“What did it look like?” the First Lord asked Admiral Beatty of the charge, expecting some grand description of his brave gallop through the desert sands.
“Brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet,” the admiral replied. It wasn’t what Winston wanted to hear, but it made the right impression. It sounded like something he would say.15
On the spot he offered Beatty an appointment as his naval secretary (the First Lord’s right-hand man), and the admiral accepted. When the chance came a year later to appoint a commander of the Battle-Cruiser Fleet, Winston wouldn’t have to think twice about the best person to lead the navy’s “cavalry.”
* * *
A lifelong student of his country’s history, Churchill was keenly aware of the part he had been allowed to play in the epic story of British naval power. He was following in the steps of giants who had defeated the Spanish Armada in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s navy in the nineteenth. He didn’t want to be the man who let the Royal Navy be overwhelmed by the Germans, a Continental power without a great naval tradition. Speaking in Glasgow on February 9, 1912, he reminded his listeners that a powerful Royal Navy was indispensable to the defense of an island nation.
“The British Navy,” he said, “is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury. . . . It is existence to us; it is expansion to them. We cannot menace the peace of a single Continental hamlet, nor do we wish to do so no matter how great and supreme our Navy may become.”16
Unfortunately, in translation, this perfectly reasonable statement caused an uproar in Germany, where “luxury” was taken to mean something akin to a frivolous plaything rather than simply an expensive extra. What was intended as simply an explanation of the defensive nature of the navy was viewed in Germany as a slur on their naval force, as if it didn’t merit the same consideration. Instead of settling for a blank page in the “book of misunderstanding,” the German press seemed to delight in contributing whole chapters.
“The speech of Mr. Churchill contains scarcely concealed menaces against Germany,” wrote one paper in Frankfurt. “We cannot be compelled by threats. The German nation would never quietly submit to a moral defeat; it would prefer to defend itself to the bitter end.” Another paper complained, “We understand that it was to [Churchill’s] interest to picture to his audience the naval armaments of Germany as a danger which England need hardly take seriously, and as something which England would be in a position at any time to meet.”17
The nationalistic pride of Germany was so sensitive to perceived slights that there seemed to be a rush to condemn Churchill’s words simply because he dared to make any comparison of the two navies. The assumption was that he couldn’t have anything good to say about his rival. In fact, the speech was full of respectful references to Germany and its place in the world. But in the perverse reaction to his Glasgow speech there was a revealing glimpse into a militaristic culture itching for a fight.
The eagerness to twist minor episodes into major grievances started at the top. Through diplomatic channels the Kaiser didn’t hesitate to make known his displeasure with what he called “Churchill’s arrogant speech.” He said it was “a provocation to Germany” and asked, “What apology has there been offered to us for the passage in the speech describing our fleet as an article of luxury?”18
The Kaiser knew better than to describe the speech as “a provocation.” At the very time that Churchill was speaking in Glasgow, Lord Haldane was on a mission in Berlin to try to reduce tensions between Germany and Britain. When Winston’s words reached Berlin, Haldane went out of his way to explain the remarks to the Kaiser, to read the “operative passages” directly to him and put them in the context of British policy. Only later did the Kaiser find it convenient to use the speech as a way of resisting Haldane’s peace overtures and to blame Winston as the warmonger who had recklessly insulted the proud German navy. When he was president of the Board of Trade or Home Secretary, Churchill was of little concern to the German government, but as First Lord of the Admiralty he was now a figure worth undermining on even the slightest pretext.19
In this effort to slander Churchill as an obstacle to peace, the Kaiser and his circle may have thought he presented an especially vulnerable target at the time. The very papers that reported his speech in Glasgow were full of stories that week about how vehemently he was being reviled in his own country by those opposed to Irish Home Rule. Just one day before speaking in Glasgow, he had been under attack in Belfast, where he had gone under heavy security to promote the government’s new plans for Home Rule. The time had arrived to reward the Irish Nationalists for their support of the Asquith administration, and Churchill was ready to help smooth the way for the legislation.
But the Ulster Unionists didn’t want his help. One of their favorite words to describe his visit was provocative. They had been warning Churchill not to come, so his willingness to do so was the “provocation.”
He could just as easily have stayed home and avoided controversy. For decades the whole issue of Home Rule had caused nothing but trouble for English politicians. As First Lord, Churchill didn’t need to become entangled in its complexities, but as a national political figure he couldn’t resist addressing the problem. Coming up with a solution seemed almost impossible, however, because the Nationalists insisted that a new Dublin parliament should have authority over all of Ireland, and the Unionists insisted that Protestant Ulster should remain under London’s control. Asquith had hoped to give the Nationalists what they wanted and appease the Unionists with minor concessions, but as Churchill discovered in Belfast, there was little interest in compromise.
Hundreds of police and soldiers were called out to protect the First Lord and the six thousand people who attended his talk. The newspapers said that parts of Belfast looked like a war zone. “If, unhappily, bloodshed results from Mr. Churchill’s visit,” said the Daily Mirror, “temporary hospitals for the treatment of the wounded will be opened in various parts of the city, and a vast medical and ambulance corps will attend to the casualties.” The local police were worried because of reports “that great quantities of bolts & rivets have been abstracted from the yards, and many revolvers have been taken out of pawn.”20
Unhelpfully, George Bernard Shaw told Jennie that there might be a riot, but he didn’t think Winston would be hurt. “Do not be uneasy about W,” he wrote. “They will not break his head, though they may possibly break each others, with a few windows thrown in.” Eddie Marsh, who traveled to Ulster with Winston, expected trouble but decided to affect a jaunty air of unconcern. “Wait and see if I am killed,” he wrote his good friend the poet Rupert Brooke, “and if not write me a long letter.”21
As Churchill’s car was driving through Belfast it was in fact attacked by a mob. They tried to overturn it. Bravely, Clemmie had insisted on accompanying Winston on this dangerous visit, but when the mob surrounded the car and lifted it in the air, she was terrified. “She was not afraid of being killed,” a friend recalled her saying, “but feared she might be disfigured for life by the glass of the motor being broken or by some other means.”
They were rescued at the last moment by a large group of policemen who had to use their batons to break the mob’s hold on the vehicle. Tragically—perhaps because of the trauma—Clemmie would suffer a miscarriage the next month. (Told the news, Churchill wrote her, “No wonder you have not felt well for the last month. Poor lamb.” Clemmie replied, “It is so strange to have all the same sensations that one has after a real Baby, but with no result.”)22
And the reason for all this animosity toward Winston? Apparently, his crime was to revise and update Lord Randolph Churchill’s famous cry against Gladstone’s old Home Rule Bill. If the son of Lord Randolph could reconcile himself to Home Rule, why couldn’t the diehard Unionists in the Tory ranks do the same?
“It is in a different sense,” Winston told the people of Belfast, “that I accept and re
peat Lord Randolph Churchill’s, ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ Let Ulster fight for the dignity and honour of Ireland. Let her fight for the reconciliation of races and for the forgiveness of ancient wrongs. . . . Let her fight for the spread of charity, tolerance, and enlightenment among men. Then, indeed, Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”23
In their rage the Unionists didn’t want to hear about forgiveness and enlightenment. They didn’t want to live in peace with the Catholic majority of Ireland by sharing power in a new Dublin parliament, even if the island itself remained part of the British Empire. Instead they wanted Churchill to be the symbol of treason to the Unionist cause that Lord Randolph had once championed. It was an effective way to rally their troops. But as the passions continued to boil over in this feud, the Unionist leaders would remain stubbornly oblivious to the harm they were causing the British government, which they claimed to prefer over Home Rule.
The German leaders didn’t overlook this dissension. Winston was their enemy, too. And they must have relished seeing the increasingly bitter attacks on him, which would reach a wild and vitriolic climax in April 1914, when the retired admiral and ardent Unionist Lord Charles Beresford addressed a rally in Hyde Park.
Churchill, the old admiral announced, was a “Lilliput Napoleon. A man with an unbalanced mind. An egomaniac, whose one absorbing thought is personal vindictiveness towards Ulster. He has not forgotten his reception in Belfast. . . . As long as Mr. Winston Churchill remains in office the State is in danger.”24
XXIII
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
With Sir Francis Drake at his side, Winston Churchill stood on the Elizabethan dock looking up at the flag on the mainmast of the Revenge—the English galleon that had battled the Spanish Armada. Then he turned and, addressing a small crowd gathered nearby, heaped praise on the ships in Drake’s fleet that had struck terror in the hearts of the Spanish captains. While the First Lord of the Admiralty spoke, Sir Francis gazed proudly at the crowd, clutching at his sword.
Thanks to Jennie, who was in the background standing at attention and looking like the model for a ship’s prow, Winston was able for a moment to imagine that he had been transported to the dawn of the British Empire, with centuries of triumph and glory ahead of him. For that fleeting moment it didn’t matter that the fleecy clouds overhead were painted on canvas, that the “Revenge” was a full-size replica in an artificial pond, or that Sir Francis Drake was a West End actor hired for the occasion. The whole thing was real enough to stir the blood and remind his listeners that the nation had conquered mighty fleets in the past, and would perhaps be forced to face another in the near future.
In an unexpected burst of energy and ambition, Jennie, at age fifty-eight, had decided to create an elaborate public fair devoted to Shakespeare’s England. She had formed a limited liability company, borrowed heavily, found a few wealthy investors, promised a long run and a tidy profit, and had built a Tudor village in London at the Earls Court exhibition grounds. In addition to the ship floating in the pond with forty plaster guns “bristling defiance to the foes of England”—which occupied pride of place at the center of the fair—there was a convincing reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, where excerpts from Elizabethan plays were to be staged in the original manner three times a day. Cobbled lanes led to cottages, taverns, restaurants, a bookstall, “shady nooks,” and “picturesque shops.” A small army of actors was engaged to dress up in period costumes and parade and perform in the lanes and courtyards. Jennie didn’t pinch pennies. Much of the village was designed by the best architect in Britain—Edwin Lutyens.
Jennie opened the fair on May 9, 1912, and was surrounded by all the dazzling royal guests and society darlings she could round up for the event. “Elizabethan” sailors climbed the rigging of Drake’s ship and shouted down to the crowds, an acting company performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe, and Jennie threw an enormous party for all her friends at the “Mermaid Tavern.” A series of balls took place over the next few months, and the king and queen toured the fair. Ordinary mortals had to pay a shilling for admission.1
The idea of holding such an educational entertainment seemed promising. The country was in the mood to reflect on its past achievements, and Jennie and Winston weren’t the only ones eager to make a connection between Elizabethan naval threats and modern ones. One of the most successful theatrical events of 1912 was Louis Parker’s Drake: A Pageant-Play, which ran for 220 performances at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. The last act featured a spectacular battle scene in which the crew of the Revenge boarded a Spanish ship, with smoke hanging in the air and the stage “lighted up fitfully with sudden flashes of flame.” The contemporary relevance of Sir Francis Drake’s victory speech in the play wasn’t lost on the audiences of 1912.
“We have opened the gates of the sea,” Drake declaimed to a little crowd ashore in the final scene; “we have given you the keys of the world. The little spot ye stand on has become the centre of the earth. . . . See that ye hold fast the heritage we leave you. Yea, and teach your children its value: that never in the coming centuries their hearts may fail them, or their hands grow weak!”
Despite enormous publicity, Jennie’s fair didn’t create the kind of enthusiasm that Louis Parker’s play enjoyed. It barely survived until the end of the summer. The crowds at Earls Court were appreciative but sparse, and Jennie wasted money on lavish free entertainments for her friends, most of whom seemed to expect free tickets for themselves and everyone they knew. The losses were staggering—at least £50,000—but they fell mostly on the banks and the investors, not on Jennie. British newspapers tended to underplay the disaster, but not the American press. “Fiasco at Earls Court,” said the headline in the New York Times. “The show has been an unmitigated failure,” the paper reported, adding that Jennie’s “friends say that she must have spent a small fortune on the many dinner parties she has given there.”2
But how did a woman who was in constant financial difficulties manage to raise so much money to build her Tudor village in the first place?
The answer lies in the identity of her biggest single investor, whose substantial contribution made it easier for Jennie to get bank loans and other funding. That investor was a thirty-nine-year-old widow with a million dollars. She wasn’t Jennie’s friend. She was one of her husband’s lovers. By 1912 Jennie’s marriage to the much younger George Cornwallis-West was all but finished. He had one foot out the door and wasn’t making much of an effort to hide his relationships with other women, one of whom was a footloose American in Paris. Called the “Tin Plate Heiress,” Nancy Stewart of Zanesville, Ohio, had already been married and divorced when she wed a wealthy manufacturer in America, who pampered her for eight years before dying in Paris in 1908 and leaving her all his fortune.
Perhaps as the price for George’s indiscretions, Jennie insisted that he ask the rich widow to invest in the fair to the tune of £15,000—a sum worth about $75,000 at the time. As George blandly remarked in later years—when neither Jennie nor Nancy was alive to protest the disclosure—“I happened to be going to Paris, where [Nancy] was staying, and I put the proposition before her. . . . She consented to do it, and I am sorry to say she lost every penny, but she paid her liabilities without a murmur, and never once did she reproach me for the part I had played in the matter.” Nancy went on to marry Prince Christopher of Greece. By the end of 1912 George and Jennie Cornwallis-West had agreed to separate.3
In retrospect, it would seem that Jennie had more reasons than one for making the “Revenge” the centerpiece of her expensive fair. At her many parties and dinners in the “Mermaid” and the Tudor banqueting hall she must have taken special pleasure in knowing that George’s “friend” in Paris was footing the bill.
The future Greek princess—Nancy would style herself Princess Anastasia—may never have understood how her investment had helped to give a modest boost to the cause of the First Lord and the Royal Navy. B
ut as soon as Jennie had squeezed all the value out of it for herself, her friends, and her famous son, she cast her eye toward her native land and wondered whether the fair would be welcome in New York. When Kate Carew, a columnist from the New York Tribune, interviewed her about the possibility, Jennie didn’t hesitate to admit that she would welcome a new benefactor willing to move the whole thing overseas. The columnist quoted her response word for word, though it was probably said in confidence.
“Could you advise me,” asked Jennie, “as to any rich man with artistic tastes who would be likely to entertain the idea of establishing the exhibition in America?”4
Unfortunately, when none came forward, she closed the fair, and the “Revenge” and the Globe were dismantled. Some of the Tudor cottages were moved to Bristol, where they were used to house officers when the real shooting began after 1914.
* * *
There was one man in 1912 who was pretty certain that he was the modern world’s answer to Drake and Nelson, and his name wasn’t Churchill. It was retired Admiral “Jacky” Fisher—now Baron Fisher—who had served more than half a century in the Royal Navy. In 1854 Lord Nelson’s last surviving captain nominated young Jacky Fisher as a naval cadet. The boy was only thirteen then, and the navy he joined had not changed much since Nelson’s day. Early on, he saw his mission as adapting Admiral Nelson’s precepts to the changing times, and creating a modern fleet both honored and feared.
A. G. Gardiner, writing at the end of Fisher’s career, said of him, “His passion for Nelson is so intense and abiding that he seems to dwell in a sort of spiritual companionship with that great man, his sayings always on his lips, his ideals always in his mind.”
One of his proudest possessions was a newspaper cartoon published on the day in 1904 when he became the professional head of the Royal Navy (the First Sea Lord). In the foreground the cartoon showed Nelson starting to climb down from his column in Trafalgar Square, with Fisher in the background striding into the Admiralty. “I was on my way down to lend them a hand myself,” said the caption under Nelson, “but if Jacky Fisher’s taking on the job there’s no need for me to be nervous. I’ll get back on my pedestal.”
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