Churchill was the most active member of every social gathering, and to the annoyance of other young men he never hesitated to take charge. As a guest at the seaside, one hostess wrote, he “flung himself with zest into our favorite and most perilous pastime of rock climbing, reveling in the scramble up crags and cliffs, the precarious transition from ledge to ledge, with slippery seaweed underfoot and roaring seas below. Though we considered ourselves salted climbers of four weeks’ experience and he was a raw novice, he always took command of every operation, decreeing strategy and tactics and even dictating the correct position of our arms and legs. He brought to every ploy the excitement of a child and, like a child, he made it seem not only exciting but serious and important.” Even more revealing was his response to a terrible fire which followed his brother’s wedding. The bride and groom having departed, the rest of the party stayed in Burley-on-the-Hill, an ancient country home near Oakham famous for its paneling, tapestries, and priceless Elizabethan manuscripts. In the middle of the night a newly installed heating system burst into flames. Awakening to screams, in smoke and darkness, the guests fled to the lawn. There, Eddie Marsh wrote, “Winston commandeered a fireman’s helmet and assumed the direction of operations.” F. E. Smith’s wife remembered Churchill on the roof, shouting down orders, trying to quench the blaze with a tiny fire engine which had been brought from Oakham. Unfortunately, nothing could be saved. The owners were in tears.56
Churchill wasn’t. He wrote Miss Hozier: “The fire was great fun & we all enjoyed it thoroughly. It is a pity such jolly entertainments are so costly. Alas for the archives. They roared to glory in about ten minutes…. It is a vy strange thing to be locked in deadly grapple with that cruel element. I had no conception—except from reading—of the power and majesty of a great conflagration. Whole rooms sprang into flames as if by enchantment. Chairs and tables burnt up like matches. Floors collapsed and ceilings crashed down…. Every window spouted fire, & from the centre of the house a volcano roared skyward in a whirlwind of sparks.” As descriptive writing, this is splendid, but as a response to tragedy it is neither pleasant nor wholesome; that the others “enjoyed it thoroughly” is doubtful—Marsh, for one, had lost his Perceval gold watch, gold chain, and three tiepins, all heirlooms. One can understand why many men distrusted Churchill. “It is no disparagement of Winston’s extraordinary qualities,” wrote Almeric Fitzroy, “to say that his judgement is not quite equal to his abilities.” Destruction, like war, enthralled the mischievous boy in him, and he would never entirely outgrow that fascination. Yet he alone had climbed to the roof and tried to extinguish the flames.57
England in those years, “lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace,” as he wrote, was like Burley-on-the-Hill before the fire: precious, deeply loved, apparently safe, unaware of its deadly peril.58 The world’s diplomats still set their clocks by Big Ben. Because the British government permitted it, Turkey ceded the Sinai to Egypt and Greece annexed Crete. Little importance was attached to the decision, made the year after Victoria’s death, to end her policy of “splendid isolation.” Actually, it was a move of enormous consequence. From Canning to Salisbury, isolationism had served Britain well, keeping it aloof from a whole series of continental wars. The Royal Navy was its mighty shield; for a century after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar no nation had attempted to build a competitive fleet. In 1870 Gladstone’s announcement that England would intervene if Belgium’s neutrality were violated had kept both the French and the Germans from crossing Belgian frontiers.
The first break with isolationist policy was made by Lord Lansdowne, the Tory foreign secretary from 1900 to 1905. Armed forces had grown all over the world, he pointed out, and at the very least England should have understandings and defined friendships with other great powers. The United States was his first choice, but America had its own isolationist tradition. Moreover, millions of new U.S. citizens were refugees from European conflicts, and this alone made an Anglo-American alliance a political impossibility. So Lansdowne signed up Japan and, in 1904, joined France in the Entente Cordiale, an agreement to settle colonial differences between the two countries. No one, not even his fellow cabinet ministers, was informed in 1906 when Sir Edward Grey, Lansdowne’s successor at the Foreign Office, assumed a “moral obligation” to defend France should it be attacked by Germany, thus adding a military dimension to the Entente. Grey had been provoked by Germany’s Wilhelm II. The previous March 31 the kaiser had appeared in Tangier, the chief Moroccan port on the Mediterranean, to declare that he regarded the local sultan as an independent sovereign, thereby offending the French, who had colonial designs there. Knowing the strength of British isolationist sentiment, Grey kept his pledge from his colleagues for five years. By then the Anglo-French relationship had, with the inclusion of Russia, ripened into the Triple Entente. No promises had been made to Saint Petersburg. Still, the links had been forged, if not joined. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had been united in central Europe’s Triple Alliance since 1882. The implications of this are clear now. They weren’t then. An open rupture was considered inconceivable. Indeed, the balance was regarded as a guarantee of peace. The nations, Churchill wrote, “were fitted and fastened, it seemed securely, into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze. A polite, discrete, pacific, and on the whole sincere diplomacy spread its web of connections over both. A sentence in a dispatch, an observation by an ambassador, a cryptic phrase in a Parliament seemed sufficient to adjust from day to day the balance of the prodigious structure.”59
London had never seemed so secure, or so prodigious. The city’s population had reached 6,600,000; New York, its closest rival, had 3,440,000; Tokyo, 1,450,000; and Los Angeles, just 103,000. Although its architecture was largely Victorian (it still is), the inhabitants believed they were leading the world into the future, literally lighting the way—the city’s Inner Circle rail lines were electrified in 1905. Businessmen who wanted their firms to become household words came to London. The Italian Auguste Oddenino, determined to own the finest restaurant on earth, built it in Regent Street. In 1902 the Ritz had opened in Piccadilly, followed by Dunhill’s in Duke Street, near Piccadilly Circus, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street, and, in the last year of Edward’s reign, the 2,500-seat London Palladium. Lord Northcliffe was Britain’s most exciting press lord. Having transformed the Daily Mail, he turned the Daily Mirror into a halfpenny picture paper, drove its circulation to a million, and bought The Times. He introduced sports pages for a nation of innovative sportsmen. The world’s affluent became small-boat enthusiasts; an English publisher gave them The Riddle of the Sands. Leisure time increased in industrial countries; their sportsmen turned to lawn tennis and football, both invented in Britain. A wave of nostalgia for an idealized childhood spread across Europe and North America. English writers quickly took it over. On December 27, 1904, James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre with Maude Adams in the lead, and it has been playing in one hall or another ever since. Kipling wrote Kim and Just So Stories for Little Children; Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit; Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows; and Sir R. S. S. Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking, published Scouting for Boys in 1906 and founded the Boy Scout movement with the motto “Be Prepared,” based on his initials. Boys around the globe enrolled, 11,000 of them coming to convene in the Crystal Palace.
In music and art the British were less successful. Sir Thomas Beecham was a gifted conductor and the London Symphony a distinguished orchestra, but Elgar was the only memorable composer. The best native tunes were heard in London’s music halls, and the liveliest of these, “Waltzing Matilda,” was written by an Austrialian, Marie Cowan, in 1903. John Singer Sargent, an American, was commissioned to paint The Marlborough Family; Westminster Bridge, The Houses of Parliament, and Port of London were the work of France’s André Derain. London painters were indee
d inhospitable to foreign genius. They jeered at the first major London exhibition of Postimpressionists, Derain among them; even Sargent said, “I am absolutely sceptical as to their having any claim whatever to being works of art, with the exception of the pictures by Gauguin that strike me as admirable in colour—and in colour only.” In literature, however, the English scene glowed. The number of books published annually soared from 5,971 to 9,541. A certain sacrifice was made for wider audiences. Before the Edwardian era, authors could assume that their readers knew Latin and the Bible. The mass-circulation newspapers had altered their vocabulary for subscribers lacking a classical education, and this was reflected in the new books, including serious fiction. R. C. K. Ensor has noted that this created “a distinct barrier of language between the modern Englishman and most of his country’s greater literature from Milton down through Burke to Macaulay.”60
Yet the gain was greater than the loss. Edwardian writers possessed a vitality unmatched in England before or since, and this is reflected in the files of the Times Literary Supplement, whose first issue was dated January 17, 1902. In poetry these were the years of Masefield and Alfred Noyes’s “Highwayman” (“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas…”). Drama apart, the novel was the only popular literary form, and it glittered with the works of Kipling, George Moore, Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh, 1903), Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Conrad, the early Maugham, Henry James, Saki, W. H. Hudson (Green Mansions, 1904), John Galsworthy (Soames Forsyte arrived in The Man of Property, 1906), and Bloomsbury’s E. M. Forster, whose most fruitful years these were (Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905; The Longest Journey, 1907; A Room with a View, 1908; and his masterpiece, Howards End, 1910). Fictive entertainment also flourished. This period saw the appearance of Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; the first Edgar Wallace thriller, The Four Just Men; and the debut of P. G. Wodehouse, whose Pothunters, astonishingly, was published in 1902.
But it was the English stage that captivated the literary world. London’s dramatic renaissance, the fruit of twenty years of brilliant criticism and experiment, reached its culmination during Edward’s reign; for the first time since Shakespeare, British plays were being translated into all continental languages, and the city’s little theaters were packed almost nightly throughout the decade. At His Majesty’s Theatre you could see Clyde Fitch’s Last of the Dandies and John Millington Synge’s Tinker’s Wedding. The Royal Court Theatre produced Galsworthy’s Silver Box and seven Shaw plays: Candida, John Bull’s Other Island, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and The Philanderer. Shaw’s Getting Married could be seen at the Haymarket, Masefield’s Tragedy of Man at the New Royalty. If you liked Barrie, and he was more popular then than now, you went to the Duke of York, which staged, in addition to Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton, Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, What Every Woman Knows, Old Friends, and The Twelve-Pound Look. The Duke of York also showed Galsworthy’s Justice and Shaw’s Misalliance. Quite apart from artistic merits, Edwardian playwrights dealt with the absorbing social and political issues of the time—labor unions, feminism, criminal justice, the prison system, the Irish question, imperialism, armaments, socialism, salvationism, syndicalism, property, marriage, and divorce—and they therefore found Churchill in their audiences. He met most of them and knew Shaw well. When rehearsals for Pygmalion ended at His Majesty’s Theatre (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Jennie’s husband’s mistress, playing Eliza Doolittle) GBS wired Winston: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill wired back: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”61
Winston was a Liberal back-bencher for eighteen months and, most of the time, an inconspicuous one. The larger part of his time was devoted to writing and building a Manchester constituency for the coming general election. In the House he tried to steer a careful course between the left and right wings of his new party, speaking on the safe subjects of army reform and the economy. But he was never completely himself unless in the center of the firing line, and Balfour, dodging on and off the floor to avoid taking stands which would further split his Tories, was an irresistible target. Churchill mocked his “miserable and disreputable shifts” of principle and “his gross and flagrant ignorance.” Punch reported Balfour’s reaction: “Prince Arthur lolls on the Treasury Bench looking straight before him with studious indifference, betrayed by a countenance clouded with rare anger.” Other Conservatives were less aloof. They published an anonymous pamphlet quoting the turncoat’s past attacks on his new colleagues. It was headed: “Mr Winston Churchill on the Radical Party Before he donned their livery and Accepted their Pay.”62
Balfour decided to resign as prime minister before the country went to the polls. On December 4, 1905, dispirited, lacking in legislative goals, and unable to reestablish a working relationship with Chamberlain, AJB stepped down over a minor issue, and the King asked Campbell-Bannerman to form a new government. Edward gave C-B a free hand in his appointments. The new prime minister offered Churchill a choice of posts and Winston asked to be named under secretary of state for the colonies; the secretary of state would be the Earl of Elgin, and since Elgin sat in the House of Lords, Winston would handle colonial matters in the Commons. C-B agreed and it was announced. The Tories, predictably, were outraged. Now the truth was out, they cried. The renegade had changed his party to reach office; he stood exposed as “a political adventurer who would do anything for his own advancement.” Actually, he was something of an ingrate. Members of the government were entitled to wear the uniforms of privy councillors. In those days secretaries, having ministerial rank, belonged to the first class, others were second-class, the difference between them being marked by the gold embroidery on the collar and cuffs—a plain edge for ministers and a serrated edge for the others. Sir Herbert Samuel later recalled accompanying Churchill to the investiture ceremony. “Winston,” he wrote, “was by no means pleased at being no more than an Undersecretary, young as he was and even as a first step in office. Suddenly, pointing to his sleeve, he said to me: ‘The badge of shame!’ ”63
In his first official act he picked as his private secretary Edward Marsh, a casual acquaintance who, until now, had been a well-connected but obscure clerk in the West African department. Eddie Marsh’s life and Churchill’s would be closely intertwined for the next thirty years. Max Beerbohm caught the essence of Eddie in one of his pencil sketches: the head cocked like a bird’s, bushy eyebrows arched eagerly, monocle twinkling. He frequently removed the monocle to wipe away a tear—like Churchill, he was emotional—and his falsetto, slate-squeak voice reminded Violet Asquith of “a high-pitched chirrup.” Eddie was nervous about his new job. He wasn’t sure he liked Winston. In his memoirs he wrote that he was “a little afraid of him” and doubted “we could ever have anything in common.”64
On December 12, however, Eddie was Winston’s guest in Mount Street. The next morning he wrote Leonie Leslie: “Such an excitement. I must tell you. Your nephew has asked me to be his private secretary for 6 months or so. It will be the most interesting thing I’ve ever done but I’m most terribly afraid of not being the right person and turning out a failure…. I’ve just dined alone with Winston. He was most perfectly charming to me but made it quite clear what he would expect in the way of help and I almost know I can’t do it—it’s awful!” Churchill, however, had decided that this was his man. When he was determined to be fascinating, he could dispel virtually all misgivings. He had a way of tossing off lapidary epigrams as though they had just occurred to him, and he now flashed such a jewel before Marsh, describing the proper spirit for a great nation: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good-will.” (“I wish,” Eddie wrote, “the tones in which he spoke this could have been ‘recorded’—the first phrase a rattle of musketry, the sec
ond ‘grating harsh thunder,’ the third a ray of the sun through storm-clouds; the last pure benediction.”)* Marsh, still anxious, awoke in the morning, presented himself to Winston, and whispered worriedly, “I’m afraid I shan’t be much use today, as I’ve lost my voice.” Churchill looked up. “What?” he boomed. “Is that resonant organ extinct?” By then they were firm friends. Jennie, however, remembering that ugly business at Sandhurst, was troubled by this appointment; according to Douglas Plummer, Marsh was known to be “the center of a large homosexual artistic colony.” But there is no evidence that his deviance was overt, and Churchill, vastly tolerant in his friendships, doubtless regarded the matter as none of his business.65
Three weeks later the two men checked into Manchester’s Midland Hotel, which would be Winston’s base for his first campaign as a Liberal candidate. That evening they toured the slums. Churchill “looked about him,” Marsh wrote, “and his sympathetic imagination was stirred. ‘Fancy,’ he said, ‘living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!’ ” He meant to be clever here, but not alarming. The city had become a Conservative stronghold—all nine seats were held by Tories—and apart from ringing tributes to Free Trade, he skirted controversy just twice. Courting workingmen’s votes, he promised that the Liberals would remember England’s “left-out millions,” and, less honorably, assured Protestant Unionists that he would “support no legislation which I regard as likely to injure the effective integrity of the United Kingdom.” Hecklers distributed copies of the pamphlet quoting his past scorn for his present party; one thrust it in his hands while others cried, “Answer it!” He did: “I said a lot of stupid things when I worked with the Conservative Party, and I left it because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.” Then, amid loud cheers, he tore the leaflet to shreds and, a newspaperman reported, “flung it from him with a dramatic gesture, expressing… contempt for the cause he had once espoused.”66