Splendid prose, wrote Hazlitt, should be accompanied by vehemence and gesture, a dramatic tone, flashing eyes, and “conscious attitude”—a precise description of Churchillian delivery. A consummate performer, he would rise, when recognized by the Speaker, with two pairs of glasses in his waistcoat. Perching the long-range pair on the end of his nose at such an angle that he could read his notes while giving the impression that he was looking directly at the House, he gave every appearance of speaking extemporaneously. If the occasion called for quoting a document, he produced his second pair and altered his voice and manner so effectively that even those who knew better believed that everything he said when not quoting was spontaneous.
As a youthful MP he had excelled at the set piece but faltered in the give-and-take of debate; Arthur Balfour, prime minister from 1902 to 1905, had chided him, calling his “artillery” impressive “but not very mobile.” It was mobile now, and frequently sardonic. “It is wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told,” he said, and, “Too often the strong, silent man is silent because he has nothing to say,” and, describing Lloyd George’s criticism of his hostility toward Nazi Germany, “It revealed a certain vein of amiable malice.” Sir Samuel Hoare, a coalition minister, was a favorite target. Winston said of him: “He never resents the resentment of those to whom he has been rude.” But the coalition government must be allowed its day: “Where there is a great deal of free speech there is always a certain amount of foolish speech.”63
Although this was said in a bantering tone, it reflected Churchill’s absolute faith in democracy. If the electorate preferred to be governed by fools, they should be. Of course, that did not make folly wisdom. He did not share the view that sagacity lies in the masses, and in thwarted moments he would quote Hazlitt: “There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.” The man of honor remained true to himself, even though drawn through the streets in a tumbril. He scorned opinion polls: “It is not a good thing always to be feeling your pulse and taking your temperature. Although one has to do it sometimes, you do not want to make a habit of it. I have heard it said that a Government should keep its ear to the ground, but they should also remember that this is not a very dignified attitude.” He was often called irrational and cheerfully admitted it. So, he replied, was politics; so was human experience. It did not, he observed, “unfold like an arithmetical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five, or minus three, and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye. The element of the unexpected and the unforeseeable is what gives some of its relish to life, and saves us from falling into the mechanic thraldom of the logicians.”64
Churchill was celebrated as a polemicist, but many of his flashing moments in the House were sheer fun. Rising to pay tribute to a fellow member on his golden wedding anniversary, Winston touched off a parliamentary cachinnation by beginning: “I rise to commit an irregularity. The intervention I make is without precedent, and the reason for that intervention is also without precedent, and the fact that the reason for my intervention is without precedent is the reason why I must ask for a precedent for my intervention.” One of his baiters was Edith Summerskill, a feminist MP. Every time he said “man” during one of his addresses she interjected “or woman.” After several such interruptions he paused, turned to her, and said: “It is always the grammarian’s answer that man embraces woman, unless otherwise stated in the text.” A rash new member called his thrusts slanders. Winston replied: “He spoke without a note and almost without a point.” And after crossing foils several times with a Welsh Labour member and anticipating another demand from him to which his only response could be an unqualified negative, he had “Nothing doing” translated into Welsh and memorized it. The entire House was stunned when the Welshman, having made his claim, sat down and Churchill rose to growl: “Dym a grbl.”
In a rare moment of humility he acknowledged to the House that it had put up with a lot from him. Since he first took his seat in the chamber, he said, “I have always said to myself one thing: ‘Do not interrupt,’ and I have never been able to keep to that resolution.” Nor had he succeeded in curbing his savage tongue; he confessed that he could not recall “any expression of scorn or severity” used against him by his critics which “has come anywhere near the language I have been myself accustomed to use…. In fact, I wonder that a great many of my colleagues are on speaking terms with me.”65
He could indeed be vicious. And he could bide his time. Ten years earlier Churchill and Michael Collins, founder of the Irish Republican Army, had established the Irish Free State, and won an Eire referendum despite opposition from Eamon de Valera. Now, with Collins and all other rivals murdered, De Valera had waded to power through their blood. In his first venture into foreign affairs he encouraged Mussolini’s absurd claims in Ethiopia. Winston remarked: “Mr. De Valera, oblivious to the claims of conquered peoples, has given his croak. No sooner has he clambered into the imperial box than he hastens to turn his thumb down upon the first prostrate gladiator he sees.” He prepared a trap for a Labour MP and spent four months waiting to spring it. Eventually the man stumbled, the House jeered, and the stumbler lost his temper. Winston pounced: “There is no one more free with interruptions, taunts, and jibes than he is. He need not get so angry because the House laughs at him: he ought to be pleased when they only laugh at him.”66
Often he was at his most dangerous when he seemed bored. Hunched over in his seat below the gangway, within spitting distance of the Treasury Bench, he would appear to be inattentive to the business before the House. His eyes would close; he would breathe heavily. It was an ambush, of course, and twice MPs on the opposite side of the House lurched into it. The first asked loudly: “Must you fall asleep when I am speaking?” Winston replied: “No, it is purely voluntary.” The second, more cautious, merely inquired whether he was asleep. Winston immediately answered: “I wish to God I were!” And he could stifle an effective jab with a sharper retort. As he finished a scathing attack on the cabinet, a backbencher called: “The Right Hon[orable] Gentleman, like a bad bridge player, blames his cards.” Churchill snapped: “I blame the crooked deal.”67
But these were minor prey. His great adversaries were the leaders of the national government—the coalition—who kept him out of the cabinet despite his long and brilliant ministerial career, which outshone any of theirs. Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, no longer spoke to him. Winston had called him “the boneless wonder,” the “greatest living master of falling without hurting himself,” and the man who possessed “the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.” He dismissed Neville Chamberlain as “a greater Birmingham.” His chief target was Baldwin, the ringmaster of the coalition, who ruled the House as lord president, using MacDonald as a puppet and grooming Neville as his successor. Observing an elderly member listening to the lord president through an ear trumpet, Churchill rumbled: “Why does that idiot deny himself his natural advantage?”68
During one evening session, when it became obvious to every man in the House that the lord president had Luftwaffe and RAF production figures hopelessly muddled, Winston called him “no better than an epileptic corpse,” and when asked what should be done if Baldwin died in office, he replied, “Embalm, bury, and cremate. Take no chances!”69
A young MP, an admirer of the lord president, delivered an emotional plea for unilateral disarmament and was so incautious as to approach Winston in the smoking room and ask his opinion of it. “Why, I thought it was very good,” Winston replied. “It must have been good, for it contained, so far as I know, all the platitudes known to the human race, with the possible exceptions of ‘Prepare to meet thy God’ and ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving.’ ”
His ow
n taunts in the House were carefully prepared to observe parliamentary custom. There was a line between ridicule, which was permissible, and personal insults, which were not. Churchill had been in Parliament since 1901; he knew exactly where the line lay—knew, for example, of Parliament’s list of banned words, which included “blackguard,” “dog,” “guttersnipe,” and “swine.” One young Labour MP, unaware of the list, had used all these in a ferocious assault on Churchill, thereby deeply offending not only Winston but the entire House. Attlee took the man aside; he told him he would have to go to Chartwell and apologize. The chastened MP drove to Kent and knocked on the front door. Churchill’s valet answered. The man stated his name and mission and was asked to wait. Winston was in the toilet, moving his bowels. The valet stood in the hall outside, delivered his message, and waited. After a long moment Churchill said: “Tell him I’m on the privy and can take only one shit at a time.”70
On the military balance between Germany and those who had conquered her armies less than twenty years earlier, Churchill was not only the most knowledgeable backbencher in the House; he was better informed than many senior diplomats on the Wilhelmstrasse. Some of his information was acquired routinely. As one of the monarch’s senior privy councillors, he was on several distribution lists. He received copies of other, more sensitive documents because in 1931 he had asked Ramsay MacDonald for access to figures on the strength of England’s armed forces. MacDonald found military matters dull, even trivial; he casually approved the request and then, apparently, forgot about it. It was one of those bureaucratic decisions which become self-perpetuating, remaining in effect unless withdrawn.
Among the documents to reach Chartwell was a Foreign Office assessment of Britain’s defenses. The FO had found them pitiful. To double the blow, military intelligence reports, which also found their way to Churchill in the mid-1930s, disclosed that Germany had begun to rearm even before Hitler came to power. The Weimar Republic had started it in 1929, when only 2.6 percent of the German electorate supported Hitler. British agents found that the republic had spent two million pounds more than the British on “artillery, small arms ammunition and anti-gas material.” Winston learned that the British embassy in Berlin, submitting its annual report in 1929, had stated that “the necessary jigs and patterns and gauges for the manufacture of modern weapons are being prepared and stocked in various factories all over Germany.”71
By contrast, the Royal Navy in the 1930s was, in Telford Taylor’s words, “sadly down-at-the-heels.” During the two interwar decades only two capital ships were commissioned, and in 1929 the Labour government cut cruiser replacement and suspended work on the Empire’s Singapore base. On May 31, 1933, when the delegates in Geneva were debating reciprocal inspections of one another’s military establishments, the ministers responsible for Britain’s armed forces told the cabinet that such inspections would “expose to the world our grave shortage of war supplies.” One of Churchill’s constituents asked him: “Don’t you think it high time that the British lion showed its teeth?” He growled: “It must go to the dentist first.”72
In the beginning many of Winston’s informants were obscure and had small tales to tell: men returning from Germany—engineers, foreign correspondents, bankers, salesmen, tourists, professors, British officers who had traveled in mufti—and diplomats from neutral countries who passed data and appraisals through third parties or sometimes arrived unexpectedly on Chartwell’s threshold. Refugees from the new Reich were interviewed, and those with scientific backgrounds were closely questioned by the Prof, who seemed to spend less and less time at Oxford and more and more advising Winston on radar, missiles, aircraft design, and high explosives. Everything found its place in Winston’s jigsaw puzzle. He even established a relationship with Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, and met with him at regular intervals until the end of the 1930s.
British contacts close to the seats of power were, of course, much more useful. It is England’s homogeneity and class insularity which make it seem small; in the public school network, referrals by mutual friends to mutual friends may lead anywhere, even to the sovereign. Here, as so often in his life, Churchill’s membership in the privileged class was a great advantage. His informants included his second cousin Lord Londonderry, from 1931 to 1935 secretary of state for air in the coalition cabinet; Sir Henry Strakosch, an official adviser to the cabinet; and John Baker White, director of the Economic League, who collected details about German rearmament, found the government unreceptive to them, and turned the lot over to Churchill, who, he drily recalls, became very affable “when I made it clear that we did not want to be paid.”73
Winston’s chief secretary, Violet Pearman, befriended Wing Commander Torr Anderson, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Anderson was troubled by Britain’s air defenses, or lack of them, and spilled it out to Mrs. P. in a Westerham tearoom. She returned to Chartwell with him in tow, and after a long conversation with Anderson, Winston acquired a pipeline into the RAF, the service which worried him most.
Mrs. P.’s tasks included sorting the daily mail. It was enormous, it came from everywhere, and it fell into patterns. The high fever of militarism was throbbing throughout Germany. Duff Cooper, financial secretary at the War Office in the early 1930s and a parliamentarian marked for higher office, spent September of 1933 driving through Germany and Austria. He wrote Winston that throughout the Reich, “everywhere and at all times of the day and night there were troops marching, drilling, singing.” Duff Cooper was convinced that the Reich was readying itself for war, preparing to fight any country at any time, “with more general enthusiasm than a whole nation has ever put into such preparation.” A retired British lieutenant colonel, known for his hospitality to continental youths visiting the United Kingdom, wrote Winston: “I dined with four young Nazi students a week ago. They had been sent over to tell England what the Hitler movement was doing to the youth of Germany. It all sounded very unpleasant, though they seemed to like it. They made no secret of their belief that within three or four more years Germany would be at war.”74
Among Churchill’s chief sources was Major Desmond Morton, slim, elegant, with hooded eyes and a handsome mustache, whose country cottage conveniently lay just over the hill from Chartwell. In 1917 Morton had been shot through the heart at Arras; he had survived to join military intelligence, where, after the Armistice, he had worked under Churchill, who was then secretary for war and air. Seconded to the Foreign Office, Morton found himself idle much of the time. He knew Churchill was researching The World Crisis, his six-volume history of the Great War, and so, in a neighborly way, he volunteered to help. The offer was eagerly accepted; they became friends. Morton’s name first appears in the Churchill papers in a letter from Clementine to Winston, then touring the United States. The brief mention is dated August 31, 1929: “Major Morton dined with us & helped keep in countenance Mr Lennox Boyd who was surrounded by a cloder of (6) cats.”75
The reference was casual, and deliberately so. Winston shared everything with his wife—at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, she had known more about Royal Navy activities than most cabinet ministers—and seven months earlier the relationship between Churchill and Morton had been transformed and was now delicate, even perilous. The major had been appointed to an extraordinarily sensitive post—chief of the Committee of Imperial Defence’s Industrial Intelligence Centre, with official instructions to “discover and report the plans for manufacture of armaments and war stores in foreign countries.” He shared Winston’s anxiety over German militarism. Because their homes were within strolling distance of each other, the two men could meet casually. Long before Hitler unveiled the Luftwaffe, Churchill knew, through Morton, that thousands of young Nazi aviators and members of national glider clubs had been carefully organized and were prepared, on a signal from Berlin, to expand and deploy into fighter and bomber squadrons.76
Late in the fifth month of the Third Reich, June
1933, Morton telephoned Chartwell and suggested an immediate rendezvous. British intelligence had just received a most secret report from Group Captain J. H. Herring, the air attaché in Berlin. The Nazis had begun production of warplanes. Hitler had ordered all owners of civilian aircraft to register with his new Air Ministry, which meant, wrote Herring, that “a process of mobilisation is in progress”; in effect, Hitler was “already engaged in building an air force.” The attaché added a prediction. Once the registration was over and the command structure in place, “all German aviation will remain a Government controlled branch of public life so long as the Nazi regime lasts.”77
Morton continued to be a vital source of classified information, but he was not alone. Today Churchill’s intelligence net seems amateurish; his informants would be quickly picked up by MI5, the internal security service. Luckily for them—and, later, for England—Scotland Yard had not yet formed a special branch to ferret out civil servants and military officers who became what were later described as security risks. Henry Stimson, an American patrician of the time, reasoned: “The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”78 Later this article of upper-class faith would be exploited by Cambridge men who became Soviet agents, but the men who kept Churchill informed were faithful to King and Country.