Winston Churchill
(1874-1965) is a deservedly revered British national hero and this year has
seen the 50th anniversary of his passing. This eminence is mainly
attributable to his masterly leadership during most of WW2 and his dedication
to the broader Allied cause. Before the heroics of 1940, he already was a very
experienced British statesman and a celebrated writer. His great merits of
imagination, dynamism, patriotism and inspiration have been extensively
chronicled and his fame resonates down the generations. Yet like any human he
had his oddities and faults; it is upon those blind-spots that this piece will
focus.
Although he was born into the aristocratic world, as the son
of a younger son of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill was unlucky in his
parents. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he posthumously worshipped
politically, was a very cold fish giving his rather slow son Winston neither
encouragement nor attention and he died prematurely. His mother, American
Jennie Jerome, was equally neglectful, though she often indulged in brief
flurries of concern. She lacked maternal feeling and lived a self-centred and
promiscuous life. It is not surprising that Winston suffered psychologically
from this lack of a warmly loving home and compensated by developing an often
obstreperous and egotistical persona, only
imperfectly suppressed by the necessities of political compromise.
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| Cold Father Randolph |
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| Neglectful Mother Jennie |
A poor student at Harrow, Winston did a little better at
Sandhurst but really blossomed intellectually in his regimental years in India.
He read widely, loved polo and had a taste for any adventure. His pushy
personality and the help of his mother’s connections enabled him to witness
action in the North-West Frontier and then to participate in the campaign of
Kitchener against the Mahdi in Sudan culminating in the bloody 1898 Battle of
Omdurman. Winston was part Army officer and part London newspaper
correspondent, an anomalous arrangement of which the Army disapproved. His
despatches gained him some celebrity. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he
rushed to South Africa as a correspondent, was captured but escaped
(tendentious allegations that he had broken parole and deserted fellow-escapers
pursued him for some years). On his return to jingoist England he was hailed as
a hero and soon entered Parliament in 1901 as a Tory.
In time he disagreed with the Tory policy of tariff reform
promulgated by Joseph Chamberlain from his political redoubt in Birmingham.
Winston crossed the floor to join the Liberals as a free-trader in 1904 just in
time to benefit from the minority Campbell-Bannerman Liberal ministry of 1905
and the Liberal electoral landslide of 1906. He castigated Tory policies in a
memorable oration:
Corruption at home,
aggression abroad, sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the Imperial pint,
the open hand at the public Exchequer and the open door at the public-house,
dear food for the millions, cheap labour for the millionaires. That is the
policy of Birmingham and we are going to erect against the policy of Birmingham
the policy of Manchester.
Winston’s rise in the Asquith ministry of 1908-15 was
remarkable, moving from Colonial Under-Secretary to the Cabinet as President of
the Board of Trade, to Home Secretary to First Lord of the Admiralty. It was a
brilliant reforming ministry and Winston worked happily with Asquith himself, Lloyd
George, Grey, Morley, Haldane and McKenna – all men of high ability. They
looked upon Winston as a phenomenon, brimming with ideas, energy, extraordinary
diction and self-confidence. His judgment was not always true; he allowed his
love of self-advertisement to send him in person to interfere with the
anarchist shoot-out known as the Siege of Sidney Street: he was a little too
quick to send troops to Tonypandy to suppress rioting Welsh miners and he was
too indulgent of erratic Admiral Jacky Fisher, whom he made First Sea Lord, efficiently
building Dreadnoughts but the cause of dire confusion later at the Dardanelles.
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| Clementine, the chosen wife |
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| Violet, the better choice |
I reckon his judgment was again at fault when he married
Clementine Hozier in 1908. Clemmie was pretty and of liberal views but was in
no way a fellow-spirit. His second choice at that time would have been Asquith’s
daughter Violet, later the formidable Liberal leader Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
Violet was madly in love with Winston to whom he made his splendid remark “We are all worms; but I do believe that I am a glow-worm!” Violet
understood and lived politics. Clemmie curiously was often apart from Winston
at key moments in his career – notionally on holiday, taking the waters but
anyhow “away” – but Violet would have seldom left his side. When Winston told
her of his engagement to Clemmie, Violet was stunned and later staged a drama
by disappearing on the cliffs beside Slains Castle at Cruden Bay in
Aberdeenshire, which her father had rented for the summer. It was Violet’s sad cry
for help; she would have been a much better choice. They remained close friends
and Violet was one of Winston’s last visitors on his 1965 death-bed.
Winston was ill-suited to being a champion of the working
class. He had no fellow-feeling with the common people and he had no talent for
small talk or for the indignities of campaigning, kissing babies or
glad-handing supporters. He knew nothing of poverty or deprivation. He never travelled
other than first-class, or ever take the bus - he usually had a chauffeur to
hand. He would write about the working man in his “cottage home” in terms that
were excruciatingly patronising. The bar he used to define poverty personally
was set rather high, observing to Violet “I
always had to earn every penny I possessed, but there has never been a day in
my life when I could not order a bottle of champagne for myself and offer
another to a friend.” He took his predilection for champagne too far when
he tried as Chancellor of the Exchequer to settle the miners’ strike in 1926.
He invited the TUC and the miners’ leaders to champagne and oysters at the Savoy,
but the main protagonists declined – Wilson’s “tea and sandwiches at No 10” at
least a generation later would have been more to their taste!
This lack of the common touch, so necessary to our
politicians, made it unsurprising that Winston did not win elections easily.
The voters were dazzled but seldom entirely convinced. Churchill simply inhabited
a different universe from their own. So Winston lost elections in Oldham,
Manchester, Dundee (to a Prohibitionist, no less!) before finding his Woodford
haven, while he led his party to a famous rout at the hands of Labour in 1945.
On the great issues of the day Winston had some major
setbacks. He foolishly sought to leave the Admiralty and to lead a defence of
Antwerp in 1914. He was blamed for the failure of the Dardanelles campaign of
1915-16, an imaginative exercise designed to neutralise Turkey, open a lifeline
to struggling Russia and rally the Balkans to the Allied cause. In truth the
Navy failed to press its initial advantage and the Army was fatally slow to enter
the field; gallant men and the military reputation of Churchill died on the
shores of Gallipoli.
He bounced back eventually and did solid work on the
creation of the Irish Free State. His term as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer was
marred by his agreement to return to the Gold Standard at the 1914 rate, though
in fairness he was the only major politician to question the logic of this
fateful decision. All establishment opinion favoured this move, but the
destruction of the coal exporting trade, serious difficulties for the cotton
industry and general recession were too high a price to pay.
In the 1930’s Winston’s stock was low as his reactionary
views on India were out of step with the majority and his misconceived support
for worthless Edward VIII alienated his friends. His judgment was seriously
questioned and his Cassandra-like warnings about resurgent Germany were at
first not much credited. Both Baldwin and Chamberlain were by contrast highly
respected at the time.
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| Winston Churchill: still honoured 50 years on |
Yet, thank goodness, he was there when the country faced
fatal perils from 1939-45. He was a single-minded war leader, no doubt making
strategic errors but basically running the war with the chiefs of staff and Britain’s
allies, maintaining morale and achieving victory after many trials. Whatever
his faults, he became the undisputed Saviour of the Nation and he deserves
every possible praise.
SMD
14.04.15
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015
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