Chartwell: Churchill’s sanctuary, home, and great keep.
Churchill’s study, in the oldest part of Chartwell, which dates from 1086, twenty years after the Battle of Hastings.
Churchill in his study.
The Churchill coat-of-arms, with its motto—fitting for this period of his life—“Faithful but unfortunate.”
Winston, Clementine, Diana, Randolph, and friends entertain Charlie Chaplin (far right) at Chartwell.
Clementine bathing in Chartwell’s swimming pool, one of Winston’s creations.
A life mask of Clementine, taken by Paul Hamann, a German artist, in the early 1930s.
Major (later Sir) Desmond Morton, a member of Churchill’s intelligence net and a Chartwell neighbor.
F. W. Lindemann, “the Prof”—later Lord Cherwell.
Brendan Bracken.
A Chartwell guest: French socialist Léon Blum, former Premier of France.
Albert Einstein (right), another 1930s guest, in Chartwell’s rose garden.
Jack Churchill and Clementine play bezique.
Accompanied by her parents, Sarah “comes out”—is formally presented at the Court in Buckingham Palace—in 1932.
Diana and her father leaving Morpeth Mansions in December 1932 for her marriage at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where Winston and Clementine had wed on September 12, 1908. Diana’s marriage ended in divorce three years later.
Winston, Clementine, and Randolph hunt with the Duke of Westminster’s boarhounds in Normandy, January 20, 1933.
Mary, aged thirteen, visibly excited, is flanked by her parents en route to Westminster Hall to hear loyal addresses from both Houses of Parliament, celebrating the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, May 9, 1935.
Diana’s second marriage, to Duncan Sandys, MP, September 16, 1935.
After electing Churchill Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, students chair him through the city streets.
A shooting party, representing the power elite confronted by the Führer of the Third Reich. (Left to right) Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times and an implacable foe of Churchill’s; Lieutenant-Colonel R. Lane Fox, MP (later Lord Bingley); Neville Chamberlain; Lord Halifax; and Sir Roger Lumley (later Earl of Scarbrough, K. G.).
Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s éminence grise.
David Lloyd George, Britain’s World War I Prime Minister, and Churchill in November 1934. A year earlier the BBC, pandering to Nazi Germany, banned both of them and Sir Austen Chamberlain, a distinguished former Foreign Secretary, from taking part in a series of political broadcasts.
What, he asked, was England’s new defense ministry doing? It was “drifting and dawdling as the precious months flow out.” No member should be under the illusion, he said, that the balance could be redressed later by a massive appropriation of funds. The House had just approved the expenditure of fifty million pounds on munitions. But only twenty million could be spent because the gun and shell plants “and, above all, the aeroplane factories,” had inadequate stockpiles of raw materials, lacked workers with the right skills, and hadn’t retooled. One must also consider the workmen at the forges, lathes, and drills, he said, again raising the issue of profiteering. As minister of munitions in the last war he had learned that “you cannot do anything without a working arrangement with the trade unions”; they would not cooperate “so long as they think there are a lot of greedy fingers having a rakeoff.” It is a measure of both the government’s incompetence and its contempt for Churchill that another two years would pass before Inskip’s ministry met with Labour’s leaders.99
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least as fast as that!”
As usual Winston sat down to a faint ripple of applause. After the last division—MPs vote, literally, by dividing, leaving the chamber through one of two exits, “aye” or “no”—members scurried out into Parliament Square, pausing there to buy newspapers. The newsstand dealers were well stocked. As the season wore on, they had found, MPs were buying more papers every week. The news was extremely interesting, and became even more so when warm weather arrived. On May 5, the Duce’s ragged legions finally straggled into the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Two months later, on Thursday, July 2, the League of Nations bowed to the inevitable, and discontinued all sanctions against Italy. Now, on July 18, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, El Caudillo and former chief of Spain’s General Staff, broadcast a manifesto from his outpost in the Canary Islands, proclaiming a Fascist revolt against the country’s republican government.
It is difficult to recapture the intense passions aroused throughout Europe and much of the United States by the bitter, bloody three-year Spanish Civil War. It was, among other things, a religious war. Loyalists, as the defenders of the republic were known, were not only hostile to the church; they tortured priests, raped nuns, and slaughtered innocents. Roman Catholics committed atrocities equally vile. The republic was Spain’s legitimate government, but it had proved incapable of governing a nation in social and economic turmoil.
Labour had remained inflexibly pacifist, but in Edinburgh in October, at the party’s first annual meeting after Franco’s revolt, delegates were split over whether England should remain aloof in Spain. Cripps expressed the familiar Labour policy in an open letter to the Glasgow Forward, urging that “every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the armed forces…. Suppose you won another imperial victory, what then? British Fascism would be less brutal than German, but the world situation would be no better. Another Versailles peace, another period of acute suffering for the workers, and then the next war. That’s all.” On the first day of the conference Arthur Greenwood introduced a resolution calling for nonintervention in Spain, and it passed, 1,836,000 to 510,000—3.6 to 1.100
But within the party a great anguished turning had begun, a growing realization that pacifism had been discredited—that the only effective answer to Fascist and Nazi aggression was to cross swords with it. (The most astute of the pacifists, for whom George Orwell would speak two years later in his Homage to Catalonia, had also begun to question Moscow’s motives in backing the Loyalist cause.) On October 7, 1936, two days after Greenwood’s resolution, the Spanish issue was raised again, in a moment of high drama. The conference was addressed by Señora Dolores Ibarruri, celebrated by Spanish Loyalists as La Pasionaria. Her English was flawless—she was the daughter of a Scotswoman—and she spoke movingly of insurgent atrocities, Republican heroism, and hope for a new, socialist Spain. She ended: “We know that we are holding your hand over the distance. But if you wish this atrocious war to end soon, come and help us. Think of the precious gift that is being wasted—of the lives of our youth. Do not tarry. Now you know the truth. Now you know what the situation is. Come and help us. Come and help us. Scotsmen, ye ken noo.”101
It was, Hugh Dalton recalled, “a magnificent performance, and it swept the whole Conference to its feet. We all rose and sang ‘The Red Flag.’ ” Dalton then moved that Britain meet her responsibilities, as a member of the League of Nations, by preserving “the people’s rights and liberties, the continuance of democratic institutions, and the observance of international law” by rearming, the quicker the better. Attlee warned the conference that if they passed the motion they would increase the risk of a general European war and Cripps tried to shelve it, but the delegates’ blood was up. The measure passed, 1,738,000 to 657,000—2.6 to 1. Labour’s parliamentary party—the MPs—did not all approve of this transformation, but Churchill’s crusade for a stronger Britain no longer seemed quixotic.102
Awakening from their pacifist dream, Labourites and intellectuals invested the Republican cause with a romantic nimbus, reflected in their slogan, “No pasarán!” (“They shall not pass!”). One young Communist undergraduate came to symbolize the swing from the submissiveness of pacifism to the aggressive mood of youths prepar
ed to sacrifice their lives in the struggle against fascism. John Cornford, returning to Cambridge from the Edinburgh meeting, called for volunteers—students who wanted to fight Franco’s troops by joining the ranks of the Loyalist army. He organized them into Brigades XI and XIV (Loyalists used military terms loosely—a “brigade” could range in size from a force of thousands to a few hundred, or even less than a hundred). He himself then crossed to the Iberian Peninsula and joined 145 other Englishmen in No. 1 Company, Twelfth Battalion, XIV Brigade. On December 27, 1936, he turned twenty-one. On that day, or the following day, he was killed in action. His body was never recovered.103
The Loyalist leadership was infested with Communists, but as Harold Macmillan put it, “Many young men—by no means all with Socialist sympathies—joined the International Brigade to support the Spanish Government, and battled heroically for their faith.” After Hitler had called them “Jews and Communists,” a German staff officer advising Franco reported sardonically: “They may be Jews and Communists, but they fight like Germans and beat Italians.” Spain, in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, “provided for the generation of the thirties the emotional experience of a lifetime.”104
The young idealists did not, however, reflect the views of the older generation, particularly those guiding Britain’s political destinies. Hoare, who did, hoped “Fascists and Bolsheviks would kill each other off.” At the Admiralty the sea lords heartily favored Franco; Harold Nicolson, ever the moderate, considered Loyalist Madrid “a mere Kerensky Government at the mercy of an armed proletariat,” though “Franco and his Moors are no better.” Without waiting for action in Berlin or Rome, Eden in August announced an embargo on arms to Spain, hoping, as he wrote Baldwin, that “we might, by setting an example, do our best to induce… Germany and Italy to follow suit.”105
Germany and Italy did the exact opposite. Mussolini sent Franco over sixty thousand troops. The Führer directed Göring to take the first steps in what became a half-billion-mark program, shipping tanks, warplanes, and artillery, all accompanied by German technicians. One of the Führer’s motives was to use the Iberian Peninsula as a proving ground for the Reich’s new weapons. Alfried Krupp first tested six batteries of his 88’s as they later became known and feared by World War II Allied infantrymen, in the siege of Madrid, and was pleasantly surprised; designed as antiaircraft guns, they were also effective against tanks and infantrymen. Krupp sent prototypes of his new U-boats to Spain, including the mammoth Deutschland. The Italians did likewise.
That was a mistake. One or more commanders, eager for action, torpedoed British and French merchantmen. In London the sea lords, so ardently pro-Franco that they wanted Eden to join Berlin and Rome in recognizing his government, attributed the losses to submarines of “unknown origin.” But their origin was unknown to no one, and nothing was surer to arouse the fury of Englishmen than firing on the red ensign. Angry questions were raised in Parliament. Chamberlain, speaking for the government, said that nothing could be done. “I have been through every possible form of retaliation,” he declared on June 20, “and it is absolutely clear that none of them can be effective unless we are prepared to go to war with Franco, which might possibly lead to war with Germany, and in any case would cut right across [the] policy of general appeasement.” Nevertheless, in the fall of 1937, Eden persuaded the French to join the Royal Navy in depth-charge attacks on Axis submarines. Berlin and Rome raised trivial objections, but they could do little more without confessing their guilt. Significantly, decisive action resolved the issue. As they quibbled, the Admiralty in London and the Amirauté in Paris began sweeping Spanish waters with a fleet of eighty destroyers. Overnight the submarine threat vanished. “Open piracy,” Eden told the House, had ended.106
Hitler’s most memorable contribution to the Caudillo’s arsenal was the Condor Legion, a Luftwaffeneinheit (squadron) of bombers which inspired one of Pablo Picasso’s most celebrated paintings. The civilized world was deeply shocked when it read that on April 27, 1937, nine waves of Heinkels, armed with 550-pound bombs and piloted by Germans in Spanish uniforms, had conducted a massive raid on Guernica, killing 1,654 civilians, most of them women and children. Foreign correspondents in the vicinity confirmed the early Loyalist reports. The burning question was: “Who was responsible?” Eden asked Ribbentrop whether Germany would agree to an international investigation; Hitler personally rejected the proposal as “entirely outside the bounds of possibility.” Instead he blamed the Russians; Guernica, he said, was a “bolschewistische” outrage, whereupon Mussolini, now being gradually obscured by the Führer’s lengthening shadow, called it “bolscevico” violence.107
Churchill’s immediate response to the outbreak of fighting in Spain had been to damn the Loyalists as the more wicked of two wicked causes. “Naturally,” he later wrote, “I was not in favor of the Communists. How could I be, when if I had been a Spaniard they would have murdered me and my friends?” In the Evening Standard of August 10, 1936, he wrote that the “constitutional and would-be Republic” had found itself “sliding steadily toward the Left… falling into the grip of dark, violent forces coming ever more plainly into the open, and operating by murder, pillage and industrial disturbance.” Atrocities were being committed by both sides, he acknowledged, but he dwelt more luridly on the “nightly butcheries” of the Loyalists. Encountering the Republican ambassador at a reception, he turned away from the diplomat’s outstretched hand, dramatically muttering, “Blood, blood, blood.”108
Yet he was among the few who understood Hitler’s role in Spain, and he was particularly troubled by the prospect of driving Mussolini deeper into the Nazi camp. In his view, advocating the use of British strength on any Iberian battlefield was absurd. Apart from the courting or alienating of Italy, Britain and the Empire had no stake in Spain. Indeed, Winston saw, an outright Anglo-French commitment to either side—given their military deficiencies, particularly in the air—would be madness. The “Spanish convulsion,” he declared, could evoke but one response: “Send charitable aid under the Red Cross to both sides, and for the rest—keep out of it and arm.” In August he added: “It is of the utmost importance that France and Britain should act together in observing the strictest neutrality themselves and endeavoring to induce it in others. This Spanish welter is not the business of either of us.” He remembered what the Duke of Wellington had said: “There is no country in Europe in… which foreigners can intervene with so little advantage as Spain.” In victory, he believed, Franco would be an ingrate, and as Hitler would discover, Winston was right.109
Those who regarded Churchill as a man of principle were baffled. They shouldn’t have been. He had always nailed his colors to the mast, but not always to the same mast. His sole concern now was the safety of his country. William James once wrote that men of genius differ from ordinary men not in any innate quality of the brain, but in the aims and purposes on which they concentrate and in the degree of concentration which they manage to achieve. Napoleon, himself great, called it the mental power “de fixer les objets longtemps sans être fatigué”—to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring. Churchill possessed it. His eyes were focused on Hitler to the exclusion of all else. Earlier, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, he had expressed doubts that the League of Nations “would be well-advised to have a quarrel with Japan…. I hope we shall try in England to understand a little the position of Japan, an ancient state, with the highest sense of national honor and patriotism and with a teeming population and a remarkable energy.” One doubts that he would have been so indulgent had Malaya, Australia, and the Raj been threatened by Nipponese bayonets then.110
He reviled Hitler, but spoke enigmatically of Mussolini and the Caudillo. In Cannes he told Vincent Sheean that to him Ethiopia, the Rhineland, and Spain were not unrelated incidents, that they “involve the whole structure of Europe, with possibilities of realignment carrying the promise of deadly danger to England.” It struck Sheean that Churchill’s “patriotism was r
apidly engulfing all other sentiments,” that his “awareness of the danger to England drove out whatever had originally prepared him for benevolence toward the Fascist principle, and he was willing, in the end, to work with the extreme left if necessary to defeat the paramount enemy. This evolution I saw.” At their last parting, with Franco on the verge of triumph, Sheean observed that Churchill, “saddened and made solemn by the whole thing, perceived the importance of the victory for Hitler and Mussolini, and regarded the fall of the Republic as a blow to England.”111
Harold Macmillan remembered “Churchill talking to me with great energy on this [aspect] of the Spanish question. He decided to declare himself neutral, for his eye was on the real enemy.” Italy, as he saw it, was not England’s real enemy. In his memoirs he would write that Britain was “justified in going so far with the League of Nations against Italy as we could carry France,” but he knew the French could not be carried far. At the time he said: “We are not strong enough to be the lawgiver and the spokesman of the world.” There was poignance here, for in his youth—before 1914 destroyed Britain’s paramountcy—they had been both.112