Churchill

by Ashley Jackson

  After nearly a month in Canada, Churchill headed to America. Here he visited California, met Charlie Chaplin at the MGM studios, called upon President Hoover, toured Civil War battlefields, and found ways to overcome the strictures of Prohibition. From Santa Barbara, he wrote to Clementine on September 19, 1929 that he reckoned they had over £21,000 coming in. But such rosy assessments were soon dashed, as the Wall Street Crash decimated his personal investments. Churchill was in New York on October 29—Black Tuesday—which precipitated the Great Crash. He had speculated on the New York stock market, and lost over £10,000. He returned to Britain on October 30. With Churchill out of government and facing financial difficulties, dust sheets appeared at Chartwell, and he took up his pen with frenzied energy, writing articles and columns wherever he could find an outlet. Only his office was left habitable in the house, and the small house in the Chartwell grounds, Wellstreet Cottage, became the family’s “slump haven.” Nineteen thirty was for the Churchill family an unusually sedentary, stay-at-home year, which the children loved.

  Churchill’s visit to America was important in developing his thinking about Anglo-American relations and their significance in international affairs. During the 1920s, his enthusiasm for America had waned because of evidence that it was trying to diminish Britain’s power while augmenting its own. America’s uncompromising attitude to British war debt irked him, especially as Britain was owed nearly twice as much by other allies as it owed America (like his attitude toward the miners, Churchill was more sympathetic to the debt relief of European countries that owed Britain than were his Cabinet colleagues). Churchill viewed America’s insistence upon naval parity with Britain as a tactic designed to give it significant influence on British policy. He was right to be worried, though the 1929 visit converted Churchill into an enthusiast for the extension of American power around the world, a second pillar of the “English-speaking world” with which he was to become fixated. Herein lay the dilemma at the core of Britain’s relations with America: America did not see things in such terms and was always less enthusiastic about a “special relationship”—a phrase pioneered by Churchill—and alliance with the British Empire–Commonwealth. It was, indeed, attempting to supplant British power with its own. And soon Britain was to become dependent on American power for its own security.

  Family and Personal Affairs

  During the First World War, and for long stretches of the 1920s, Churchill was too busy to see much of his family. But Clementine was a politician’s wife and knew what to expect. Trips together, to the theater for example, were rare, and Churchill’s circle of friends, never large, contracted. When he was able to spend time with his family, he remained an engaging father, playing gorilla with the children in the garden, making tree houses and encouraging them to participate in dinner table conversations about politics and current affairs. He took less exercise than in the past, playing the occasional game of polo (for example, for the Commons versus the Lords), though he played his last game in 1927. Infrequently. Churchill monitored “lifestyle” matters, such as body weight and alcohol consumption, but he remained a reluctant convert. “Not for Pig” was his assessment, in a letter to Clementine, of the news that his great friend F. E. Smith had given up all alcohol except cider.‡

  Churchill’s character developed along its set course. In 1921, A. G. Gardener wrote that he “doesn’t want to hear your views. He does not want to disturb the beautiful clarity of his thought by the tiresome reminders of the other side.”30 His writing continued to serve his personal rendition of history—though of no lesser value to the historian because of this—his multivolume The World Crisis having as one of its major themes the desire to set the record straight regarding Churchill’s tenure at the Admiralty, a work famously described by Balfour as “Winston’s brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe.”31

  The 1920s were years of considerable upheaval in the personal life of the Churchill family. There were regular house moves; in 1920, they took 2 Sussex Square, north of Hyde Park. Typically, while Clementine grappled with the move, Churchill was boar-hunting and painting at the Duke of Westminster’s estate in the south of France. The fact that he remained undiminished as a politician and writer showed immense reserves of strength. Churchill had an ability to maintain bulkheads between the competing spheres of his life—not, for example, allowing bereavement, a downturn in political fortunes, withering press criticism, or financial concerns to ruin his family life or his career as a writer. It is an ability that very few people possess, founded, possibly, on egocentrism.

  One brief period in the early 1920s brought not only the death of his mother, but also the suicide of Clementine’s brother, plus the death of his manservant Thomas Walden. Jennie Churchill’s life in the postwar years had reflected the country-house party lifestyle of the upper classes, as well as the social whirl of the 1920s. By then in her sixties, she was still a well-known hostess and partygoer. She met Ravel, Conrad, Stravinsky, Picasso, and Delius. Though she was sixty-seven, her joie de vivre was undiminished, but in June 1921 she fell down the stairs while wearing high-heeled shoes. Gangrene set in, an amputation was performed, and she entered a coma before Winston and Jack could arrive at her bedside. She died on June 29, 1921. As Churchill wrote to the Duke of Connaught, “She looked beautiful yesterday in her coffin. Since the pangs of the morning thirty years had rolled from her brow and one saw again her old splendour.”32 She was laid to rest alongside her husband, Randolph, in the churchyard at Bladon.

  For themselves, Churchill and Clementine remained a loving couple, though often apart. On January 4, 1922 Churchill wrote from Cannes that “I have been thinking so much about you & worrying over your health.” He returned on January 7, though before the month was out, Clementine, pregnant once more (with her last child, Mary), was off to Cannes. The couple stoically endured the tragedy of their three-year-old daughter, Marigold, dying of septicemia in the previous April. Clementine suffered bouts of ill health; she was knocked over by a bus on Brompton Road in June 1927, and in the following February was gravely ill with a mastoid problem requiring two operations in the space of ten hours at 11 Downing Street. What is more, she was often worried about domestic and family matters. Though Churchill told her not to fret, and that “servants exist to save one trouble,”33 she was one of life’s worriers. Churchill, too, had his bouts of depression, though the famous “Black Dog” was clearly a beast that drove him to new heights of endeavor. More is made of Churchill’s depressive tendencies than they deserve. They did not rule him or warp his judgment. Overemphasis upon the “Black Dog” reflects the common tendency to view and assess Churchill in a manner in which one would not view or assess other human beings, perhaps an inevitable penalty of greatness. Toward the end of his own life, Brendan Bracken offered Lord Moran some penetrating insights about Churchill. He said that Churchill had great success at controlling his fears, which was sometimes mistaken for recklessness. He noted the strain of melancholy that had afflicted the Marlborough line, and how in Winston’s case it had been offset by the robustness of the Jeromes. A man who, especially as he aged, could sit in silence for hours—like a trance, Bracken said—liked to surround himself with buoyant people.

  Churchill often had to worry about money, but his personal fortunes rose when he inherited the Garron Tower estate in Northern Ireland from his grandmother. Its sale allowed the purchase of Chartwell in Kent in September 1922, a property that Churchill had viewed and fallen in love with the year before. Though it was only twenty-four miles from Westminster and the heart of the empire, it stood in an idyllic rural setting, surrounded by sweeping views of the English countryside. For some time, the Churchills had wanted a country house, having sold Lullenden in 1919 for financial reasons. But Clementine, practical as ever, wanted to become a country lady on the right terms. As she wrote to her husband in July 1921, “I long for a country home but I would like it to be a rest & a joy Bunny not a fresh preoccupation.” Purchas
ed for £5,000, Chartwell, with its age and rural location, satisfied Churchill’s sense of English history, though it took many years to become the leisurely abode that Clementine wished for. This was because it required substantial, and expensive, renovation. Nevertheless, the fact that it was so far from being the finished article satisfied Churchill’s instincts to build, plant, and design his own landscape in which to live. It was to become a huge financial drain, however, as Clementine recognized from the start that it would be, indicated by the fact that Philip Tilden was immediately commissioned to rebuild the house (Lutyens and Baker, the two most famous architects of the period, being unavailable).

  At Chartwell, Churchill spent many decades improving the buildings, erecting new cottages and walls, excavating lakes and gardens, and experimenting with pigs and chickens. Animals played an important part in Churchill’s life, from Australian black swans to golden carp, racehorses, marmalade cats, and poodles. He loved playing the farmer and gardener, reporting to Clementine on events such as “a minor catastrophe in the pig world”34 and planting Japanese azaleas, Britannia rhododendrons, and white magnolias. Showing his capacity to engage deeply with whatever he turned his attention to, he took delight in building and furnishing his home. On July 22, 1922 he wrote a “dissertation on dining room chairs” as a guide to their purchase. “The Dining Room chair has certain very marked requisites,” he began, declaring that there should be twenty, comfortable and with arms. Though Chartwell was purchased in 1922, the family did not properly move in until 1924. As their daughter was to write, “I think it most significant that Clementine was not there at a moment when most women would feel their presence absolutely necessary.”35 Instead, Churchill reported on these first Chartwell days in letters—“I drink champagne at meals & buckets of claret and soda in between.”36

  Chartwell was to witness a procession of Churchillian fads, fancies, hobbies, and business ventures over the ensuing forty years. He indulged in extensive stockbreeding, as well as creating lakes and buildings, turning his own hand to bricklaying in the construction, for example, of Chickenham Palace, a large brick hen house. He bought up surrounding farms when funds allowed and wrangled over bills with builders and plumbers. He pored over lawnmower catalogues before making a purchase, imported black swans, and attempted to introduce new varieties of butterfly. He planted roses and dabbled in commercial market gardening. He stocked his lakes with carp, lionheads, catfish, and golden comets, bred English Shorthorn cattle and Swedish Landrace pigs. New livestock arrivals he toasted with sherry and maintained that it was wrong to eat an animal one had said “Good Morning” to.

  During the 1920s, painting intensified as a pleasure and release for Churchill. He even wrote about it, articles on “Painting as a Pastime” appearing in the Strand Magazine in 1921 and 1922, netting the princely sum of £1,000. Clementine had counseled caution—“I expect the professionals would be vexed & say you do not yet know enough about Art.” But the lure of the money prevailed, and the articles were a great success, Churchill explaining how painting had first come to him and the many pleasures associated with brush and canvas. His paintings varied considerably in this period. Following the death of Marigold, he retreated with his family to Lochmore in the Scottish Highlands, where painting brought him solace. “Happy are the painters,” he wrote, “for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.” It was very much Churchill’s practice, in the aristocratic tradition, to visit the country homes of friends and colleagues. Trips to such “paintatious” places (as he called them) often led to new canvases. Venues included Colonel John Astor’s home, Hever Castle in Kent, where the colonnaded Italian garden captured Churchill’s artistic attention, and Breccles in Norfolk, home of Clementine’s cousin, where he painted the wooded gardens. In 1927, he stayed with King George V at Balmoral, where he worked from a painting of the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He painted on his regular jaunts to the French Riviera, attempted the pyramids when visiting Cairo, and took his paints to America and Canada’s Rocky Mountains. When at home and the weather inclement, he resorted to still-life studies of fruit, bottles, and glassware collected by the children, or blooms from the magnolia that Clementine had planted beneath his window.

  Wherever he went, even on official visits, the full paraphernalia of the painter went, too. In 1925, he showed a painting anonymously at an amateur art exhibition in London. The judges awarded Winter Sunshine, Chartwell first prize, though one of them, Sir Joseph Duveen, at first refused to believe it was the work of an amateur. Observing Churchill painting at Lympne near Folkestone, a friend captured the extent of his concentration: “He was completely absorbed . . . wearing his immense sombrero of light felt. . . . Four sketches were drying in the sun, propped against the feet of the easel. He was now slashing the fifth canvas, almost throwing the paint on; he was sighing, almost out of breath with the effort of expressing his feelings.”37

  6

  Man of Kent: A Frenzied Unemployment

  In the 1930s, Winston Churchill had no sense of the inevitability of war, no prescient inkling that the time and the hour were close at hand when he would be called upon to lead the nation. Though Churchill, along with many others, subsequently cast the years leading to his “finest hour” in a golden light, the decade had neither the consistency nor the continuity sometimes ascribed to it, and accounts that highlight Churchill’s activities and portentous pronouncements are devoid of proper context. Before the heroic War Leader coming to his country’s aid in its moment of greatest peril, the Churchill myth-history would have it, came a decade in which the Great Sage prophesied from the wilderness and was ignored. But while Churchill’s political activity, especially his consistent warnings about Germany, were a major theme of the decade, there were a myriad other things going on in the 1930s—it wasn’t all about a world waiting patiently to stumble into catastrophic conflict. Beyond the politics, wilderness or no, the 1930s was a very successful decade for both Churchill the writer and Churchill the artist. He remained one of the nation’s most powerful politicians and, for the first time, a leader of mass movements. He also developed his portfolio as a stockbreeder and beekeeper.

  For much of the 1930s, Churchill believed that Britain was not directly threatened from the continent, and even when the German menace became clear to him, he perceived no serious threat from Italy or Japan, the latter a notable Churchillian blind spot. On September 15, 1937, he wrote in the Evening Standard that “major war is not imminent, and I still believe there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our time.” But his whole stance was based upon the notion that war would be far less likely if Britain were properly prepared to fight and prepared to deal robustly and consistently with potential enemies. such as Germany.

  During the second half of the decade, Churchill’s concern about the menace of German resurgence grew, as did the force of his warnings that all due preparation was needed. Churchill was the most prominent British politician who simply refused to see the appeasement of Germany as a sensible policy (though he supported measures that amounted to the appeasement of Italy and Japan). As early as 1932, Churchill was raising the alarm with regard to the Nazis. “He understood what Hitler meant by the Versailles grievances but something, probably just brilliant intuition, told him that Hitler had much more in mind than the mere redress of them.”1 Much of what Churchill achieved during the 1930s, including the foundations of his claim to be a national leader in 1940 despite severe opposition, depended upon his isolation and independence from the government, as well as the accuracy of his predictions. For when the time came, he could legitimately claim to bear no responsibility for British foreign and defense policy during the so-called appeasement years. He could appear instead as a new broom, renowned for his pugnacity and just the man to call time on the follies of appeasement and show Hitler a line in the sand with John Bull standing four-square behind it.

  It has o
ften been remarked that some of Churchill’s other salient activities during the 1930s diminished the potency of his calls for serious preparation in the face of German expansionism and militarism. In particular, his role in opposing reform in India and in supporting King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis are widely seen to have demonstrated his poor judgment. But it would transpire that Churchill’s argumentativeness and willingness to crusade for lost causes was also a boon for democracy and civilization. For much of the decade, however, these traits were regarded as a source of national inconvenience warranting ridicule. While his stance on India or the abdication might have augmented his reputation for poor judgment and belligerence, his lonely stand on Germany and rearmament had immeasurable significance for his country’s future independence.

  In 1929, Churchill had said that he quite relished the prospect of a period out of government, as it would offer a chance for him to show his mettle as an Opposition spokesman. Two years later, his wish was granted, though his spell as an Opposition front-bencher soon came to an untimely end and ushered in almost a decade in which he held no major office and wielded no governmental or party power. After the Conservatives lost office in 1929, and after Churchill had subsequently fallen foul of his party’s leadership following marked differences of opinion, the sensible money would have been on his career as a national and international politician being over. This would almost certainly have been the case if the 1930s had not witnessed the most severe international crisis in history. The threat to British survival posed by the European dictators called for a type of political animal that democratic politics was simply not designed to produce. Thankfully, a man of talent, bellicosity, and strategic vision was waiting in the wings, a descendant of Marlborough.