred to them by various nicknames worked out from the names of the participants — “Malcolmtents,” “Hughligans,” etc. Churchill became so exercised about Free Trade and the workingman that he was scarcely distinguishable from his old running mate, the late Mawdsley. He took his best friend, Hugh Cecil, and spent the summer of 1903 barnstorming directly on the heels of Joseph Chamberlain, who was speaking from town to town in favor of “Free Trade Within the Empire.” The fact that the Hughligans were coming up astern was said to have nettled Chamberlain to the point where he forsook his message and spent most of his time preaching about the immature absurdities of Churchill, whom he took to be the instigator of practically everything troublesome in that era. The net result of this was very beneficial to the mop-up pair; Chamberlain’s blasts acted as a kind of preliminary billing; he was cast in the role of advance man, like Frank Braden with the Ringling Brothers Circus.

  By the time Churchill and Cecil reached a town, everybody was stimulated to receive them, sometimes with cheers and encouragement and occasionally with ropes. They were almost lynched in Birmingham, Chamberlain’s native city. Birmingham was a traditionally impulsive spot, from which Lloyd George, after a pacifist rally, had recently withdrawn in safety only by donning a policeman’s uniform. Warned that a genuinely hostile crowd was planning a necktie party, in the Western term, Churchill drove his carriage into the midst of the people, lit a cigar, got down leisurely, and made a path to the speaking platform, puffing away as serenely as if he had been in the Carlton Club. At first stunned, the crowd finally relaxed and then cheered him in admiration.

  Churchill had some club trouble on this trip. In one town, he and Cecil repaired to the Conservative Club only to find themselves locked out. From the front windows a number of indignant, elderly faces stared down, and several bony fists were brandished. Churchill shrugged and led his comrade to a pub, where they found refreshment just as satisfying.

  The incident was one of a series that ended in a sensational move by Churchill. Continuing, he wrote to one Liberal candidate wishing him success against his protectionist Conservative opponent; then, at a meeting in Halifax, he ended a speech by crying, “Thank God we have a Liberal Party”; and in the House he arose during a Liberal address to say, “Mr. Speaker, I rise to a point of order. I am quite unable to hear what my honorable friend is saying owing to the vulgar clamor maintained by the Conservative Party.” At his constituency of Oldham, the Conservative Association passed a resolution saying that he had “forfeited its confidence” and officially disowned him. Then occurred a spontaneous group discourtesy that has no parallel before or since in the House of Commons. When Churchill essayed another speech, Arthur Balfour, who had succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister, and the rest of the Conservatives got up and filed out noisily. To reduce the scene to bedrock comedy, each one except Balfour paused in the doorway and jeered at Churchill like a schoolboy. In its way, the episode brought him as much notoriety as his escape from the Boers.

  The fact is that Churchill touched off one of the racketiest sessions the House has ever known. In the succeeding debates, the antagonists descended to a name-calling remarkably sprightly for Englishmen. A Colonel Kenyon-Slaney had the effrontery to call Churchill a traitor; the accused replied, “I have noticed that when political controversy becomes excited, persons of choleric dispositions and limited intelligence are apt to become rude. If I was a traitor, at any rate I was fighting the Boers in South Africa when Colonel Kenyon-Slaney was slandering them at home. I had the honor of serving in the field for our country while this gallant, fire-eating colonel was content to kill Kruger with his mouth in the comfortable security of England.”

  A young Conservative, Claude Lowther, tensely informed the House that beriberi was known to have broken out in South Africa and suggested that Churchill had contracted the disease. He documented this diagnosis by saying that “I made that remark because I have heard that the most marked characteristic symptom of the disease is a terrific swelling of the head.”

  Churchill got up and changed seats, moving over to the Liberal side, from which he conducted a heckling campaign of Joseph Chamberlain that is still fondly remembered. In rebuttal, the Conservatives raised such a howl every time he opened his mouth that the usually decorous Parliament came to
a complete standstill. Raising his voice over the din, Churchill shouted that the chaos was a calculated “conspiracy” in which Chamberlain was an “accomplice.” There were shocked cries of “Oh, oh!” and Chamberlain came bouncing out of his seat like a man stung by a wasp. This slur from a stripling on one of England’s most venerated servants was regarded as beyond the pale, and Churchill made a sort of apology. In general, however, he continued his agitations.

  Psychiatrists have observed that a few people appear destined to envelop themselves in trouble, as Jove wrapped thunderclouds around his head. Something about the atmospheric conditions when they are born, perhaps an uncommon presence of static electricity, produces a low equanimity quotient. They are the destroyers of serenity, and the builders of the world. Churchill is pre-eminently one of these. He fixed his course very early in his career: he chose to row upstream and drag trouble along in his wake. His appearance in the House on any day was sufficient to ruffle Members of established torpor. His facial expression — bellicose, tardy, unconvinced, and half pouting — drew rejoinders automatically. Often there was no need for him to speak; somebody, after a glance at him, would spring up and shout, in effect, “You’re another.” He put Arthur Balfour to flight so consistently that he thoughtfully cautioned, as one session got under way, “The right honorable gentleman need not run away. I am not attacking him today.”

  To add to his stress, Churchill was trying to change his methods of oratory at this time. Heretofore he had memorized his speeches and rehearsed them carefully. Now (for a brief while) he was trying to improvise from notes. It was tough going. He found that he had a genius for digression; his mind wandered off on side issues, all of them entertaining. On one occasion he marshaled his thoughts successfully for nearly an hour, arrived at the last paragraph of his remarks, stammered, floundered, and then collapsed in his seat. The press was instantly alerted to the similarity of this breakdown to one Lord Randolph had suffered in the House shortly before the end. Several theories were advanced, including the suggestion that his recreational habits were sapping. It was true that Churchill, in this period of his closing twenties, went at his amusements as though he were attacking Tories. He had been making the rounds of the ducal houses of his acquaintance, enjoying convivial dinners, dances, and hunts. He was still especially fond of both hunting and polo and had suffered a painful accident while engaged in the former. At one meeting, during which the fox had shown an annoying reluctance to give up its brush, Churchill had ricocheted off a horse and broken his shoulder. The injury had healed but in doing so had not improved his general health.

  His close friends in these days included Lord Hugh Cecil (later to calm down amazingly, become Lord Quickswood and Provost of Eton College); Max Aitken, a young Canadian-born promoter who had come to England for the candid purpose of making money (and would succeed admirably as Lord Beaverbrook, the publisher); and one of the genuinely gifted roisterers of all time, F. E. (“Galloper”) Smith, who is still considered in many clubs the greatest drinker England has produced. Smith (who in the inevitable upper-class progression finally got to be Lord Birkenhead, as well as a famous trial lawyer) once remarked of his friend, “Mr. Churchill is easily satisfied with the best.” The latter’s companions were forever saying memorable things about him. Max Aitken told a reporter, “I would pay five pounds an hour just to listen to him talk.” While one and another of this group was noted for special talents — Aitken for spotting cash, Smith for his ability to haul genies out of bottles, etc. — Churchill was hailed as the most talkative young man in England and her Colonies (including India). His monologues at dinners were renowned for the brilliant variety of their topics and for the expediency of their classical allusions, a gift from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Unquestionably the rising politician was, and is, one of the most eloquent conversationalists ever known, inferior to the clacking Johnson only in the technical sense that he had no long-suffering Boswell.

  His political associates formed a scintillating collection. Besides some of the men just named, there were John Morley, who had written a biography of Gladstone; Ivor Guest; Sir Gilbert Parker, the novelist; Major Jack Seely; Sir John Gorst, his father’s old political ally; Gibson Bowles; Reginald McKenna; and, incongruously enough, Walter Runciman, who had just got back into Parliament as Liberal Member for Dewsbury. Churchill was not in the least embarrassed to find himself shoulder to shoulder with Runciman after all the mean things they had said about each other. Merely reminding the shipping heir of his prediction that “the world has not heard the last of either of us,” Churchill went ahead denouncing the Tories and their tariffs. Leader of the Liberals was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and it was understood that young Herbert Asquith would succeed him, but the flaming Welsh orator, David Lloyd George, was still the undisputed party prodigy.

  This was a peevish situation for Churchill, who preferred to be the party prodigy himself. He found in general that going over to the Liberals had its drawbacks. High on his list of complaints was the fact that the Marlborough family dropped him for a space, cutting off a bountiful source of influence near the Crown. The Marlboroughs and many others of his Tory connections balked at some of the things he had begun to advocate. The list now looks unbelievable, in view of the successful propaganda the Socialists have spread about Churchill, describing him as the arch-enemy of labor and a professional warmonger. “When one considers how vast the Labour interest is,” he said in a speech at this time, “how vital, how human; when one considers the gigantic powers which by the consent of both Parties have been given to the working classes; when, on the other hand, one considers the influence on this House of company directors, the learned professions, the service members, the railway, landed and liquor interests; it will surely be admitted that the influence of Labour on the course of legislation is even ludicrously small.” He campaigned so forcibly in favor of stopping the war that he became known as “Peace-at-any-Price Churchill.” His argument was that the struggle should be “ended with a handshake.”

  Despite the corrosive malice of Socialist and Communist publicity, it is difficult to construe these as the attitudes of a warmongering labor-hater.

  *

  In the Churchill household, the general election of 1880 had ushered in a time of mourning, with the Liberal Gladstone throwing the Tories, including Winston’s grandfather, out of office. Now a strange cycle was being completed: the general election of 1906 again removed the Tories from power, but in doing so it established Winston Churchill, the Liberal, as a Cabinet minister. (His appointment had actually taken place some weeks previously, when the Conservatives had failed to form a government.) Lord Randolph had attained Cabinet rank at the precocious age of thirty-six; his son clipped five years from this record. Churchill’s post — Under-Secretary for the Colonies — was relatively unimposing, but in securing it he continued the legend of Boy Wonder, adding another to his string of infant stupendities. The outcome of the election also perpetuated his history of stunning good luck. Oldham having given Churchill a disapproving eye, he accepted a constituency in Manchester, from which a popular Conservative Member had just retired, to be replaced by candidate William Joynson-Hicks, a temperance lecturer and church devotee.

  Churchill’s meetings got off to a mediocre start. After one speech at the Coal Exchange, a number of people rushed the stairs to watch him leave, but they overshot their mark and all tumbled down, injuring several. A few days later he was declaiming in well-oiled style at a large public building when the crowd cheered, there was a noisy crash, and about half of the group disappeared, the stands having fallen into the bed of a swimming pool. Seeing that the damage was slight, Churchill cried out strongly, “Let justice be done, even though the floor falls in!”

  It seemed that his fights for public office could never be ordinary. He and his opponent were again in odd contrast on the platform. While Joynson-Hicks was for the Church and against whiskey, Churchill was in favor of whiskey and critical of the Church.
And although the issues of the day transcended these two points, religion did play an eccentric part in the contest. During one speech, Churchill declared against the Government’s Aliens Bill and made a few affectionate remarks about Zionism. The Manchester Jews promptly fell in line behind him as though he were a kind of latter-day Moses. One of their leaders got up at an all-Jewish meeting and announced that “any Jew who votes against Winston Churchill is a traitor to the common cause.” Another suggested the slogan, “Vote for Winston the Winsome.” The candidate modestly amended this by saying that “On Saturday, after the poll, you may call me Winston the winner.”

  The unfortunate Joynson-Hicks, cleaving stoutly to his principles, jarred the Jewish contingent by declining to address an audience of them on Sunday. “Never,” he cried, with a pious and sober gesture toward the heavens, “never so long as I am your candidate or your member, will I go electioneering on a Sunday!” That settled it. The Jews all went down and voted for Churchill, who enjoyed electioneering on Sunday, there being little else to do except go to church. Joynson-Hicks remained their candidate a great deal longer than he was their member. When the results were in, Manchester had embraced the unreconstructed Churchill; his opponent went back to good works and resumed his vilification of the demon rum.

  *

  Churchill’s cause in the election was considered by many to have been helped by a brilliant biography of his father that he had just published. In two volumes, it had the unqualified praise of practically every critic and literary person in the kingdom, including those of contrary political beliefs. Lord Rosebery, who also had written about Lord Randolph, called it “little less than marvelous” and “one to be marked among the first dozen, perhaps the first half-dozen, biographies in our language.”