English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  What the Cassandras had said at the beginning turned out to be the case. After all, Churchill himself, before he was seduced by the marvels of modern artillery, had told the cabinet in 1911 that the days of forcing the Dardanelles by warships were gone: ‘Nobody would expose a modern fleet to such peril.’ And had not General Callwell, the director of military operations, told Kitchener and Churchill the preceding autumn that, even with a force of 60,000 men, ‘the attack is likely to prove an extremely difficult operation of war’? And had not Admiral Carden, the British commander in the Aegean, told Churchill that ‘I do not consider the Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with large numbers of ships’? Carden and Callwell both meant to discourage Churchill. They little knew their man. The First Lord telegraphed back, ‘Our view is agreed by high authorities here’ (principally, it seems, the First Lord himself – he had not consulted the First Sea Lord, the 73-year-old Jacky Fisher, or anyone else who might turn out to be sceptical). ‘Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations.’

  Churchill then used Carden’s reply and the subsequent refinements of it to argue in The World Crisis that ‘I did not and I could not make the plan’ and ‘the genesis of this plan and its elaboration were purely naval and professional in their character’. Well, from this distance in time, it looks remarkably like a bouncing operation and a wilful misreading of a hesitant ‘might’ (which is what Carden later confirmed he intended) into a gung-ho can-do.

  If Churchill had not been at the Admiralty, it remains highly doubtful whether the Dardanelles plans would ever have been carried through on such a scale. There might have been a couple of naval bombardments of the straits, no doubt abandoned when they turned out to be as costly as the 18 March assault which cost the navy three battleships. No doubt several British submarines would have slipped under the Turkish nets at the narrows and wreaked the same havoc in the Sea of Marmara as the incredible Lt-Commander Nasmith. There might have been one or two commando-style raids on the shore batteries. But would there have been landings involving half a million men, and would it all have gone on for nearly a year and cost 50,000 Allied lives?

  As John Terraine remarks, ‘The peculiarity of the whole Gallipoli story is the number of times that the Allies came within inches of success; it is this, as much as anything, that makes its memory so poignant . . . a series of “accidents” may be blamed for each successive failure. But can so many breakdowns, so similar in character, only be called “accidents”? Do they not seem to point to a chronic basic disorder?’

  The most obvious weakness was the division of command. Even when General Hamilton and Admiral de Robeck were on speaking terms, they were often unable to get in touch with one another. And this misfortune was not merely a technical accident or the product of inter-service rivalry, it reached down to the very depths of the enterprise, which seemed unable to make up its mind whether it was to be primarily naval or military. To start with, the straits were to be forced by the navy alone. Then the army was to silence the batteries first; then in the dying stages, when evacuation was virtually a certainty, Admiral Keyes hatched dramatic plans for the navy to blast its way through to Constantinople.

  But why did the politicians never agree on a sufficiently large combined operation? Why was it always too little, too late? This is surely the crucial question, though it does not seem to have been asked much. The answer is that to have contemplated, openly and candidly, an operation of the necessary size would have drained the Dardanelles of most of their attractions as an alternative to the horrific slaughter of the Western Front. To call this thing by its right name, it would have been an invasion of Turkey – a country which had been only reluctantly dragged into the war by German arm-twisting and was much better left to doze on under the decrepitude of Ottoman rule. And any fool could see that an invasion might well tie up an Allied army of half a million men and more, which is just what did happen later on in Salonica. Churchill himself wrote to Fisher in January 1915 that ‘I would not grudge 100,000 men because of the great political effects in the Balkan peninsula but Germany is the foe, and it is bad war to seek cheaper victories and easier antagonists’.

  Yet that is just what, with many hesitations and backtrackings, they were about to do. For all the cultivated sobriety with which the forty-year-old Churchill persuaded his older colleagues of the virtues of the scheme, there is no doubt that he – and most of them – saw the prospect as a with-one-bound-we-are-free operation, to be carried through at relatively modest cost against an inferior opponent. Only Hamilton, I think, had the grace to admit that he had found ‘Mehmetçik’ a tougher nut than the Johnny Turk of British mythology. And there is no mistaking, either, Churchill’s belief that success in the Dardanelles would also carry him bobbing along on the crest of the wave.

  ‘My God,’ he said to Margot Asquith in January 1915, ‘this, this is living history. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling – it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why, I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me – don’t repeat that I said the word delicious, you know what I mean.’

  Immediately after the Great War, it was this self-dramatizing, self-regarding aspect of Churchill’s character that struck people. He was seen as ‘continually posing, almost strutting, for his portrait for posterity’. Dr Bean, the official Anzac historian, denounced Churchill’s ‘excess of imagination’, his ‘layman’s ignorance of artillery and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains’ (Asquith, Kitchener and Balfour were all in their mid-sixties). But under the heavy pounding of Churchill’s own rhetoric and with the horror of Flanders burning ever deeper into the memory, by the 1930s the conventional wisdom had swung round to accept, more or less, Roger Keyes’s claim that ‘the forcing of the Dardanelles would have shortened the war by two years and spared literally millions of lives’. Liddell Hart described the policy as ‘a sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled even in British history’. Churchill’s glorious achievements in the Second World War gave this view a further lease of life. In the mid-1950s, Moorehead was still more inclined to blame the generals than the politicians.

  But already the tide was turning against Churchill again, J. F. C. Fuller’s considered verdict in 1956 was that ‘Mr Churchill forced the Dardanelles card on the Government and the Government was incapable of playing the hand’. A. J. P. Taylor diagnosed the operation as an attempt to evade the basic problem that the Germans could be beaten only by a force of the equivalent size. Correlli Barnett surely gets through to the real point: ‘Surprise might have won an initial success, but sooner or later the German reserves would have arrived and the Allies would have faced a similar situation as in the West. As the second world war proved, Europe has no “soft underbelly”.’ The ‘Easterners’ were just as much escapists as those who believed in a quick victory on the Western Front. Since the American Civil War, large wars between well-matched opponents have not been decided without mass slaughter: in the Great War on the Western Front, in the Second World War on the Eastern. That is the terrible truth which nobody wanted to face at the time and I don’t think most people really want to face today since it involves accepting that the real donkeys were not the generals but the politicians and the public who insisted on unconditional surrender. So much easier to blame silly old buffers in uniform.

  In a way, the trouble with Churchill in 1915 was not excess but poverty of imagination. He had not at that stage (but then nor had anyone else) much instinctive understanding of the terrible imperatives of a people’s war. His mind still bore traces of the dash and jingle of the low-cost victories of nineteenth-century colonial warfare. Of course, nobody was quicker than he to grasp what Raymond Aron dubbed ‘the technical surprises’ of modern wars; the fighting begins with cavalry and ends with tanks and aircraft. But did he as yet see how people’s wars coul
d mobilize entire populations and engender that inexhaustible determination to carry on to victory even in so apparently debilitated a nation as the Turks? After all, the only enduring legacy of Gallipoli – apart from the memory of so much carefree expenditure of heroism – was the forging of a popular will on the Turkish side which led ultimately to Major Kemal becoming President Ataturk and the creation of modern fez-free Turkey. ‘The key to Winston’, Leo Amery remarked in 1929, ‘is to realise that he is mid-Victorian and unable ever to get the modern point of view.’ That defect became a grand virtue in 1940, when a certain lack of accommodation to modernity was what was wanted. In 1915, by keeping alive the tempting illusion that somewhere, somehow there existed a short cut to victory, Churchill was making it possible for the same errors to be committed on other Mediterranean shores in the next war.

  In the end, it is hard not to agree with that erratic old firecracker, Jacky Fisher, who felt himself pursued by Churchill’s quenchless advocacy like a man persecuted by a swarm of bees: ‘You are just simply eaten up with the Dardanelles and cannot think of anything else. Damn the Dardanelles! They will be our grave!’ As the minibus bundled us back along the peninsula to the long, weary road through the plains of Thrace, I began to feel the spell of the Dardanelles drop away and became once more convinced that the whole enterprise had been not only a mistake but a mirage.

  OSWALD MOSLEY: THE POOR OLD FÜHRER

  It is thirty-five years since Oswald Mosley breathed his last at the Temple de la Gloire, the athletic frame which he had once so proudly flexed now sadly bloated, his piercing eyes shrunk to peepholes, the sinister moustache long shaven. It is seventy-five years since Churchill brought his serious political career to an abrupt end by interning him in Brixton jail. Yet Mosley never quite stops haunting us. He provokes questions that some people think have not been properly answered even now, stirs uneasy if fading memories, tickles up nightmarish might-have-beens. Was he a lost leader, a usable Lucifer who need not have fallen? Why did he go off the rails, or was he pushed? Did he ever come within touching distance of power, and if so when? Was he right about the Slump and how to cure it, and, by extension, right about the Old Gang blocking his path? Martin Pugh’s publishers tell us breathlessly that ‘this book demonstrates for the first time how close Britain came to being a Fascist state in the interwar years.’ Is that a fact or just a pretty piece of hype? Does the limelight that Mosley continued to hog show how powerful his hold was over the British people, or was it merely a reflection of the far more powerful and evil megawattage sweeping the Continent?

  Stephen Dorril’s intertwined biography of Mosley and British Fascism is exhaustive but easy-paced and entertaining, judicious – and damning. We shall not need another. He says pretty well everything that needs to be said, working his way carefully through all the claims made for Mosley and showing how far each one is hollow, misconceived or false.

  It is not true, to start with, that Mosley, always known as Tom, entranced everyone from the moment that, as a war veteran of twenty-two, he was elected as the Conservative Unionist MP for Harrow, the youngest member of the House. On the contrary, something about him apart from his wealth and glamour instantly aroused suspicion. Beatrice Webb called him the most brilliant man in the Commons, but argued that ‘so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere’. F. E. Smith, another unscrupulous chancer whom Mosley idolized, called him ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’. His voice initially had a high-pitched note, and after he took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing gear’. Duff Cooper called him an ‘adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie’. When Mosley switched over to Labour in 1924, his new colleagues were equally suspicious of him. Ernest Bevin thought him ‘the kind of unreliable intellectual who might at any moment stab me in the back’. Attlee complained: ‘Why does Mosley always speak to us as though he were a feudal landlord abusing tenants who are in arrears with their rent?’ For Ellen Wilkinson, he was the Sheikh – ‘not the nice kind hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture, but the one who hisses: “At last – we meet.”’

  It is worth noting, too, how soon the mockery in print started. Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point was published in 1928 while Mosley was still a Labour MP. Yet Everard Webley, the leader of the British Freemen, in their green uniforms ‘like the male chorus at a musical comedy’, is unmistakably Mosley, very tall and burly, consumed with ambition and deliberately unpleasant: ‘Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. It was not until 1938 that P. G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts in The Code of the Woosters:

  ‘By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’

  ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’

  ‘Footer bags, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How perfectly foul.’

  Spode, a huge man with piercing eyes and a moustache, can be brought to heel by the mention of the word ‘Eulalie’, because in private life he designs ladies’ underwear under the name of Eulalie Soeurs. Mosley, it turns out, had a plan for a range of Blackshirt cosmetics which were to be marketed on a commercial radio station secretly controlled by himself.

  Previous biographies have not, I think, fully brought out how nasty Mosley was in private life. He was, for a start, what might be called a hereditary blackguard. The Mosleys once owned the whole of Manchester (admittedly then not much of a place) and were plutocrats of the most unmitigated ghastliness. A Sir Oswald Mosley built the Manchester Cotton Exchange in 1729. His descendants helped to instigate the Peterloo Massacre and suppress the Chartists. Mosley’s grandfather was at the forefront of the campaign against Jewish emancipation. Both his father and grandfather were dissolute pugilists who quarrelled violently, liked to punch the lights out of each other and refused to leave a penny to their eldest sons. Mosley’s mother left his father because of his goatish infidelity, and Sir Oswald senior poured out a stream of vitriol when Mosley decamped to Labour.

  Mosley himself was anally tight with money, raided the trust funds of his first wife, Cimmie, and their children, and refused to pay for his son Alexander’s university education. He was also notoriously ruthless in his pursuit of women. Apart from dozens of other married women, he slept with his wife’s stepmother, Grace Curzon, her sister Irene and, after Cimmie’s death in 1933, her other sister, ‘Baba Blackshirt’ Metcalfe, who was married to the Prince of Wales’s equerry, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. Poor Fruity was a faithful member of the British Fascisti and had to put up with being cuckolded not only by Mosley but by Count Grandi, Mussolini’s man in London.

  Somehow Mosley managed to make his adoring wife think that she was the one who was at fault. He lied, habitually and unashamedly, to men and women alike. He told her: ‘To lead what we believe to be a moral life in our immoral society, some subterfuge is necessary if we are to retain our power to change society.’ For several years he denied his marriage to Diana Mitford, which took place in Berlin in the presence of Hitler and Goebbels. He came clean to his mother and his children by his first marriage only when Diana was about to give birth.

  He lied just as persistently about the source of his party funding, claiming under interrogation in 1940 that he had never received money from Mussolini and that ‘my general directions were that no money should be accepted except from British subjects.’ In fact, MI5 discovered that he had been receiving tens of thousands of pounds from Mussolini every year, totalling £234,730 – £8 million in today’s money, Dorril computes – through secret accounts personally controlled by him. And when Mussolini stopped the flow, exasperated by the Blackshirts’ pathetic lack of progress, Goebbels stepped i
n with handsome donations through a secret agent – £91,000 in 1936 alone. But Hitler, like Mussolini, always regarded Mosley as a second-rate imitator of his methods who had no idea how to appeal to the British people. Mosley was completely dependent on these grants, which made him subservient to Mussolini over Abyssinia, and then to Hitler over Czechoslovakia. He was, to use the sort of language that he belted out from the platform, the lackey of an alien power, in fact of two alien powers.

  He lied repeatedly over the British Union of Fascists’ anti-Semitism, claiming that he was not to blame for the vile outpourings of the Blackshirt as ‘party journals were in other hands, because I was often absent from London.’ A. K. Chesterton, Gilbert’s cousin, whose views made G. K. C. seem philosemitic, reminded him that he read the page proofs of every issue and if he was out of London would check them over the phone. Phrases in the Blackshirt such as ‘the oily, material, swaggering Jew’ and the ‘pot-bellied, sneering, money-mad Jew’ would have been specifically approved by Mosley. Interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle in 1933, he claimed that attacks on Jews were ‘strictly forbidden’ in the movement. But only a few months later, the BUF was attacking ‘the low type of foreign Jew who is to the fore in every crooked financial deal’ and denouncing Jews as ‘a cancer in the body politic which requires a surgical operation’. In talking to Nazi representatives (and in his rare meetings with Hitler), he stressed that he would have to take drastic measures against his Jewish opponents, though he was dealing with the Jewish problem in an appropriately English way.