They went up as often as ten times a day. Every officer on the instruction staff worried about their eminent student. “We were all scared stiff,” said Courtney, “of having a smashed First Lord on our hands.” Eugene Gerrard, later air commodore, said: “WSC has had as much as twenty-five hours in the air, but no one will risk letting him solo; if anything happened to WSC the career of the man who had allowed him a solo flight would be finished.” Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, later air chief marshal, remembered Winston as “a very fair pilot once he was in the air, but more than uncertain in his take-off and landing. His instructors usually took over the controls to make the final approach and touchdown.” Another future RAF marshal, Hugh Trenchard, gave him lower marks. After watching him “wallowing about the sky,” as he put it, he decided Winston was “altogether too impatient for a good pupil.”170
Churchill in pilot’s gear for a practice flight
But Churchill persevered. He spent the afternoon of Saturday, November 29, 1913, in the air with Captain Gilbert Wildman-Lushington of the Royal Marines. After they had parted, the captain wrote his fiancée: “I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15 & he got so bitten with it, I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ hour for lunch we were in the machine till about 3.30. He showed great promise, & is coming down again for further instruction & practice.” Winston himself was dissatisfied. Once he had set his mind on an objective, anything short of total conquest was unacceptable. Back in his Admiralty office that evening he wrote Lushington: “I wish you would clear up the question of the steering control and let me know what was the real difficulty I had in making the rudder act. Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself…. Could you not go up with another flying officer and, sitting yourself in the back seat, see whether there is great stiffness and difficulty in steering, or whether it was all my clumsiness.” Then he dropped Clementine a line: “I have been very naughty today about flying…. With twenty machines in the air at once and thousands of flights made without mishap, it is not possible to look upon it as a vy serious risk. Do not be vexed with me.”171
She wasn’t vexed; she was frantic. By the time this letter reached her, Lushington was dead; coming in to land at Eastchurch on Sunday, he sideslipped and crashed. F.E. wrote Winston: “Why do you do such a foolish thing as fly repeatedly? Surely it is unfair to your family, your career & your friends.” It was; it was thoughtless, the act of a supreme egoist. H. G. Wells wrote: “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and I think of him as a very intractable, a very mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.” The fact is that His Majesty’s first lord of the Admiralty deserved a good spanking. Despite his instructor’s death and his wife’s appeals, he refused to stay on the ground. At Easter Clementine wrote him from Spain, where she and Mrs. Keppel were Cassel’s guests: “I have been seized by a dreadful anxiety that you are making use of my absence to fly even more often than you do when I am there—I beg of you not to do it at all, at any rate till I can be there.” It was a shrewd guess. That very day he had not only flown; he had been shaken up when engine failure forced his new instructor to make an emergency landing. Undaunted, he took off again two days later. Clementine and the children were now staying with her mother in Dieppe, and on May 29, 1914, he wrote her there: “I have been at the Central Flying School for a couple of days—flying a little in good & careful hands & under perfect conditions. So I did not write you from there as I knew you would be vexed.”172
She replied: “I felt what you were doing before I read about it, but I felt too weak & tired to struggle against it. It is like beating one’s head against a stone wall…. Perhaps if I saw you, I could love and pet you, but you have been so naughty that I can’t do it on paper. I must be ‘brought round’ first.” She signed the letter with the sketch of a cat, its ears down. She did see him the following week; he crossed on the Enchantress to spend a day with her and the children. They discussed his flying, and he assured her that the airfield he was using, at Sheerness in Kent, had every modern facility. Yet in her next letter the tension was still there: “I cannot help knowing that you are going to fly as you go to Sheerness & it fills me with anxiety. I know nothing will stop you from doing it so I will not weary you with tedious entreaties, but don’t forget that I am thinking about it all the time & so, do it as little & as moderately as you can, & only with the very best Pilot. I feel very ‘ears down’ about it.” Her fear haunted her; she was five months pregnant with their third child—it would be another daughter, Sarah—and thought, not unreasonably, that she was entitled to more consideration from her husband. In her next letter she described a nightmare. She had dreamed she had had her baby, but the doctor and nurse hid it. Finding the infant in a darkened room, she feverishly counted its fingers and toes only to find that it was a gaping idiot. “And then the worst thing of all happened—I wanted the Doctor to kill it—but he was shocked & took it away & I was mad too.” The evening before, she had received a cable from Winston, telling her he was safely home. “Every time I see a telegram now,” she wrote, “I think it is to announce that you have been killed flying. I had a fright but went to sleep relieved; but this morning after the nightmare I looked at it again for consolation & found to my horror it was from Sheerness & not from Dover where I thought you were going first—so you are probably at it again at this very moment. Goodbye my Dear but Cruel One, Your loving Clemmie.”173
Winston instantly replied: “My darling one, I will not fly any more until at any rate you have recovered from your kitten.” He had been callous, but he recognized a cry of despair when he heard it. Mulling it over, he realized that her anxiety had been fully justified. Prewar aviation was, in fact, a risky business, even for skillful airmen; only a few days earlier, Gustav Hamel, a celebrated monoplane aviator and a friend of both the Churchills, had disappeared over the Channel. Abandoning flight was “a wrench,” Winston wrote Clementine, “because I was on the verge of taking my pilot’s certificate; & I am confident of my ability to achieve it vy respectably. I shd greatly have liked to reach this point wh wd have made a suitable moment for breaking off. But I must admit that the numerous fatalities of this year wd justify you in complaining if I continued to share the risks—as I am proud to do—of these good fellows. So I give it up decidedly for many months & perhaps for ever. This is a gift—so stupidly am I made—wh costs me more than anything wh cd be bought with money. So I am vy glad to lay it at your feet, because I know it will rejoice & relieve your heart. Anyhow I can feel I know a good deal about this fascinating new art. I can manage a machine with ease in the air, even with high winds, & only a little more practice in landings wd have enabled me to go up with reasonable safety alone. I have been up nearly 140 times, with many pilots, & all kinds of machines, so I know the difficulties the dangers & the joys of the air—well enough to appreciate them, & to understand all the questions of policy wh will arise in the near future…. You will give me some kisses and forgive me for past distresses—I am sure. Though I had no need & perhaps no right to do it—it was an important part of my life during the last 7 months, & I am sure my nerve, my spirits & my virtue were all improved by it. But at your expense my poor pussy cat! I am so sorry.”174
It is astonishing to reflect that Churchill was flying over Kent before the young RAF pilots who won the Battle of Britain, dogfighting in those same skies, were even born. By then, of course, no one questioned the absolute necessity of a strong air arm. In Winston’s cockpit days it was regarded as a frill, however, and he was hard put to justify it in an Admiralty budget already swollen by the need to stay ahead of Germany. Alarmed by the expensive arms race, in April 1912 he had proposed a “Naval Holiday,” during which both nations would suspend the laying of new keels. The kaiser rejected the idea; such an agreement, he said, could be reached only between allies. But Albert Ballin, director of the Hamburg-American Steams
hip Line, told Cassel that the “frankness and honesty” of Churchill’s offer had “flustered… the leading parties in Germany, and has caused a torrent of [comment] in the Press.” Winston wrote Cassel a conciliatory letter, meant for der hohe Herr’s eyes. It accomplished nothing. Ballin thought Churchill should visit Berlin; he believed he would be well received, and could “have some useful conversation with Admiral Tirpitz.” Winston declined on the ground that “all that could be said on our part wd be that till Germany dropped the naval challenge her policy wd be continually viewed here with deepening suspicion and apprehension; but that any slackening on her part wd produce an immediate détente, with much good will from England. Failing that I see little in prospect but politeness and preparation.” On October 24, 1913, he again suggested a shipbuilding suspension, forwarding the recommendation to der hohe Herr through Ballin and advising the cabinet: “The simultaneous building by so many powers great and small of capital ships, their general naval expansion, are causes of deep anxiety to us…. Naval strength to other powers is a mere panache. But as the frog said to the boy in the fable ‘It is sport to you: it is death to us.’ ” This time his proposal wasn’t even acknowledged.175
All overtures to the kaiser having failed, he and Jack Seely, who had succeeded Haldane as war minister, pushed for higher military appropriations. At the end of the year Churchill submitted his naval estimates for 1914. They were shocking: £50,694,800—the largest in British history, the largest in the world. The chancellor of the Exchequer was stunned. Winston and Lloyd George were still friends, but they were no longer partners in political counterpoint. The first lord had become militant, even belligerent; the chancellor, whose own position was softening again, complained that Churchill was “getting more and more absorbed in boilers.” The cabinet was divided. Asquith accepted the estimates, but Margot wrote Lloyd George: “Don’t let Winston have too much money—it will hurt our party in every way—Labour and even Liberals. If one can’t be a little economical when all foreign countries are peaceful I don’t know when we can.”176
The split was deep, and involved more than money. Asquith, Churchill, Seely, and Grey believed that the integrity of France was vital to England’s national interest; that, as Grey put it, “if Germany dominated the Continent it would be disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.” The Tories agreed, but among Liberals, even within the cabinet, it was a minority view. Their leader there, Lord Morley, believed he could count on “eight or nine likely to agree with us” in opposing the policies being advanced by Grey with “strenuous simplicity” and by Churchill with “daemonic energy.” Morley described himself as “a pacifist at heart.” He had been Gladstone’s friend and biographer, and he and those who agreed with him believed they were acting on Gladstonian principles. The fights they loved were those fought for Free Trade, social reforms, Irish Home Rule, and the defeat of the arrogant dukes. They were unmoved by France. Only an appeal for help from a little country like Belgium could reach their hearts, and even that was uncertain.177
Thus Lloyd George had friends in power when, on New Year’s Day, 1914, he told a Daily Chronicle reporter that Churchill’s plan for “exorbitant expenditure on armaments” violated Lord Randolph’s memory. Replying, Winston rebuked him; he said he never granted newspaper interviews “on important subjects of this character while they are under the consideration of the Cabinet.” One of the two ministers, it seemed, would have to resign. While refusing to be quoted, Churchill became the source of sensational rumors. He was pondering a return to the Conservative party; he had become doubtful about Home Rule; if he left the Admiralty, the four sea lords would quit in protest. As tempers rose, the two principals sat down for five hours of what Winston called “polite but deadly” negotiation. The prime minister joined them, and his strong support of the estimates decided the issue. To save Lloyd George’s face, 2 percent was cut from the naval budget, further economies were promised for the following year, and expensive maneuvers planned for the following summer were canceled, to be replaced by a trial mobilization of the fleet. George avoided mortification by pretending that he had changed his mind. He invited Churchill to breakfast at No. 11 Downing Street, the traditional home of the chancellors. He said his wife had told him that he ought to let “that nice Mr Churchill” have his dreadnoughts, arguing that it would be better to have too many than too few. “So,” he said, “I have decided to let you build them. Let’s go in to breakfast.” Winston wrote his mother: “I think the naval estimates are now past the danger point & if so the situation will be satisfactory. But it has been a long and wearing business wh has caused me at times vy gt perplexity.”178
In March he presented his naval estimates to the House. The Liberals were tepid, the Conservatives enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph hailed his address as “the most weighty and eloquent speech to which the House of Commons have listened [from a first lord of the Admiralty] during the present generation.”179 This was praise Churchill didn’t need. Indeed, though Tories publicly approved of his naval expansion, behind his back they said it was inspired by a personal pursuit of glory. Winston’s defection from their ranks, his humiliation of Joe Chamberlain, and his corrosive invective in political campaigns and parliamentary struggles could be neither forgotten nor forgiven. His political advancement—even survival—depended on his strength with his adopted party, where, more and more, MPs on the back benches were saying: “He’s not really a Liberal.” He had to prove that he was. In that four-year interval between the end of the Edwardian era and the outbreak of the Kaiser’s War there were many disputes between the Asquith government and the Opposition, but Churchill needed a dramatic issue. One appeared. It seemed ideal: explosive, emotional, and above all a matter of principle. And it was unavoidable. The eighty-four Irish Nationalist MPs had presented their bill for services rendered in unmanning the House of Lords, and payment was now due.
By later Irish standards they were mild—“Gentlemen first, Irishmen second” had been their muted war cry—and as gentlemen they had been patient. Their cause had been hopeless in the fourteen years between Parnell’s death in Kitty O’Shea’s arms and the fall of the Balfour government, but the Liberals had been in power since 1906 and had done nothing to redeem Gladstone’s promise. Winston had prodded the cabinet; on February 13, 1910, Blunt had noted in his diary that Churchill had said it was “the ambition of my life to bring in a Home Rule Bill.” But neither Asquith nor Lloyd George found the issue appealing, and even Winston, who had been offered the post of chief secretary for Ireland, had turned down what was known as the “hoodoo job of the Cabinet.” Ireland had always been a political minefield, and it had been doubly treacherous since Lord Randolph had played what he called his “ace of trumps, the Orange card.”180
Ulster—the nine counties around Belfast, in northern Ireland—was largely populated by Protestants, descendants of Scots who had settled there before the Mayflower sighted Plymouth. Under Home Rule, the entire island would be ruled by a parliament in Dublin. Inevitably Catholics from southern Ireland would dominate it. Before they would accept that, Ulstermen swore, they would die fighting. “Home Rule,” they said, meant “Rome Rule.” The differences between the northern Unionists and the southern Nationalists had been, were, and always would be irreconcilable. The southerners found the status quo intolerable. For nearly eight centuries they had been governed like serfs by English viceroys entrenched in Dublin Castle. The finest estates in what is now Eire then belonged to an Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the Protestant Ascendancy. Gladstone had told these overlords again and again that the southern yearning for freedom was an indestructible passion, but they preferred to quote Queen Victoria: “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” After the coronation of George V, however, the Irish Nationalists, under pressure from home, prepared to drop their genteel manners. They wanted their own parliament, and they wanted it immediately. “The Irish question,” Churchill wrote afterward, “now cut jaggedly across
the British political scene.” By this time, he had completely emerged from his father’s shadow and was one of the most vigorous champions of a united Ireland, governed from Dublin. Because he was Randolph’s son as well as the ablest parliamentarian in the cabinet, Asquith chose him as point man for the issue. In Dundee, on October 4, 1911, Winston declared: “Next year we propose to introduce the Home Rule Bill, and we propose to carry it forward with all our strength.” The crowd, knowing he had been born and bred a Unionist, was taken aback. Someone called: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right!” Churchill snapped: “That is a slogan from which every street bully with a brickbat and every crazy fanatic fumbling with a pistol may draw inspiration.”181
Early the following year he announced that he had accepted an invitation from the Ulster Liberal Association to speak in Belfast’s Ulster Hall, where Lord Randolph had spoken, on February 12. The Irish Unionist party erupted. “What a man to select!” thundered Sir Edward Carson, former solicitor general and a leader of the Ulster Unionists in the House. “The most provocative speaker in the whole party, going under the most provocative circumstances to a place where the words of his own father are still ringing in the ear!” Death threats arrived at Admiralty House by post and telephone. One Unionist warned him in an open letter: “The heather is on fire and Belfast today is the rallying ground of the clans. The fiery cross has sped through hill and glen, and with the undying spirit of their forbears the Ulstermen are answering to the message…. It would be well if Mr Churchill would read the writing on the wall, for there is great fear that harm may happen to him.” Clementine decided to accompany her husband, hoping that would discourage violence. At the last minute Winston’s cousin Freddie Guest joined the party, carrying a revolver in his pocket.182