She froze. So did Elizabeth Nel, when, on the evening of her secretarial baptism, she found her machine had been set at single, not double, spacing. With Churchill rattling along, uncharacteristically fluent at this early hour, she had no time to switch. After she had passed him the first page, she will recall, “he went off like a rocket. I was a fool, a mug, and idiot: I was to leave his presence and one of the others was to appear.” Later she was given a second chance, and, still later, a third. She was understandably nervous, and “my apprehensions were seldom ill-founded. More often than not it would come skimming back to me with a few red alterations on it, sometimes to the accompaniment of remarks disparaging to my education and sense of hearing.”55 Yet their misunderstandings are completely understandable. Who can blame a stenographer who types “lemons” when he means the Greek island of Lemnos, mistakes “fretful” for “dreadful,” or “perfervid” for “perverted”? Winston can and does; he rages and stamps his feet. (Foot-stamping is his outlet with women, a substitute for obscenities; if only men were present he would cut loose with a string of short Anglo-Saxon oaths “mostly beginning,” as he once put it, “with the earlier letters of the alphabet.”) One young woman wrote home:
Not in a very good temper this morning. He suddenly said “Gimme t—gr—spts—pk.” Interpreting this as “Give me a toothpick,” I leapt up, looked round and then started rummaging in the bag where such necessities should be kept. After less than 20 seconds he said, very bored and superior “now Miss Layton just stop playing the bloody ass and”…. Presently, after dictating something, he found I’d put “Somehow I think it right” (which was what I thought he’d said). So fairly patient, he said “no, no, I said now the time is right” (with accents like that). So I did it again. Gave it back. There was a roar of rage. “God’s teeth, girl, can’t you do it right the second time? I said ripe ripe ripe—P P P.” I should, perhaps, have realized, but he hadn’t mentioned that “right” was “wrong.” However he forgave me for the rest of the day.
Occasionally the secretaries guess at a word, trusting to chance rather than provoke certain wrath by asking: “What did you say, sir?” Any break in his creative flow is intolerable to him. When a girl reaches the bottom of a page she must remove paper, carbon, and second sheet, then insert a new set and roll it into place. Winston makes no allowance for this. He barks: “Come on! Come on! What are you waiting for?” The crackling of carbon and the flimsy second sheets is almost as intolerable to him as whistling. He splutters: “Don’t fidget so with that paper! Stop it!” His tantrums would be more bearable if he apologized afterward or complimented them on work well done. He never does either. When one of the secretaries carries on the night after one of his outbursts, he may mutter, “There. I knew you could do it.” Or, if one bursts into tears: “Good heavens, you mustn’t mind me. We’re all toads beneath the harrow, you know.” Once a manservant stood up to him. The result was a blazing row. At the end of it Churchill, his lower lip jutting, said: “You were very rude to me, you know.” The servant, still seething, replied: “Yes, but you were rude, too.” Churchill grumbled: “Yes, but I am a great man.”56
At Chartwell this is the last word. Later the servant will say: “There was no answer to that. He knew, as I and the rest of the world knew, that he was right.” Elizabeth Nel, after reciting her very legitimate grievances, adds: “Neither I nor anyone else considered this treatment unfair…. I used to wonder how long his patience would last, if he would not one day say, ‘Go, and never let me see you again.’ ” Phyllis Moir, another member of the secretarial pool, will recall Winston on the phone, telling her to fetch him certain papers: “Mr. Churchill was standing by the telephone, his face very red and very angry, stamping his feet and sputtering with rage. He literally tore the papers out of my hand and savagely stammered an incoherent answer into the mouthpiece.” She adds loyally: “Mr. Churchill is not the sort of man to apologize to anyone, but he would go out of his way to say something appreciative and his whole manner made you feel he was ashamed of his bad behavior.” In this instance, she explains, he expressed his shame by failing to turn on her wrathfully after he had hung up. Instead he asked her if she was enjoying the countryside.57
It seems hardly adequate. Neither does his forgiveness “for the rest of the day” seem appropriate redress for browbeating a girl who mistook his lisped “ripe” for “right.” The blunt truth is that Winston has never considered himself a toad beneath the harrow, and for the best of reasons: he isn’t one. No humble man would outflank a traffic jam by driving on pavement. He believes he is a superior being, entitled to exceptional forbearance as well as special privilege and not subject to judgment by the rules of polite society. This is, of course, arguable. What is striking is that those who work for him, toiling long hours, underpaid, and subject to savage, undeserved reprimands, agree with him. They feel the sting of his whip. Yet he continues to command their respect, even their love. Those who are shocked by Churchill’s treatment of his employees all have this in common: they never worked for him.
Sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. he quits, leaving the others to sort out ribbon copies and carbons, clean up the study, and, if the night’s dictation has included manuscript, prepare a packet for the London courier. In his bedroom he divests himself of his trousers and velvet slippers; then, in one great overhead swoop, yanks the rest of his clothing up, away, and across the chamber. In a gesture that is more narcissistic than remedial, he faces the mirror in his bedroom and brushes his strands of hair straight down over his ears, saying to his valet, with dubious authority, “That’s the way to keep your hair, Inches.” He asks him for “my eye blinkers,” slips the sleep mask in place, and is soon breathing the deep, slow breaths of the slumberer. His dreams, he tells his family, are often of his father, who died prophesying Winston would be a failure. In 1932 it would be hard to find more than a dozen men of Parliament or Fleet Street who would think that prediction laughable.
PROLOGUE
A FEVER OVER EUROPE
VICTORIA Regina—“the Old Queen,” still a vivid memory among Englishmen in their forties—would have been shocked speechless. Here was London, the most civilized city in the world, and there in its streets were the rabble, identifiable by their ragged clothes, their faces clenched in rage, and, when they raised their voices, the unmistakable accents of their class. To affluent spectators, the rioting seemed illusory. Many were looking at the poor, really looking at them, for the first time in their lives. Usually the patriciate encountered them only in servile roles, and the privileged had been raised to ignore them, even to speak of them in their presence as though they were not there. But in 1932, with the Depression at rock bottom, the poor could not escape notice. There were too many of them, and they were too angry.
A London constable needed only a brief glance to distinguish between the classes. Shaw’s Pygmalion to the contrary, it wasn’t just a matter of clothes, expressions, and accents. No speech therapist or couturier could alter their posture, mannerisms, and physique. Lower-class diets were so poor that emergency programs were needed to provide them with fruit, vegetables, and, for each schoolchild, 2.67 ounces of milk a day. Generations of malnutrition, of stooping in tunnels or bending over textile looms, had given workmen slight stature, poor posture, coarse complexions, weak eyesight, and hollow chests; and even among nubile women, breasts were small and limp. Individually they were unattractive and easily overpowered. But when they coalesced into a mob they could constitute a threat to the tall, fair, erect gentry. Of course, the gentry did not dream of meeting force with their own force. It was, as most of them said, a matter for the police.
Those of less insensitive conscience were shocked. Yet they shouldn’t have been. There had been plenty of warnings. People were edgy. The city’s celebrated civility was beginning to fray. Every household in Mayfair or Belgravia had its tales, hushly told, of rude beggars who had accosted ladies outside Harrods or St. Paul’s and grew ugly if denied sixpence. A
nd Whitechapel had actually insulted a member of the Royal Family. The Prince of Wales’s brother Prince “Bertie”—the future King George VI—had paid a compassionate visit to the city’s starving East End. According to sworn testimony, published in The Times, His Royal Highness had been driven back by ragged cockneys shaking grimy fists and shouting: “Food! Give us food! We don’t want royal parasites!”1
This lèse-majesté was the prelude to the riots of October 1932. The first seems to have been spontaneous. The cockneys who had defied royalty had been released by the magistrate with a warning. Emboldened, they decided to sortie into the city proper. The sheer size of the multitude was frightening. They poured into the streets by the thousands, and soon they were bearing down on Lambeth Bridge. Twenty times the bobbies launched truncheon charges; finally, as a last resort, they blocked their bridgehead with lorries parked hubcap to hubcap. The barricade held until the bruised, scarred, and exhausted throng fell back.2
The second onslaught, a march on London from the outer reaches of the country, was more menacing. Its moves had been carefully planned by a dour, disheveled youth named W. A. L. Hannington, “Wal” to his men and “Red Wal” in the London newspapers. The men behind him called their trek a hunger march. It was a long one. They had come from towns as far as western Wales and northern Scotland, bearing a petition for relief signed by a million unemployed workers, with the expectation that the prime minister would receive their delegation. In the countryside local charities fed the marchers, but after a cabinet minister told the House of Commons that Bolsheviks were behind their protest and it was “up to the Communists to feed them,” they were given few handouts in the capital.3
Their enormous petition was too cumbersome for the street brawlers to carry, so they checked it at Charing Cross Station and then swarmed up the Strand to Trafalgar Square, stoning limousines and using tree branches—hacked off in Hyde Park—to club well-dressed men. Bobbies waded into them, swinging billy clubs, and broke their momentum at Marble Arch. England’s most sacred political institutions, it seemed, were safe. Then it was learned that a second column, five thousand strong, had emerged from concealment in Green Park and was crossing St. James’s Park, in their rear. Debouching by the Guards Memorial, this mob advanced on No. 10 Downing Street. The only policeman in sight was the single bobby who, by tradition, stands by the prime minister’s front door.
At this point, less than four hundred yards from their objective, the marchers’ luck turned against them. The open ground between the rioters and the entrance to Downing Street was occupied by the parade ground of the Royal Horse Guards. As long as anyone could remember, the only duty of these cavalrymen had been to perform ceremoniously for admiring tourists. Now, preparing to fight for King and Country, they buckled on their glittering helmets, mounted their handsome steeds, drew their gleaming sabers from their polished scabbards, and formed a very thin red line. The sheer weight of the mob could have overwhelmed them, but the marchers, most of them in London for the first time, seemed awestruck. They wavered and milled around. By the time they had regrouped, reserves from Bow Street were there in force, sending them reeling back toward Trafalgar Square. Anticlimax followed. At Charing Cross Station, where they produced their claim check, a courteous clerk explained that the petition, with its million signatures, had been classified as an incentive to riot and confiscated by Scotland Yard. Beaten and bitter, they rode home on British railroads, which, relieved to see them dispersed, charged only token fares.4
Television did not exist, and radio news was closely monitored by Sir John Reith, czar of the BBC, so the failed demonstrations had little impact on the British public. Few, if any, could have predicted that the suppressed riots, with their threat of social upheaval, would later play a role in the formation of the most disastrous foreign policy in the history of Britain and its empire. The significance of the incidents was largely overlooked by Fleet Street. It was a dreary time; people were less interested in momentous events than in escapism.
In the early thirties, the average Englishman’s exposure to American culture—and he enjoyed it immensely—was chiefly confined to motion pictures, now in the transition period between silent films and talkies. In Westerham, the local cinema was The Swan. Winston Churchill, trudging up its steps with little Mary in tow to see MGM’s lavish Ben-Hur, was, at least in this, typical of his countrymen. Like them he loved Westerns. His favorite was Destry Rides Again, with Tom Mix. He favored movies featuring drama, excitement, action, slapstick—Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross, Douglas Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, Walt Disney’s anthropomorphic Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the Marx Brothers at the peak of their lunacy. With the arrival of sound had come popular music from abroad: “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” and Marlene Dietrich, at twenty-nine huskily serenading Emil Jannings with “Falling in Love Again” in Josef von Sternberg’s first German talkie, Der blaue Engel. For Britons who preferred to buy British, homemade pickings were slim, with one shining exception: Noel Coward. These were the years when Gertrude Lawrence, young Laurence Olivier, Beatrice Lillie, and Coward himself played roles he had created, when his name was writ large on the hoardings of four London theatres: Private Lives at the Phoenix; Cavalcade at the Drury Lane; Words and Music at the Adelphi; and, at His Majesty’s Theatre, Bitter Sweet.
In the back gardens of their semidetached bungalows in Streatham or Battersea, British housewives’ gossip and snobbery had always served as shields against unpleasantness. The most exciting rumors in 1932 centered around the Royal Family, especially the world’s most eligible bachelor, HRH the Prince of Wales, now thirty-eight. It was no secret that King George and Queen Mary were putting heavy pressure on their middle-aged heir to marry someone suitable; they had just spent over £10,000 renovating and redecorating Marlborough House, at the west end of Pall Mall, making it both comfortable and elegant for their new daughter-in-law, whoever she might be. Of course the Prince would find a bride soon, the housewives told one another, hanging clothes out to dry. He knew his duty. And, they added, nodding vigorously, he would marry well, giving Great Britain a future queen who would become the pride of the Empire.
The Empire! The mere mention of it aroused patriotic Britons like Churchill, made them brace their backs and lift their eyes. If there was any fixed star in their firmament it was an abiding faith in the everlasting glory of their realm—Dominions, Crown Colonies, protectorates, Chinese treaty towns—which, in sum, was over three times the size of the Roman Empire at its height: 475 million people, 11 million square miles, ninety-one times the area of Great Britain, encompassing a quarter of both the earth’s surface and its population. The fourth edition of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defined “imperial” as “magnificent”; “imperialism” as the “extension of the British Empire for protection of trade, union of its parts for defence, internal commerce, etc.”; and “imperialist” as an “advocate of British imperialism.”
Britons still scrupulously observed Empire Day, giving schoolchildren a half-holiday. They joined or encouraged the British Empire League, the British Empire Union, the Victoria League, and the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas. They cried “Hear, hear” when the new viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, foresaw “a Great Imperial Federation, when we can snap our fingers at the rest of the world.” Baldwin declared: “The British Empire stands firm, as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea.” Colin Cross, the historian, has observed that “with authority reaching to every continent, the British Empire was literally a world power; indeed in terms of its influence it was the only world power.”5
Historian James Morris has written of the Empire: “Most Britons still considered it, all in all, a force for good in the world…. The Monarchy was still immensely popular in most parts of the Empire, even in India, even in Ireland.” Schoolboys in the United Kingdom and the United States alike were taught that in battle the British “alw
ays won,” as indeed they had in every major war since the eighteenth century.
All the imperial trappings were kept intact. The prime ministers of the Dominions continued to meet in London, ostensibly to coordinate economic policies, though none were forthcoming. Dominion children studied books with such chapter titles as “The Thread That Binds Our Race,” and Boy Scouts—not only in the Empire but also in America—wore broad-brimmed Boer War hats and shared with the South African police the motto “Be Prepared.” Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers, particularly the London Daily Express, made expansion of the imperial domain a crusade. Graduates of “Oxbridge”—Oxford and Cambridge—still sailed abroad to spend lifetimes as imperial proconsuls, looking forward, late in life, to the rewards of CMG, KCMG, or GCMG. In New Delhi, at state banquets, the viceroy’s entrance into the dining hall was preceded by two elegantly uniformed aides-de-camp; and when the orchestra played “God Save the King,” the Indian servants in their gold and scarlet liveries stood poised behind each guest.6
And yet…
There were signs, for those who could read them, that the Empire was, in Churchill’s gloomy words, on a “downward slurge.” La belle époque was over. Most of the Crown’s subjects, abroad as well as at home, felt comfortable with imperialism. With the exception of the Daily Worker, every British newspaper supported it. Few, even in Ireland, were offended when the thick voice of their sovereign was identified on radio for his annual, unbearably boring Christmas broadcast (“Another year has passed…”) by an announcer with a plummy accent as “His Britannic Majesty, by Grace of God and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” But the mystique was fading; indeed, for some it had already gone.7