His route lay past Malta and Cyprus through the Red Sea to Mombasa, thence by way of British East Africa, Uganda, and the Sudan to Cairo, and then back home. He had a lot of interesting experiences. Members of his African safaris said afterward that he was the most undisciplined man on a hunt it had ever been their misfortune to attend. He often refused to obey even the ordinary rules of safety. On one occasion, advised to give a movement of army ants a wide berth, he investigated, was surrounded, fell down, and, in escaping in the nick of time, abandoned a prized walking stick, which was devoured. Behaving with caution, Churchill shot a white rhino, but in the hottest lion country of Uganda he insisted on venturing out alone with a makeshift butterfly net (looking for butterflies). He took innumerable pictures with which to implement his articles, but was dissuaded from trying to photograph crocodiles while floating down the Nile on a log. It was noted that he argued politics with everybody, including native chiefs whose English was pretty well limited to “Me thirty-two wives” and “Gottum baccy?” In Kampala he tried to moderate the time-honored noise of the rickshaw coolies, who egg themselves on with strange and impetuous cries. He relented when it was pointed out that silence was taking all the spring out of their legs. A strange coincidence was that, approaching Khartoum, before which he had seen so much bloodshed and sorrow, his valet fell ill and died, and was buried the next day. Churchill stood in melancholy silence by the grave, not far from the spot where, a few years ago, he had saved the life of a newborn baby.
The tour aroused some criticism, but it was trifling compared to the over-all criticism that Churchill had begun to reap. The Liberal Party as a whole, after a bland voyage of two years, was running into the first signs of heavy weather. An English political student wrote that the Liberal landslide of 1906 “went too far.” Nothing could hide the fact, he added, that the ranks of the Government were “honey-combed with cranks, faddists, pacifists, and other strange political wild fowl.” Churchill was doing his part in championing unpopular measures. He fought hard for the Miners’ Eight Hours Bill, the Scottish Small-landholders’ Act, the Labour Exchanges Act (a means of combating unemployment), and the Old Age Pensions Bill. As President of the Board of Trade, he introduced a Port of London Bill, which established government control over all the docks and wharves in the port. In arguing for this legislation, he told the House that, if the bill was not passed, “the docks, which have already been called obsolescent, will have to be allowed to obsolesce into obsoleteness.”
Without doubt he was the hardest-working minister ever to fill his position, given to stints far into the night at his Whitehall office and in Commons, and to incessant trips of inspection. He visited the famous shipyards at Newcastle, where the local suffragettes were so grateful that they deployed behind stacks of cargo and pelted him with coke. Their inverse allegiance to Churchill was unshaken; they never let him down. When he took his bride along on a speaking journey to South-port, three women ascended to the roof of the hall and bellowed at him through ventilators. The new Mrs. Churchill waved to them sweetly. Friends of the Churchills say that the bride was worried about her husband’s travail in this period; she was especially so when it was erroneously reported that he had entered a night session in Commons clad in a pair of pink pajamas. Churchill was disregardful of his dress then, as he is now. There had been a tremendous hubbub over his appearance at Windsor Castle when King Edward elevated him to the status of Privy Councilor. For a hundred years, ritual had prescribed that the new Privy Councilors be uniformly dressed in tail coats. On the occasion of Churchill’s visit everybody was rigged out impeccably except him. He had on a kind of old cutaway that looked as though it might have been handed down by his great-grandfather. The audience was shocked; however, the King chose not to see it. He even kept Churchill for a chat after the others had gone.
When the opposition to the Liberal Party became serious in 1910, a general election was held in which Churchill was again returned from Dundee, defeating the parched Scrymgeour. In the new Liberal Cabinet, the former President of the Board of Trade was advanced to the post of Home Secretary, and he promptly redoubled his work on the House of Lords, where his ancestors had sat in comfortable torpor, all unaware of the black sheep who was to come along and attack their sanctuary. Churchill’s comrade, F. E. Smith, a Conservative, finally took umbrage at his reckless language about the Upper House and exploded in Commons with a very uncomradely speech. “The Home Secretary is beginning to play Lady Macbeth to the Prime Minister’s Thane of Cawdor,” he said. “No more shameful speech has ever been made by a member of the Commons than that in which the Home Secretary said, ‘The time has come for the Crown and the Commons acting together, to override the Lords.’ Everyone knows that the Home Secretary does not mean that the Crown and the House of Commons are to act together. What he means is that the time has come for the Crown and the Liberal Party and the Labour Party and the Irish Party to act together and go against the House of Lords. This is an insolent appropriation of the name of the Sovereign to purely Party purposes. It is analagous, physically, to the act of striking a woman.”
In many parts of the United States these frank words would have ended a happy friendship, probably with gunfire, but Churchill and Smith shortly went off together on a yachting trip, during which they had many a chuckle over their political rages. They were particularly amused, it is said, because a report had recently been current that the two foregathered before sessions and set up their bombastic tangles, providing one another with leads upon which to base the waspish epithets that aroused such widespread dismay. Their trip was aboard the Baron de Forest’s yacht, Honor, whose party included Churchill and his bride, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Churchill’s brother, and several others. In most ways it was a typical outing of Churchill’s. At Vesuvius the group, save for him, made the usual spiral ascent to the top. Churchill chose to climb in a beeline from the base. Inevitably getting stuck on an impossible slope, he had to be taken off by a rescue unit. Somewhat later, he had the good sense to turn back when Smith, after a number of champagne cocktails, elected to swim the harbor at Syracuse and write an original poem on the Messina earthquake. Smith contributed several skillful touches to the holiday. At Crete the officials had planned a gigantic welcome for the Home Secretary, but Smith, having arisen earlier than the others, went ashore and allowed himself to be feted by error. He professed an extraordinary interest in the production of Cretan wines and was persuaded, as Home Secretary, to sample most of them. Churchill finally turned up, rather hastily dressed, and explained the situation to everybody’s great embarrassment except Smith’s, who kept smiling at the baffled officials and giving them to understand, in a sort of patois, that he was not on a very solid footing in either Greek or English.
Not long after the yachting trip, Churchill was entangled in the separate incidents involving “Peter the Painter” and the “Dartmoor Shepherd,” which netted him about the usual amount of abuse. In the first case, a gang of Russian desperados under the leadership of one Peter the Painter, whose real name was Jacob Peters, broke into a Houndsditch jeweler’s and, in escaping, shot and killed three policemen. The public, always on the prowl for an easy culprit, decided that Churchill, as Home Secretary, was somehow negligent. He was therefore relieved when, soon afterward, the gang was bottled up in a house in nearby Sidney Street, a poor and run-down section. The news got around fast. Before very long the scene resembled New York around the Gotham Hotel when a man stood on a seventeenth-story ledge the whole day through before leaping to his death. As more and more London police rushed to Sidney Street, the Painter and his associates poured a steady fire from the windows of their squalid citadel. Under their barrage, a policeman went down and was hauled back for treatment. Besides the crowds in the street, every window in the neighborhood was bursting with the morbid curious.
Churchill arrived just before noon, wearing a silk hat and a black opera cape. He looked a little as though a professional dresser had made him up to play Auguste
Dupin in a suburban presentation of The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He was full of enterprise, shouting, waving, and pacing back and forth within easy range of the criminals. He had not come alone; the Scots Guards from the Tower of London marched in a few moments later, and then came an artillery piece from the St. John’s Wood Barracks. It was the first time the Scots Guards had been called out since 1820. In a twinkling, what with the field gun booming, the Guards kneeling and firing, and the policemen and the others trying to get out of the way, the spectacle bore a positive resemblance to the Storming of the Bastille. The result was a foregone conclusion; the house burst into flames and collapsed on its inmates, two of whose bodies were recovered. Peter the Painter had apparently escaped. He would later be identified with Bolshevist agitations.
Churchill was the goat, as always. The press and the public, which had found him negligent before, now declared that he had no business taking charge and raising such a ruckus. What did he mean coming down there with the Scots Guards and a cannon? He had turned a picturesque residence into a battlefield shambles. At the inquest, Churchill denied most of the allegations and went on his way, no more disturbed than ever at this fickle turn of mass sentiment.
The Dartmoor Shepherd provided the richest buffoonery of that year of 1911. The aged Welshman in question had a remarkable record: except for a few years in his infancy, when he was gathering strength, he had spent his entire life in jail, for a succession of mean and uninspired larcenies. David Lloyd George, a man of hasty Welsh Liberalism, chose to stir up a general belief that the unfortunate was a typical victim of “the landlord system.” This was about as farfetched as excusing a triple murderer on the ground that he was reared in a tenement, but it hit the public right in the eye. “Oh, the poor old man! All those wasted years!” was the widespread feeling, and the blinking unregenerate was led out of prison, where he burst into tears and agreed wholeheartedly that he had been framed. Churchill and Lloyd George both made speeches pillorying the landlords, and Churchill found the derelict a situation at Wrexham, as caretaker. For several days the public wallowed in bathos, with many an “I told you so!” and then the Shepherd, terribly sick of his job, took two sprinkling cans and a lawn-mower and went over the wall. With the proceeds from these as a new start in life, he bought some grade-A burglar’s tools and took care of a nearby mansion to the tune of $112.50. Re-apprehended and returned to his prison abode — one of the many fruits of the landlord system — he expressed himself as being without bitterness. The kind gentlemen, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George, had done their best by him, and if it had not been for a neighbor’s dog, the reformation would have gone through on schedule. By-passing Lloyd George, a discriminating public selected Churchill as the target for its ridicule.
Politically, he continued his near-socialistic pressures. Urging a confiscatory income tax, he made a speech saying that in the future the tax collector would not ask, “What have you got?” but “How did you get it?” In retrospect, these sound like odd words indeed from the latter-day opposition leader who would rage at British Socialism. He fought through the anti-military budget and won his feud with the House of Lords, when that hoary and paternal chamber was reduced to impotency by the Parliament Bill of 1911. One of Churchill’s pet legislations, when he was Home Secretary, bounced back in his face. Despite the sad incident of the Dartmoor Shepherd, he became anxiety-ridden about the conditions in British prisons and instituted a bill carrying certain reforms, centering on lectures and concerts for the inmates. Surely, he must have thought, this will appeal to everybody, outside and in. But no, the ever faithful suffragettes raised a lamentable howl, for the singular reason that such alleviations of prison misery might tend to lessen their martyrdom. This was seen by nearly everybody as selfishness of a very high order, and the Cause, which all along had been right and just, though regrettably managed, took a sharp setback.
Like so many politicians before and after him, Churchill now found that, in the midst of his efforts for labor, the workers of the country showed their gratitude by marching out in a succession of paralyzing strikes. First came the dock strikes in South Wales, always a trouble center, where troops had to be called out to see that the strikers obeyed the laws, as ordinary citizens were compelled to do. Then came a railway strike, also attended by soldiers, and after that a complete breakdown in the weaving industry. Churchill worked hard to restore harmony everywhere. The method he favored most was to gather the disputing leaders together and ply them with liquor. As a rule the tension was eased and friendly talks followed.
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Internationally at this time friendly talks were at a premium. The brawling state of Germany had been at peace for several years and was growing very restive. Kaiser Wilhelm II, its Emperor, a man whose main attributes of leadership were a gift for practical joking and a fondness for street carnivals, was never very interested in war, or anything adult, but his ministers and advisers, drawn from the Prussian military class, were keenly anxious to put some nation or other in its place. As usual with Germany, the principal contender was France. An opportunity for a squabble arose in 1911, when France decided to broaden the scope of its protectorate over Morocco. This was entirely within its legal right, but a pair of German industrialists, the Mannesmann brothers, complained bitterly that their commerce was being jeopardized. The Kaiser was busy when the emergency arose — he was said to be occupied in contriving a sort of hotfoot to be tried out on one of the servants (believed to be among the earliest recorded examples of this hilarious trick) and his Secretary of State, Herr von Kiderlen-Waechter, happily sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir.
The gesture touched off a deal more anger than even Kiderlen-Waechter had bargained for. It aroused France to prompt resistance, it called the world’s attention to the failing relations between the two countries, and, far more important, it kindled a great fire under Winston Churchill. The English Home Secretary now sailed off on yet another tack. During his years as war correspondent, he had been fiercely jingoistic; as a young politician he had turned pacifistic; and now, as a moderately young politician, he was yawing about again. It takes a wise and plucky man to change his mind, and in the light of history, there can be no question that Churchill almost alone saved England’s skin in the First World War.
Although the Germans withdrew their gunboat, he pitched himself headlong into the cause of preparedness. He did it with habitual thoroughness. He was at a garden party when it was remarked by another minister that the nation’s supply of cordite, used by the Navy, was loosely guarded.
“Under whose jurisdiction is it?” inquired the Home Secretary.
“Why, yours, I believe,” replied the minister.
Churchill tossed aside a teacup and a remnant of biscuit, cried, “Good-by!” and rushed from the scene, with a lot of curious eyes staring after him. He telephoned the acting First Lord of the Admiralty and demanded that a guard be turned out.
“I say, what is all this?” the man kept asking, and when it was borne in upon him that the Home Secretary wished the cordite guarded, he said, “Why, I haven’t got a guard, don’t you know — they’ve all gone off to the races.”
In a furious temper, Churchill persuaded Richard Haldane, the War Minister, to dispatch troops to the cordite cache; then he got to work on a bill enabling him to open “the correspondence to and from spies.” While this amounted practically to carte blanche to intercept all the correspondence in the land, the bill went through, and, by the outbreak of the war, it had been utilized with such skill that nearly every dangerous spy was easily rounded up.
Heretofore, even in his own government, Churchill had not been admitted to the inner circle to which Asquith confided the secrets of foreign policy. Both Churchill and Lloyd George were regarded as too pacifistic to be entrusted with information touching on war. Now the doors were thrown open to both men, Lloyd George, too, having turned around and made a speech in which he said that “peace at that price [surrender of her great and
beneficent position] would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”
Privy to all the facts, Churchill drew up a historic document, a timetable of probable developments in the case of war. It is still viewed, even by his enemies, as one of the world’s classics of prophecy, laying the groundwork for the many uncanny predictions of his that have followed.
The document started off, “It is assumed that an alliance exists between Great Britain, France and Russia, and that these Powers are attacked by Germany and Austria,” and went on with details. The highest military leaders in England had declared, in closed meeting, that the French Army was sufficiently strong to counterattack sometime between the ninth and thirteenth days after the start, and then roll the Teuton back. Churchill presented a scintillating argument why the French strength was easily exaggerated, and countered with an analysis of his own. The French, he said, would still be in full retreat from the Meuse on the twentieth day and would not be in a position to attack until at least the fortieth day, when the Germans had extended their lines, been engaged at sea, and begun to worry about the Russian pachyderm to their rear.
Three years later, the French would be in retreat on the twenty-first day, and the Battle of the Marne, generally conceded to mark the turning point of the war, would begin on the thirty-sixth day.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 25