Churchill (10 page)

Churchill’s tenure of the exchequer had more serious consequences in a field where he might have been expected to be more sensible: defense. Here he changed his persona completely. From the first lord of the Admiralty who had built up the fleet to over a thousand warships, he reverted to his father’s policy of stinginess to the armed services, adding a good deal of rhetoric of his own. He was particularly hard on plans to replace aging warships with new ones such as “silly little cruisers, which would be no use in war anyway.” Given his earlier foresight about airpower, he showed no interest in pushing for a class of large aircraft carriers to replace battleships. When in charge of the War Office under LG, he had taken a lead in the government’s adoption of the Ten Year Rule, an official assumption there would be no major war in the next ten years, renewed and extended annually. This made exceedingly difficult getting higher spending estimates adopted. It meant Britain emerged from the twenties seriously underarmed for a world power.

What made matters worse was that Japan, hitherto a staunch friend of Britain’s, had changed from an ally into a potential enemy. From the 1860s Japan had been transforming itself into a modern power. The Prussians had trained and armed its army and the British its navy, with all its warships being built in British dockyards until the Japanese were taught to design and build their own. The Anglo-Japanese naval treaty, the key to the friendship, came up for renewal in 1922, by which time the Lloyd George coalition was in disarray and had other things to think about. Instead of renewing it, Britain agreed, under pressure from America, which was strongly anti-Japanese, to substitute an international agreement known as the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty. This laid down a 5:5:3 ratio of capital ships for Britain, the United States, and Japan. The Japanese considered this a condescending insult and never forgave Britain for agreeing to it. There were other irksome provisions—an upper limit of thirty-five thousand tons for capital ships and what the Americans called a “naval holiday.” Japan turned nasty and insisted, as part of the agreement, that Britain build no naval bases north of Singapore or west of Hawaii.

Why Churchill did not protest against this antagonism of Japan and the drastic weakening of Britain’s naval position in the Pacific, which was to have appalling consequences in 1941-42, is a complete mystery. At this stage of his life he seems to have been completely blind to any danger from Japan. On December 15, 1924, flush with his new office as chancellor and determined on economy, he wrote a letter to Baldwin which used long arguments backed by statistics to show there was no need at all to consider a possible war with Japan:

Churchill’s blindness to the power and intentions of the Japanese extended to the vulnerability of the new base being built in Singapore. Though he frustrated the Labour plan to scrap it altogether, he believed it could be defended mainly by airpower, and it never seems to have occurred to him that the Japanese army could overwhelm it by land, sweeping through Malaya. When this happened, of course, he blamed himself—he never shrank from accepting responsibility when it was just—but it must be admitted he was a prime author of the British debacle in the Far East in 1941-42.

Nevertheless, the twenties were a splendid period in Churchill’s life. Baldwin, constantly full of his praise in his letters to the king, called him “the star of the government.” The press formed the habit of describing him as “the Smiling Chancellor.” His budgets became the “great events of the parliamentary year” (the
Times
). He seemed to Lord Winterton, MP, hitherto a sharp critic, “a man transformed . . . head and shoulders above anyone else in the House (not excluding Lloyd George) . . . he has suddenly acquired, quite late in Parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humour and banter on almost all occasions; no one used to ‘suffer fools un-gladly’ more than Winston, now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally.”

Everyone tried to have a good time in the twenties. Few succeeded as well as Churchill. He loved bricklaying and excavating, and Chartwell daily grew more beautiful (in his eyes) and “comfy.” He painted with increasing skill, having received much detailed advice from the modern master Walter Sickert (who wrote it down and it is well worth reading). He was energetic in play. He kept up his polo until 1927, when he was fifty-three. He hunted, especially wild boar, on the estate his friend Bendor, Duke of Westminster, kept for this purpose in southwest France. He drove a fast motorcar until, in 1925, Clemmie insisted he leave it to the chauffeur. He wrote when possible, completing his Great War volumes and starting work on a grandiose life of his ancestor Marlborough. Bracken arranged highly lucrative contracts. The Churchills lived grandly—he probably consumed more bottles of champagne in the twenties than in any other decade of his life, and there is a vignette of him enjoying 1863 brandy. He had plenty of secretarial help, research assistants and young history dons to advise him. He earned, he spent: it was his philosophy of wealth which he set down in the twenties:

He called for “a premium on effort” and “a penalty on inertia,” and he certainly practiced what he preached.

Despite his performance as chancellor, however, the country gave thumbs-down to Baldwin at the general election in 1929. The Tories got more votes than Labour but MacDonald secured the largest number of seats and formed a new government. Ousted, Churchill at once turned to the business of making money on a large scale. In the stock exchange boom of the late twenties he had been prevented from speculating by his position. Now he set to. In America to give highly paid lectures and to write for American magazines, he wrote joyfully to his wife on September 20, 1929, from California that “very great and extraordinary good fortune” had attended him on the stock exchange, thanks to the advice of Sir Harry McGowan, chairman of Imperial Chemicals, whom he had got elected to the Other Club and who, in return, was looking after his money. He instructed Clemmie to embark on plans for large-scale entertainment in London of “colleagues and MPs and a few business people who are of importance.” He had earned nearly £ 20,000 since he last wrote:

A month later all had gone with the wind as the great Wall Street crash reverberated through the skyscraper canyons. He was present to hear a dinner host address a table full of top businessmen with the words “Friends and
former
millionaires.” He added: “Under my window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces.” McGowan had been investing his funds “on margin” (something Churchill did not understand), so he not only lost all his money but had to buy himself out of the mess. He considered selling Chartwell, but it was “a bad time.” Instead he redoubled his writing output, negotiating fresh contracts and lecture tours. His earnings rose to over £40,000 a year, an immense income in those days. But his confidence had been shaken, and in his bruised condition he began to make political mistakes again.

First he resigned his seat on the Conservative front bench. The issue was India. True, both the new Labour government, plus Baldwin and most of his colleagues, supported by the report of the Simon Commission and the liberal viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), were united in backing a gradual progression to self-rule. Churchill rejected this totally and got himself into a die-hard position. He fought a campaign, making speeches all over the country, associating with the extreme right-wing of the Tories, and moving closer than ever before to the press barons, especially Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who controlled the
Daily Mail
group. Churchill had not been back to India since 1899. He had only met Gandhi, who now led the resistance movement, once, when undersecretary to the colonies, and mistaking his significance dismissed him as “a half-naked fakir,” a phrase which stuck, to his own discredit. His speeches were notably less impressive than those he made as chancellor. Worse, his activities were seen as part of a move to replace Baldwin, in which the press barons enthusiastically joined. This was a huge mistake, for the drive to get rid of him gave “the old turnip lanthorn,” as Churchill called him, a new lease on life, and he made some of the best speeches in his career, slaughtering the press lords and putting Churchill right out into the cold. In August 1931 the Labour government collapsed and MacDonald formed a national coalition with Baldwin as number two but the real power, as most of its huge majority were his Tory followers. Churchill was away and does not seem to have been even considered for office. The coalition went to the country and was returned with a vast majority, Labour being reduced to a mere fifty-two seats. Churchill found his majority doubled but he seems, for the moment, to have been without direction in politics, obsessed with the need to make money. So he returned to America to lecture and write.

On December 13, 1931, crossing Fifth Avenue in the dark, he looked the wrong way, as in England, and a fast car, coming from the opposite direction, knocked him down. He was badly damaged on the head, thigh, and ribs, and in terrible pain. But he remained conscious and when a policeman asked what had happened insisted it was entirely his own fault. He was in fact lucky to be alive. A taxi took him to hospital, and he was a long time recovering. He was very down. He told Clemmie: “I have now in the last two years had three very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the Crash. Then the loss of my political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible physical injury.” He was afraid he would never recover from these blows. In fact he began the process while still in hospital by dictating a moving and thoughtful article about his accident:

He got for this article £600 for world rights, the largest sum he had ever received for a single piece. It was printed everywhere. Then he went back to the fray, shaken but calm, to live more dangerously than ever before, but to fear even less.

The Unregarded Prophet

N
ow began the hardest, harshest period of Churchill’s life. He was lucky to have a safe seat where he was active, was much loved, and had many faithful friends. Otherwise he might have been extinguished as a politician and become instead a professional writer, for which he had reliable talents. He was lucky to have an adoring (but wise and sometimes critical) wife and a growing family of children who were his warmest supporters. Lucky to have Chartwell, a burgeoning personal paradise where he could lick his many, and often serious, wounds. Lucky to have his art, doing more paintings in this decade (250 out of the 500 that have survived) than in any other. Lucky, above all, that events suddenly gave him a clear vision of what was happening in the world, and what would happen unless he prevented it by his amazing gifts and energies.

The picture cleared early in 1933, when Adolf Hitler captured power in Germany and immediately set about his own plan to destroy Versailles and make Germany the strongest power in Europe, and eventually the world. Churchill had read
Mein Kampf
and believed it represented Hitler’s plain intentions. So did Hitler. “My programme from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles . . . I have written it thousands of times. No human being has ever declared or recorded what he wanted more often than me.” There was no British response to Hitler’s arrival in power. Churchill had already pointed out that the Germans had been breaking the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, which forbade the creation of a large army, for some time, by buying heavy weapons from the Soviet Union. Hitler merely accelerated the process. Few people had read
Mein Kampf;
fewer still believed it. In government circles Hitler was seen as a deluded adventurer who would soon be discarded. The mood of the country was highlighted by a provocative debate at the Oxford Union, in which the undergraduates voted 275-153 for the motion “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.” Churchill called “that abject, squalid, shameless avowal . . . a very disquieting and disgusting symptom.” His son, Randolph, now grown up, noisy and attention seeking, often in ways which caused his father acute embarrassment, made a much-publicized attempt to tear the record of the debate out of the Union’s book of minutes. Later, Churchill himself calmed down and said, “When it comes to the crunch [a word he invented in this sense] those young men will fight just as their fathers did”—as indeed happened in 1939-45. The future Lord Longford, then a young man, provided a vignette of Churchill in autumn 1935, entertaining young people to lunch at Chartwell. He had spent the morning writing and laying bricks (he told Baldwin he could do two hundred bricks and two thousand words in a day) and was grumpy at first. “But as the wine flowed his eloquence expanded and for three hours the small company were treated to a harangue I have never heard equalled.” The theme was German rearmament, and “somewhere around four o’clock, whiskey and sodas were called for and . . . I was emboldened to ask him, ‘If the Germans are already as strong as you say, what could we do if they landed here?’ ‘That should not prove an insoluble conundrum. We are here five able-bodied men. The armoury at our disposal is not perhaps very modern, but none of us would be without a weapon. We should sally forth. I should venture to assume the responsibilities of command. If the worst came to the worst, we should sell our lives dearly. Whatever the outcome, I feel confident we should render a good account of ourselves.’ ”