His predecessor, in handing over the seals of office, had told him: “As regards prisons, it won’t be a bad thing to give a harassed department some rest.” Winston gave it no rest. Beginning a series of visits to penitentiaries, he abolished floggings and introduced libraries and lecture programs. Of Britain’s 184,000 prisoners, he found, a third had been committed for drunkenness and more than half for failure to pay fines. Imprisonment for debt, theoretically abolished, was still common: “We are confronted annually with an ever increasing number of committals to prison and hence of failures to recover debt. A vicious system of credit, based on no real security, is increasingly involving working class families in domestic disputes, extravagance, embarrassment and ultimate disgrace, and is sapping thrift and honesty.” Here again he could identify with the men in cells; he, too, knew the burden of debt. He instituted a “time-to-pay” program for debtors and replaced the jailing of drunkards with fines. The number of debtors behind bars dropped from 95,686 to 5,264; of drunks, from 62,822 to 1,670. At the same time, he moved to deprive suffragettes of their martyrdom. They were, he said, “political prisoners.” As such they were neither searched nor forbidden to bathe; they could wear their own clothing, receive food and parcels from outside, and talk to one another. His explanation for this leniency was that “prison rules which are suitable to criminals jailed for dishonesty or cruelty or other crimes implying moral turpitude should not be applied inflexibly to those whose general character is good and whose offences, however reprehensible, do not involve personal dishonour.”119
He had been impressed and influenced by John Galsworthy’s Justice. Galsworthy now wrote The Times: “These changes are one and all inspired by imagination, without which reform is deadly, and by common sense, without which it is dangerous.” But a penal official warned that England should not “ignore the poorer classes outside the prison walls while we do so much for the worst classes of our population,” and the Tories were delighted when one case of clemency backfired. On a prison visit, accompanied by Lloyd George, Winston met the “Dartmoor Shepherd.” This unfortunate man had been in and out of prison since 1870. Once he had been sentenced to ten years for stealing a watch and chain; another time to five years for stealing £1 6s. 6d.; and, most recently, to three years for taking two shillings from a church box. He had never been guilty of violence. At Dartmoor he tended the penitentiary’s flock of sheep. Winston described him in a minute as a man who “enjoyed a melancholy celebrity for the prodigious sentences he had endured, for his good behaviour and docility in prison, and for his unusual gift of calling individual sheep by name.” On the stump Lloyd George contrasted him with the peers, “plunderers of the poor.” Churchill ordered him released. It was a mistake. The man was a recidivist. He promptly left the job the warden had found for him and, three months later, was arrested while breaking into a house. Winston reported to the King that the incident had received its “mead of merriment” in the House. The Tories formally moved a reduction of £500 in his salary, and, Churchill wrote in another report to the King, “as the Irish members were away, half the Labour members absent, ministers at the gala and holiday moods in the air, this flagitious proposal was rejected only by a majority of 32.”120
Why weren’t all the Liberals and their allies there to save him from this humiliation? The answer lies in the letter’s date: June 27, 1911. By then MPs on the left had begun to qualify their admiration of Churchill. Actually, it had never been wholehearted. His colleagues in the Liberal hierarchy had always had reservations about him. Asquith complained that he “thinks with his mouth”; his wife wrote in her diary, “Winston has a noisy mind”; Lloyd George compared him to “a chauffeur who apparently is perfectly sane and drives with great skill for months, then suddenly takes you over a precipice.” Almeric Fitzroy thought that “his defect is that he sees everything through the magnifying-glass of his self-confidence.” Another Liberal leader came closer to the deepest source of their misgivings when he told A. G. Gardiner: “Don’t forget that the aristocrat is still there—submerged but latent.” Charles Masterman put it bluntly a few years later: “He desired in England a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to an industrious, bien pensant, and grateful working class.” There was an undefined feeling that his social legislation smacked of paternalism and had been a gesture de haut en bas; that, in Margot Asquith’s words, he had merely learned “the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George’s native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference.’ ” In point of fact there was a difference. Beatrice Webb remarked upon Winston’s “capacity for quick appreciation and rapid execution of new ideas, whilst hardly comprehending the philosophy beneath them.” But in time he did comprehend the philosophy of the extremists. And when he understood it, he recoiled. He put his trust in social evolution, not upheaval. England’s class distinctions suited him. He saw no need to efface them, or even blur them. Only when reactionaries refused to budge, as in the struggle with the Lords, would he endorse sweeping action. Rejected by Tories because he had betrayed his class, he was distrusted by radical reformers because his conversion had been incomplete. He couldn’t win.121
He was likeliest to lose in the Home Office. The first duty of the home secretary was maintenance of order, and beginning in the year he took over the ministry, organized workingmen suddenly turned to violent tactics. In the beginning the prospect of labor strife didn’t daunt him. Three weeks after taking over the Board of Trade he had settled a shipbuilding lockout on the Tyne to the satisfaction of both parties. But in the two years since then battle lines had been drawn between capital and labor, and as a moderate he occupied no-man’s-land. In union chapels his ritualistic denunciations of socialism were resented—though, curiously, Lloyd George’s, just as vehement, were not—and his attempts to be evenhanded failed. He compared irresponsible workmen to irresponsible peers and succeeded only in irking the new King, who felt he had insulted the aristocracy. Replying to the sovereign, Winston said that the home secretary had received “with deep regret the expression of YM’s Displeasure wh has reached him through the PM… with regard to the particular phrase wh has caused YM’s displeasure, wh Mr Churchill understands is ‘It should be remembered that there are idlers at both ends of the social scale.’ Mr Churchill cannot understand why this shd be thought Socialistic in character…. To say this is not to attack the wealthy classes, most of whom as Mr Churchill knows well have done their duty in many ways: but only to point to those particular persons whose idle and frivolous conduct and lack of public spirit brings a reproach to the meritorious class to wh they belong.” George was unmollified. And the left, judging Winston by his acts, found him wanting.122
In the first week of November, 1910, over 25,000 coal miners walked out at Rhondda, in south Wales. Riots followed; several mines were flooded, and the disorders culminated in the battle of Glamorgan Valley, after which the miners smashed shop fronts in the town of Tonypandy. The local chief constable, unable to cope, asked for troops. Aware that sending soldiers against strikers was bad politics, Churchill kept the number of troops to a minimum of four hundred, sent three hundred London policemen, and made sure that the commanding officer was reponsible to him. Afterward the officer said: “It was entirely due to Mr Churchill’s foresight in sending a strong force of Metropolitan Police, directly he was made aware of the state of affairs in the valleys, that bloodshed was avoided.”123 Strikers charged the bobbies, but the policemen swung rolled-up mackintoshes and beat them off. Elsewhere, however, two miners were killed, and when a unit of soldiers was stoned, they fixed bayonets and prodded the strikers into retreating.
In light of the fact that the wrecked stores in Tonypandy were looted during what The Times called “an orgy of naked anarchy,” the use of force does not seem excessive. The troops had been sent in response to an appeal from the Glamorgan law-enforcement official, and Churchill had had no part in that decision. But the fact that they ha
d been called out, and had unsheathed bayonets, infuriated union leaders. Churchill firmly told them that the soldiers now in position would remain there until he judged that troops were “no longer necessary.” They then blamed the two deaths on him. He called this “a cruel lie,” which it was. Keir Hardie, maddened beyond reason, declared that the Liberals “will give you Insurance Bills, they will give you all sorts of soothing syrups to keep you quiet, but in the end your Liberal Party, just like your Tory Party, is the Party of the rich and exists to protect the rich when Labour and Capital come into conflict.”124
The Conservatives turned this inside out. If troops had been sent in earlier, they said in the House, there would have been no looting and no property damage. An appeal from Winston, urging the strikers to renounce violence, was ridiculed by The Times as showing “a somewhat maudlin tone…. Mr Churchill hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen, which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place, but its place is not in the face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction.” The Daily Express was even harsher: “Nothing was ever more contemptible in childish and vicious folly than Mr Churchill’s message to the miners…. It is the last word in a policy of shameful neglect and poltroonery which may cost the country dear.” To the King, Winston reported: “The insensate action of the rioters in wrecking shops in the town of Tonypandy, against which they had not the slightest cause for animosity, was not foreseen by anyone on the spot, and would not have been prevented by the presence of soldiers at the colliery itself.” Nevertheless, the two myths endured. Tories thought he had acted spinelessly. Labor believed he had overreacted, and for more than forty years he would be heckled by workingmen who were convinced that he had led a bloody massacre of miners at Tonypandy.125
Less than two months later he was in his bathtub—it is extraordinary how many crises found him bathing—when he was summoned to the telephone, “dripping wet and shrouded in a towel,” as he later recalled, to be told that members of a gang of Latvian anarchists had been trapped at 100 Sidney Street in Whitechapel. This was welcome news, exciting and important. Churchill wanted these men badly. They were not only criminals; the Liberal government was responsible for their presence in England. The city’s East End, inhabited by nearly two million poor Londoners, had always seethed with crime. But since the abortive Russian uprising of 1905 and the Liberals’ refusal to restrict immigration, Whitechapel, Stepney, Shadwell, and Bethnal Green had also become asylums for political refugees from the czar’s Okhrana, or secret police. Joseph Stalin had briefly lived in Whitechapel in June 1907, sharing a tiny room with Maxim Litvinov. In their homeland these anarchists—today they would be called urban guerrillas—had supported their causes by robberies, and they continued to do so here, treating bobbies as they treated the Okhrana. Among them was a band of Letts led by Peter Piaktow, alias “Peter the Painter,” so christened because when not ambushing bank messengers or holding up shopkeepers at pistol point, he worked as a house painter. The men trapped in the Sidney Street house were part of this gang. Heavily armed, they had already murdered three policemen; Winston and Clementine had attended the funerals in St. Paul’s ten days earlier. Now the bobbies holding them at bay wanted the assistance of troops; hence the phone call to the home secretary. “Use whatever force is necessary,” he said, promising that a detachment of Scots Guards from the Tower would be there within the hour. Then, dressing and donning his top hat and astrakhan-collared coat, he hurried by cab to the Home Office in search of more information. There was none there, so at noon he decided to take an official car to the scene because “I thought it my duty to see what was going on myself…. I must, however, admit that convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check.”126
In Whitechapel he found high drama. Spectators and men in uniform were crouching behind buildings on both sides of the street while the killers and their besiegers blazed away at one another—the anarchists in their hideout firing Mausers; the Scots Guards, Lee-Enfields; and the sixty policemen, obsolete Morris-tube rifles. A Daily Chronicle reporter perched on the roof of the Rising Sun pub estimated that in the past hour and a half several thousand bullets had been exchanged without result. Churchill realized that he had made a mistake in coming: “It was not for me to interfere with those who were in charge on the spot. Yet… my position of authority, far above them all, attracted inevitably to itself direct responsibility. I saw now that I should have done much better to have remained quietly in my office. On the other hand, it was impossible to get into one’s car and drive away while matters stood in such great uncertainty, and, moreover, were extremely interesting.” Crossing the street for a better view, he sheltered in a warehouse doorway. Senior officers believed the house should be stormed, and he agreed; his “instincts,” he later wrote, “turned at once to a direct advance up the staircase behind a steel plate or shield, and a search was made in the foundries of the neighborhood for one of suitable size.” None was found, but the idea had lodged in his mind. In Sidney Street his concept of the tank was born.127
At one o’clock thin wisps of bluish smoke curled upward from a garret window of the embattled hideout, and within a half hour it was burning fiercely. The London fire brigade clattered up. Firemen and policemen argued. The bobbies refused to let the men with hoses approach the building; the firemen insisted that extinguishing the flames was their duty. At this point Churchill intervened. “I thought it better to let the house burn down,” he explained afterward, “than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.” So it blazed for an hour. “Then at last,” reported the Daily News, “Mr Churchill stepped to the middle of the street and waved his arms… firemen appeared and regardless of possible bullets poured water on the burning house… and policemen led by Mr Churchill rushed forward to the door.” Inside they found nothing but charred bodies.128
All this was recorded by cameramen. Eddie Marsh, dropping into the Palace Theatre, saw flickering newsreels, captioned “Mr Churchill directing the operations,” and heard them greeted by boos, hisses, shouts of “ ’E let the bastards in the country!” and “Shoot ’im!” More embarrassing, Balfour rose in the House to ask caustically: “We are concerned to observe photographs in the illustrated newspapers of the Home Secretary in the danger zone. I understand what the photographer was doing, but why the Home Secretary?” The Conservative press agreed that it was absurd. Churchill noted that “The Times blamed me for stopping the soldiers going to Tonypandy and now blames me for sending them to Sidney Street. Their doctrine is now apparent, that soldiers should always be sent to put down British miners in trade disputes but never to apprehend alien murderers engaged in crime. This is on a par with Tory thought in other directions.” It was not only Tory thought, however. Liberals were equally troubled; his recent conduct seemed inconsistent with their serene slogan: “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” A. G. Gardiner wrote in the Daily News: “He is always unconsciously playing a part—an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator. He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle—triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed in thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain…. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in this fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot, with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. Hence that portentous gravity that sits on his youthful shoulders so oddly, those impressive postures and tremendous silences, the body flung wearily in the chair, the head resting gloomily in the hand, the abstracted look.” Thus, Gardiner accounted for his “tendency to exaggerate a situation” and dispatch “the military hither and thither as though Armageddon was upon us.” Other Liberals believed that he had shown he lacked a sense of proportion, using “a steamhammer to crack a nut.” Charles Masterman, returning from holiday, demanded: “What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?” Churchill, lapsing into his
lisp, replied: “Now, Charlie. Don’t be croth. It was such fun.”129
The “Siege of Sidney Street,” as the press called it, was followed by the hottest summer on record, and, with it, a wave of industrial unrest. The disturbances began in June, when dockers walked out in Southampton, and swiftly spread to other ports. Then transport workers struck to show that they sided with the longshoremen. Churchill observed that “a new force has arisen in trades unionism, whereby the power of the old leaders has proved quite ineffective, and the sympathetic strike on a wide scale is prominent. Shipping, coal, railways, dockers etc etc are all uniting and breaking out at once.” The head constable in Liverpool reported to the Home Office that rioters had built barricades of dustbins and wire entanglements in side streets, lured policemen there, and stoned them from windows and housetops. The King wired Churchill: “Accounts from Liverpool show that situation there more like revolution than a strike…. Strongly deprecate half-hearted employment of troops: they should not be called on except as a last resource but if called on they should be given a free hand & the mob should be made to fear them.”130
The immediate threat was famine. On August 9 the London meat and fruit markets shut down; they had nothing left to sell. Then, a week later, the railwaymen gave notice of a national strike. The railway companies had refused to recognize their union as a bargaining agent. Food shortages were imminent in the great quadrilateral of British industrialism, from Liverpool and Manchester in the west to Hull and Grimsby in the east, from Newcastle down to Birmingham and Coventry. Asquith offered the trainmen an inquiry by a royal commission. When they turned it down on the ground that such a commission would take too long, he reportedly said: “Then your blood be on your own head.” That night every member of the union received a wire from its leadership: “Your liberty is at stake, all railwaymen must strike at once.” Churchill told the House that “no blockade by a foreign enemy” could be so perilous. If unchecked it would lead, he said, “to the starvation of great numbers of the poorer people.”131