Perhaps the most perceptive glimpse of Churchill during the Ethiopian crisis is provided by Vincent Sheean, the American foreign correspondent. Sheean, like Churchill, Lloyd George, the writer Michael Arlen—and, later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—was a friend of Maxine Elliott, a rich retired actress whose white, terraced villa in Cannes, the Château de l’Horizon, offered exotic asylum to celebrities.
“Churchill first became visible to me,” Sheean wrote, “in a red bathrobe over bathing trunks; he wore a large, flopping straw hat, and slippers and a cherubic grin.” He was defensive on the Ethiopia issue, but never evasive. When an elegant Frenchwoman pointed out that the British Empire had been built by the sort of small wars Italy was now waging, Winston smiled benevolently and said: “Ah, but you see, all that belongs to the unregenerate past, is locked away in the limbo of the old, the wicked days. The world progresses.” That, he said, explained the purpose of the League of Nations. Winston declared that the Duce was “making a most dangerous and foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure.” The results were “quite incalculable. Who is to say what will come of it in a year, or two, or three? With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent—Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for your children?”14
In such company he never criticized His Majesty’s Government, but his letters are full of it. After four days with Lloyd George at the Hotel Mamounia in Marrakech, he wrote Clementine that Britain was “getting into the most terrible position, involved definitely by honour & by contract in almost any quarrel that can break out in Europe” with her “defences neglected” and the cabinet “less capable a machine for conducting affairs that I have ever seen.” He believed that the “Baldwin-MacDonald regime has hit this country very hard indeed, and may well be the end of its glories.”15
Clemmie replied that “I really would not like you to serve under Baldwin, unless he really gave you a great deal of power and you were able to inspire and vilify the Government.” The political situation at home, she wrote, was “depressing.” She saw, as he did not, how powerful his position would be if, when his hour struck, he were free of any tainted association with the appeasers. Afterward he agreed, writing of his years in the wilderness: “Now one can see how lucky I was. Over me beat the invisible wings.” Anthony Eden, less fortunate, emerged slightly stained. He had nearly resigned when he learned of the Hoare-Laval agreement, but Baldwin persuaded him to remain and then appointed him foreign secretary. Eden was only thirty-eight. He looked like a man of the future. But Churchill thought him a poor choice. He wrote home: “I expect the greatness of his office will find him out.”16
It was Eden, in his new role, who had to tell the House that what Austen Chamberlain had described as the Ethiopian “madness” was over. It wasn’t quite; but clearly the old kingdom was doomed to become an Italian colony. Lloyd George rose in a terrible fury. He said: “I have never before heard a British Minister… come down to the House of Commons and say that Britain was beaten… and that we must abandon an enterprise we had taken in hand.” He pointed at the front bench. “Tonight we have had the cowardly surrender, and there are the cowards.”17
In itself, the seven-month Ethiopian war was of little consequence. But the implications of the Hoare-Laval fiasco were far-reaching. By the time Haile Selassie’s capital fell, the League of Nations had been destroyed as a force for peace and a referee of international disputes. At the same time, British hopes for an Anglo-Italian alliance, based on Mussolini’s determination to keep Austria free of Nazi rule, had vanished in the quarreling between London and Rome. Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s designated successor, had written off collective security as a bad debt. The Stresa Front, the Duce’s handiwork, lay in ruins, and though he himself was to blame, he resigned from the league in a blind rage and sent his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to Hitler’s Berghof retreat on the Obersalzberg, overlooking the resort town of Berchtesgaden. Informal discussions there led to serious talks in Berlin. The climax came in a fateful speech by Mussolini, delivered in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on November 1, 1936. In it he added a phrase to history, declaring, “The Berlin conversations have resulted in an understanding between our two countries…. This Rome-Berlin line is not a diaphragm but rather an axis around which can revolve all those European states with a will to collaboration and peace.” “Rome-Berlin Axis” would be on front pages all over the world for the next seven years. Thus Germany, though uninvolved throughout, was the one beneficiary of the Ethiopian travesty. The naval treaty with Britain had been Hitler’s first giant step in freeing his country from the diplomatic quarantine imposed on it after he had violated treaties bearing the signatures of Germany’s leaders. Now two clumsy Allied politicians had freed him of that odium. In foreign chancelleries, at least, the Reich was once more respected as a great power.18
Today Hoare’s conspiracy with Laval would mean the destruction of his political career. But fifty years ago members of the old boy network could survive almost any disgrace. Hoare’s career was switched to a siding, but Baldwin had already marked him down as the next first lord of the Admiralty, and subsequently he served as home secretary, lord privy seal, secretary for air, and ambassador to Spain, after which he moved over to the House of Lords as Viscount Templewood. The great mass of the British people had a short memory and paid little attention to upper-class quid pro quo. In 1935 Baldwin merely advised Hoare to lie low for the present. The future viscount understood; he knew the rules; he must stiffen his lip and do his penance when old friends declined to be seen with him just now.
He was, therefore, startled to receive a graceful letter, bearing a Morocco postmark, from Winston Churchill. Winston wrote “to congratulate you on the dignity of yr speech of resignation, & to tell you how vy sorry I am at what has happened…. After so much work & worry I daresay the breathing space will be welcome.” Like the hypochondriac who always arrives at the bedside of the sick, Winston rarely failed to provide consolation for political casualties. But Hoare was uncomforted. That same day he had been subjected to the unkindest cut of all—and from his sovereign at that. Following the timeless custom, he had resigned his office by riding to Buckingham Palace and surrendering his seals of office to King George V. The King said: “Do you know what they’re all saying? No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris!” When Eden arrived to kiss hands and claim the seals, the monarch repeated his royal jest and added that he had been puzzled by Hoare’s response. “You know,” he said, “the fellow didn’t even laugh.”19
Churchill had ended his letter to Hoare: “We are moving into a year of measureless perils.” The first blow of 1936 was the death of the King, at Sandringham, in January. Winston was still in Morocco when he learned of it from a News of the World cable, which offered him £1,000—three times an MP’s annual salary—to write a tribute to George V. He dictated the piece to Mrs. Pearman on a train between Tangier and Marrakech and dispatched it only three days after the new monarch, Edward VIII, had begun his reign. Winston had known Edward for twenty-five years, and to his “joyous and gay” memories of their long association, as he now wrote him, there was also the “hope that Your Majesty’s name will shine in history as the bravest and best beloved of all the sovereigns who had worn the island Crown.”20
Within hours of his return to London he was engulfed in politics. Since Hitler’s early days in power, Churchill had been urging Baldwin to create a new cabinet post, a minister of defense who would coordinate all three services. Support for the office had been growing in Parliament ever since, and now Baldwin agreed. But who would he name? Most MPs didn’t even ask; the appointment of Churchill was assumed. Austen Chamberlain wrote his sister: “In my view there is only one man who by his studies, and special abilities, and aptitudes, is marked for it, and that man is Winston Churchill.” At one time or another Churchill had borne ministerial responsibility fo
r the War Office, the Admiralty, and the RAF. The previous November, when he had been excluded from the post-election cabinet shake-up, Harold Nicolson had written in his diary: “Clemmie tells me that Winston has not yet been approached. It looks as if he were going to be left out till February.” It was February now. H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, a harsh critic of Churchill for over twenty years, nevertheless took the matter as “settled.” Harold Macmillan and Lord Castlereagh were openly backing him, and Cavalcade magazine reported that even “left-wing Conservatives, who were hostile to Winston over the India question, now take the line that if there must be a defence minister, Winston Churchill is the man.” Anthony Crossley, a young Conservative MP, parodied the arguments against Churchill’s appointment:
But Winston were worst, with his logic accursed
For he’ll scorn our impartial endeavour.
He’ll make up his mind, right or wrong, with the first,
And how shall we temporise ever?
Let’s have soldier or sailor or peer or civilian,
Whatever his faults, so they not be Churchillian.21
The inner circle around Baldwin—the members, so to speak, of the Dear Vicar’s congregation—were not amused. They were thinking along other lines. Secretary to the Cabinet Hankey wanted a “sound man,” someone who “will work and not upset the psychology of the whole machine.” Warren Fisher, permanent under secretary of the Treasury, thought that the minister “should be a disinterested type of man, with no axe to grind or desire to make a place for himself”—a qualification which would have ruled out every gifted man in the House. Hoare, untouched by the letter which had wished him well in his dark hour, sang Churchill’s dispraises with the prime minister and emerged to write Neville Chamberlain jubilantly: “On no account would he [Baldwin] contemplate the possibility of Winston in the Cabinet for several obvious reasons, but chiefly for the risk that would be involved by having him in the Cabinet when the question of his (S.B.’s) successor became imminent.” News of this reached Chartwell. Sir Roger Keyes wrote Churchill that, encountering Baldwin in one of Westminster’s halls, he had told him that Churchill “would be a very good appointment both in your interests and those of the Country.” “I cannot only think of my interests,” Baldwin remarked, turning away. “I have to think of the smooth working of the machine.” The two minds—one preoccupied with the country, the other with the party machine—could not meet.22
Churchill, at Chartwell, remained on tenterhooks. He wrote Clemmie on February 21: “There is no change in the uncertainty about my affairs. Evidently B. desires above all things to avoid bringing me in. This I must now recognize. But his own position is much shaken, & the storm clouds gather.” She replied: “My darling, Baldwin must be mad not to ask you to help him. Perhaps it is a case of ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy….’ ” Ten days later he wrote her: “The Defence business is at its height. Baldwin is still undecided…. Now this morning the DT [Daily Telegraph] comes out as the enclosed, wh is the most positive statement yet & the latest—& from a normally well-informed quarter. Anyhow I seem to be still en jeu.”23
Baldwin didn’t want Churchill, but since the Ethiopian debacle his prestige had dwindled, and support for Winston was growing in the House and in Fleet Street. It was at this moment, when events hung in a delicate balance, that Winston was sandbagged by his impetuous son. Churchill had a premonition of disaster from this quarter. On the day after Christmas he had written Randolph from Rabat: “It would in my belief be vy injurious to me at this junction if you publish articles attacking the motives & character of Ministers, especially Baldwin & Eden. I hope therefore you will make certain this does not happen. If not, I shall not be able to feel confidence in yr loyalty & affection for me.”24
Randolph honored his father’s request; he wrote no pieces critical of anyone else in the government. He did something worse. He announced that he would stand for Parliament, running against the national government’s incumbent—Ramsay MacDonald’s son Malcolm, a member of Baldwin’s cabinet. Winston wrote Clemmie that Randolph had “put a spoke in my wheel.” Later he wrote her: “You will see how unfortunate and inconvenient such a fight is to me. ‘Churchill v MacDonald.’ ” It was worse: Lord Rothermere, the press lord, had assigned Baldwin’s son Oliver “to write up Randolph, which he is apparently ready to do, and to write down Malcolm…. So we shall have Ramsay’s son, Baldwin’s son, and my son—all mauling each other in this remote constituency.” Churchill was apprehensive that the prime minister might interpret Randolph’s candidacy “as a definite declaration of war by me.” Then he surmised that no other interpretation was possible: “I should think that any question of my joining the Government was closed by the hostility which Randolph’s campaign must excite.” Yet he still hoped for a post.25
Winston did not appear in Scotland to speak for his son. He wanted to; Brendan Bracken advised against it. They compromised by agreeing that Churchill should release a brief statement to the press, concluding with the mild observation that with “parliamentary government under grievous challenge in the present age… undue pressure should not be put by the Central Government upon a free choice of the constituency.” That fell far short of a ringing endorsement, but the assumption that he was behind his son’s challenge remained. The Times as much as said so. Winston wrote the proprietor of the paper that he was “surprised to read in the leading article of Saturday’s ‘Times’ on the Ross and Cromarty by election, an insinuation that I had prompted my Son’s candidature. As a matter of fact, I strongly advised him to have nothing to do with it. Naturally, as a Father, I cannot watch his fight… without sympathy; but I am taking no part in it…. In these circumstances the innuendo of your leading article is neither true nor fair.”26
But the skeptics included the Scots voters, who, when they went to the polls, turned the contest into a rout. Malcolm MacDonald’s victory was extraordinary. Of the 17,343 votes cast, 2,427—less than 14 percent—were for Randolph. Boothby wrote Winston that while he was “sorry,” he believed that “a little chastening at this particular juncture will not necessarily be to his ultimate disadvantage.” There was, Boothby continued, “more sympathy & friendly feeling” for Randolph “than he suspects. But, my God, you don’t challenge that machine with impunity.” The Edinburgh Evening News wrote bitingly: “By emphasizing the unpopularity of the Churchillians’ attitude, the decisive defeat of Mr Randolph Churchill in Ross and Cromarty seems to be regarded as another nail in the political coffin of Mr Winston Churchill, either as a candidate for the Admiralty or Cabinet Minister charged with the coordination of Defence Services.” Friends visiting Chartwell were careful to avoid any mention of the by-election, though they could see Winston’s hurt, a wound sharper than any inflictable by a serpent’s tooth.27
The prime minister thought Winston lacked judgment. Yet on his instructions, the cabinet was taking the first of the steps Churchill had demanded. On March 3, the government published a new Defence White Paper, revealing plans to build an aircraft carrier, two new battleships, and five battle cruisers; recruit six thousand Royal Navy ratings; raise four motorized infantry battalions; modernize antiaircraft defense and field artillery; and build 224 more Spitfires and Hurricanes. Fleet Street called it a bid for carte blanche, and indeed the White Paper itself declared: “Any attempt to estimate the total cost of the measures would be premature.”28
Backbenchers were startled. It seemed hardly possible that such a program could get past the Exchequer without Neville’s approval. Nor had it. He had suggested the vague wording, reasoning that “it would probably be advisable to avoid figures which could be added up to a larger amount than public opinion is expecting.” The appropriation endorsed by the cabinet was £400 million, to be spread over the next five years. Since Nazi Germany was spending over twice that much on arms every year, the outlay which troubled Chamberlain seems rather less than exorbitant. It was in fact quite inadequate; RAF strength would rise from 1,512 front-line aircra
ft to only 1,736. To Churchill a strong England was one capable of defending itself. To Chamberlain it meant balanced budgets. “The British government,” in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, “still lived in the psychological atmosphere of 1931: more terrified of a flight from the pound than of defeat in war…. The confidence of the City of London came first; armaments came second.” Furthermore, the program outlined in the White Paper specified that it must be carried out “without impeding the course of normal trade.” In other words, Britain would observe business as usual.29
Although the step was in the right direction, Churchill told Parliament on March 10, it was far too short. He could not feel that the new policy “has done full justice to the anxiety which the House feels about the condition of our national defences.” Money was irrelevant and should not even be a consideration: “When things are left as late as this, no high economy is possible. That is the part of the price nations pay for being caught short.” Churchill had been startled to read in the press, and even to hear remarks in the House smoking room, “giving a general impression that we are over-hauling Germany now…. The contrary is true. All this year and probably for many months next year Germany will be outstripping us more and more.” It would “not be possible for us to overtake Germany and achieve air parity, as was so solemnly promised,” until the Germans reached a saturation point and decided to end expansion of the Luftwaffe. Then England could bridge the gap. “But this day will be fixed by Germany, and not by us, whatever we do.” He believed that if London and Paris acted promptly, as he later wrote, there was “still time for an assertion of collective security.” But “virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”30