Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  They were careful not to accost him in the House, where he was at his most dangerous. After one of his most effective speeches, Wedgwood Benn completely ignored his arguments and evasively replied that although Winston had “entered the Irish Conference with a dripping sword, he emerged with a dripping pen, and I am not without hope that even here, as he did in the Irish case, he will come in this matter to a better judgment.” Baldwin blunted his thrusts with sweeping generalizations. Ignoring the issue of Indian independence, he said that it was England’s aim to introduce “self-governing institutions” to the subcontinent “with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire”—an Empire which, although he did not say so, the Statute of Westminster, not to mention future events, would eventually dismantle. He said: “We have impregnated India ourselves with Western ideas, and, for good or ill, we are reaping the fruits of our own work.” But only a fraction of the subcontinent’s population had been exposed to Western thought, and it was this elite which would rule India when the Raj pulled out.* Baldwin thought the House should agree “to keep India out of party politics.” It had been in party politics for three centuries; if Parliament couldn’t determine the future of the Raj, who should? He was “firmly convinced” that such articles as Churchill’s pieces in the Daily Mail “will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else.” Even though “the rank and file refuse to face facts,” he said, “the leader has to look at them, and he has to warn his people.” It was “the supreme duty of a political figure to tell the people of the country the truth, because truth is greater than tactics.” The question which stumped Pontius Pilate held no mysteries for Stanley Baldwin, and in his gentlest, most civil manner he advised his colleagues to keep their opinions in this matter to themselves and leave all decisions to him, the prime minister, and the secretary of state for India.289

  Churchill entering the political wilderness over the India issue

  But Churchill had the bone in his teeth, and wouldn’t yield it until events wrenched it from him. Intricate efforts to resolve the Indian question continued on what he called their “downward slurge,” ending in the Government of India Act of 1935, the longest single piece of legislation ever to emerge from the House of Commons—“a gigantic split,” said Churchill, “of jumbled crochet work.” He had fought it for three years in what was probably the most brilliant parliamentary performance of his life. He lost, but so did everyone else; the act’s ultimate objective, an all-India federation which would weave together all the provinces and states on the subcontinent, was rejected by the congress, the Moslems, and the Indian princes. Nevertheless, it was a long step toward dissolution of the Raj. British India was destined to vanish in Winston’s own lifetime. A harbinger was the welcome England extended to Gandhi when he arrived in the fall of 1931, clad only in his homespun shawl and swaddling dhoti, a long loincloth worn by Indian men at home but never, until now, seen in Britain. Had the phrase Radical Chic existed then, it would have described the Mahatma’s reception. He planted trees, gave unsolicited advice on a thousand topics, was extolled by Anglican clergymen, entered the goat which supplied his milk in an English dairy show and was awarded first place, had lunch with Lady Astor, and was invited to tea with the King and Queen. Everyone of consequence clamored to meet Gandhi, with one exception. Churchill refused to see him. Winston was roundly criticized for this, though he had company outside Britain. On December 13 the Mahatma called at the Vatican for an audience with the pope and was turned away. The reason, he was told, was his “inadequate clothing.”290

  The Crash of ’29, like the Blizzard of ’88, is identified with a specific year. Even more is it associated with an American city and a particular street. But it wasn’t confined to Wall Street—the first European quake had come in Vienna, when the Credit-Anstalt, Austria’s largest bank, closed its doors—and the repercussions were international. Wall Street’s significance derived from the new role of the American financial community as successor to London’s City. It was the linchpin of the world’s economic system, and when it snapped the whole structure came tumbling down. The New York Stock Exchange, more familiarly known as the Big Board, was the trading center for Churchill’s securities, and he was among those who discovered to their dismay that the Crash was only the beginning; price levels sank lower and lower throughout 1930, and by the summer of 1931 they made the ticker readings of the ’29 panic look lofty. Britain, in trouble since the return to gold, was mired in its worst fiscal crisis since the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Indeed, this was worse. South Sea stock had plunged to 13.5 percent of its highest quotation, but then it had rallied; the company had continued to do business for eighty years and paid dividends. By the end of 1931, however, the average securities in New York and London were worth 11 percent of their pre-Crash value. Investors in the Big Board had lost seventy-four billion dollars. The panic was spinning in vicious circles. Retail sales ebbed, so costs were cut by laying off workers. The workers laid off could not buy the goods of other industries. Therefore sales dropped further, leading to more layoffs and a general shrinkage of purchasing power, until farmers were pauperized by the poverty of industrial workers. In forming his second government, Ramsay MacDonald had hoped to break this cycle. Instead, the lines of jobless Britons grew longer. The TUC declared that it would accept no cuts in unemployment benefits. England having left the gold standard, the pound dropped from $4.86 to $3.49. The King called MacDonald to Buckingham Palace and asked him to remain in power as head of an all-party national government. Two Labour ministers, Snowden and J.H. Thomas, agreed to serve with him; the rest of the Labour party called them traitors and withdrew their support. Baldwin went along, however, and with Lloyd George still ill, Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel committed the Liberals.

  Churchill was the last man in Parliament entitled to criticize any government’s Treasury policy, but, never conspicuous for lack of gall, he did so anyhow, describing Snowden’s management of the Exchequer as “incompetent.” He agreed that all parties should “come to the rescue of a Socialist Government reduced to impotence.” At the same time, he warned that he would remember his “grievous complaints” against those he held responsible for the plight of the economy. The dole was reduced despite the unions, and after £25,000,000 had been withdrawn from the Bank of England in a single day—a record—the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was saved from bankruptcy by credits from Washington. But so many makeshift decisions trembled in the balance that the House required a national referendum. Before the general election, Hoare wrote that he was “very nervous” about the outcome. He needn’t have been. The results were an astonishing triumph for the national government, which won 554 of the 615 seats in the House. It was a landslide, but there was more to it than that; the largest part of the avalanche was a historic Tory sweep. The Conservative party was now represented by 473 MPs, over three-fourths of the House, while Labour had dropped from 236 to 52—the bitter fruit of MacDonald’s split with mainstream Labourites. So huge was the Conservative majority that Baldwin was expected to form a new government. He declined; they had campaigned as a coalition, he said, and should so rule. He knew he could oust MacDonald whenever he chose, but this was not the moment. Instead, he installed himself as lord president of the council and picked the new cabinet: eleven Tories, including Hoare at the India Office; five National Liberals; and four National Labourites. Under any other circumstances, Churchill, with his seniority and achievements, would have received a major ministry. His own reelection had been spectacular. Although MacDonald had disparaged him on the stump, and one government minister, Samuel, had actually appeared in Epping to call for his defeat, Winston’s margin of victory had exceeded twenty thousand votes, nearly two out of every three. He nursed a faint hope that a summons might arrive from No. 10. None did. His popularity in the country remained high, bu
t his cause had been repudiated; only twenty candidates endorsed by the Indian Empire Society had been elected, and even before the polling Baldwin and MacDonald had agreed that there would be no place for Churchill. “Like many others,” he wryly wrote afterward, “I had felt the need of a national concentration. But I was neither surprised nor unhappy when I was left out of it…. What I should have done if I had been asked to join I cannot tell. It is superfluous to discuss doubtful temptations that have never existed.” Snowden was elevated to the peerage and Neville Chamberlain robed as chancellor of the Exchequer. To Winston, England’s political future seemed hopeless. MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain—the reign of mediocrities stretched over the horizon and beyond. In all Parliament he could count on the absolute support of just two MPs, Boothby and Bracken. His isolation was virtually complete. “Now, truly,” writes Kenneth Young, Beaverbrook’s biographer, “Churchill was out in the cold.”291

  He accepted it, “defiant,” by his maxim, “in defeat.” In the House he sat on the front bench, on the government’s side, just below the aisle. “What a gap there is,” wrote Guy Eden, “what a vast, terrific chasm, between the Treasury Bench, seat of power, and that seat just two feet, six inches away, below the gangway!” Clement Attlee later recalled: “Here he was well placed to fire on both parties. I remember describing him as a heavily armed tank cruising in No Man’s Land.” What intrigued Eden “above all else was the manner of his treatment by the Tory members. I have watched him, accompanied by a sole companion, walking broodingly through the corridors of the House or conversing in the Smoking Room with a few admirers like Brendan Bracken and Robert Boothby. But generally, Tory members gave him a wide berth.” In opposition he adopted a technique of maintaining constant streams of objections, some audible and to the point, others quite unintelligible. One afternoon a minister in the middle of a speech was distracted by Churchill. Winston was making movements of disagreement. The irritated minister said: “I see my right honourable friend shakes his head, but I am only expressing my own opinion.” “And I,” said Winston, without looking up, “am only shaking my own head.”292

  That was clever and gentle, but his tongue had a much rougher side, and many who had been slashed by it, inside the House and out, now descended upon him like vultures homing in on carrion, believing, as Beaverbrook did, that he had “finally shot his bolt.” Churchill had accused all MPs who favored dominion status for India, whatever their party allegiance, of defeatism and inadequate patriotism. Samuel now flung this back at him: “If indeed the truest patriot is a man who breathes hatred, who lays the seeds of war, and stirs up the greatest number of enemies against his country, then Mr Churchill is a great patriot.” Now that he was down, many MPs, hitherto silent, reached the conclusion that Churchill was obsessed by a relentless besoin de faire which had expressed itself in such adventures as Gallipoli, the Russian civil war, and the breaking of the general strike. Publicists wrote of him as an outcast, as untouchable as the harijans he had championed. “The tragedy of Mr Churchill,” one commented in 1931, “is that whilst in reality he had nothing to offer the genuine Labour man, he fails to command the confidence of the Conservative. For the ghosts of Gallipoli will always rise up to damn him anew…. What sensible man is going to place confidence in Mr Churchill in any situation which needs cool-headedness, moderation, or tact?”293

  In the rooms and halls of Parliament he was humiliated and subjected to sneers, snubs, patronizing nudging, and indifferent shruggings from those who saw him coming and turned their backs. Detective Thompson, still assigned to him—Winston had told the Yard he no longer needed a bodyguard, but the Yard, intercepting threats on his life from Indian nationalists, decided otherwise—was angry and puzzled. A rough, brusque man, unintimidated by rank, Thompson questioned some who had slighted Churchill. “He’s like a weather-vane,” explained one. Another said: “His life is one long speech. He does not talk. He orates…. He does not want to hear your views. He does not want to disturb the beautiful clarity of his thoughts by the tiresome reminders of the other side.” Baldwin told friends and even casual acquaintances how pleasant it was to attend meetings without Winston there to ignore the agenda and introduce “some extremely clever memorandum submitted by him on the work of some department other than his own.” Churchill’s critics called him rash, impetuous, tactless, contentious, inconsistent, unsound, an amusing parliamentary celebrity who was forever out of step. “We just don’t know what to make of him,” a troubled Tory MP told Lady Astor. She asked brightly: “How about a nice rug?”294

  He was hurt and baffled. Long afterward a legend arose that he had endured these slights philosophically. “In the midst of so many outward upheavals,” Alan Moorehead wrote, Churchill was “the least displaced person one could possibly imagine.” He himself lent credence to the myth. “There was much mocking in the press about my exclusion,” he said later, “but now one can see how lucky I was. Over me beat the invisible wings.” At the time they were both invisible and inaudible. Guy Eden has recalled: “He clearly hated it and a bitterness crept into his speeches which had not been there before and which has not been there since…. Political life is a merciless affair, and the man who has been at the top of the tree is most ruthlessly ‘clawed’—to use one of Churchill’s own favorite words—when he falls, or even slips.” Bewildered, Winston said: “I have never joined in an intrigue. Everything I have got I have fought for. And yet I am more hated than anybody.” In a rare moment of self-pity he told a friend: “Here I am, after almost thirty years in the House of Commons, after holding many of the highest offices of state. Here I am, discarded, cast away, marooned, rejected, and disliked.” There seemed no way out. He saw little to choose between Baldwin and MacDonald—“two nurses,” he called them, “fit to keep silence in a darkened room.”295

  He missed Birkenhead terribly and found solace in one of F.E.’s old speeches: “The world still has its glittering prizes for those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.” But this, he realized, was not the time for either. No glittering prizes awaited Britons like him in 1931 or for long thereafter; stout hearts were suspect in the early 1930s, and sharp swords scorned, even by those whose lives would depend upon them in a crisis. It was time to hibernate. He let the lease on Venetia Montagu’s house lapse and made Chartwell his family’s year-round residence. The Churchills had no London home now. Winston kept a pied-à-terre in Morpeth Mansions, near Parliament, but the House seldom saw him. He was toiling on Chartwell’s outside grounds, driving his Black Dog away by hard manual labor and, inside, writing his way out of debt. If he were to survive his political wilderness, he would need much more than the £500 stipend of a back-bencher. He intended to make a new fortune and invest it wisely, relying on Baruch’s advice, avoiding speculation, and turning away from all the fiscal totems he had deified at the Treasury. “I have gone whole hog against gold,” he wrote Boothby. “To hell with it! It has been used as a vile trap to destroy us. I would pay the rest of the American debt in gold as long as the gold lasted, and then say—‘Henceforward, we will only pay in goods. Pray specify what goods you desire.’ ”296

  Less than two weeks after surrendering his chancellor’s seals at Windsor he had begun research on his Marlborough biography, working in Blenheim’s archives with two assistants: Maurice Ashley, a young scholar whom he hired at £300 a year, and Colonel Charles Holdern, at £500. His literary approach, he wrote Ashley, “will probably not be to ‘defend’ or ‘vindicate’ my subject, but to tell the tale with close adherence to chronology in such a way and in such proportions and with such emphasis as will produce upon the mind of the reader the impersonation I wish to give. I have first of all to visualize this extraordinary personality. This I can only do gradually as my knowledge increases.” He was one of those authors—this writer is another—who believe that the past should not be judged by the standards of the present. He wrote: “One has got to find out what the rules of the age were—there certainly were rules. Murder plot
s, for instance, were treated quite differently from treason even in its grossest form.” To the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, who was dickering for the Marlborough serial rights, he wrote: “I have no doubt that I shall be able to tell this famous tale from a modern point of view that will rivet attention.”297