Churchill

by Ashley Jackson

  While rightly renowned as a speaker, he was not expert in all fields of the art. He prepared speeches laboriously in advance, but if the mood of a meeting or a House of Commons session was not with him, he was not flexible enough to ad-lib, and his guns could be spiked. Moreover the qualities of the platform orator were becoming less important as the significance of lengthy parliamentary or election disquisitions declined, with speeches becoming shorter and attention spans waning. Showing his ability to move with the times while apparently impersonating a dinosaur, Churchill was aware of the growing power of radio and sought to manipulate it, ahead of many of his peers, and attempted to change his speaking style to remain in tune with changing public tastes.

  Churchill’s first big decision as chancellor was whether to return to gold at the prewar rate, a move the Bank of England had coveted ever since the end of the war. Most economists argued that a return to gold at prewar rates would drive down inflation and restore stability. But Churchill was not an uncritical champion of the principles of classical economics. The return to the gold standard, far from being a blow deliberately aimed at the working classes on behalf of the owners of the “means of production,” was an attempt to protect home industries by making them more efficient. A committee appointed in 1924 by the Labour government had reported unanimously in favor of a return, despite the adverse comment of the economist John Maynard Keynes (who was prompted to pen the famous tract “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill”). By the following year the governor of the Bank of England and Treasury officials were keen to expedite the return. In January 1925, however, Churchill had serious second thoughts following criticism of the policy in the Daily Express. The governor of the bank, Montagu Norman, and other leading economists and Treasury officials had to paddle hard to counter this opposition. A clutch of former chancellors supported the return to gold, Keynes remaining a lone voice in opposition. The battle over the gold standard dragged on for two months. Churchill’s decision to return to gold, which later in life he came to regard as his greatest mistake, was supported by both the other main political parties as well as the Bank of England and the Treasury.

  Aside from the issue of gold, Chancellor Churchill needed to wield the ax on government spending. He was unable to make immediate cuts in military expenditure, and existing plans for the RAF and the navy anticipated spending increases. So Churchill told Baldwin that something had to be done to keep military estimates down. This, of course, provided ammunition for Churchill’s opponents, as the spectacle of the former “we want eight” dreadnoughts champion arguing for military cuts offered an attractive contrast and led later historians to emphasize Churchill’s role in Britain’s interwar disarmament. The reality at the time was that Churchill’s desire for retrenchment reflected nothing more than the inevitable cut and thrust of democratic politics and the fact that the international atmosphere of the 1920s was very different from that prevailing in the 1930s. It also reflected Churchill’s entirely sound assessment that a major world war was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and it logically followed that cutting military expenditure was not tantamount to a desertion of the government’s duty to protect Britain and its interests around the world. Adopting the “ten-year rule” that had already been established was not a gross dereliction of duty, but “a perfectly reasonable prognostication” which “in fact proved fairly accurate.”19 This was the age of Locarno, not of Munich, and prophesying doom from the vantage point of hindsight is a singularly profitless enterprise, though one that holds a strange attraction for historians. With Germany vanquished and Japan an ally, the British Empire appeared to be secure. An attempt to see off New York’s challenge to the City of London as the world’s financial center, therefore, seemed like a reasonable target.

  The service departments were the ones who found Churchill most implacable as chancellor. He battled with the Admiralty over the 1924–25 and 1925–26 estimates, asking, “Why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime,” as he attempted to curb their spending.20 Some contend that he disarmed the navy, though this fails to take into account the vicissitudes of democratic politics and the inability of politicians to predict the future or stop economic tidal waves in their course. In the case of the Singapore naval base, the problems had as much to do with interservice rivalry as with interwar parsimony. What is more, the naval budget actually rose while Churchill was chancellor, from £105 million in 1923 to £113 million in 1929. Any chancellor in the mid-1920s would have sought significant cuts in military spending. Churchill thought the prospect of war with Germany or Japan was remote and argued against the proposed creation of a fleet to be based at Singapore, the reverse of his position when Labour had talked along similar lines when in power. Eventually, Baldwin decided the matter, accepting the need for new ships, though reducing the size of a new class of cruisers and making other economies. Churchill’s battles with the Admiralty, the department for which he had demanded ever-increasing resources in the run-up to the First World War, led to many bruising encounters. Unlike the other two services, the navy was used to being given pretty much whatever it asked for, though it faced a formidable cost-cutting opponent in Churchill. As the First Sea Lord, the Earl Beatty, put it, “It takes a good deal out of me when dealing with a man of his caliber with a very quick brain.”21

  One of the most unfortunate elements of 1920s defense cuts was the weakening of the Royal Navy in the Far East. Because adequate ships were not forthcoming, unreasonable expectations were piled onto “the Singapore strategy.” The strategy, intended to protect the eastern empire, deter Japan, and develop an alliance with America, came unstuck when Britain faced the worst possible scenario of fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously. But there was little alternative for the British government in the 1920s when, after a period of total military mobilization, the electorate insisted upon peace and the prioritization of social issues at home rather than building defensive castles in oriental skies. In the mid-1920s, the grave challenges that were to beset Britain and the empire in the 1930s were far off, if discerned at all. Disarmament and collective security—trusting to naval limitation conferences and the League of Nations—were the preferred methods of dealing with potentially troublesome foreign powers.

  Churchill remained an influential contributor to European and international developments. From an early juncture, he recognized the problems the League of Nations faced in trying to deliver international security—“How can the League of Nations accomplish anything without a Navy & an Army behind it?” he asked.22 At negotiations on international war debts in Paris in January 1924, he achieved a widely admired settlement and was a force behind the Locarno guarantee of European frontiers, which brought Germany in as a signatory and equal partner, part of the process of rehabilitating Germany, of which Churchill was a vocal proponent.

  Given Churchill’s association with the concept of an “English-speaking world” and the transatlantic alliance, it is interesting to note that in this period he criticized the land of his mother’s birth, perceiving how America was seeking to supplant British power. In 1928, Herbert Hoover won the American presidential election. Churchill thought it bad for Britain—“I feel that this is not good for us. Poor old England—she is being slowly but surely forced into the shade.”23 After outgoing president Calvin Coolidge’s Armistice Day speech of 1928, in which he vented his anger at British naval policy and openly called for American naval superiority, Clementine wrote that it made her “blood boil” and that “it should be learned by everyone over here so that we shall thoroughly grasp what the Swine think and mean.”24 Churchill agreed, writing that “my blood boiled too at Coolidge’s proclamation. Why can’t they let us alone? They have exacted every last penny owing from Europe: they say they are not going to help: surely they might leave us to manage our own affairs.”25 On the same day, Clementine, contemplating Churchill’s next ministerial position, wrote, “I think it would be a go
od idea if you went to the Foreign Office. But I am afraid your known hostility to America might stand in the way—You would have to try & understand & master America & make her like you.”

  The General Strike

  Given the prevailing economic climate in Britain, as Chancellor Churchill had no choice but to demand economy in government expenditure. The main problems afflicting the British economy were not financial but revolved around excessive capacity in the staple industry sector. The increased value of the pound after the return to gold detracted from Baldwin’s industrial policy, making things more difficult for the traditional export trades, especially coal.

  Like other staples, the British coal industry was in a state of structural decline, and trouble between employers and miners loomed large in the mid-1920s. Once again, Churchill was to find himself at the center of a national storm. At the end of June 1925, the mine owners served notice: wages would have to be reduced and working hours increased if the industry was to keep going. The Miners’ Federation prepared for a national strike to oppose these draconian moves. The entire nation’s workforce then became involved when the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was called upon, and the prospect of a general strike loomed. The government, watching uneasily, announced a temporary subsidy and hoped the two sides would come to some agreement.

  Churchill, like the prime minister, but unlike some Cabinet colleagues, sympathized with the miners’ plight. His prestige in Baldwin’s eyes gave him a more prominent role during the strike than was perhaps necessary or wise. The budget of April 1926, another personal triumph for Churchill, occurred just as the subsidy supporting the status quo in the coal industry came to an end, and the prospect of a general strike reappeared. There was stalemate in the coal districts, and the TUC prepared for a national strike. On the evening of May 2, the Cabinet voted unanimously to break off negotiations with the General Council of the TUC, and the threatened strike began.

  The chancellor’s conduct during the strike has come to form part of the Churchill mythology. Because he chose—once hostilities had been declared—to prosecute the campaign against the strikers with resolution and military precision, he was castigated as a heartless, trigger-happy enemy of the working man. In fact, he was more in sympathy with the miners’ plight and did more to ameliorate their suffering than any of his colleagues. He firmly believed that robust action would end the strike soonest and limit the potentially catastrophic damage to the national economy, his first priority as chancellor. Churchill also saw the strike as a potential threat to constitutional government and throughout its duration distinguished sharply between the constitutional issue and the dispute in the coal industry. Of course, there was more to it than this, for Churchill found the opportunity in the rarefied atmosphere of a national crisis to indulge his passion for hands-on involvement. The strike brought out his martial instincts, which exasperated those around him. As Neville Chamberlain wrote, “He simply revels in this affair, which he will continually treat and talk of as if it were 1914.”26 Yet while Churchill’s bellicose stance confirmed the prejudices of his opponents and reaffirmed the antipathy of the Labour Party, just like his position on Bolshevism, it pleased many Conservatives.

  During the strike, Churchill took special interest in the creation and production of a government mouthpiece, the British Gazette newspaper. Given that the newspapermen had joined the strike, the government needed a method of reaching the people, and the paper achieved a record circulation of over two and a half million. Though J. C. C. Davidson, a junior minister, was in charge of the paper, Churchill saw it as an extremely effective weapon against the strikers and wrote for it with gusto. Davidson found some of his more explosive pieces unprintable. Exasperated, he wrote that Churchill “thinks he is Napoleon, but curiously enough the men who have been printing all their life in the various processes happen to know more about their job than he does.” Davidson effectively summed up the qualities that made Churchill a frustrating colleague: “If I had a mountain that wanted to be moved, I should send for him at once. I think, however, that I should not consult him . . . if I wanted to know where to put it.”27 Churchill’s enthusiasm for using the armed forces to intimidate the strikers also had to be curbed by his colleagues, though he was put in charge of a subcommittee overseeing Territorial Army volunteers in an unarmed police reserve. Characteristically, Churchill produced a comprehensive plan of action that would have allowed this force to be deployed in the event of the regular police being stretched beyond capacity.

  Despite his penchant for robust action, Churchill was thought soft by some of his colleagues because of his desire to offer an olive branch to the strikers; “ready to agree to anything,” as the minister of labor put it. The restraining hand of the prime minister was applied in negotiations with the miners, lest Churchill give away too much. Churchill’s actions, at least in part, were motivated by a mounting concern about the damage to the economy, and he was prepared to offer all sorts of terms and conditions in order to end the strike. By the end of September, Churchill was in the backseat as Baldwin returned from holiday. From October to November 1926, Churchill became a prisoner of the prevailing views of his Cabinet colleagues, who much preferred victory for the mine owners to a negotiated settlement. He was a lone voice in Cabinet arguing the miners’ cause. Though the general strike petered out, the dispute in the coal industry lingered on, with very little attempt by Baldwin to resolve it. Eventually the bitter economic realities forced the men back to work.

  Churchill’s 1927 budget recorded a worrying deficit caused by the strike. But in his budget speech he proceeded to pull a series of rabbits from the hat, finding money without resorting to unpopular and vote-losing retrenchments and taxes. Churchill subsequently fought hard to assist industrial recovery and ameliorate the state of depression settling over the staple industries. He also showed his long-standing concern for social welfare in measures like the increase in children’s allowance on income tax (1928)—an example, as he put it in Parliament, of the government “helping the producer.”

  1929: Out of Office

  Clementine, Randolph, and Diana were all involved in Churchill’s campaign for the 1929 general election, in which he held his Epping seat. The Labour Party, however, made significant gains, and Baldwin was obliged to resign, ushering in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government. Thomas Jones, deputy secretary to the Cabinet, described Churchill on election night 1929, which he spent at 10 Downing Street. He kept “score as results came in, sipping whisky and soda, getting redder and redder, rising often and going to glare at the machine . . . hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge. As Labour gain after Labour gain was announced, Winston became more and more flushed with anger . . . and behaved as if any more Labour gains came along he would smash the whole apparatus. His ejaculations to the surrounding staff were quite unprintable.”28

  The departure from office which followed this defeat allowed Churchill to redirect his energies, though for far longer, as it turned out, than he would have wished. His quite incredible portfolio of nonpolitical activities, pastimes, jobs, and hobbies now came to the fore. The major writing project he embarked upon was the life of his ancestor the 1st Duke of Marlborough. Adopting a practice that was to become common in the preparation of his great works, Churchill employed a part-time researcher, Maurice Ashley, and a couple of former naval officers advised him on the maritime aspects of the campaign.

  In 1929, a Churchill delegation—Jack, Randolph, and Winston—embarked on a three-month visit to North America aboard the Empress of Australia, part holiday, part lecture tour. Tonsil problems prevented Clementine from accompanying them. On the voyage out, Churchill spent hours writing articles from his grand cabin suite and reading into his Marlborough book. He also spent hours inflicting “most cruel defeats” upon Jack at bezique, the early-nineteenth-century French card game. At one point, a bottle of 1865 brandy was required to help him overcome the news from home that the new Labour governm
ent had dismissed Lord Lloyd as high commissioner in Egypt. Leopold Amery, also on board the Empress of Australia, offered an interesting insight into Churchill’s political thoughts at the time: “He was of the opinion that the caliber of politicians had declined. He felt that he had had a good political innings, and that there was little hope of his ever becoming Prime Minister.” It was a sound assessment, given the causes Churchill was to champion during the coming decade and the wariness with which leading politicians viewed him. As the 1930s began, Churchill appeared to have peaked as a politician. The general consensus of opinion was that he was uniquely talented, even a genius perhaps, but had major faults that diminished his potential as a politician. He was not a team player, was unreliable and even disloyal, and his judgment could be poor as the appeal of risk and danger trumped discretion.

  A British Parliamentary Association reporter met Churchill off the ship on August 12, 1929, and he cashed in on his visit with a series of articles in the Telegraph entitled “Impressions of America.” Once in Canada, the luxurious Canadian Pacific Railway conveyed the Churchills across the vast Dominion. Churchill had a special saloon cabin with double beds, an observation room, and a dining room, carriages placed at his disposal by Mr. Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He traveled to Montreal, writing to Clementine of the luxury of the carriages and their short baths—though he reported that “by lying on one’s back with one’s paws in the air, a good dip can be obtained.”29 Churchill was charmed by his reception in Canada and even talked of moving there and starting a new life.