Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Forever alive to his opportunities, the warrior-statesman emerged from his half retirement and was soon under full sail again. Sitting in armchairs in front of the fire was deferred to another time, one that, to date, has not yet come.

  Chapter 23

  THE HULLABALOO over Churchill at Westminster acted as a lively stimulant to the Conservative cause. Everybody sensed that the new Constitutionalist Party would assuredly be absorbed, to a man, by the Conservatives and that the union would be healthful for the nation. Churchill’s position, in 1924, was soon made even more influential when the constituency of Epping returned him with an overriding majority as its Constitutional Member for Parliament. Anti-Socialist victories all over the country were so resounding that the government of “the Boneless Wonder,” Ramsay MacDonald, fell apart and was succeeded by a Tory administration with Stanley Baldwin again at the helm. To the surprise of practically nobody, he made Churchill his new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  This appointment gave Churchill the all-time British record for holding ministerial jobs. He had been, in succession, Undersecretary for the Colonies, President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War and for Air, Secretary for the Colonies, and, now, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Even his staunchest enemies admitted that these added up to quite a list.

  For the first time in years, Churchill seemed nervous while making a maiden address in a new post. He had put on his father’s robe, and he paused frequently to look up and smile at the gallery, where his wife and four children were sitting. He spoke very slowly, with traces of stammering and a noticeable harkback to his old complaint of the sibilants. In his speech presenting the Budget, a tense time for all Exchequer heads, he appeared to have relaxed his adamantine stand on Free Trade. He was now a Free Trader in theory, he implied, but in practice a Free Trader with empire preferences. For purposes of both illustration and nourishment, he had brought a glass of whiskey out of the House bar, and, sipping along, he referred to it in connection with his new tax on liquors. “It is imperative that I should refresh the revenue,” he said at one point. “I do so now,” and he took a hearty swig.

  Important on the list of those not amused were Philip Snowden, the preceding Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the House’s leading pair of teetotalers, Lady Astor and Mr. Scrymgeour, the Conscience of Dundee. These last two had formed a strange partnership. In Scrymgeour, the rich, American-born champion of forlorn causes had found a congenial spirit, one who, like her, saw no middle ground in dealing with intoxicants. They were both ardent “Prohibitionists,” having borrowed the new and unlovely term from across the Atlantic. During his five years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill tilted almost daily with the sober pair. As far as parliamentary business went, they were a thoroughgoing nuisance, given to heckling, interruptions, asides, squirrel-like noises, and booing. On one occasion, Churchill talked for nearly half an hour on his revenues to the accompaniment of a continuous chorus that went about as follows: “Haw — Psssst! — Doubt it — Wawk! Wawk! — Sit down! — Fie, for shame! — Phg! — Oh, what a lie!” — and so on. He finally got so fed up that he stopped and addressed a remark directly to Lady Astor, saying, “I have great regard and respect for the noble lady, but I do not think we are likely to learn much from the liquor legislation of the United States.” As the House applauded, her answer, studiously conceived, was, “Why?”

  Churchill had emerged now as the full-blown nemesis of the Socialist Party. Snowden took exception to everything he did and said. The campaign of nagging opposition was aimed to make life miserable for Churchill, but it only made life miserable for Snowden. Churchill has always been an impossible man to heckle successfully. He cannot be persuaded to rise to the bait. Neither can he be trapped into confessions of guilt, error, bad judgment, or inconsistency. Snowden once sprang to his feet to denounce bitterly the Chancellor’s abandonment of strict Free Trade principles.

  “There is nothing wrong in change, if it is in the right direction,” replied Churchill, with confusing logic.

  Snowden thought the sentence over, then said lamely, “You are an authority on that.”

  In his most sanctimonious vein, Churchill concluded with, “To improve is to change. To be perfect is to have changed often.”

  Snowden sat down and cast about for a less difficult theme. In his later years, he wrote the usual autobiography and included an articulate passage on Churchill:

  “It would be tiresome if I were to deal at length with the innumerable encounters between Mr. Churchill and myself in the Budget debates of this year and succeeding years. As an Ex-Chancellor it fell to me to lead the Opposition in the Budget debates, and I found Mr. Churchill a foeman worthy of my steel. The debates between us became quite a Parliamentary entertainment. They were regarded as the best show in London. When it was expected that we should both be speaking, the public galleries were invariably crowded. After a time I ceased to take very much interest in these duels, but I was expected to play the Parliamentary game of opposition and to provide entertainment for my supporters.

  “Mr. Churchill, during these years, gradually developed as a Parliamentary debater. He learnt to rely less on careful preparation of his speeches and more upon spontaneous effort. However much one may differ from Mr. Churchill, one is compelled to like him for his finer qualities. There is an attractiveness in everything he does. His high spirits are irrepressible. It was said of a French monarch that no one ever lost a kingdom with so much gaiety. Mr. Churchill was as happy facing a Budget deficit as in distributing a surplus. He is an adventurer, a soldier of fortune. An escapade has an irresistible fascination for him.”

  Though alert about publishing payments, Churchill has never been considered a financial wizard, and his Budgets made about as many foes as friends. Among others, he managed to alienate an entirely new segment of womanhood. The suffragettes had been more or less quiescent of late, with only an occasional thrown bottle or a small, organized fit of hysterics to mark their latent fury, and it is likely that Churchill was enlivened by the distaff wrangle now springing from his revenues. In a surprise move, he decided to place a tax on horse bets. The outcry that went up in all quarters of the kingdom was piteous, but the remarkable truth is that by far the loudest voices were those of women. They poured letters into his office in painful abundance. The tone of these baffled experts for a suitable reply; in essence, the women all threatened to quit gambling if Churchill didn’t ease up on the horse grab. Their indignation made a pretty sight when he composed a form letter advising them by all means to go ahead and quit, that the revenue would probably gain by their “increased usefulness in other directions.”

  The principal feature of his first Budget was a return to the gold standard, in an effort to jack up the sagging pound. Off the gold standard during the war, England had seen the pound dip to the alarmingly low price, in the foreign exchange, of eighteen shillings (it is now worth about twelve). His action provoked the economist, J. M. Keynes, to write an angry little pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill. Its prediction was reminiscent of the familiar statement by Louis XIV — “After me the deluge.” Keynes believed very strongly that Churchill was kowtowing to the bankers, and said, “To begin with, there will be a great depression in the export industries. This, in itself, will be helpful, since it will produce an atmosphere favorable to the reduction of wages. The cost of living will fall somewhat. This will be helpful, too, because it will give you a good argument in favor of reducing wages.” These things promptly came to pass, with particular reference to the coal industry, and Keynes pressed the attack. Churchill made a reply in which he asserted that the gold standard was about as responsible for the conditions in the mines as “the Gulf Stream.”

  Keynes digested this opinion and rejected it, possibly because he was weak in oceanography. He felt strong in economics, though, and went on to say that “T
hus Mr. Churchill’s policy of improving the exchange by ten percent was, sooner or later, a policy of reducing everybody’s wages by two shillings in the pound. In doing what he did in the actual circumstances of last spring, he was just asking for trouble. For he was committing himself to force down wages and all money values, without any idea of how it was to be done. Why did he do such a silly thing?”

  Gold standard or Gulf Stream, wise or silly, Keynes or Churchill, there followed a Miners’ Lockout and then a gigantic General Strike. A great many experts, most of them employed by colleges, have tried to assay the exact causes of Britain’s financial crisis in the middle twenties. The findings vary. Economics, like beauty, exist largely in the eye of the beholder. One economist’s chart is another economist’s poison. President Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau once fixed the price of American gold by flipping a coin, and a meeting of learned professors, in the same era, resolved a tough banking procedure by holding a chess tournament. It has been suggested that if economists could foresee the financial future they would probably predict tomorrow’s stock prices and retire with a fortune. Most of Keynes’ prophecies, during Churchill’s Ex-chequered career, proved uncomfortably correct, but other experts on the scene missed wildly. As for Churchill himself, he stuck to his Gulf Stream theory and continued with the business of breaking the strike.

  In the words of one of his hostile biographers, a Welsh M.P. named Emrys Hughes, “The General Strike gave Churchill another opportunity for playing the Napoleon.” This statement was founded partly on the Chancellor’s zest for inspecting the strike-breaking milk trucks. Churchill saw the marshaling of the nation’s non-union facilities as a gigantic military operation, rushed into being to avert a catastrophe. Whatever the faults or virtues of his basic stand, he took every step necessary to maintain the national commerce and good health, in the manner of President Truman invoking the Taft-Hartley Act. It was not so much his thinking as the fact of his seeming to enjoy himself that appeared to enrage many people. When the emergency horses and milk carts assembled each morning on the streets of London, he appeared, with a small retinue, and went down the line on inspection. The similarity between his procession and the average general’s parade was striking. With courtly grace (the essence of successful command) he paused to question a driver here, or pat a horse there, and if in his haste he inadvertently switched the procedure, it must be laid to the confusion of the moment.

  All the newspapers of London quit publishing, except for a tiny, four-page version of the Times, and Churchill quickly showed his surest leadership of the strike. His friends agreed that, all his life, he had felt possessed of unexploited potentialities as an editor. The collapse of the London papers in the face of union walkouts gave him his chance. He rushed into the office of the Morning Post, which had never been known as a champion of labor, and set up a national newspaper called the British Gazette, with himself in charge. The precise relevancy this bore to the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer was not revealed. Nevertheless, Churchill established himself in a plushy office, put on a green eyeshade and a pair of sleeve garters, draped himself with wet galleys, and began bawling out directions in the approximate idiom of the Fourth Estate. By mischance, there was practically nobody on hand to take them, barring a few of the city’s best-known editors, who dropped in to help, and these displayed notable apathy upon hearing cries of “Copy!” and “Here, boy!” So bizarre was this whole enterprise that a good many distinguished persons came to visit and were taken on conducted tours of the plant. And in one of the most aggravating coincidences on record, Lord Birkenhead, who had been arrested while attempting to call on Churchill at Ploegsteert, was turned away from the door by an officious special constable. Birkenhead left with the observation that, in future, he thought he would let Churchill come to him.

  The new editor’s selection of material for his paper was rich with bias. All the articles seemed to pick rather heavily on labor. Proceeding along this line, Churchill suddenly took the patriotic notion that the workers were, after all, British, so he lifted a piece from a French journal in which it was suggested that the English General Strike was fomented by the Bolsheviks. Thereafter, the Gazette stuck pretty closely to the theory that the strikers were merely unhappy dupes. The Russian accusation naturally stirred up resentment in circles notoriously sympathetic to Communism. Not long after it appeared, the Archbishop of Canterbury blew up a noisy bladder described as a “Peace Manifesto,” which was rushed by messenger to Churchill’s office. The man was ushered from the premises with detailed instructions about what the Archbishop could do with his Manifesto. For eight days Churchill reigned as the preeminent news dispenser of England. He pointed out with editorial pride that the Gazette’s circulation had risen, through his management, to 3,000,000, but his critics countered with the opinion that it was because he had no competition. His plans for expansion were maturing rapidly when the strike caved in. Under the direction of Commander Locker-Lampson, his side-kick of the Westminster election, he had organized a subsidiary paper in a defunct printing works in Gough Square and was offering a free course in linotype operation to college students. By all accounts, Churchill returned the Gazette to the Morning Post with vast reluctance.

  The most slavish of Churchill’s followers seldom wax eloquent over his course as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The abrupt return to the gold standard, the economic decline, the dissatisfaction of labor, and the flamboyant strikes did much to destroy his rewon popularity. Plainly enough he had veered away from the all-out compassion for the workers he had exhibited while in political tandem with Asquith and, perhaps infected by the fear of Socialism or Communism, had turned more sharply to the right than most of his new Tory colleagues. The old cry was raised that, as often before, he had gone too far, had been too impulsive. Even the Tories, with a rekindled suspicion of the firebrand, were moved to wonder if Lord Oxford was right when he called Churchill “a genius without judgment.” Another admiring but vexed critic remarked that he was “jaywalking through life.” Stanley Baldwin had spoken nervously of “Winston’s hundred horsepower brain.” It was felt that Churchill’s career, and his weather-vane convictions, had whipped about in the wind of political opportunism. In a word, he was too much for nearly everybody. And once again, as the Tories crashed before MacDonald’s Socialist, or Labor, upsurge of 1929, “everyone threw the blame on me.” While still a Member of Parliament, Churchill stepped down from his high Government post. He was entering upon his desert period, a ten-year span of near-oblivion. In the busy time since Sandhurst, he had fought five wars, held nine Cabinet offices, made 8000 public speeches, and seen himself, in quick order, the most popular and the most unpopular man in England. It was a dazzling record, and it was far from finished. Unlike Alexander, he had yet more worlds to conquer.

  *

  The interval between 1929 and 1939 in Churchill’s life has been variously described as “the lotus years,” “the time between,” his “out of step” period, and several other circumlocutions aimed to indicate public disfavor without actually saying so. The fact is that he was retired rather abruptly to Chartwell, following which he occupied himself chiefly in writing and otherwise making a living. This took the form, soon after his banishment, of journeying to the United States to undertake another lecture tour. His first one, at the time of the Boer War, had been lucrative and even pleasant, barring the Irish yammering, and he was anxious to reap a similar harvest now in his distinguished middle age. Ship news reporters in New York were impressed by the sprightly way in which he received them, aboard the Europa; the Times spoke of “the twinkle in his eye.” Because of his recent ambiguous success with the British Gazette, Churchill addressed the boys as “colleagues” and threw in a number of professional phrases.

  The speaking tour itself was rudely interrupted. Churchill left the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel one afternoon to visit his old friend of the First World War, Bernard Baruch, and got mixed up about the location of Baruch’s house, at 1055 Fifth Av
enue. He descended from a taxicab at Sixty-seventh Street and wandered around looking at numbers. Crossing from one corner to another, with an automatic British glance for drivers on the left side of the road, he heard a screaming of hard-braked tires and felt a tremendous shock. He came to in the Lenox Hill Hospital. He had been struck by a taxicab in the hands of one Mario Contasino, who was at the moment out in the corridor setting up lamentations of a superior order. Churchill, who had a sprained right shoulder and multiple lacerations of the face and nose, insisted in taking all the blame. He suggested, and the driver verified, that he had managed to say “It’s my fault” before lapsing into semi-consciousness. Churchill spoke to an anxious King George V on the telephone, then summoned Contasino and gave him an autographed copy of The World Crisis. He had a restful visit in the hospital, not at all unsettled by Sergeant Thompson’s extreme measures, which included flinging all the clothes out of incoming laundry baskets, to prevent reporters from disturbing the sickroom. For once, Churchill was in agreement with his doctors that he should be guarded from upsets. His concern, while identical to theirs, was prompted by a different reason. Propped up in bed, he was busily at work on a rush article for an American magazine, tentatively titled, “My New York Misadventure.” He finished it without distraction, sold it for twenty-five hundred dollars, then got up and took a convalescent trip to the Bahamas on the proceeds.