Winston Churchill: Politics, Strategy and Statecraft 9781474263849, 9781474263856, 9781474263887, 9781474263870

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
2 Churchill: The Young Statesman, 1901–14
3 Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, 23 October 1911 to 24 May 1915
4 Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–9) and the Return to the Gold Standard
5 Churchill and Labour
6 Churchill and the General Strike
7 Churchill and the Conservative Party
8 Churchill and Women
9 Churchill and the Empire
10 Churchill and the Islamic World
11 Churchill and Airpower
12 Churchill as Strategist in the Second World War
13 Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’
14 Churchill and Nuclear Weapons
15 Churchill and the Cold War
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill Politics, Strategy and Statecraft Edited by Richard Toye

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Richard Toye and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6384-9 PB: 978-1-4742-6385-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6387-0 ePub: 978-1-4742-6386-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Toye, Richard, 1973- editor. Title: Winston Churchill : politics, strategy and statecraft / edited by Richard Toye. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016024954 (print) | LCCN 2016030178 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474263849 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474263856 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474263870 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474263863 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965. | Great Britain – Politics and government--20th century. | Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965 – Influence. | Prime ministers – Great Britain – Biography. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | HISTORY / Military / General. Classification: LCC DA566.9.C5 W515 2017 (print) | LCC DA566.9.C5 (ebook) | DDC 941.084092 [B] – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024954 Cover design: Clare Turner Cover image: A portrait of Winston Churchill. Photo by Popperfoto / Getty Images Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors  vii

1 Introduction  1 Richard Toye 2

Churchill: The Young Statesman, 1901–14  13 David Thackeray

3 Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, 23 October 1911 to 24 May 1915  23 Martin Thornton 4 Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–9) and the Return to the Gold Standard  35 Peter Catterall 5 Churchill and Labour  49 Chris Wrigley 6 Churchill and the General Strike  59 Peter Catterall 7 Churchill and the Conservative Party  75 Stuart Ball 8

Churchill and Women  93 Paul Addison

vi

CONTENTS

9 Churchill and the Empire  105 Richard Toye 10 Churchill and the Islamic World  113 Warren Dockter 11 Churchill and Airpower  127 Richard Overy 12 Churchill as Strategist in the Second World War  139 Jeremy Black 13 Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’  153 David B.Woolner 14 Churchill and Nuclear Weapons  171 Kevin Ruane 15 Churchill and the Cold War  187 Kevin Ruane Select Bibliography   205 Index  211

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Addison is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh, where he taught history from 1967 to 2005. He was a research assistant to Randolph Churchill on the official biography of Churchill and subsequently the author of Churchill on the Home Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) and Churchill the Unexpected Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Amongst his other publications are The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975) and No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Postwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). He was the co-founder of the Centre for Second World War Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and its director from 1996 to 2005. Stuart Ball is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester. He has written a short biography of Churchill, Winston Churchill (London: British Library, 2003), and has published extensively on the history of the Conservative Party in the twentieth century. His most recent books are Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India 1926–1931 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). He has also edited the political diaries of Sir Cuthbert Headlam (two volumes, 1992 and 1999), and, with Anthony Seldon, Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), The Heath Government 1970–1974: A Reappraisal (Harlow: Longman, 1996) and Recovering Power: The Conservatives in Opposition since 1867 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Jeremy Black holds the Established Chair in History at the University of Exeter. He was previously Professor of History at Durham. His books include Rethinking World War Two (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) and The British Seaborne Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). He holds an MBE for services to stamp design. Peter Catterall is Reader in History at the University of Westminster. The founding editor of National Identities, he also teaches democracy and public policy for the Hansard Society and serves on the academic board of the Centre for Opposition Studies. He has published extensively on twentiethcentury British history, most recently as editor of The Macmillan Diaries: Prime Minister and After, 1957–1966 (London: Macmillan, 2011).

viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Warren Dockter is Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. A graduate of the University of Tennessee, he gained his PhD at the University of Nottingham and has taught at the University of Exeter and the University of Worcester, UK. He is the author of Winston Churchill and the Islamic World: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East. His research interest lies in British imperialism in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encapsulating orientalism and transnational historical approaches. Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has written more than twenty-five books on the air war, the Second World War and the European dictatorships, including The Air War 1939–1945 (3rd ed., 2007), Why the Allies Won (2nd ed., 2006) and The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization between the Wars (2009). He won the Wolfson Prize for History in 2005 for his book The Dictators and won a Cundill Award for Historical Literature for his book The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 in 2014. He is currently writing a history of the Second World War. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the European Academy for Sciences and Arts and is Chair of the RAF Museum Research Board. Kevin Ruane is Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His doctoral research was concerned with Churchill’s peacetime administration, 1951–5, and he has gone on to publish widely on post-war international history. An expert in Cold War history, his books include The Rise and Fall of the European Defence Community (2000) and The Vietnam Wars (also 2000). His latest book, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. David Thackeray is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. He studied for his PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has previously worked at The Queen’s College, Oxford. A book based on his PhD thesis, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century Britain, was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. His new project seeks to understand how perceptions of Britain’s overseas markets have changed over the last century. Martin Thornton was for many years Senior Lecturer in International History and Politics in the School of History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Sir Robert Borden: Canada (London: Haus, 2010) in the series Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–23 and Their Aftermath; and also Times of Heroism, Times of Terror: American Presidents and Foreign Policy during the Cold War, 1945–1991 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005). He has written a book on Churchill, Borden and AngloCanadian Naval Relations, 1911–14 (London: Palgrave, 2013) and articles on Churchill, including ‘Lester Pearson, the Commonwealth and Winston

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

Churchill’s Fulton Missouri Speech of 5 March 1946’, Journal of American and Canadian Studies, no. 16 (1998). Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. He previously worked at the universities of Manchester and Cambridge. He has published widely on Churchill. His books include Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007), Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2010) and The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (2013). His other interests include the history of economic policy, the United Nations and the writings of H. G. Wells. David B. Woolner is Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Associate Professor of History at Marist College and Senior Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, where he is also a member of the faculty of the Bard Prison Initiative. He is co-editor of four books: Progressivism in America: Past Present and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016); FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies (Palgrave, 2008); FDR and the Environment (Palgrave, 2005); and FDR, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933–1945 (Palgrave, 2003). He is also the editor of The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace; Canada, Great Britain and the United States in 1944–1945 (Palgrave/St Martin’s Press, 1998). He serves on the Editorial Board of the International History Review and has held the Archives Bi-Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge (2007), the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands (2010) and was awarded the first Roosevelt Fellowship in Middelburg’s University College Roosevelt (2016). From 2000 to 2010, Dr Woolner served as the Roosevelt Institute’s Executive Director, overseeing a significant expansion of the organization’s budget, programmatic dimension and staff. He earned his PhD and MA in history from McGill University and a BA summa cum laude in English Literature and history from the University of Minnesota. Chris Wrigley is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at Nottingham University. He is the author of many books, including three on David Lloyd George, two on Churchill (Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion, Santa Barbara/Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2002, and Churchill, London: Haus, 2006), one on Arthur Henderson and several on the history of British industrial relations. He was President of the Historical Association (1996–9), Vice President of the Royal Historical Society (1997–2001) and both Chair (1997–2001) and Vice President (2012–) of the Society for the Study of Labour History. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of East Anglia in 1998.

1 Introduction Richard Toye University of Exeter

More than fifty years after his death, Winston Churchill remains a world-renowned figure. He is widely celebrated for his battle against the appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s and for his subsequent contribution, as prime minister, to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Yet in spite of his continuing fame, few people are aware of the full range of his achievements or, indeed, the many controversial aspects of his career, which included a number of spectacular political and military failures. Facts that are well known to historians and which were vitally important to Churchill’s personal and political development fail to penetrate popular awareness, which is heavily influenced by media treatments that focus on a narrow range of themes. For example, many people today would be surprised to learn of Churchill’s dramatic escape from a South African prison camp in 1900, even though that was the episode that first made him a global celebrity and helped set him on the road to election to the House of Commons. The sheer length and variety of Churchill’s career make it hard to get to grips with its full complexity. He first fought a parliamentary election (unsuccessfully) in 1899 and only finally stood down as an MP sixty-five years later. In the meantime he had not only served two spells in Downing Street but held a range of other important offices, including Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. His interests ranged across imperial and foreign policy, and yet he also forged a significant but often neglected record as one of the godfathers of the welfare state. His involvement at the centre of British decision-making in two world wars gave him a crucial influence over military affairs as well as political ones. He was, moreover, a prolific author and journalist whose own writings have proved very influential in terms of the way that he is remembered today. When trying to understand Churchill,

2

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

then, we need to remember that much of the relevant evidence was shaped by himself, very often with at least one eye on posterity. This book’s purpose is to provide a short, accessible and analytical introduction to key themes in Churchill’s life. Written by leading experts, the chapters are based on documents from Churchill’s extensive personal papers and reflect cutting-edge scholarship based on the authors’ wide knowledge of both the man and the period. Ranging from Churchill’s youthful statesmanship to the period of the Cold War, the volume considers his military and geopolitical strategy and also examines the social, constitutional and economic issues that helped define the Churchillian era. It does not provide a mere recitation of biographical facts; the judgements offered are based on the notion that Churchill cannot be understood exclusively in his own terms, but he must rather be assessed in the light of the political and cultural environment in which he operated. The biographical facts are, nonetheless, important. Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Blenheim was the seat of the Marlborough family; Winston Churchill was the grandson of the seventh duke and hence also the descendant of the first duke, John Churchill, an illustrious military hero of whom he published a lengthy biography in the 1930s. Yet although the circumstances of Winston’s birth and upbringing were enormously privileged, he could not rely on inherited wealth. He was the son of Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, the former a rising Conservative politician, the latter (née Jennie Jerome) an American heiress. Both were enormously profligate, and because their son followed their example, he was for much of his life obliged to fund his extravagant lifestyle through literary earnings. Having reached the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph committed political suicide through an ill-advised resignation and never again held office. He died young, when Winston was not yet twenty-one. The two had never been close, but Winston was influenced by Lord Randolph’s concept of ‘Tory Democracy’ and also acted as his biographer. The extent to which his parents neglected him is a matter of debate, but it is clear that he did not have a particularly happy childhood. He was, however, very close to his nurse, Elizabeth Everest, and his relationship with his mother improved as he reached maturity. Having a wide range of high-level contacts, Lady Randolph’s help was valuable to him as he strived to make his way in journalism, literature and politics. Having first attended two different private preparatory schools, Churchill was educated at Harrow, an elite institution with a strong imperial ethos. (The headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon, recalled that he had birched Churchill ‘more frequently than any other boy, but with little effect’.)1 The Classics were an important part of the curriculum, and Churchill struggled with them, but he did do well at English and also developed a powerful memory. He did not attend university but instead joined the army, training for a year at the Military Academy at Sandhurst. Having first made a private

INTRODUCTION

3

expedition to Cuba, which he wrote up in articles for the Daily Graphic, he shipped out to India as part of a cavalry regiment. Dissatisfied with the state of his learning, he embarked on an intensive phase of self-education, reading a wide range of works including those of the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward Gibbon, both of whom influenced his literary style. He also gave considerable thought to the art of rhetoric. Furthermore, he underwent a crisis of religious faith, from which he emerged without conventional Christian convictions but with a strong belief in Providence and a powerful sense of personal destiny. Thus, he was strongly affected by the morals and assumptions of the Victorian age in which he grew up but was never wholly defined by it. The young Churchill was clever, self-centred and, in many people’s eyes, less than wholly charming. But he could not and would not be ignored. Bored of the regimental routine and desperate to see action, he used his acquaintance with General Sir Bindon Blood to secure a place on the latter’s expedition to put down a rebellion on the Indian North-West Frontier. This resulted in Churchill’s first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). He subsequently pulled more strings and took part in Britain’s reconquest of the Sudan, the story of which he told in The River War (1899). He then left the army and made his first, failed attempt to enter the Commons, as a Conservative candidate at a by-election in Oldham. When war broke out between the British and the Boers, he made his way to see the action in South Africa as a highly paid correspondent for the Morning Post. When the armoured train on which he was travelling was ambushed, he acted with great bravery and distinction but fell into captivity. Then came his spectacular escape from prison in Pretoria, his return to British territory and his sudden worldwide fame. After a short further spell at war, during which he temporarily rejoined the army, he returned to England and was perfectly placed to win the Oldham seat at the general election of 1900. Churchill was not content simply to take his place as a loyal government backbencher. Up until this point, his political views had fallen within the Conservative mainstream, albeit he showed occasional Liberal sympathies. Now, though, he took on the role of gadfly, challenging his party’s leaders over the issue of army reform. Following in his father’s footsteps, he urged the need to economize on defence, a position which for him may seem surprising but which he maintained until a few years before the First World War. More seriously, he fell out with his party over the issue of free trade, to which he was strongly committed, and crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Liberals in 1904. He was also obliged to find a new seat (Manchester North-West), which he won easily during the Liberal landslide of 1906, but which he did not retain for long. He did, however, secure office, first at a junior level (at the Colonial Office) and as a member of the Cabinet not long after. It was in his position as President of the Board of Trade that he made his first contributions to the cause of social reform, in alliance with his radical colleague David Lloyd George. His Conservative

4

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

enemies branded him a class warrior. He continued to court controversy, for example when, as Home Secretary, he took personal charge of the police operation against an anarchist cell during the 1911 ‘Siege of Sidney Street’. That same year, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty (i.e. minister in charge of the navy). In that position he became a strong advocate of national defence against the growing German threat and fought successfully to maintain his department’s budget. When war broke out in 1914, Churchill, who had an instinct for war and aggression, might well have been expected to succeed brilliantly. Instead, he met with personal and political calamity. His name will forever be associated with the attempt to force the Dardanelle Straits, first using ships alone and then, when that had failed, via armed landings on the Gallipoli peninsula. This was a bold effort to change the course of the war by defeating Turkey, Germany’s ally; but it was a catastrophic failure. Many others were involved in the decision-making too, but Churchill did bear a heavy responsibility. The disaster was not, however, the direct cause of the major political setback that he met in May 1915. Rather, he fell out with the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, over an apparently trivial aspect of the operations. Fisher’s resignation triggered a political crisis which led to the fall of the Liberal government and its replacement by a cross-party coalition. The Conservatives were able to insist on Churchill’s demotion as the price of their participation, and a few months later he stood down as a minister altogether. He was devastated by what had happened to him, although he did derive some psychological comfort from a new hobby, painting, which became a lifelong habit. After resigning, Churchill took up a military command on the Western Front. He served bravely but hankered to return to politics and took an early opportunity to do so. When Lloyd George became prime minister at the head of a new coalition at the end of 1916 Churchill was excluded, but not long after he was appointed minister of munitions. His comeback continued after the 1918 Armistice when he was appointed secretary of state for war and air; in 1921 he became secretary of state for the colonies. These roles involved him in some of the greatest controversies of his career. He became a strong advocate of British military support of the ‘White’ or anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. He was involved in ruthless actions against rebellions in Ireland and Iraq. He also played a key part in deciding the boundaries of the modern Middle East, with results that remain problematic to this day. On the other hand, he also helped negotiate the eventual Irish peace settlement; he strongly denounced the notorious Amritsar massacre of 1919; and, with respect to the Middle East, he was guided by the advice of supposed experts rather than by mere personal whim. He did, however, remain an impulsive figure whose judgements were often highly questionable. This could be seen during the so-called Chanak Crisis of 1922 – when there was a risk of a new war with Turkey – which brought about the fall of the Lloyd George coalition. In the general

INTRODUCTION

5

election that followed, Churchill lost his Dundee seat to an anti-alcohol candidate. The following years saw the publication of The World Crisis (1923– 31), Churchill’s multivolume account of the First World War. They also witnessed Churchill’s transition back to the Conservatives. With the Labour Party growing in strength, he took the view that the Liberal Party was now an irrelevance and that anti-socialists should join together under the Tory banner. At the general election of 1924, he returned to the Commons as a supporter of the Conservatives and was surprised and delighted when the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, invited him to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. He served five years in that position, and once more his actions proved contentious. In 1925 he took the decision – following the conventional wisdom of the time – to return the pound to the Gold Standard (a fixed exchange-rate mechanism), a choice that has often been blamed for making unemployment worse. A further issue was the following year’s General Strike. Churchill, in charge of the government-run anti-strike newspaper The British Gazette, engaged in bellicose rhetoric. From the point of view of him and his colleagues, however, the strike’s swift collapse meant the defeat of a revolutionary conspiracy against the British constitution. It should also be observed that Churchill did maintain his interest in social reform during this period, collaborating with Neville Chamberlain (as minister of health) on the extension of pension provision. The Conservatives’ loss of the 1929 election to Labour marked the beginning of Churchill’s so-called ‘wilderness years’. He became more and more dissatisfied with Baldwin’s leadership, in particular over the issue of India, where Churchill opposed any extension of self-government. He may have had some thought of becoming party leader himself. Eventually he resigned from the Shadow Cabinet. This meant that, when the crossparty ‘National Government’ was formed in August 1931, it was easy for his enemies to exclude him from ministerial office. He spent much of the first part of the decade campaigning, unsuccessfully, against what became the Government of India Act (1935). He was also, however, increasingly concerned with the threat posed by Nazi Germany and worked tirelessly for greater rearmament and against the government’s policy of Appeasement. He continued to make mistakes, for example his support for Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis. Even though his attitudes were not always consistent and his behaviour was sometimes erratic, he was certainly courageous and his isolation worked, in the long run, to his advantage. By the time that Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Churchill could no longer be ignored. Chamberlain, as prime minister, had little option but to appoint him to the War Cabinet, in his old position at the Admiralty. His determination to prosecute the war aggressively was obvious and helped establish him in the public mind as a potential alternative to Chamberlain. Ironically, Churchill himself bore a great deal of responsibility for the calamitous Norwegian campaign that brought about Chamberlain’s

6

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

political downfall in May 1940. Nevertheless, when the other leading candidate, Lord Halifax, ruled himself out, it was inevitable that Churchill would become prime minister, at the head of a wide-ranging coalition government. What was less clear was how long he would last. Britain faced a long series of defeats and Churchill, who was still distrusted by many, could only count on true political security during the latter part of the war, from the triumph at El Alamein onwards. And even then, his domestic critics were by no means silent. Churchill entered Downing Street just as German forces began sweeping through France and the Low Countries, carrying all before them. During late May – before it was clear that the British evacuation at Dunkirk would be successful – he fought skilfully within the War Cabinet to reject Halifax’s arguments for exploring the possibility of making peace. Arguably, this decision to fight on was the most important one he took as war leader. In addition to sheer determination, he brought many other skills and character traits to the job. He was energetic, in spite of his age and progressively failing health. He could be harsh with his subordinates, but was normally forgiving of human frailty. His ready humour helped keep up people’s spirits. He was also, of course, a superb orator, whose speeches and broadcasts made an important contribution to national morale. He had been honing his command of the English language for decades. He alternated homely wit and inspiring phrases, to remarkable effect. Perhaps most crucially he never offered false comfort. Although people desperately wanted the war to be over quickly, Churchill consistently emphasized that the road to victory would be long and hard. At the same time, even in the darkest days, he offered hope by making clear that triumph would come eventually. He was able to draw both on his extensive knowledge of history and his experience during the First World War in order to better help his listeners understand the frightening situation that Britain faced. Nonetheless, many myths have grown up around Churchill’s speeches. For example, many people believe that they can recall hearing Churchill deliver his famous ‘fight on the beaches speech’ on the wireless on 4 June 1940. Yet although he had given the speech in the Commons that day he did not (by contrast with some subsequent speeches) repeat it over the airwaves later. Rather, a BBC announcer read out sections of it on the evening news. Churchill did not record it for posterity until nine years later. Nor is it true that, as is widely believed, an actor delivered Churchill’s radio speeches for him. Furthermore, whilst it is certainly true that very large numbers of people were invigorated, energized and galvanized by the broadcasters, it is also the case that the speeches attracted more adverse criticism at the time than is popularly supposed, in spite of Churchill’s undoubted personal popularity. To put it another way, the range of responses was much wider than is generally imagined. It varied from speech to speech and often from region to region. Sometimes people were depressed by Churchill’s words rather than inspired – this was hardly surprising when he conveyed bad

INTRODUCTION

7

news – but this does not imply that he had thereby failed as an orator. Rather, when we appreciate both the diverse nature of his audience and the repeated military failures that he was required to explain, we can better understand the complexity of the rhetorical challenges he faced. It is impossible to think of another individual who would have been able to handle them better. It must be remembered also that Churchill’s speeches were not only aimed at people within the United Kingdom and the British Empire. They were also targeted, in particular, at the United States, which remained neutral for the first two years of the war. Churchill realized from the first that the war could not be won without America’s involvement but that if she were recruited as an ally ultimate success was assured. In addition to his subtly crafted public statements, Churchill spent enormous effort cultivating his relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In August 1941 – two months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union – they met on board a ship off the coast of Newfoundland. Although this summit meeting did not result in an American declaration of war, it did produce the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of aims for the post-war world. After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war that same December, Churchill worked hard to cement the Anglo-American alliance and to ensure that it served British strategic aims. Historians have puzzled over whether or not the Churchill–Roosevelt friendship was genuine but that is perhaps beside the point. At the very least, both of them realized that the appearance of intimacy was crucial to the public image of cooperation that they wanted to project. At the same time it is clear that Roosevelt never allowed sentiment to get in the way of America’s best interests, as he saw them. For Churchill, as the leader of a country that was being relegated to secondary status behind the two superpowers, personal charm was one of the most important weapons left in his diplomatic armoury. The outcome of the war was brought about by numerous factors, including economic ones, and the Allied victory cannot be attributed solely to the actions of one individual. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that Churchill made a greater contribution to it than any other single person. That is not to say that everything he did was right. He must take his share of the blame for a number of significant military errors, such as the flawed decision to send troops to Greece in 1941, and for the failure to understand the weakness of the British defences at Singapore, which fell to the Japanese in 1942. He also continued to take a profoundly negative approach to political reform in India, and failed to take sufficiently seriously the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in millions of deaths. At the same time, some of his habits drove his military advisers to distraction. He kept them up late at night, often indulging in what they regarded as rambling irrelevancies, and putting forward plans for action they regarded as hare-brained. As chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke described Churchill in brutal terms: ‘Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again.’2 This has to

8

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

be read in context: Brooke, who undoubtedly admired his prime minister, was writing in the heat of the moment and later admitted he had been too harsh. There were virtues in Churchill’s methods: he tested the top brass, relentlessly forcing them to justify themselves, but when they made a unanimous recommendation he would generally accept it. In this sense, he was actually a more collegial and less bull-headed figure than legend would suggest. Churchill was, however, much less successful as a military strategist than as a geopolitical one. He was skilled at summit diplomacy, and he got the big picture right, on the one hand by tying the Americans into a policy of prioritizing the European war over the one in the Far East, and on the other by recognizing the importance of the Anglo-American alliance. He probably invested too much faith in his personal relationships with Roosevelt and Stalin. For example, he reached agreement with the former over the sharing of nuclear technology, but this was overridden (after the president’s death) when, in the aftermath of the war, Congress passed a law which prevented information about the US atomic programme being disseminated to the British. More broadly, though, it may be said that Churchill generally took a realistic view of Britain’s decline as a great power, and did what he could to mitigate it, at both the rhetorical and the practical levels. He was nonetheless forced into some deeply uncomfortable realpolitik decisions, notably the effective sacrifice of Poland to post-war Soviet domination at the Yalta conference, which has been controversial ever since. One field in which Churchill clearly failed during the war was domestic politics. Although he was by no means opposed to social reform in general, he was unenthusiastic about the 1942 Beveridge Report, which proposed a radical extension of the welfare state, and which was extremely popular with the public. Understandably, he preferred to focus on the war effort rather than on post-war reconstruction, but his rather grudging approach to the issue allowed the initiative to pass to the Labour Party. In spite of his consistently high personal popularity ratings, the Conservatives were heavily defeated in the 1945 general election (which took place after Victory in Europe but before Victory over Japan). His opening broadcast of the campaign included the notorious observation that a Labour government ‘would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance’.3 This has generally been seen as a crass error, and certainly as a political tactic it was misconceived. It should, however, be viewed as part of an intelligible strategy aimed at Liberal, anti-socialist opinion, rather than as a wild aberration. He would revive the memory of his own Liberal past more successfully during subsequent campaigns. As leader of the opposition Churchill was rather lackadaisical, leaving much of the day-to-day work to his heir apparent (and eventual successor), Anthony Eden. He himself spent much time on his war memoirs, which were published in six volumes from 1948 to 1954. He also revelled in his continuing role as an international statesman. Two speeches, both given

INTRODUCTION

9

in 1946, are of particular note. The first, made in Fulton, Missouri, noted the descent of an ‘iron curtain’ cutting off Eastern Europe from the West and called for an Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ to counteract the growing Soviet threat. The second, made in Zurich, called for the formation of a ‘United States of Europe’, thus appearing to foreshadow today’s European Union. It should be noted, however, that Churchill saw the United Kingdom not as a member of this proposed body but rather as one of its sponsors. To him, Britain’s future role would be a product of its pivotal position connecting three overlapping circles: Europe, the English-speaking world and the British Commonwealth and Empire. Simultaneously, he was a strong opponent of the Attlee government’s policy of ‘scuttle’ (as he called it), that is withdrawal from India, Palestine and other areas where Britain was struggling to maintain its imperial dominance. At the 1950 election, the Conservatives succeeded in whittling down the Labour majority to a handful of seats, and at the further election that took place the following year, Churchill returned triumphant to Downing Street. He was, however, diminished by age and ill health. A major stroke in 1953 was disguised from the public with the help of friendly press magnates. Although his recovery was in many ways remarkable, Churchill’s powers were undoubtedly in serious decline. He spent much of his remaining energy on an effort to end the Cold War by securing a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The attempt was doomed and only succeeded in annoying the Americans. This final Churchillian government had some achievements to its credit – notably the successful house-building programme under Harold Macmillan – but they generally occurred without much input from Churchill himself. He stood down as prime minister in April 1955. Having been knighted two years earlier, he declined the Queen’s offer of a dukedom. He remained an MP until 1964, but took little further part in politics. He did, however, publish his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–8), a long-standing project that the Second World War had forced him to put to one side. He died in 1965 and was accorded a state funeral. He was laid to rest in the Churchyard at Bladon, an Oxfordshire village close to his birthplace at Blenheim. It is appropriate to reflect briefly here on Churchill’s personal life. In 1908, after a brief courtship, he married Clementine Hozier. He recalled in his memoir My Early Life (1930) that he ‘lived happily ever afterwards’.4 Things were of course more complex than that. Although the marriage was, overall, undoubtedly a contented one, there were some tensions. In particular, Clementine resented her husband’s purchase of Chartwell, their house in Kent, which was expensive to run and of which she was never fond. Churchill, it must also be said, was not an easy person to live with. Accounts of his tendency towards depression – his so-called ‘black dog’ – have often been exaggerated. Undoubtedly, though, he could be moody and withdrawn and was profoundly egotistical. Often, of course, his low mood was the product of political setbacks and personal crises. His life was

10

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

touched with tragedy. Two of his five children predeceased him: Marigold in infancy in 1921 and Diana by suicide in 1964. Sarah, meanwhile, suffered from alcoholism, and his relationship with his son Randolph was stormy. Churchill did, however, appoint him as his official biographer, although Randolph completed only two volumes prior to his own death in 1968. (This epic work was eventually completed by Martin Gilbert.) Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, had a much happier life and wrote an excellent biography of Clementine. She lived until 2014. Although the official Life (and its accompanying documentary companion volumes) remains an essential starting point for the study of Churchill, there is an enormous amount of additional scholarship that must also be taken into account. There are, of course, a huge number of singlevolume biographies as well as books that trace Churchill’s relationships with other significant individuals, such as Neville Chamberlain, Gandhi and the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. In addition, there are many themed studies, which show how Churchill addressed particular political or strategic issues or how he related to particular countries. Deserving of especial mention are works by, respectively, Robin Prior, John Ramsden and David Reynolds, which analyse the ways in which Churchill endeavoured to shape his own historical reputation.5 All of these various works are based, to a greater or lesser extent, on Churchill’s own papers, which are held at the Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. These run to approximately 800,000 pages of material, and have now been digitized. This collection has now been made freely available to British secondary schools and high schools in the United States. Thus, documents which were once consulted only by a small number of dedicated scholars are now available to a much wider audience. The present book can of course be read simply as an introduction to Churchill himself. However, as the chapters are themselves based directly on the Churchill Papers, they can also be read as an entry point to this astonishing electronic archive. Moreover, the e-book edition of this volume provides links to the original documents to which the text refers. This allows the reader to check if they agree with the interpretation of the sources that is offered. Viewing a copy of the original also offers a deeper insight into history than is possible from reading a simple transcript. In this way Churchill’s life can be made very tangible, even to those born decades after his death. The book engages both with domestic politics and with the broader question of military and diplomatic strategy. David Thackeray considers Churchill as a rising politician in the Edwardian era. Martin Thornton focusses on Churchill’s controversial tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915. Peter Catterall tackles his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, reflecting on both the return to the Gold Standard and the General Strike. Chris Wrigley looks at Churchill’s relationship with the Labour Party and the wider Labour movement. Paul Addison blends personal and political issues in his chapter on Churchill’s attitudes towards women. Richard

INTRODUCTION

11

Toye analyses Churchill’s commitment to the British Empire and how it changed over time. Similarly, Warren Dockter considers how Churchill interacted with the Islamic world, first as a young soldier and journalist and later as a statesman whose decisions had global consequences. Richard Overy assesses Churchill’s enthusiasm for air power and its consequences with respect to the bombing of Germany during the Second World War. Jeremy Black takes a broad look at Churchill’s role as a strategist during that same war. David Woolner writes on the creation of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ in which Churchill himself played a vital part. Kevin Ruane analyses Churchill the Cold Warrior and his approach to the issue of nuclear weapons. Together, these chapters provide an effective weighing up of Churchill’s statecraft – that is to say, the way in which he sought power and tried to use it for personal, party and strategic ends. Very few people who read them will end up approving of everything Churchill did. Almost all of them, though, will surely be struck both by his astonishing personality and by the significance of his impact on the world in which he lived.

Notes 1

Aylmer Haldane, A Soldier’s Saga (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1948), p. 131.

2

Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds), War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 590.

3

‘“Vote National, Not Party”’, The Times, 5 June 1945.

4

Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Macmillan, 1941), first published 1930, p. 385.

5

Robin Prior, Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ as History (London: Croom Helm, 1983); John Ramsden, Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2002); David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

2 Churchill: The Young Statesman, 1901–14 David Thackeray University of Exeter

This chapter analyses the early years of Winston Churchill’s parliamentary career. Having been elected as a Conservative MP, he defected to the Liberal Party in 1904 and quickly established himself as a rising star in political life. Following the Liberals’ landslide election victory in 1906, Churchill held a succession of offices. As president of the Board of Trade he became one of the main architects of the New Liberal social reform programme. Promotion to the position of Home Secretary followed. Churchill’s tenure was notable for a number of controversies including the escalation of suffragette militancy and outbreaks of industrial unrest. As First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 he oversaw an expansion of the British fleet in response to the growing challenge of Germany. With its colourful and varied trajectory, Winston Churchill’s early political career provides a unique opportunity to explore the tumultuous course of Edwardian politics between 1901 and 1914. In charting Winston Churchill’s long and illustrious career in public life, it can be easy to overlook the Edwardian period. But this was a seminal time in shaping both Churchill’s political outlook and the wider political trajectory of twentieth-century Britain. Having found fame for his exploits during the Boer War, Churchill entered the House of Commons in 1900. Within a decade he had established himself as a prominent statesman and one of the main architects of Britain’s incipient welfare state. The expansion of this system of social spending would provide one of the main controversies of subsequent decades. Ironically, Churchill, who had invited William Beveridge to work at the Board of Trade to oversee the development of labour exchanges and a system of unemployment insurance in 1908, was reluctant to support

14

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the 1942 Beveridge Report, which laid the basis for the post-1945 welfare state, with its call for ‘cradle to grave’ provision. The Edwardian period also marked a watershed in Britain’s international affairs, in part as a result of Germany’s expanding industrial and naval power. Rejecting its earlier policy of ‘splendid isolation’, Britain formed alliances with France, Russia and Japan in a bid to shore up its geopolitical position. This was an important period in shaping Churchill’s relationship with Germany; he was well aware of the Kaiser’s expansionist designs and, as First Lord of the Admiralty, sought to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy over its main rival. In a peculiar twist of fate, when Churchill the anti-appeaser returned to office following his famous ‘wilderness years’ in September 1939, it was to be as First Lord of the Admiralty. Within eight months he would be prime minister.

The politics of Edwardian Britain Britain entered the twentieth century with a new sense of uncertainty about its international position, taking three years to defeat an army of poorly resourced Boer farmers in South Africa. For contemporaries, the Boer War of 1899–1902 raised searching questions about Britain’s fitness as an imperial nation. In some cities, such as Manchester, up to half of military recruits were rejected on health grounds. This, along with social surveys of the urban poor conducted by Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree, sparked demands for social reforms across the political spectrum. But how would the government meet the demand for increased expenditure? For Joseph Chamberlain, who had been one of the main architects of the Boer War as colonial secretary, the answer was to be found in taxing the foreigner. In 1903 he proposed an end to Britain’s free trade system, laying out a plan for a system of tariffs on imported goods, weighted to favour trade with the Empire. Since 1895 Lord Salisbury had overseen a Unionist government, which was dominated by the Conservative Party, but also drew support from the Liberal Unionists, who had split from the Liberal Party over the issue of Irish home rule in 1886. However, Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign caused divisions in both parties within the Unionist government and contributed towards the Liberals’ landslide election victory in 1906. Tariff reformers sought to play on anxieties about the nation’s world position, arguing that free trade Britain could no longer compete effectively with its industrial rivals. The expansion of the Kaiser’s navy under Admiral Tirpitz challenged Britain’s maritime supremacy and fuelled a series of spy and invasion stories which heightened fears of the growing German threat.1 In domestic affairs, the Edwardian period was a time of ferment in political life. This was a period of lively and sensationalist electioneering, fostered by the rise of the popular press and the survival of unruly and boisterous traditions of public politics. During these years women came to play an unprecedented role in political life, most notoriously in the

THE YOUNG STATESMAN, 1901–14

15

suffragettes’ militant campaign, but also in the free trade/tariff reform debate, which placed the housewife at the heart of political controversy. Labour may have remained a sectional interest group for trade unionists in 1914 but it was still able to challenge the existing status quo. A wave of strikes after 1911 alarmed members of the British elite, some of whom voiced their fears about the revolutionary potential of industrial unrest.2 Moreover, the Liberal Party’s attempts to introduce Irish home rule after 1912 sparked fierce resistance from Unionists. By 1914 opposing paramilitary forces had been recruited in Ireland and civil war appeared a real possibility. Winston Churchill’s career, perhaps more than any other, provides a fruitful opportunity to reflect on the turmoil of Edwardian politics. Beginning the period as a Conservative, he crossed the floor and rapidly established himself as a prominent New Liberal, combining a commitment to free trade with support for a programme of social reform. On his appointment as president of the Board of Trade in 1908, he became the youngest Cabinet minister since 1866 and struck up a close working relationship with David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Promotion to the position of Home Secretary followed in January 1910, forcing Churchill to confront a number of challenges including suffragette militancy and an escalation in industrial unrest. The military threat posed by Germany became one of the main political preoccupations of late Edwardian politics, and one which Churchill had to confront directly in his post as First Lord of the Admiralty after October 1911. Throughout his tenure at the Admiralty, Churchill was preoccupied with maintaining Britain’s naval supremacy over Germany. An extraordinary memorandum he produced in April 1913, ‘The timetable of a nightmare’, highlights his concerns with Britain’s military position and discusses the likely effects of a German invasion.3

Churchill the Conservative Churchill entered Parliament as the Conservative MP for Oldham, Lancashire, at the 1900 general election. However, his relationship with the party became increasingly fractious over subsequent years. Whilst he criticized the Salisbury government’s plans for army reform, it was Churchill’s commitment to free trade that prompted his eventual departure from the Conservative Party. In May 1902 the Liberal Party managed to overturn a Liberal Unionist majority at a by-election in Bury, a few miles away from Oldham. The central issue at the by-election was the Salisbury government’s decision to introduce a levy on imported corn as a measure to raise revenue following the Boer War. Churchill had little doubt that the duty was a voteloser, and he strongly signalled his opposition to protectionism in private.4 Unsurprisingly then, Churchill met Joseph Chamberlain’s decision to call for the introduction of tariff reform in May 1903 with dismay. Lancashire, with its reliance on the cotton industry, proved deeply hostile to

16

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Chamberlain’s campaign. In a letter to Lord Hugh Cecil written in October, which was not sent, Churchill expressed his deepening sense of hostility to his colleagues on the government benches: ‘I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory party, their men, their words and their methods. I feel no sort of sympathy with them – except to my own people at Oldham.’5 This was a time when the tariff reform campaign was tearing the Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties apart. Churchill’s family did not remain unaffected. In November Churchill’s mother, Jennie Cornwallis-West, protested at plans which had been made for the secretary of the Tariff Reform League to address a meeting of the Randolph Churchill habitation of the Primrose League. A few months later she decided to leave this organization, which her husband had helped to found.6 Like several free-trader MPs, Churchill decided to defect from the Conservatives, and took his seat on the Liberal benches in May 1904.

The New Liberal Churchill was returned as Liberal MP for North-West Manchester during the party’s landslide election victory in 1906 and took up the post of undersecretary at the Colonial Office in the government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. In this role Churchill played an important part in the conciliation of South Africa, supporting self-government for the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, where the Boers formed the majority of the white population. Churchill’s interest in social reform grew steadily, aided by his friendship with David Lloyd George, and in March 1908 he achieved Cabinet rank at the age of thirty-three as president of the Board of Trade in Herbert Asquith’s new administration. Obliged to stand for re-election on entering Cabinet, Churchill lost North-West Manchester, having been hampered by an industrial depression which enabled tariff reformers to win a series of victories at by-elections that year. However, he was returned for Dundee at another by-election in May, a seat which he was to hold until 1922. Churchill also married Clementine Hozier, who proved to be an important confidant throughout his political career, in September 1908. Established as one of the leading New Liberals, Churchill stated his support for a safety net of social security of the kind which existed in Germany.7 As president of the Board of Trade, he introduced a number of social reforms including state-run labour exchanges, compulsory unemployment insurance and the Trade Boards Act of 1909, which enforced minimum wages in sweated trades, which relied on a poorly paid, largely female, workforce. Churchill’s public profile grew considerably as a member of Herbert Asquith’s government. He responded to the House of Lords’ decision to reject Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ in 1909 by attacking the peers for their selfish pursuit of class interests. Churchill became president of the Budget League, which held a series of meetings across the country to protest

THE YOUNG STATESMAN, 1901–14

17

against the Lords’ unprecedented action. Aided by a £10,000 donation from the Dundee industrialist James Caird, and no doubt chastened by his defeat at North-West Manchester, Churchill was an evangelist for the free trade cause, overseeing the development of a massive free trade campaign which included lectures, exhibitions and, more unusually, a series of meetings at popular seaside resorts.8

Home Secretary Churchill was appointed Home Secretary following the January 1910 election, when the Liberal Party was returned to power with a substantially reduced majority. One of the main controversies which dogged Churchill’s tenure as Home Secretary was his treatment of suffragette militancy. As a prominent Liberal minister, Churchill was a particular target for disruption by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Several of his meetings at the Dundee by-election in 1908 were wrecked by a female suffrage supporter ringing a large bell. In autumn 1909 Churchill was attacked by a WSPU member brandishing a riding-whip at Bristol Temple Meads railway station.9 Whilst Churchill favoured female suffrage in principle, he was deeply angered by the suffragettes’ tactics and women were excluded from some of his meetings as a precaution against further violence.10 In 1910 a Conciliation Bill was introduced, which was designed to extend the parliamentary vote to around one million women who would have to pass a property qualification. The bill drew criticism from both the Liberal and Conservative benches as well as the WSPU. Angered by the limited female franchise, Christabel Pankhurst saw the bill as ‘simply a wicked move on the part of Mr Lloyd George and Mr Churchill’.11 Lloyd George himself was uneasy at the provisions of the bill; like many Liberals he feared that the property qualification would aid the Conservative Party, as it would be mainly affluent women who stood to gain the vote.12 Churchill took an ambiguous stance towards the Conciliation Bill. In April 1910 he agreed to be quoted as welcoming the Conciliation Committee for Women’s Suffrage but expressed a wish not be committed to a specific measure.13 However, Churchill subsequently opposed the bill in Parliament, claiming that propertied women had not taken sufficient interest in the existing opportunities they had to vote in municipal elections. Despite receiving significant support in the Commons, the Conciliation Bill was shelved following the announcement of a general election. Relations between Churchill and the WSPU worsened as a result of ‘Black Friday’ in November 1910, when several women’s suffrage supporters marched to Parliament following the failure of the Conciliation Bill. Many were injured following rough treatment by the police. Although the WSPU had suspended its violent campaign whilst the Conciliation Bill was before Parliament, Black Friday helped to trigger an escalation in suffragette militancy.

18

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Women’s suffrage remained a prominent topic in politics, and in November 1911 Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, announced that the government would introduce a bill in support of universal male suffrage, which could be amended to give some women the vote. Churchill met this development with alarm, privately expressing concern that the government would fall if it tried to push through women’s suffrage.14 The Franchise Bill, with its plans for universal male suffrage, was introduced in 1912 but made little progress. Churchill drew criticism for his sometimes hot-tempered conduct as Home Secretary, most notably during the Tonypandy Incident. In November 1910 rioting and looting broke out during a strike of Rhondda Valley coalminers as a result of clashes between strikers determined to prevent the introduction of blackleg labour and the police. After initial hesitation, Churchill sanctioned the deployment of troops to quell the disturbances. In January 1911 he provoked further controversy as a result of his decision to personally oversee the police’s attempts to capture a group of Russian anarchists led by ‘Peter the Painter’ who were holed up in a house in Sidney Street, in London’s East End. Churchill’s intervention during the ‘Sidney Street Siege’ was captured on newsreel film and he was criticized for potentially putting himself in the line of fire.15

First Lord of the Admiralty Appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911, Churchill moved quickly to state his commitment to Britain’s maintenance of its naval supremacy over Germany. Responding to the Kaiser’s increases in naval and army spending in February 1912, he told a Glasgow audience that ‘the British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury …. It is the British Navy which makes Great Britain a great power.’16 Churchill was determined that Britain needed to respond to the German Navy Law by developing a new battle squadron in home waters; he favoured a policy of withdrawing ships from the Mediterranean to strengthen the Home Fleet.17 Naval cooperation with France was enhanced with the signing of an agreement in February 1913. Churchill’s insistence on strengthening the naval rebuilding programme caused friction amongst leading members of the Liberal Cabinet such as John Simon, Reginald McKenna and David Lloyd George.18 In 1913–14 the Liberal Party suffered a number of by-election defeats, in part as a result of the Conservatives’ ability to capitalize on popular hostility to the National Insurance Act, which was portrayed as placing unfair burdens on businesses and employees, who were both expected to make contributions.19 In this climate, significant increases in government spending were likely to prove unpopular, especially as a general election would have to be called before the end of 1915. In December 1913 Churchill circulated a memorandum proposing an increase in the naval estimates of nearly £3

THE YOUNG STATESMAN, 1901–14

19

million, and modernization measures such as greater reserves of oil for the fleet and the development of the naval air arm. After a fraught series of negotiations Churchill was able to gain agreement for the naval estimates, but the controversy strained his working partnership with Lloyd George, who had unsuccessfully sought a pledge that future estimates would be less than those proposed for 1914–15.20 Despite the naval estimates crisis it was the issue of Ireland, rather than threats from Europe, which dominated politics in the late Edwardian period. Although his father, Randolph Churchill, had been a keen defender of Ulster Unionism, Churchill became one of the most prominent supporters of the Irish Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912. He provocatively chose to give a Belfast speech at the Ulster Hall, the same building where his father had denounced Irish home rule in 1886. Although Churchill was keen to state that his choice of venue was not meant as a challenge to Unionists, concerns were raised that he was risking assault by speaking at the Ulster Hall. Whilst Churchill ignored pleas not to take his wife to Belfast due to fears of a riot, the meeting venue was eventually changed due to fears about disruption.21 The First World War was to provide the first major setback to Churchill’s political career. He became associated with the disastrous Dardanelles campaign and, having been demoted to the position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, resigned from office in November 1915. Yet as one of the main architects of New Liberal social reforms, Churchill had established himself as a prominent reforming statesman during the Edwardian period. Subsequently, when Churchill returned to the Conservative Party in 1924, Stanley Baldwin, who was keen to associate his administration with moderate social reform, promoted him to Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Notes 1

Amongst the most popular were William Le Quex, The Invasion of 1910 (1906); Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903); and John Buchan, The Thirty Nine Steps (1915).

2

The 17th Lord Derby to Winston Churchill, 15 August 1911, CHAR 12/12/35 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/12/35]; George V to Winston Churchill, 16 August 1911, CHAR 12/12/37 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+12/12/37].

3

Memorandum by Winston Churchill, ‘The timetable of a nightmare’, 16 April 1913, CHAR 13/22A/36-42 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/22A/36-42].

4

Winston Churchill to Ernest Fletcher, 14 November 1902, CHAR 2/2/30-31 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/2/30-31].

5

Winston Churchill to Lord Hugh Cecil (unsent), 24 October 1903, CHAR 2/8/105-107 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/8/105-107].

20

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

6

Jennie Cornwallis-West to P. Smith, 27 November 1903, CHAR 28/51/5 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+28/51/5].

7

Winston Churchill to Arthur Wilson Fox, 4 January 1908, CHAR 2/33/1-2 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/33/1-2]; Winston Churchill to Henry Herbert Asquith, 29 December 1908, CHAR 2/36/50-51 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/36/50-51].

8

Winston Churchill to James Caird, 22 September 1910, CHAR 2/44/2832 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+2/44/28-32]; Graham Wallace Carter to Winston Churchill, 25 March 1910, CHAR 2/44/49-64 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?con textId=CHAR+2/44/49-64]; Graham Wallace Carter to Winston Churchill, 11 April 1910, CHAR 2/44/99 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?co ntextId=CHAR+2/44/99].

9

See for example Hugh Franklin, ‘Why I struck at Mr Churchill’, newspaper cutting from Votes for Women, 9 December 1910, CHAR 12/3/49 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+12/3/49].

10 See for example Winston Churchill to the Master of Elibank, 18 December 1911, CHAR 2/53/83 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+2/53/83]. 11 Christabel Pankhurst to C. P. Scott, 14 July 1910, cited in P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 121. 12 Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism, p. 121. 13 Winston Churchill to Henry Brailsford, 19 April 1910, CHAR 2/47/61 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/47/61]. 14 Winston Churchill to the Master of Elibank, 18 December 1911, CHAR 2/53/83 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/53/83]; Winston Churchill to Henry Herbert Asquith, 21 December 1911, CHAR 13/5/1-4 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId =CHAR+13/5/1-4]. 15 British Pathé, Sidney Street Siege, newsreel film, http://www.britishpathe.com/ record.php?id=84933; for Churchill’s own account of the siege, see Winston Churchill to Henry Herbert Asquith, 3 January 1911, CHAR 2/51/2-3 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/51/2-3]. 16 Winston Churchill, speech at Glasgow, 9 February 1912, cited in Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Volume 2 Young Statesman 1901–1914 (1967), p. 563. 17 Memorandum by Winston Churchill, 15 February 1912, CHAR 13/8/75 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/8/75]; on the policy of withdrawing British ships from the Mediterranean, see Winston Churchill to Lord Roberts, 12 July 1912, CHAR 13/9/133 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/9/133]. 18 John Seely to Winston Churchill, 12 December 1913, CHAR 13/20/144 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/20/144].

THE YOUNG STATESMAN, 1901–14

21

19 David Thackeray, ‘Rethinking the Edwardian Crisis of Conservatism’, Historical Journal, 54, 1 (2011), 191–213 at 207–8, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ S0018246X10000518. 20 Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George, 26 January 1914, CHAR 13/26/8 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/26/8]. 21 For Churchill’s claims that he did not select the Ulster Hall as a challenge to Unionists, see Winston Churchill to 6th Lord Londonderry, 27 January 1912, CHAR 2/59/22 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/59/22]. The Master of Elibank pleaded for him not to take his wife to Belfast; see his letter to Churchill, 31 January 1912, CHAR 2/56/22-23 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/56/22-23].

3 Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, 23 October 1911 to 24 May 1915 Martin Thornton University of Leeds

Working at the Admiralty prior to the First World War, Winston Churchill exhibited a number of positive and negative attitudes towards Germany. He admired much about Germany’s modernization and social reform programmes, but saw their naval expansion as a direct threat to peace. In calling for a two-to-one battleship construction programme in favour of Great Britain, Churchill also mooted the idea of a ‘holiday’ in construction – an idea not taken seriously by Germany. At the Admiralty, Churchill appeared to be in his element, both as a micromanager and a strategic thinker. In turn, the First World War justified many of his concerns about Germany and made him a man for his times. However, his tenure at the Admiralty became beset with difficult news at sea and culminated with the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. An issue like Ireland concerned Churchill deeply, even as First Lord of the Admiralty, but it is dealt with in other studies. Invariably, you can look at Winston Churchill’s own published writing and published speeches for an exposition on world problems contemporary to his own life. This is true of appeasement, the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War. It is also true of Churchill’s tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty for the first time between 1911 and 1915. His volumes on The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (variously published, but first published as five volumes in six parts between 1923 and 1931) are a tour de force in explaining the importance of naval preparations against the onset of an impending war and the seminal events of the First World War itself. Intriguingly, the work

24

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

started life as a study of sea power and was initially a work under the more unusual title of The Great Amphibian, but under his publisher’s advice and a broadening of scope by Churchill, it became The World Crisis.1 In the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century, the navies of Great Britain and Germany were symbolic of national power and prestige. They were also seen as crucial for the maintenance and development of empires and the close security of the North Sea. Anglo-German naval rivalry developed firmly with policies of naval construction inherent to the Naval Bills passed in Germany in 1898 and 1900. These were prompted by the desires of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (German secretary of state of the Imperial Navy, 1897–1916) and Kaiser Wilhelm II for a prestigious German navy. They were united in their opposition to the existing stark British naval superiority. German and British naval expansion was also to be part of broader defence expenditure issues that concerned the European powers of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy. A striking concern of the European powers was the possibility of a general war in Europe. Multiple reasons may account for the eventual outbreak of the First World War. In particular, international strategic arguments and domestic concerns of individual states are factored into many of the scholarly debates on the causes of the war. Whether or not the expansion in naval armaments is the dominant factor in the outbreak of the First World War, the British government and Winston Churchill perceived German naval policy to be aggressive and a direct threat to Britain’s national security and the functioning of the Royal Navy. Large battleships (often referred to as dreadnoughts and battle cruisers) became part of the Anglo-German naval arms race. The heavily armed British class of ship HMS Dreadnought was completed in 1906 under the support of Admiral Sir John ‘Jacky’ Arbuthnot Fisher, First Sea Lord (later Lord Fisher of Kilverstone), and further dreadnoughts were produced in 1909, with the British adopting a programme in 1910 to construct eight new ships by 1913. These were developed by the British with improvements in speed and increased firepower. Ships with rather large guns (although the size of guns varied) and with propulsion by steam turbines tended to be known as dreadnoughts or super-dreadnoughts. British dreadnoughts were programmed over a long period of time but were completed in various classes in the following years: Bellerophon class, 1909; St Vincent class, 1909–11; Colossus class, 1911; Orion class, 1912; King George V class, 1912–13; Iron Duke class, 1914; Queen Elizabeth class, 1915–16; and the Royal Sovereign class, 1916–17.2 The Queen Elizabeth class (which included the Queen Elizabeth, Warspite, Barham, Valiant and Malaya) had been programmed as early as 1912–13 but delivered in the years 1915–16.3 Germany produced similar dreadnoughts, including: the Nassau class, 1909–10; Helgoland class, 1911–12; Kaiser class, 1912–13; and the König class.4 The Nassau class (Nassau, Westfalen, Rheinland and Posen dreadnought ships) were planned as early as the period 1906–08 and

CHURCHILL AS FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

25

indicate, alongside the British production of ships, that the naval arms race had materialized fairly quickly after the development of the first dreadnought. The Admiralty claimed in September 1912 that German naval expansion was not forced by British naval expansion between 1905 and 1908. It argued that it was not until 1909 that the British were forced into substantially increasing the number of ships they possessed. This response is explained by the fact that the new ships produced by Germany were cheaper to maintain and repair than some of the older ships held by Great Britain. It was also in 1909 that the Admiralty authorized a large review of the naval situation and British Empire security: ‘In that year, 8 capital ships were laid down in Great Britain, and 2 others were provided by the Commonwealth of Australia and the Dominion of New Zealand respectively – a total of 10.’5 In 1909, Winston Churchill (president of the Board of Trade) was not as pessimistic about the German naval menace as the then Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, who was demanding an increased production of six new dreadnought battleships before a perceived crisis point would be reached in 1912. It was suggested that the margin of British naval superiority would be adversely affected by publicly planned German dreadnought construction as well as secret dreadnought production and this would be particularly worrying for Britain by 1912. From Churchill’s own analysis at the time, he believed four new ships would be sufficient for production in 1909 and two more might follow. The broader fear of the German threat nevertheless produced the result of a confused British expansion: ‘The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four: and we compromised on eight. However, five out of the eight were not ready before “the danger year” of 1912 had passed peacefully away.’6 What had become widely accepted in Great Britain was that the Royal Navy could not afford to lag behind Germany in battleship production or Germany would soon catch up with its naval superiority. Churchill recorded his recollections of his feelings on this in his own inimitable way: There was a deep and growing feeling, no longer confined to political and diplomatic circles, that the Prussians meant mischief, that they envied the splendour of the British Empire, and that if they saw a good chance at our expense they would take good advantage of it. Moreover, it began to be realized that it was no use trying to turn Germany from her course by abstaining from counter measures. Reluctance on our part to build ships was attributed in Germany to want of national spirit, and as another proof that the virile race should advance to replace the effete overcivilized and pacifist society which was no longer capable of sustaining its great place in the world’s affairs.7 Churchill’s conclusion was that Germany wanted a great navy for ‘malignant design’.8 His analysis, derived from being president of the Board of Trade, led him to believe further that, despite his admiration for

26

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the social reforms undertaken in Germany, the German economy had been put under considerable strain by the naval expansion programme and this could create domestic unrest. The downside of this for Britain was that the German government might wish to alleviate the domestic economic and social situation by encouraging foreign adventure. An adage of international relations is that governments evoke the issue of external enemies to unite a nation state in a nationalist cause, alleviating domestic criticism. In Germany’s case it began to look like a self-fulfilling prophecy since some of the economic difficulties were being created by an expensive naval expansion. Great Britain had a long-term policy of making sure that the strongest nation state on continental Europe did not threaten its interests. Thus the concerns of Russia and France about Germany also became British concerns. Both France and Russia would increase their armies whilst Britain would develop its navy. The British strategy was to strengthen its relations with the powers, France and Russia, since they also perceived Germany to be a menace. Churchill’s fears were particularly strong in this regard: ‘Swiftly, surely, methodically, a German Navy was coming into being at our doors which must expose us to dangers only to be warded off by strenuous exertions, and by a vigilance almost as tense as that of actual war.’9 By 1910 and the following year, Anglo-German naval competition quickened in pace, with both Britain and Germany building battleships. With the Germans committing themselves to a large fleet of thirty-three battleships of various forms in the German Naval Law of 1912, the British believed they would be outnumbered in home waters. A particular worry for the British government was that if Britain were forced to withdraw from the Mediterranean, its world influence would be brought into question and decline accordingly. Events in 1911 made it appear that a war between France and Germany was a possibility. France made claims to parts of Morocco where Germany appeared to have few discernible interests, the French believing that the Germans would at least be satisfied with colonial compensation in the Congo. Instead, the German government sent the Panther, a gunboat, to protect its interests in the port of Agadir in Morocco. To Germany’s surprise, Great Britain was not disinterested and made it obvious that it supported France. The British Cabinet appeared concerned with trade routes being protected and wanted to make it clear that any war between Germany and France would see Britain very much supporting France. The Agadir crisis did not escalate and a diplomatic accommodation, with France offering concessions, was produced, but this dispute suggested the possibility of a major conflict if France and Germany were to behave in a reckless manner. As Home Secretary (appointed 1910), Churchill’s role was rather peripheral, but there was rarely a case in international affairs of the day in which he did not take a personal interest. Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911 (a month short of his 37th birthday), having been offered the post by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. In fact, Asquith and Churchill had discussed the

CHURCHILL AS FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

27

possibility of Winston going to the Admiralty in March 1908, but despite the fact he felt it was the most ‘glittering post in the Ministry’, he accepted the presidency of the Board of Trade on 10 April 1908.10 Churchill talked himself out of the post in the Admiralty in 1908. He was not sure how he could influence the structure and organization at the Admiralty, and he wanted to address issues like finance, the administrative machinery at the Admiralty and the professional nature of naval service provided to the nation. Churchill clearly wanted to stamp his authority on the Admiralty, but he felt that was not possible at that time. Nepotism aside, he did not want the situation of taking over from Lord Tweedmouth, his uncle, and immediately having the embarrassment of suggesting radical change. The naval estimates for expenditure and a building programme for 1912–13 were well advanced when Churchill moved from being Home Secretary to becoming the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, but he believed that further countermeasures needed to be introduced to act as a deterrent to Germany. He reinforced his own view of an ‘ever-present danger’ of Germany: Upon the wall behind my chair I had an open case fitted, within whose folding doors spread a large chart of the North Sea. On this chart every day a Staff Officer marked with flags the position of the German Fleet. Never once was this ceremony omitted until the War broke out, and the great maps, covering the whole of one side of the War Room began to function. I made a rule to look at the chart once every day when I first entered my room.11 This reflects Churchill’s boyish enthusiasm for the job, but he was more than a clever amateur in his appetite for naval technical knowledge and strategic ideas. He was very quick to enlist the advice and views of the septuagenarian Lord Fisher, who initially Churchill used as an informal consultant, meeting and exchanging letters with him.12 As First Lord, Churchill was responsible to Parliament for the Admiralty and had four Sea Lords under him. The First Sea Lord was the Chief of the Naval Staff and was initially Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman, then Admiral Prince Louis of Battenburg (1912–14), who was to be replaced by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher (1914–15). Naval supremacy for Great Britain was high on Churchill’s priority list. Slightly mischievous in his public attitude towards Germany, he proclaimed in Glasgow in February 1912 that Britain’s considerable navy was a ‘necessity’, but in contrast, Germany’s navy was a ‘luxury’.13 Increases in the size of the German navy, evident in the German Navy Law, encouraged Churchill to press the British government for further naval expansion.14 This British expansion, based on the considered German building programme, meant ‘Sixty per cent in Dreadnoughts over Germany as long as she adhered to her present declared programme, and two keels to one for every additional ship laid down by her’.15 Here was a very strong commitment from Churchill

28

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

to construct two battleships for every one that Germany could construct, a potentially rather expensive policy for the Liberal government. This he presented as part of the naval estimates delivered to the House of Commons on 18 March 1912. The strategic decision that Churchill was forced to take was to concentrate the British fleet in home waters and remove battleships from the Mediterranean, encumbering France with the responsibility to command the Mediterranean with large ships. This obviously tied the British more closely to French strategic decision-making. As Churchill put it to his prime minister on 23 August 1912, ‘we have the obligations of an alliance without its advantages, and above all without its precise definitions’.16 Winston Churchill also called for a naval policy for the Dominions that would deliver a flexible Imperial Squadron that could cruise the Empire and rotate through the seas of all the Dominions.17 Churchill’s approach to the building programme with regard to the Dominions was not to count any ships potentially provided by them. Any ships provided by them would then be additional and the efforts of the Dominions would more clearly add to Britain’s naval strength. On 14 April 1912, Churchill looked for guidance from Prime Minister Asquith to support a naval policy for the Dominions or, rather, a naval policy for Great Britain that would include the Dominions.18 Whatever the disposition of a British Empire fleet in peacetime, Churchill wanted protection from the ‘big dog’ (Germany) in British home waters during any war; the fleet could then be redistributed again after a major conflict.19 All administration including discipline and training would be controlled by the Admiralty, and Churchill expected the bulk of service personnel to be provided by the British in the early years. His idea was that a Dominion Squadron would proceed to waters where they were needed and could call upon docking facilities as required, for example at Vancouver, Simonstown or Sydney.20 The Dominions themselves would have provided for their own coastal defence. Churchill felt that Australia and New Zealand were doing a great deal already and Louis Botha, the first prime minister of South Africa, would be very compliant. However, the Canadians would need convincing. The idea of financial support from the Dominions did take shape, although Canada’s contribution of 35 million Canadian dollars did not materialize because of the defeat of the Naval Aid Bill in the Senate of the Canadian Parliament. This made a flexible Imperial Squadron unworkable and the onset of the First World War changed exact priorities. Many domestic allies were won over by Churchill’s dramatic pronouncements on naval expansion, including the leader of the Opposition, and member of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Arthur J. Balfour. Although hitherto sceptical of Germany’s intentions, Balfour wrote to Churchill: A war entered upon for no other object than to restore the Germanic Empire of Charlemagne in a modern form, appears to me at once so

CHURCHILL AS FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

29

wicked and so stupid as to be almost incredible! And yet it is almost impossible to make sense of modern German policy without crediting it with this intention.21 Convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, of the necessity of the Navy Estimates for 1913–14 was a more difficult matter, but Churchill was not short on advice for how the navy expenditure could be financed.22 This was to further annoy Lloyd George in early 1914 when Churchill put forward his Naval Estimates of 1914–15. Although the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s views suggest anguish on his part with the changing estimates produced by Churchill, the ‘Welsh wizard’s’ wit was evident in his response to Winston: ‘I now thoroughly appreciate your idea of a bargain: it is an argument which binds the Treasury not even to attempt any further economies in the interests of the taxpayer, whilst it does not in the least impose any obligation on the Admiralty not to incur fresh liabilities.’23 Against this background and in counter distinction to it, Churchill had earlier floated the idea of a ‘naval holiday’ with the Germans for the year 1913 (i.e. not building any ships in 1913). Three ships planned by Britain would be cancelled if the two ships planned for construction by Germany ceased to be developed. As John Maurer points out, the significant German politicians found very little merit in the idea: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm sent Churchill a “courteous” message that a naval holiday “would only be possible between allies”. To his intimates, however, Wilhelm was much less courteous: he branded Churchill’s speech “arrogant”.’24 Had a ‘freeze’ in naval building come about, it would have clearly favoured Britain’s position in terms of the existing balance of naval power, even if it was presented as not further disadvantaging Germany. Germany might have been advantaged by British modernization programme being held up. It still seemed paradoxical that it was the First Lord of the Admiralty who was promoting naval limitations, but this general proposal also undercut some of the more radical elements within Churchill’s own Liberal Party.25 Unsurprisingly, the onset of the First World War in August 1914 rendered the notion of naval limitations a moot point. Churchill was thrust into an international crisis, the dimensions of which he clearly understood. He aptly told his wife, Clementine, on 2 August: ‘But the world is gone mad.’26 This was a response to Germany declaring war on Russia and a French declaration of war on the horizon. By 4 August the Admiralty issued the order ‘COMMENCE HOSTILITIES AGAINST GERMANY’.27 The ultimatum to Germany to respect Belgium’s neutrality had been ignored. Churchill’s achievements during his first period at the Admiralty were admirable; his preparations of the fleet at the beginning of the war seemed sound. The relative strength in home waters of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Sea Fleet was in Britain’s favour at the declaration of war (Table 3.1):

30

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

TABLE 3.1  The Naval Situation at Home. Relative Strength. British

German

Dreadnought battleships

20

13

Dreadnought battle cruisers

4

  3 and Blucher – described as ‘almost a battle cruiser’

Armoured cruisers

8

6 (older)

Modern light cruisers

10

15

Source: Churchill memorandum circulated to the coalition government, ‘The N ­ aval Situation at Home’, 30 May 1915, M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: ­Companion Volume III: The Challenge of War, 1914–1916: Part 2: May 1915–­ December 1916 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1972), p. 965, CHAR 13/58/18 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/58/18].

With building programmes, ships destroyed and some speculation on the value of older ships, Churchill could report in a document printed on 30 May 1915 that the situation of the British had improved in home waters and would improve further with the construction of new ships taking place. Another interesting aspect of Churchill’s tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty was his development of a Royal Naval Air Service in 1912. This service became useful in the First World War as it provided protection of ships, harbours and oil supplies, but it was also a contributor to the offensive strategy on continental Europe. It was not long before Churchill was asked to organize the air defences of Great Britain, giving him an unenviable workload, but aviation, particularly after flying lessons, enthused him even more than his passion for naval matters. In a clear stretch of the responsibilities of the Admiralty, Churchill embroiled himself in the defence of Antwerp in Belgium, having created an ‘infantry’ division from the navy. Although it was a brave attempt to defend the city against the Germans, the ultimate failure of his expedition made him appear rather rash and prone to excitable decisions. In a more considered moment, Churchill appointed his mentor ‘Jacky’ Fisher as First Sea Lord in October 1914 and, despite Fisher being seventy-three years of age, they appeared to be a formidable team leading British naval affairs. Yet Churchill never escaped the criticism that he pursued a rather too vigorous offensive strategy in naval warfare. His role in the Dardanelles campaign, which resulted in the slaughter at Gallipoli, was to critically hound him for a considerable number of years afterwards. The audacious attack on the Turkish coast, combining land and naval support to force Turkey into a peace agreement, was a disaster. By May 1915, Churchill was relieved of his position at the Admiralty as Herbert Asquith formed a new coalition government.

CHURCHILL AS FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

31

The World Crisis only offers a partial account of the campaign against Turkey that led to failures at Gallipoli. In Churchill’s defence, complex decision-making was behind the failures at Gallipoli and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, secretary for war, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, ‘Jackie’ Fisher (who resigned in May 1915), the War Council, the War Office and many naval colleagues contributed to the plan and its failure.28 The military pounding taken by Australian, New Zealand and British forces on the Gallipoli peninsular is perhaps what is most remembered about the campaign, and by January 1916, ‘some 46,000 allied troops, including 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders, had been killed’.29 Churchill became keen to prove that his detailed plans brought before the War Council in January and February 1915 had ‘the strong support of the naval project given by you [Asquith], Grey, Kitchener & A. Balfour & Fisher’s note of dissent’.30 Disclaimers had also been made by Churchill at the time that without adequate troop support during the naval operations, then effectively he could not be held responsible for a military disaster. Churchill’s defence of his decisions given at the Dardanelles Commission of Inquiry in 1916 was to prove a form of exoneration, with the published reports appearing in 1917. However, the detailed evidence given to the Commission was not published until 1968.31 Clearly, Churchill was not responsible for the whole Dardanelles campaign, but given his immense personal confidence and ambition, his sacking from the Admiralty and demotion to the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster (a job including appointing magistrates) was a serious setback to his career prospects. Although he retained a position in the Cabinet and on the War Council for a short period of time, from Churchill’s point of view his removal from the Admiralty reflected the ingratitude that could accompany political life. On 24 May 1915, Churchill’s first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty came to an ignominious close. Churchill never seemed happy as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and resigned towards the end of November 1915. His alternative choice was active service on the Western Front and he was appointed as lieutenant colonel commanding the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. Within six months he had fulfilled one ambition and returned to Westminster in May 1916. By July 1917 he was appointed by Prime Minister Lloyd George as minister of munitions, a job that again put Churchill in a position to contribute directly to the running of the war. Although this appointment would suggest Churchill had recovered from the political setback of the Dardanelles campaign, Clementine Churchill was to recount to Martin Gilbert the depth of the personal upset that leaving the Admiralty caused for Winston: ‘The Dardanelles haunted him for the rest of his life. He always believed in it. When he left the Admiralty he thought he was finished …. I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.’32 Not only did Clementine capture the dark mood of Winston that followed this period in office as First Lord at the Admiralty but her comments in a

32

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

letter to Prime Minister Asquith on 20 May 1915 were to presage the future: ‘Winston may in your eyes & in those with whom he has to work have faults but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess, the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany.’33

Notes 1

M. Gilbert, ‘Preface’, W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis [Abridged] (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. xvi.

2

R. K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Appendix, pp. 909–10. Massie provides a useful list of the displacement tonnage and the size of the main armaments of the Dreadnoughts.

3 Massie, Dreadnought, Appendix, pp. 909–10. 4 Massie, Dreadnought, Appendix, p. 911. 5

‘Draft Memorandum for Publication’, 20 September 1912, Admiralty (ADM) 116/3485/C430387, National Archives.

6

W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1 (London: Odhams Press, 1938), p. 24.

7 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 24. 8 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 25. 9 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 26. 10 Churchill wrote to Asquith on 14 March 1908 about their previous discussions concerning the Admiralty. On 10 April 1908, Churchill wrote to Asquith accepting the presidency of the Board of Trade. H. H. Asquith Papers, MS Asquith 11, fols 10 and 59, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Also, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Volume II: Young Statesman, 1901–1914 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), p. 241. 11 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 53. 12 Including: Winston Churchill to Lord Fisher, 2 November 1911, Lennoxlove Papers, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Young Statesman, 1901–1914: Part 2: 1907–1911 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), p. 1318; Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, 2 November 1911, CHAR 13/2/6-9 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/2/6-9]; Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, 4 November 1911, CHAR 13/2/13-15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/2/13-15]. 13 P. Addison, ‘Churchill’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32413. Also, R. S. Churchill,Winston S. Churchill: Volume II, p. 563. 14 Winston Churchill, memorandum to Cabinet colleagues, 13 February 1912, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Young Statesman, 1901–1914: Part 3: 1911–1914 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967),

CHURCHILL AS FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

33

p. 1517, CHAR 13/17/3-4 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/17/3-4]. 15 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 83. 16 Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume 1, p. 87. 17 Winston Churchill to Herbert Asquith, 14 April 1912, CHAR 13/5/1822 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+13/5/18-22]. 18 Winston Churchill to Herbert Asquith, 14 April 1912, ADM 116/3485/ C430387, National Archives; also R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, pp. 1538–40. 19 Winston Churchill to Herbert Asquith, 14 April 1912, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, p. 1539, CHAR 13/5/18-22 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/5/18-22]. 20 Winston Churchill to Herbert Asquith, 14 April 1912, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, p. 1539, CHAR 13/5/18-22 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/5/18-22]. 21 Arthur Balfour to Winston Churchill, 22 March 1912, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, pp. 1530–31, CHAR 2/56/74-75 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+2/56/74-75]. 22 Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George, 8 December 1912, CHAR 13/13/154-159 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+13/13/154-159]. 23 David Lloyd George to Winston Churchill, 27 January 1914, Lloyd George Papers, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, p. 1856. 24 J. H. Maurer, ‘Churchill’s Naval Holiday: Arms Control and the AngloGerman Naval Race, 1912–1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 15, no. 1 (1992), p. 105. 25 Maurer, ‘Churchill’s Naval Holiday’, p. 110. 26 Winston Churchill to Clementine Churchill, 2 August 1914, CSC Papers, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, p. 1997. 27 Admiralty to HM ships and Naval Establishments, 11 p.m., 4 August 1914, R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Part 3, p. 1999, CHAR 13/36/42 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+13/36/42]. 28 Fisher’s views included advice to Churchill, 3 January, 1915, M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: The Challenge of War, 1914– 1916: Part 1: August 1914–April 1915 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1972), pp. 367–8, CHAR 13/57/37-38 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+13/57/37-38]. Vice-Admiral Carden responded to Naval Intelligence Department reports with his advice to Churchill, 11 January 1915, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: Part 1, pp. 405–06, CHAR 13/65/5-7 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?

34

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

contextId=CHAR+13/65/5-7]. Meeting of the War Council, 13 January 1915, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: Part 1, pp. 407–11. Sir Henry Jackson concurred with Carden’s proposals on the Dardanelles in a memorandum to Vice Admiral Oliver, 15 January 1915, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: Part 1, pp. 419–21, CHAR 2/82/1 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/82/1]. 29 Addison, ‘Churchill’. 30 Winston S. Churchill to Prime Minister Asquith, 22 June 1916, M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: The Challenge of War, 1914– 1916: Part 2: May 1915–December 1916 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1972), p. 1520, CHAR 2/74/8 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+2/74/8]. 31 M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III: The Challenge of War, 1914– 1916 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1971), p. 200, footnote. 32 Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III, p. 473. Correspondence between Clementine Churchill and Winston Churchill during his period at the Western Front, January–March 1916, CHAR 1/118B/100-102 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1/118B/100-102] and CHAR 1/118B/78-79 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+1/118B/78-79]. 33 Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume III: Part 2, p. 921.

4 Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–9) and the Return to the Gold Standard Peter Catterall

University of Westminster

The general election of 29 October 1924 saw Winston Churchill return to Parliament as Constitutionalist MP for Epping after two years in the political wilderness. It also saw Stanley Baldwin swept back to Number 10 on a Conservative landslide. Speculation about whether Baldwin would cement Churchill’s drift from the Liberal fold by offering him office surfaced during the election campaign. Churchill nevertheless thought ‘it very unlikely that I shall be invited to join the Government, as owing to the size of the majority it will probably be composed only of impeccable Conservatives’.1 Because of his anti-socialist credentials, his ability to reassure wavering Liberals through his opposition to protectionism – dropped by Baldwin after its rejection in the 1923 general election – and concern he could prove a rallying point for backbench malcontents, there was, however, much to commend giving Churchill a post. To his surprise, Baldwin offered Churchill the long-coveted office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, briefly held by his father before his ill-conceived resignation in 1887. Having arranged a meeting with his Labour predecessor, Philip Snowden, about outstanding business, the new chancellor set to work. Marking his political transition, a few days later Churchill resigned from the National Liberal Club. There were numerous financial problems confronting the new chancellor. Churchill’s own finances were as constrained as those of the state. Nevertheless, the emoluments of office emboldened him to write to Lloyds

36

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Bank about repaying his loan and overdraft. The reply expressed the ‘hope you may be able to work out some original idea and perform the impossible task of making two and two produce five’ similarly to address the nation’s finances.2 Clearly he did not make the hoped-for progress in his personal finances: shortly after leaving office his overdraft stood at £10,004 and Lloyds refused to advance him more monies.3 Making progress with the nation’s enormous debts, greatly exacerbated as they were by the recent war of 1914–18, was no less challenging. By 1920 the national debt had increased from £1 billion to £5.4 billion. Furthermore, notwithstanding the efforts of Coalition ministers, including Churchill, to tackle increased expenditure in the aftermath of the war, government spending as a share of gross domestic product had still doubled from 11.9 per cent to 23.6 per cent by 1924, at which level it remained until 1939.4 Politically there were middle-class pressures to try to curb expenditure and the perceived associated risks of inflation and undermining of the currency. Churchill therefore had to try to balance the books by some combination of reducing spending and/or raising taxation. Tax levels had, however, already greatly increased as a result of the war, stirring middle-class discontent. At the same time, whilst radical demands for the conscription of the wealth of holders of the national debt in the form of a capital levy seem to have faded, Churchill was also conscious of class tensions heightened by the effects of wartime inflation on wages and by the surge of post-war unemployment. Domestically the new chancellor thus faced an interlocking series of political, economic and fiscal challenges. As his own memoranda from the period testify, managing these often involved choices in terms of the effects on different sections of British society and economy, commenting for instance in 1926, ‘I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.’5 Externally there was the additional problem of inter-Allied war debts. Pursuing Russian debts was futile, but Churchill hoped that much could be recovered from France and Italy. The August 1924 Dawes Plan to restore war reparation payments, he initially believed, also created a chance of getting up to £25 million per annum out of Germany, helping in turn to address the £900 million Britain owed the United States.6 Churchill, notwithstanding his familial ties to that country, appreciated contemporary concerns that these debts rendered Britain dependent upon the United States. They also dried up credit availability in debtor nations, whilst America’s position as ultimate creditor ensured that £300 million of gold reserves had unproductively accumulated in American vaults. To officials advocating a restoration of the Gold Standard abandoned in 1919, he therefore asked, would this not simply be rewarding the Americans for their selfishness?7 Additionally he was aware that, whilst easy to attain, keeping the Gold Standard ‘will require a most strict policy of debt repayment and a high standard of credit’.8 The resultant disciplines might be desirable, but might damage the patient. Invoking John Maynard Keynes’

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

37

criticisms, Churchill raised with Sir Otto Niemeyer, the financial controller of the Treasury, the paradox whereby, partly as a result of the deflationary policies pursued to create circumstances in which the Gold Standard might be restored, ‘The community lacks goods and a million and a quarter people lack work.’9 Keynes’ alternative was a managed currency. However, as the city editor of The Times put it on 19 March 1925, ‘A managed currency would be entirely at the mercy of politicians with big programmes.’ As the former Treasury official, Sir John Bradbury, explained, the Gold Standard instead was ‘knave-proof’. To resolve these debates Churchill arranged a dinner party on 17 March 1925, attended by Bradbury and Niemeyer for the ‘gold bugs’ and Keynes and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald McKenna, as sceptics.10 This seems to have persuaded Churchill that the Gold Standard, by providing an external price discipline, would facilitate a non-inflationary expansion to tackle his economic paradox. As the distinguished Swedish economist, Gustav Cassel, explained in 1923, the Gold Standard worked by ‘keeping the value of the currency of the country at a constant par with gold’. Because gold was a scarce commodity and under the Gold Standard all currencies were pegged to its value,11 this meant that the internal purchasing power of currencies had to be maintained. Governments could not simply inflate to meet budget deficits. For the same reason, Cassel pointed out as follows: There must also be an equilibrium in the balance of payment between the country and the outside world at least to the extent that the country is not forced to sell its currency abroad as an object of speculation in order to fill up the deficit.12 This is what Churchill meant in 1925 when he argued that the Gold Standard would ‘shackle us to reality’.13 With Germany, the United States and Canada already on the Gold Standard and South Africa, Australia and New Zealand only awaiting Britain’s signal to join, ‘The benefit of a uniform standard of value … throughout the British Empire and through a very large part of the world cannot be over-estimated.’14 Domestically Churchill argued it would prevent the price fluctuations that helped speculators but defrauded wage-earners. The resulting price stability might also encourage the Americans to deploy their gold to secure ‘a slow, gradual, healthy and perfectly legitimate expansion of credit all over the world’. ‘The resulting growth of consuming power internationally’, Churchill noted, ‘is bound to react favourably upon us. We cannot live without exports to the markets of the world.’15 Furthermore, a lower exchange rate would mean larger interest payments to the United States. On such grounds, having secured $300 million in credits, Churchill announced a return to the Gold Standard to wide approval in his 1925 Budget.

38

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill soon had to defend his decision. Indeed, he fell out with his friend, Lord Beaverbrook, over it. In the Commons he imagined Beaverbrook’s newspaper, the Daily Express, pointing out, ‘What did we tell you would follow the gold standard?’16 The occasion was the wage reductions posted by mine owners hit by falling exports and prices, and the government’s resulting decision to give a £10 million subsidy for the coal industry for nine months. In contemporary, apparently unused, speech notes Churchill acknowledged that the Gold Standard ‘forms [a] very convenient explanation [for] most sufferings [of] humanity’. The government, however, was unrepentant, whilst Keynes’ managed currency alternative was lambasted as likely to prove inflationary and, by encouraging easy credit, lead to unsustainable expansion.17 Privately Churchill was not so sanguine, writing to Niemeyer a few days earlier that coal exports were higher in 1923 than 1913 because the exchange rate was then $4.65, not $4.86.18 The situation could be eased, as a lengthy paper of indeterminate authorship hopefully concluded in December 1925, if the United States wrote down international debts. Meanwhile, it was exacerbated by the 1921 Washington naval treaty,19 and resulting Admiralty anxiety to rearm against the consequent Japanese naval preponderance in the Pacific. A year earlier Churchill complained, ‘To accept these armament increases is to sterilize and paralyse the whole policy of the Government … We shall be a Naval Parliament busily preparing our Navy for some great imminent shock.’ Dismissing ‘the slightest chance’ of war with Japan ‘in our lifetime’, he suggested Admiralty planning should be ‘on the basis that no naval war against a first class Navy is likely to take place in the next twenty years’.20 Budgetary savings, in which naval expenditure perennially loomed large, were required not only for a successful return to the Gold Standard but also to allow other measures promoting economic recovery. One possible solution was imperial development: an enthusiasm of the colonial secretary, Leo Amery,21 and a theme of the 1926 Imperial Conference.22 Churchill instead growled, apparently to the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Sir Warren Fisher, about the fallacy ‘that a great loan for colonial development would be a permanent remedy for unemployment’.23 He was no more enthusiastic about encouraging the unemployed to settle in the Empire or on Forestry Commission land. Amery, however, urged the Cabinet that colonial development could be ‘An Employment Policy for the Election’,24 though it fell to the succeeding Labour government to pass his bill. Churchill had been no more enthusiastic about domestic infrastructure investment at the time of the 1921 Trade Facilities Act (TFA). The credits provided under this legislation conflicted with his desire to reduce debt, hence his 1926 Budget announcement ending this scheme in 1927. In this he was at one with Treasury officials who noted that, if ‘the State steps in with a promise of assistance … efforts of self-help will be retarded and the ultimate reorganisation of industry postponed’.25 Similarly, Churchill was concerned at possible misuse of the 1925–6 coal subsidy merely to rebuild profits. Even

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

39

the £40–50 million spent on electricity reorganization26 he condemned in March 1929 as monies ‘brutally withdrawn from industry and enterprise’.27 He preferred to use tax relief rather than direct subsidies, for instance, to encourage consolidation in the steel industry or the 1928 Vickers and Armstrong merger. His boldest tax relief scheme, in the 1928 Budget, however, was the £30 million reduction in the burden of local rates on industry and agriculture. Churchill’s aim was to staunch the decline of staple industries and their flight to greenfield sites, thus helping investment and tackling stubbornly high rates of unemployment.28 Churchill preferred to help the railways and persuaded the Cabinet to include them in the derating proposals. He followed this in his 1929 Budget by responding to calls in the Daily Express for rail reorganization by abolishing the Passenger Duty in return for promises of capital investments of the £6.5 million proceeds.29 Tax relief for individuals rather than businesses was the centrepiece of Churchill’s first budget in 1925. Taking the view that ‘the rich, whether idle or not, are already taxed in this country to the very highest point compatible with the accumulation of capital for future production’,30 he reduced income tax – then only paid by a minority, often on dividends – from 22.5 to 20 per cent. Churchill also provided relief for less wealthy payers of supertax, taking the view that it ‘hampers initiative and enterprise’.31 These measures were balanced politically by developing the social insurance he and Lloyd George had promoted in his prewar Liberal guise, with enhanced benefits helping to secure middle-class support for the more onerous interwar tax regime.32 However, Churchill’s entreaties to Neville Chamberlain, who as minister of health led on the scheme, to also employ Liberals on its development fell on deaf ears. The idea originated with a party inquiry set up by Baldwin in 1922. The resulting scheme for old age pensioners, widows and orphans needed to be contributory, Churchill stated, both to build personal responsibility and to ensure affordability.33 It was affordable as the cost of war pensions was gradually declining, and socially desirable because ‘it will anchor the mass of the nation to an ordered system of society and to continuity in national life’.34 Whilst relieving pensioners, Churchill was also concerned to spread ‘our present burden of debt more broadly over the shoulders of posterity’. This both entailed balancing the books on an annualized basis through savings or increased taxes and reducing the debt burden itself through either a sinking fund or conversion from short to long securities.35 Churchill’s preference was the latter. After Lord Colwyn in 1926 recommended a sinking fund of £75 million rising to £100 million a year, he angrily criticized ‘all this folly’ Niemeyer had ‘been shoving in Colwyn’s mouth’. He felt that redeeming debt in this way used tax revenues to underpin the value of government debt held by financiers.36 This was undesirable in terms of the expansion Churchill sought in two ways. First, businessmen under the existing tax

40

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

regime were ‘at a great disadvantage compared to the rentier merchant or financier’.37 Second, because taxes paid by businesses are passed on to consumers, it diminished the latter’s ability to act as ‘a stimulus to future production’; hence Churchill ended his diatribe to Niemeyer with a ringing endorsement of tax cuts. Tax relief schemes required balancing expenditure savings. This was a challenge. The Admiralty, where Churchill had served as First Lord in 1911–15, proved particularly frustrating. There is a well-founded view, he complained, ‘that the Admiralty gives less value for money than either of the other two services’.38 His latest successor, W. C. Bridgeman, entered office asking for a ballooning budget of £65.7 million, prompting the creation of a Cabinet committee on the naval programme.39 One consequence of naval anxiety about Japan was the costly construction of the Singapore naval base announced by the previous Conservative government in 1923. Drawing on prior experience at the Colonial Office, Churchill unsuccessfully suggested that the cheapest and most effective way to defend it was by aeroplanes, rather than the guns that were in due course installed with disastrous consequences.40 An innovation in tackling the naval budget was the ‘shadow cut’, a budgeting device which assumed that Admiralty construction contracts would be behind schedule but gave provision for contingency funding if necessary. By such processes Churchill managed to bring the naval budget back down to £55.8 million by 1929.41 More radically, though less successfully, he further suggested savings by pooling government research and combining the services. Churchill’s room for manoeuvre on indirect taxes was restricted by his free trade credentials.42 Nevertheless, in 1925 he reintroduced the wartime McKenna duties, added a new silk duty and increased imperial preference on various Empire foodstuffs. In 1926 he extended the McKenna duties to commercial vehicles.43 With the petrol duty, the proportion of revenue from indirect taxes rose from 33 to 35.6 per cent under Churchill’s chancellorship.44 He began this worrying that increasing consumption might be at the expense of ‘the capital reserves of individuals and businesses’, hence his shift from income to indirect taxes.45 The latter were, however, primarily for revenue purposes on luxury goods bought by the relatively well-off, such as motorists. The 1925 proposals for safeguarding the iron and steel industry46 were therefore successfully resisted because they constituted a move towards the general tariff Baldwin had pledged not to introduce. Increasing indirect tax revenues were achieved despite a fall in the yield from their main component, beer duties. Bad summers and the effects of the 1926 coal strike both depressed beer consumption: by 1928 the deficiency on the yield against budget was £1.5 million. Right from the start, however, Churchill seems to have had in mind an alternative: betting. This reflected his view that luxuries and indulgences should be taxed. Churchill also thought it might yield £10 million.

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

41

The implementation and effects of the betting tax proved more complex than envisaged.47 There was the problem of whether the legislation could be circumvented through Ireland, hence the abortive consideration of legislation prohibiting overseas betting.48 It was also found that large numbers of bookmakers traded both legally and illegally, and that tax evasion was widespread. To tackle the dishonest bookmaker – and increase revenue – Churchill supported the private bill introducing the recently invented totalisator betting system to the UK.49 Not least, Conservative Central Office was concerned that ‘we shall be somewhat embarrassed politically over the Betting tax’, prompting Churchill’s determination to avoid prosecutions.50 Swiftly the trade moved to propose various alternatives to Churchill’s turnover tax and to threaten anti-government political campaigns. In the run-up to the 1929 election the betting industry’s interventions allegedly damaged Conservative chances in several by-elections. In the end Churchill tried to defuse the situation by replacing the betting tax with licence duties. This was not the only fiscal measure taken with an eye to the coming campaign. Most conspicuous was the removal of tea duty in the 1929 Budget: Churchill’s young acolyte, Harold Macmillan, wrote of this: ‘What a gambit! … Snowden will grind his teeth over this.’51 The prime minister also sent congratulations on a ‘brilliant’ budget speech.52 It was insufficient. A week earlier Macmillan had warned of the risk of a 1906-style debacle.53 In the event, although the Tories won the most votes in the election of 30 May 1929, Labour won the most seats. It was to be ten years before Churchill again held office. Churchill’s time at the Treasury was not without frustrations. The Chancellor complained both of not being consulted, for instance, about spending £300,000 on new note issues, and of the ‘lack of a system of docketing and minuting’.54 Churchill clearly benefited from the advice of his officials, but that did not mean he invariably agreed with them. He could rail that, ‘The Niemeyer attitude of letting everything smash into bankruptcy and unemployment so that reconstruction can be built up upon the ruins is neither sound economics nor wise policy.’55 Simply reducing costs on the household budget through deflationary policies was no longer enough. During Churchill’s chancellorship the cost of living for working-class households fell by 5 per cent.56 However, people did not feel better off because this was a result of falling prices whilst wages remained static. Meanwhile, trade was subdued and unemployment remained persistently high. Churchill did make some progress on debt reductions: the debt principal fell by £107 million and the interest charges, mainly through sinking funds rather than conversions, declined by £11 million per annum.57 However, both in tackling unemployment and in economizing, Churchill admitted, ‘All my efforts, such as they have been, have failed.’ Derating was intended to address this, economically by aiding ‘the producing class’, and politically by resolving a fractious debate about block grants to local government.58

42

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill switched to these internal attempts to stimulate the economy as prospects of achieving external agreement to reduce debt and promote trade faded: he complained, ‘We have suffered unequalled ill-usage having been committed to paying the American debt irrespective of reparations, having had to scale down to a fourth or a fifth of their values the debts due to us from France and Italy.’59 The situation was exacerbated by the American naval disarmament initiative at Geneva in 1927, which thereafter framed internal discussions on naval expenditure.60 This had the unintended consequence of increasing French insecurity, leading them to demand further reductions of their debt repayments. These external problems stymied the return to the Gold Standard, a decision that has always overshadowed Churchill’s chancellorship. It did not lead to the hoped-for global recovery. Cassel had anticipated that it ought to help reduce the distorting effect of America’s dominant influence on international finance.61 Instead, such American credit as was made available was often short term and inflationary, as the American investment in Germany under the Dawes Plan proved. Churchill was in New York as the stock exchange crashed in October 1929, followed by a recall of American funds from Germany. The subsequent panic-selling of foreign exchange for gold by European central banks was to drive Britain back off the Gold Standard on 21 September 1931. This denouement should not necessarily damn the 1925 decision. Although he may later have come to regret it, in 1931 Churchill continued to maintain that ‘There is nothing wrong with the gold standard, but how could the gold standard be enforced if there were no gold? … twothirds of the gold has been impounded’ by the French and Americans.62 These imbalances were to depress prices, credit and thereby trade.63 This prevented the non-inflationary expansion Churchill sought. It should not, however, distract from his efforts creatively to tackle the many challenges he confronted whilst at the Treasury.

Notes 1

Winston Churchill to Sir Alan Burgoyne, 4 November 1924, CHAR 2/136/4 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/136/4]; see also Winston Churchill to James Erskine, 5 November 1924, CHAR 2/136/6 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/136/6].

2

Winston Churchill to W. Bernau, 8 November 1924, CHAR 28/144B/238 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+28/1 44B/238]; W. Bernau to Winston Churchill, 11 November 1924, CHAR 28/144B/237 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+28/144B/237].

3

W. Bernau to Winston Churchill, 11 October 1929, CHAR 28/145/8-9 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+28/145/8-9].

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

43

4

Ranald Michie, ‘The City of London and the British Government: The Changing Relationship’, in Ranald Michie and Philip Williamson, eds. The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 34; Martin Daunton, ‘Churchill at the Treasury: Remaking Conservative Taxation Policy 1924– 1929’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 75, 4 (1997), p. 1063.

5

Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 22 February 1925, CHAR 18/12A/96–99 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/12A/96–99].

6

Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 25 November 1924, CHAR 18/3/19– 20 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/3/19–20]; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V: The Prophet of Truth: 1922–1939 (London: William Heinemann, 1976), p. 68 note.

7

Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 2 January 1925, CHAR 18/12A/8 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/12A/8].

8

Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 13 December 1924, CHAR 18/2/62– 71 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/2/62–71].

9

Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 22 February 1925, CHAR 18/12A/96–99 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/12A/96–99].

10 Cited in Robert Boyce, ‘Government–City of London relations under the gold standard 1925–31’, in Michie and Williamson, eds. The British Government, pp. 217–18; Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900–1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), chapter 7, especially pp. 246–8. 11 In Britain’s case at £3/17/10¼ per ounce, restoring the prewar parity with the dollar of £1 = $4.86. 12 Gustav Cassel, ‘The Restoration of the Gold Standard’, Economica, 9 (1923), pp. 173–4. 13 House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 183, col. 671, 4 May 1925. 14 Winston Churchill to King George V, 23 April 1925, CHAR 18/7/150–164 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/7/150–164]. 15 Winston Churchill, speech notes for Gold Standard Bill, 2nd Reading, 4 May 1925, CHAR 9/71/62–93 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+9/71/62–93]. The full text is in House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 183, cols 663–81, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ commons/1925/may/04/gold-standard-bill 16 Winston Churchill, speech notes for coal subsidy, 6 August 1925, CHAR 9/72A/41–60 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+9/72A/41–60]. The full text is in House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 187, col. 1684, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/ aug/06/coal-mining-industry-subvention 17 CHAR9/72A/62-7: ‘Appropriations Bill (Gold Standard)’ speech notes, 6 August 1925.

44

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

18 CHAR18/12B/219: WSC to Niemeyer, 2 August 1925. 19 ‘Anglo-American Relations’, December 1925, CHAR 2/144/1–25 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/144/1–25]. 20 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 13 December 1924, CHAR 18/2/62–71 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/2/62–71]. 21 See CHAR 22/44 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+22/44], CHAR 22/46 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+22/46] and CHAR 22/232 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/232]. 22 See CHAR 22/97 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+22/97]. 23 Winston Churchill to Sir Warren Fisher, 13 February 1929, CHAR 18/103/10 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/103/10]. 24 Cabinet Conclusions, CC(17)29.1, 17 April 1929, CHAR 22/238/1841 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+22/238/18-41]. 25 Sir Horace Hamilton to Sir Warren Fisher, 16 October 1928, CHAR 18/106/14–15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/106/14–15]. 26 See CHAR 22/62–64 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+22/62–64]. 27 Note by Winston Churchill (31 March 1929) at foot of Frederick LeithRoss to Sir Richard Hopkins and Donald Ferguson, 28 March 1929, CHAR 18/100/137–138 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/100/137–138]. 28 The development of this scheme is the focus of files CHAR 18/64–65 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/64–65], CHAR 18/85–93 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId =CHAR+18/85–93], whilst additional relevant material is in CHAR 18/73 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/73], CHAR 9/84 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+9/84], CHAR 9/86 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/86] and CHAR 7/106B [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+7/106B]. It was partfunded by a tax on petrol introduced in 1928 (see CHAR 18/66 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/66] and CHAR 18/94–95 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+18/94–95]). 29 See CHAR 18/105 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/105]. 30 Winston Churchill to Lord Salisbury, 9 December 1924, CHAR 18/2/43-45 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/2/ 43-45]. 31 Winston Churchill to King George V, 23 April 1925, CHAR 18/7/150–164

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

45

[http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/7/ 150–164]. 32 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 28 November 1924, CHAR 18/7/89–94 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/7/89–94]; Daunton, ‘Churchill at the Treasury’, pp. 1065f. 33 Material about this scheme can be found in CHAR 18/19 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/19], supplemented by CHAR 18/12 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+18/12]. Churchill’s correspondence with Chamberlain on this matter is in CHAR 22/34 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/34] and the report of the Government Actuary on its implications in CHAR 22/35 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/35] (see also CHAR 22/39 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/39]). On extending this benefit to the devolved statelet of Northern Ireland see CHAR 22/75 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/75]. 34 Winston Churchill to King George V, 23 April 1925, CHAR 18/7/150– 164 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+18/7/150–164]. 35 Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 26 November 1924, CHAR 18/3/25 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/3/25]. 36 Winston Churchill to Sir Otto Niemeyer, 28 October 1926, CHAR 18/30B/309–314 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/30B/309–314]. 37 Winston Churchill to Sir Richard Hopkins, 7 March 1926, CHAR 18/30A/129–130 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/30A/129–130]. 38 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 29 January 1928, CHAR 18/77/2–4 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/77/2–4]. 39 See CHAR 22/65–69 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?conte xtId=CHAR+22/65–69], CHAR 22/172–176 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/172–176]. Several of the Treasury files are dominated by this topic (CHAR 18/4–6 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/4–6], CHAR 18/14 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/14], CHAR 18/32–33 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+18/32–33]), whilst additional material can be found in CHAR 22/30 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/30], CHAR 22/136 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/136], CHAR 22/138 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/138], CHAR 22/166 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/166], CHAR 22/198 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/198], CHAR 22/209 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/209], CHAR 22/236 [http://www.churchillarchive.

46

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/236], CHAR 18/44–46 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/44–46] and CHAR 18/48–49 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/48–49]. 40 Winston Churchill to Samuel Hoare, 12 December 1924, CHAR 18/2/60–61 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?conte xtId=CHAR+18/2/60–61]. Discussions on the base’s progress are found in CHAR 22/22 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/22], CHAR 22/66 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/66], CHAR 22/161 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/161], CHAR 22/210 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/210] and CHAR 22/213 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/213]. 41 Winston Churchill to W. C. Bridgeman, 14 February 1929, CHAR 18/102/23–24 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/102/23–24]; Sir Otto Niemeyer to Winston Churchill, 25 November 1924, CHAR 18/7/79 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId= CHAR+18/7/79]. 42 Sensitivity to calls for Protectionism is reflected in CHAR 18/78 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/78], a file in response to calls from the right-wing Tory MP, Henry Page-Croft, for more safeguarding. 43 Relevant correspondence with the president of the Board of Trade, Philip Cunliffe-Lister, is in CHAR 22/28–29 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/28–29], CHAR 22/40 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/40], CHAR 22/42 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/42], CHAR 22/44 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/44], CHAR 22/46 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/46], CHAR 22/92 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/92], CHAR 22/155 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/155], CHAR 22/157 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/157], CHAR 22/196–199 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+22/196–199], CHAR 22/236 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/236], CHAR 22/238 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/238], CHAR 18/10 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/10] and CHAR 18/30 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+18/30]. 44 Sir Horace Hamilton to P. J. Grigg, 13 April 1929, CHAR 18/100/186–187 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/100/186–187]. 45 Winston Churchill to Sir Horace Hamilton, 16 November 1924, CHAR 18/7/64–66 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/7/64–66].

CHURCHILL AS CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

47

46 Covered in CHAR 18/20 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+18/20] and CHAR 22/38 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/38]. 47 Correspondence and memoranda tracing the implementation and effects of betting tax from 1 November 1926 are in CHAR 18/36–38 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/36–38], CHAR 18/50–60 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+­ 18/50–60], CHAR 18/79–80 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page ?contextId=CHAR+18/79–80], CHAR 18/104 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/104] and CHAR 22/89 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/89]. 48 See CHAR 18/39 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+18/39] and CHAR 18/84 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/84]. 49 Background documents and speech notes for 16 March 1928, CHAR 9/83A/18 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId =CHAR+9/83A/18], CHAR 9/83A/19 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/83A/19], CHAR 9/83A/20-27 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/8 3A/20-27]. The full text is in House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 214, cols 2347–55 [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1928/ mar/16/racecourse-betting-bill]. See also CHAR 18/59 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/59], CHAR 18/81–83 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/81–83], CHAR 22/221 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/221] and Lord Hamilton of Dalzell to Winston Churchill, CHAR 2/158/115 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+2/158/115]. 50 Pembroke Wicks to J. C. C. Davidson (Conservative Party chairman), 12 October 1926, CHAR 18/37/28 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/pa ge?contextId=CHAR+18/37/28]; Sir Horace Hamilton to Sir John Anderson, 13 November 1926, CHAR 18/37/41–42 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/37/41–42]. 51 Harold Macmillan to Winston Churchill, 8 April 1929, CHAR 18/101/42–43 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/101/42–43]. 52 Stanley Baldwin to Winston Churchill, 16 April 1929, CHAR 18/101/55 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/101/55]. 53 Harold Macmillan to Winston Churchill, 27 March 1929, CHAR 18/101/34– 41 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/101/34–41]. 54 Winston Churchill to Sir Warren Fisher, 14 September 1928, CHAR 18/75/176–177 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/75/176–177]; Winston Churchill to Sir Warren Fisher, 28 March 1926, CHAR 18/30B/188–191 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page? contextId=CHAR+18/30B/188–191].

48

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

55 Winston Churchill to Sir Richard Hopkins, 22 July 1928, CHAR 18/75/134– 137 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+18/75/134–137]. 56 ‘The movement of wages and cost of living 1924–9’, 12 April 1929, CHAR 18/100/177 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/100/177]. 57 Sir Richard Hopkins to P. J. Grigg, 18 March 1929, CHAR 18/100/89–98 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/100/89–98]. 58 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 6 June 1927, CHAR 18/64/3– 13 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+18/64/3–13]; see also CHAR 18/62–63 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page? contextId=CHAR+18/62–63]. 59 Winston Churchill to Sir Warren Fisher, 14 September 1928, CHAR 22/155 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/75/167–173]. 60 See CHAR 22/155 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/155], CHAR 22/182 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/182], CHAR 22/205 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/205], CHAR 22/208 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/208] and CHAR 22/213 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/213]. 61 Winston Churchill, ‘The Gold Standard’, 10 February 1926, CHAR 22/87/46 http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/87/46]: CP55(26). Cassel’s article from the Times Annual Financial and Commercial Review (9 February 1926) is at pp. 6–9. 62 House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 256, cols 701–3, 15 September 1931, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1931/sep/15/standardrate-of-tax-for-1931-2-and 63 Winston Churchill to Lawrence Sloan, 11 January 1932, CHAR 1/401B/279 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1/40 1B/279]. See also CHAR 2/186 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/186].

5 Churchill and Labour Chris Wrigley

Nottingham University

Churchill’s political career coincided with the considerable growth of the British labour movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Churchill was very hostile to communism and to militant trade unionism. His attitude to the Labour Party was mixed. He depicted it as a major threat to the social order during the period of red revolution in Europe after the First World War. By the later 1930s he was ready to work with Labour supporters of rearmament and the Labour Party was a major partner in his Second World War coalition government. Whilst hostile to militant trade unionism, he generally saw moderate trade unionism as a respected element of British democracy. He had a paternalistic concern for the well-being of the underdogs in British society, and he showed this in practical measures such as minimum wages in sweated trades (under his Trades Board legislation before the First World War). Labour was very important to Churchill’s career, especially as the British labour movement grew in strength and as international communism became a threat in the interwar period. Churchill was usually well disposed towards moderate skilled trade unionism. Indeed, when he was building a big brick wall at Chartwell in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he joined the Amalgamated Union of Building Workers as an adult apprentice,1 though there was an element of mischief in so doing (and unsurprisingly it aroused criticism amongst some building workers).2 He was hostile to militant trade unionism. A vigorous opponent of communism, in the interwar period he often condemned British democratic socialism as either a direct threat to democracy or, like Russian socialism under Alexander Kerensky in Russia, ineffectual in the face of subversion. However, in 1940 the Labour Party was a crucial part of his coalition government and in 1941 he was very ready to form an alliance with Soviet Russia in the struggle against fascism.

50

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill was in Parliament most of the years 1900 to 1964. In this period the trade unions grew greatly in strength. From 2 million members in 1900, British and Northern Irish trade unions expanded to 4 million in 1910 and to 8.3 million in 1920, dropping to around 4 million until 1936, but growing again to over 10 million at the time of Churchill’s death. The Labour Party became the second party in Britain after the First World War. From 142 members of Parliament (MPs) in 1922, Labour had 191 in 1923 and 151 in 1924, and became the largest party in the House of Commons with 287 MPs in 1929. After the severe setback of 1931, Labour secured 154 MPs in 1935 and 393 in 1945, when it won its first majority in the Commons. In 1950 it narrowly held on to power with 315 MPs, but thereafter its contingents of MPs declined to 295 in 1951, 277 in 1955 and 258 in 1959. Before he became a parliamentary candidate in 1899, Winston Churchill had little contact with the industrial working class. He had been more used to estate workers and to those working for the Army. Other than his kind nanny, Mrs Everest, and his servant George Scrivings, who died whilst in Churchill’s employment in East Africa in 1908, Churchill made little mention of servants and, indeed, his summoning of them when he required a drink or other services was very much in a Victorian patrician style. Churchill shared the aristocracy’s fears of revolution, not least in regard to the Terror of the French Revolution, 1793–4, and the Paris Commune, 1871. He had hazy ideas of socialism. In his novel Savrola (1900) he confused the German Social Democrats with Anarchists.3 As Home Secretary, he was to deal firmly with a small group of violent and criminal foreign anarchists in Sidney Street in the East End of London in 1911. In this he was criticized for acting as if still in the Army. However, he was able to justify his proactive role.4 The Siege of Sidney Street did nothing to lessen his ongoing fears of anarchism and revolutionary socialism, which were long intertwined in his mind. When standing with a vehemently anti-socialist, Conservative trade unionist in a by-election in Oldham in 1899, Churchill appears to have felt that such a working-class candidate was inevitably a socialist, or at least that was how he remembered the contest in My Early Life (1930), with himself as ‘a “scion” of the ancient British aristocracy’ and James Mawdsley as a ‘socialist’.5 At the time of the by-election Churchill even saw Mawdsley’s candidature as ‘marking the birth of a new party which has been for a very long time in the minds of a great section of our fellow-countrymen – a Conservative Labour Party.’6 Churchill’s outlook included a benevolent paternalism. He sought to ameliorate the lot of the less fortunate in society, expecting them in turn to conform to what he deemed to be the norms of the existing social order. Such attitudes became especially marked during his early Liberal Party years, notably when at the Board of Trade (1908–10) and the Home Office (1910–11). In a much quoted statement of his beliefs, Churchill emphasized his commitment to free market economics:

CHURCHILL AND LABOUR

51

The existing organisation of society is driven by one mainspring – competitive selection. It may be a very imperfect organisation of society, but it is all we have got between us and barbarism … I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure.7 Churchill’s efforts to mitigate the consequences of failure, to ‘cast a safety net over the abyss’ (as he put it on another occasion), was most marked by his trades boards’ legislation. Bringing in minimum wages for even relatively few workers divided opinion on the progressive end of politics, some feeling it would weaken trade unionism.8 The trade boards were set up in sweated trades (trades in which workers were paid pitifully for long hours) under the Trade Boards Act, 1909. As the most exploited labour was female, women workers benefited disproportionately. With the initial trade boards, women accounted for 70 per cent of the 200,000 workers covered. By 1914 the Trade Boards Act had been extended to cover a further 170,000 people.9 For these people the legislation was a blessing. Churchill’s major social welfare initiatives benefited unemployed labour. Labour exchanges were effective in several British cities as well as in Germany. The first British ones had been set up in 1885, with the Salvation Army sponsoring them from 1890. In spite of government concerns over the level of public expenditure, Churchill introduced his Labour Exchanges Bill in May 1909.10 The resulting Act gave the Board of Trade the power to establish labour exchanges where they were needed and it took over sixtyone existing exchanges.11 Also, Churchill joined with David Lloyd George in the National Insurance Act, 1911, which was, perhaps, the most innovative of the social welfare measures introduced by the Liberal government (1905–15). Churchill was responsible for Part 2 of the Act, which provided unemployment insurance for some 2,230,000 workers in trades with high cyclical and seasonal unemployment.12 Lloyd George and Churchill were motivated by a mixture of altruism, a desire not to be surpassed by socialists and a belief that such measures were crucial for an efficient labour force in the face of German and American industrial competition.13 Like Lloyd George, his predecessor as president of the Board of Trade (1905–08), Churchill was notably proactive in seeking to resolve industrial disputes. Under the 1896 Conciliation Act a president of the Board of Trade could, with the agreement of both sides in a dispute, offer to try to find an acceptable solution, but (unlike arbitration) neither side was bound to accept what was offered. Churchill was pleased to appear centre stage as a man who could resolve threats of, or actual, industrial warfare. His efforts included an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a new slidingscale agreement in the cotton industry in order to avoid the persistent strikes and lockouts in the industry. He was also unsuccessful in getting agreement to give the government stronger powers of intervention in industrial disputes.14

52

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Whilst he was MP for Oldham, Churchill had experienced much contact with local trade unionists. These included J. R. Clynes, the future Labour Party leader (1921–2) and Cabinet minister. Clynes failed to convince Churchill on various labour issues in 1899, but he did win him over to the cause of repealing the Taff Vale Judgement 1902 (which undid many of the rights the trade unions had enjoyed under 1871 and 1875 legislation).15 As one of seventeen Conservative MPs who voted for a Trades Union Congress (TUC) backed bill to reverse the Taff Vale Judgement, Churchill made characteristic comments praising Benjamin Disraeli’s Tory Democracy that was behind the 1875 legislation, which Churchill deemed to have created fairness in industrial relations between employers and employees.16 In the years before the high levels of labour unrest of 1911–21, Churchill was notably favourable in his remarks about trade unionism, as he was again after 1945. At Dundee in May 1908 he observed, ‘Trade unions are not socialistic. They are the antithesis of socialism. They are undoubtedly individualistic organisations, more in the character of the old guilds.’ Earlier, in November 1904, he spoke in favour of the right to strike.17 Churchill became more anxious about trade unions during the substantial labour unrest after 1910. As Home Secretary in February 1910 to October 1911, he was responsible for law and order during strikes. Until late in his career, Labour supporters in general elections shouted ‘Tonypandy’ at him. This referred to firm policing in November 1910 during a mining strike in which there were half-hearted attacks on the pits but rioting on the main street of Tonypandy. Churchill sent 800 London police to the area, rather than troops as the local authority wished, and the police were enough to restore peace without fatalities. Nevertheless, in folk memory Churchill was responsible for deaths at Tonypandy. This was to confuse events there with events at Llanelli in August 1911 during the national railway strike. At Llanelli, Churchill had agreed to the use of troops to protect the railways, and two people died when soldiers fired at a crowd attacking an engine driver.18 Churchill, the soldier, came to the fore in major industrial unrest. Paul Addison has written of Churchill in 1910–12 that when ‘sections of the working class began to challenge the state’s authority, Churchill adopted a belligerent posture: the spirit of insubordination must be broken’. This he displayed during the railway dispute of 1912 when, according to a usually reliable source, he telephoned Lloyd George to say that he regretted Lloyd George had settled the dispute as ‘It would have been better to have gone on and given these men a good thrashing.’19 Churchill came back in contact with organized labour when he returned to office under David Lloyd George in July 1917. Like Lloyd George he was a dynamic minister of munitions, but Churchill was sometimes less skilful in dealing with the trade unions. This was shown when he became entangled in wage differential issues in munitions in October 1917 and afterwards. Churchill intended to remove major grievances of skilled engineers, notably

CHURCHILL AND LABOUR

53

by scrapping leaving certificates (without which workers could not be employed elsewhere, but which gave their current employers much power over them) and enhancing hourly pay. The granting of a 12.5 per cent bonus to skilled workers on hourly rates of pay set off demands by skilled piecerate workers, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Churchill was warned of the likely dire consequences of the 12.5 per cent award to one group of workers by Sir George Askwith, the chief industrial commissioner, and Sir Lynden Macassey, head of the Shipyard Labour Department, but he ignored these warnings and had to face the bad consequences.20 With the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in October 1917, Churchill’s old fears of revolutionary socialism and anarchism were given a new and major focus. Churchill’s vehement hostility to Bolshevism helped alienate him from the left of the British labour movement.21 Churchill, however, did take pains to rebut claims that he alone was behind the intervention and that he was trying to undermine the withdrawal of British troops.22 Yet it is sometimes overlooked that several leading Labour Party figures – such as Arthur Henderson, J. R. Clynes, J. H. Thomas and Ernest Bevin – shared his hostility to communism and in 1919 some also supported outside intervention to oust the Bolsheviks. Indeed, Henderson had even denounced the Bolsheviks when he was in Russia between the February and October revolutions.23 After the First World War, Churchill was also vigorous in demanding firm action against militant miners and other workers. For instance, in February 1920, he strongly supported the use of the emergency transport organization to keep supplies moving during a strike. ‘It is not strike breaking’, he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘it is feeding the people’.24 Churchill exhibited similar belligerence during the General Strike, 1926, which was solidarity action in support of the miners. This action he deemed to be a constitutional outrage. However, he saw the miners’ actions in the coal lockout to be legitimate trade union activity. Churchill’s eagerness to play a leading role in combating the General Strike, not least his editorship of the British Gazette (the government’s newspaper), identified him thereafter in the collective memory of the British labour movement as a virulent anti-labour figure.25 Along with ‘Tonypandy’, his role long remained a matter of resentment. Churchill later claimed his 1926 actions were consistent with his views before and after: that he fought with all his might to win, but in victory he displayed magnanimity. In 1926 he did seek a compromise to settle the coal dispute, but when his efforts failed he moved to remove financial relief from those miners and their families who remained obdurate.26 By the time of the General Strike, Churchill had not only returned to the Conservative Party but had entered the Cabinet in 1924 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had moved back to the Conservatives in stages since he had been a Liberal coalitionist in Lloyd George’s coalition governments. By 1919 he had established himself as the leading ministerial advocate

54

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

of intervention in Russia against the Bolsheviks. In February 1919 Lloyd George had even telegrammed Churchill to warn him that intervention was ‘the road to bankruptcy and Bolshevism in these islands’.27 He also excelled in hostility to the more powerful Labour Party of post–First World War Britain. After the 1923 general election Churchill was prominent in urging Conservative–Liberal electoral understandings to keep Labour from office.28 In a letter to The Times, dated 18 January 1924, he made it very clear that his politics were now dominated by hostility to socialism. In the letter he warned against a government of ‘a minority party innately pledged to the fundamental subversion of the existing social and economic civilization’. After this letter it was clear that Churchill was returning to the Conservatives with a reputation as the leading anti-socialist in British politics.29 Churchill began building bridges with some of the Labour right-wing from 1936 with fears building in relation to Nazi Germany. He met Sir Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, Hugh Dalton MP, J. R. Clynes MP and others at lunches given by the Anti-Nazi Council.30 Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, shared Churchill’s concerns about Britain’s air preparedness. More generally, Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton moved Labour’s defence policy away from its earlier anti-war attitudes. This common ground made Labour’s leadership more willing to work with Churchill, having earlier deplored Churchill’s stances over India and the Abdication Crisis, 1936. In the Second World War Churchill drew on his experiences at the Ministry of Munitions in the First World War. In January 1940 he spoke of the need for more than a million women to work in the war industries, saying he would need the ‘aid and guidance’ of ‘our Labour colleagues and trade union leaders’.31 Throughout his wartime premiership he was to rely heavily on Ernest Bevin, who was his minister of labour and national service. As Bevin’s biographer wrote, Churchill recognized that Bevin had ‘a toughness of mind, a self-confidence and strength of will which matched his own’.32 On several occasions Churchill paid tribute to the trade union role in the war effort. For instance, in 1941, he remarked that he could ‘never forget the support and encouragement which the Trade Unions … gave me in the darkest days of 1940 and are giving with all their heart today’.33 Churchill’s deputy prime minister in his wartime coalition government was the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee. Attlee was an effective deputy, famous for his brevity and sharp focus when chairing meetings, a contrast to Churchill. Labour ministers such as A. V. Alexander and Herbert Morrison were effective members of Churchill’s government. This made Churchill’s 1945 general election speech in which he warned that the coming of socialism would require ‘some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance’ all the more shocking, even to members of his family.34 After his defeat in the 1945 general election, Churchill reached out to working-class voters. Over the years he had mostly taken pains to stress the worthiness of trade unions. In the House of Commons in 1911 he had

CHURCHILL AND LABOUR

55

declared, ‘I consider that every workman is well advised to join a trade union’, and urged trade union unity (unlike continental trade unionism often split between different political groups and religions).35 Even in February 1919 he was saying, ‘The curse of trade unionism was that there was not enough of it, and it was not highly enough developed to make its branch secretaries fall into line with head office.’36 After 1945 he was even more fulsome in his praise: The trade unions are a long-established and essential part of our national life … we take our stand by these pillars of our British Society … of the right of individual labouring men to adjust their wages and conditions by collective bargaining, including the right to strike.37 At the 1950 Conservative Party Conference he returned to what he saw as the Tory Democracy themes of Disraeli and his father, Lord Randolph Churchill: The salient feature of this conference has been the growing association of Tory democracy with the trade unions. After all it was Lord Beaconsfield and the Tory Party who gave British trade unionism its charter, and collective bargaining with the right to strike. I have urged that every craftsman or wage earner should of his own free will be a trade unionist, but I also think he should attend the meetings of his trade union and stand up for his ideas instead of letting only socialists and communists get control of what is after all an essentially British institution.38 With his return to office in 1951 Churchill was eager to avoid confrontations with the miners or trade unionists generally.39 He appointed the emollient Sir Walter Monkton as minister for labour. Monckton’s approach was summed up by his observation: ‘I am a firm believer in government by consultation and consent’, an attitude which was to worry Conservatives concerned by increasing inflation. Churchill also personally cultivated moderate trade union leaders such as Vincent Tewson, the General Secretary of the TUC.40 Churchill’s career was marked by strong hostility to socialism but usually a warm acceptance of trade unionism as a major element of British freedom. For him the trade unions were elements of Victorian individualism. In contrast, he was often vehement against ‘socialism’, which he often saw as not British, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a return to the horrors of the French Revolution, a nightmare for aristocrats. As for the Labour Party, after the First World War he liked to depict its leaders – even Arthur Henderson, Ramsay MacDonald and J. R. Clynes – as either dupes of extremists or even, occasionally, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unlike David Lloyd George, there was never speculation that Churchill might join the labour movement.

56

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Notes 1

A comment from ‘A Knight of the Blade’ on Winston Churchill’s membership of the Amalgamated Union of Building Workers, n.d. but 1928, CHAR 1/201/67 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+1/201/67].

2

J. J. Riley, letter regarding Winston Churchill’s qualifications to join the Amalgamated Union of Building Workers, 10 October 1928, CHAR 1/201/24-25 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+­1/201/24-25].

3

Winston Churchill, Savrola (London: Beacon, 1957 [1900]), pp. 63 and 105.

4

Winston Churchill, draft letters for the Coroner regarding his actions at Sidney Street, 10 January 1911, CHAR 12/11/4-5 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+12/11/4-5].

5

Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), chapter 17.

6

Oldham, 29 June 1899, in Robert Rhodes James, ed. Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, vol. 1 (London: Chelsea House/New York: Bowker, 1974), p. 219; cutting from the Manchester Guardian, regarding the Oldham by-election, 1899, CHAR 2/1/18 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/1/18].

7

Glasgow, 11 October 1906, in Winston Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), p. 82.

8

Observations on Women’s Industrial Council memorandum, ‘The Case for and against a Legal Minimum Wage for Sweated Workers’, CHAR 11/16/13-20 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+11/16/13-20].

9

Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), pp. 78–9.

10 Sydney Buxton to Winston Churchill, regarding unemployment, 30 January 1909, CHAR 2/39/13 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/39/13]; Winston Churchill, memorandum on labour exchanges and unemployment insurance, August 1912, CHAR 2/57/35-41 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/57/3541]; Labour Exchanges Committee Report, with Minute by Winston Churchill, 19 April 1909, and Supplementary Report, CHAR 11/35/3 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+11/35/3]. 11 Bentley B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance (London: Michael Joseph, 1966), pp. 37–8 and 260–2; Jose Harris, Unemployment and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 276–95. 12 Gilbert, The Evolution, pp. 266–86; Harris, Unemployment, pp. 295–334; Sydney Buxton to Winston Churchill, regarding unemployment, 30 January 1909, CHAR 2/39/13 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+2/39/13].

CHURCHILL AND LABOUR

57

13 Edward Marsh to E. H. Kenney, conveying Churchill’s views on unemployment insurance, 17 September 1912, August 1912, CHAR 2/57/49 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/57/49]. 14 Conference at Board of Trade, 4 March 1909, in Rhodes James, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2, pp. 1181–3; Chris Wrigley, ‘The government and industrial relations’, in Chris Wrigley, ed. A History of British Industrial Relations 1875–1914 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 145–6. 15 Cutting from the Manchester Courier, regarding the Trades Disputes Bill, 20 January 1903, CHAR 2/5/6 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/5/6]. 16 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 42; Chris Wrigley, ‘Churchill and the Trade Unions’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 11, 2001, pp. 273–93; Rhodes James, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 1, pp. 274–6. 17 Wrigley, ‘Churchill and the Trade Unions’, p. 278. 18 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume 2: Young Statesman, 1901–1914 (London: William Heinemann, 1967), pp. 373–8. General Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1924), pp. 136–54. 19 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 150. 20 Chris Wrigley, David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976), pp. 219–22; Chris Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department?’ in K. Burk, ed. War and the State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), pp. 32–56; Lord Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes (London: John Murray, 1920), pp. 426–45. 21 Winston Churchill and Lord Curzon, correspondence regarding Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian regime, 1 and 2 May 1919, CHAR 2/105/72 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/105/72], CHAR 2/105/73-74 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/105/73-74]. 22 Winston Churchill to the editor of the British Weekly, regarding the withdrawal of British troops from Russia, 31 January 1920, CHAR 2/110/6-15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/110/6-15]; Winston Churchill to Leicester and District Trades Council, regarding withdrawal of British troops from Russia and Bolshevik actions beyond Russia, 5 August 1920, CHAR 2/110/67-68 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/110/67-68]. 23 Chris Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990), pp. 114–16. 24 Notes of a Cabinet meeting, 2 February 1920, K. Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones: Whitehall Diary, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 99–103. 25 Winston Churchill to Sir James Hawkey, regarding alleged subversion in the General Strike, 16 November 1926, CHAR 2/147/167-173 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/147/167-173]. 26 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 268.

58

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

27 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume IV: Part 1: January 1917–June 1919 (London: William Heinemann, 1977), p. 539. 28 Summary of Press Comments, including Winston Churchill’s view that Labour was not fit to govern, 27 February 1920, CHAR 2/110/19 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/110/19]; Winston Churchill and Archibald Salvidge, correspondence regarding a public meeting on the ‘present dangers of the Socialist movement’, April 1924, CHAR 2/132/80 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+2/132/80], CHAR 2/132/82 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/132/82] and CHAR 2/132/83-85 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=char+2/132/83-85]. 29 Winston Churchill, press statement on the alternative to a Labour government, January 1924, CHAR 2/132/1-6 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/pag e?contextId=CHAR+2/132/1-6]. 30 A. H. Richards to Winston Churchill, listing those intending to attend Anti-Nazi Council luncheons (including Labour figures), 28 March 1939, CHAR 2/376/32 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/376/32] and 24 July 1939, CHAR 2/376/66-69 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=char+2/376/66-69]. 31 Speech at Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 27 January 1940, Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers: At the Admiralty: September 1939–May 1940, vol. I (London: William Heinemann, 1993), p. 695. 32 Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 4. 33 Churchill to Luke Fawcett, 4 September 1941, Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers: The Ever-Widening War: 1941, vol. 3 (London: William Heinemann, 2000), p. 1150. 34 Rhodes James, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, p. 7172. 35 Quoted in Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, pp. 145–7. 36 Quoted in Wrigley, ‘Churchill and the Trade Unions’, p. 287. 37 Conservative Party Conference Report 1947 (London: Conservative Party, 4 October 1947). 38 Chris Wrigley, British Trade Unions 1945–1995 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 44. 39 What the Conservatives Will Do (short statement of policy in 1951 general election), CHAR 2/123/44 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?con textId=CHAR+2/123/44]. 40 V. L. Allen, Trade Unions and the Government (London: Longman, 1960), pp. 34 and 304; Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), pp. 29, 199 and 568–9; Justin Davis Smith, The Attlee and Churchill Governments and Industrial Relations (London: Pinter, 1990).

6 Churchill and the General Strike Peter Catterall

University of Westminster

Churchill made clear his concerns about the constitutional challenge posed by a general strike long before the events of May 1926. However, his direct role in the run-up to those events was largely confined to agreeing the subsidy for the mining industry in July 1925, which postponed the conflagration. Churchill’s profile, not least through involvement with the British Gazette, nevertheless led to some exaggeration of his part in events, though not of his hostility to a general strike. The coal dispute which helped to spark it was however for him a very different matter, and Churchill tried hard if unsuccessfully to resolve this during the autumn of 1926. ‘Business is all disorganised … hideous reciprocal injuries are being inflicted by British hands on British throats’, Winston Churchill lamented in the Commons on 31 August 1926. To reinforce the point, Parliament had just been recalled to renew the state of emergency deemed necessary by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government in face of bitter industrial conflict. The difficulty of resolving the prolonged coal dispute was clearly expressed by Churchill: the government was confronted by miners repeatedly demanding a subsidy, whilst ‘all the owners say to us is, “Leave us alone”’. In seeking resolution, Churchill acknowledged the widespread view that he was not the man for the job: ‘One set of criticism is that the Prime Minister is always anxious to be very tender-hearted and make peaceful settlements, and that I am the marplot who frequently comes forward and intervenes to obstruct.’1 This view was particularly common amongst his political opponents. The parliamentary report to the 1926 Labour Party conference made clear Churchill’s reputation in industrial disputes, noting with surprise of this debate: ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Churchill] made, for him, a very pacificatory speech, bringing with it a distinct improvement in the atmosphere’.2

60

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

The crisis originated in the industrial travails following the First World War. The much more heavily unionized labour force that emerged from the conflict responded to wartime inflation, taking advantage of a post-war boom to recover real wage levels. These shot up to around 30 per cent above prewar norms, whilst hours were reduced. Interest rates were meanwhile increased both to choke off resultant inflationary pressures and to help restore sterling to prewar levels, whilst government spending was drastically cut from 1921. The result was reduced productivity and profitability and a credit squeeze just as the short boom ended in 1920–21. All this restricted investment and exacerbated the problems of staple industries now hit hard by a combination of the over-capacity encouraged during the war and the wartime loss of export markets. In response, businesses tried to reduce their costs, not least by reducing wages, a process resisted with varying success by the trade unions. Probably the most politically sensitive sector affected by these developments was the coal-mining industry, which was vital for domestic heating, transport, and electricity and gas generation. A very fragmented industry of some 1,400 firms employed over a million men in dirty and dangerous work. Wartime necessity led to it being put under state control in 1916, with additional pits that later proved uneconomic brought into operation.3 Making permanent this situation and rationalizing the industry through nationalization was narrowly recommended by a Royal Commission report to David Lloyd George’s coalition government in 1919. Churchill, who was then Secretary of State for War and Air, shared the Cabinet view instead favouring regulation, though labour underground was reduced by the Seven Hours Act 1919. Subsequently, with the post-war boom receding and prices and profits falling, the coalition instead decided to decontrol the industry in March 1921. There followed a dress rehearsal for 1926. Mine-owners of what were now often unprofitable pits blamed the government for their plight, especially in the once-thriving export districts, hit by wartime importsubstitution and replacement in overseas markets by reparations coal from Germany. They saw no solution other than to cut costs by reducing wages. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) resisted these moves and the government invoked the Emergency Powers Act 1920 (EPA) to declare a state of emergency. However, on the pretext that the MFGB had turned down opportunities for settlement, the railwaymen and transport workers did not support them, calling off their planned sympathy action on 15 April 1921. The spectre of a national dispute, led by the ‘Triple Alliance’ of coal, rail and transport workers that could halt the economy, first emerged in 1914. Three years earlier, Churchill had already drafted a lengthy note reflecting on the rising problem of politically motivated strikes. ‘Thirty years ago the “general strike” was a very shadowy proposal’, the then Home Secretary observed; ‘now it is a definite objective deliberately advocated’.4 Churchill regarded a general strike as an intentional political project, later arguing that

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

61

after 1919, through ‘a group of extremists in the Trade Union movement … a whole literature upon a General Strike as the supreme weapon of labour came into existence’. Although Churchill always expected the majority of trade unionists to stand by parliamentary rule, the risk that a general strike could be used to make government ‘surrender to force what they would not concede to parley’,5 not least by denying food supplies, led him in 1919 to advocate the deployment of troops ‘if it was a question of saving lives’.6 Anxieties about industrial conflict that year also led to the creation of the Cabinet’s Supply and Transport Committee (STC). The new Baldwin Cabinet which Churchill joined in November 1924 immediately decided to continue with ‘The Supply and Transport Organisation [STO], which former Governments have relied on in times of industrial crisis for the maintenance of supplies essential to the life of the civil community’. This provided a nucleus organization to apply a code of emergency regulations drafted under the EPA. A statement that ‘The Mines Department consider that this selected code contains all the powers which they would require at the outset of the emergency’ made clear where such a crisis was expected to occur.7 When these words were written in July 1925, problems had returned in the coal industry. Temporarily, the Franco–Belgian occupation of the German coalfields in January 1923 brought prosperity to the British industry, during which an increased minimum wage was agreed under the 1924 Labour government. The occupation, however, was ended following the Dawes Plan in September 1924. This prompted falling export prices for British coal, increasing pressure to reduce labour costs. Then, on 28 April 1925, Churchill announced a return to the Gold Standard.8 Churchill had justified the policy on grounds of international price stability but, as the economist John Maynard Keynes warned, because he did so at the prewar parity with the dollar, prices would have to fall in Britain in order to adjust to a now overvalued currency. If, Keynes argued, prices and wages could fall across the entire economy by 10 per cent, then this might have minimal effects on real wages. The likelihood, however, was that the burden would fall particularly on weakened and heavily export-dependent industries such as coal.9 Even beforehand the coal industry was already struggling with unit costs that had doubled since 1913, whilst miners’ real wages in the export districts could be as much as 50 per cent below prewar levels.10 The MFGB was therefore in no mood to accept the wage reductions posted by the owners in June 1925, to come into force on 31 July. This came in the midst of attempts to revive trade-union cooperation in the wake of 1921. A conference called by a number of leading unions to consider the idea of an industrial alliance on 17 July 1925 supported industrial action in sympathy with unions felt to be under attack. The hastily convened court of inquiry the government set up meanwhile reported on 28 July in favour of a national minimum wage, whilst also pointing out the coal industry’s parlous financial state. Baldwin

62

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

nevertheless that day told an MFGB delegation complaining of the effect of the Gold Standard that he would not give a subsidy. Instead, he asked Churchill to consider the mining royalties paid to landowners. Two days later, on 30 July, the Chancellor recommended gradual national purchase of the royalties, costing around £100 million.11 Meanwhile, a Special Industrial Conference called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) reacted with anger when the miners reported that the prime minister had told them, ‘All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.’ Strike notices and embargoes on coal movements were consequently issued.12 Baldwin then reconsidered his earlier position and a subsidy for nine months ending on 30 April 1926, which eventually totalled about £23 million, was agreed. This staved off the immediate crisis. Churchill was no enthusiast for subsidies, feeling they misallocated resources and undermined effort. He also came to feel that they were merely being used by the mine-owners to rebuild their balance sheets.13 This undoubtedly stymied his efforts to balance the nation’s books: Churchill allegedly snarled at Arthur Cook, the General Secretary of the MFGB, ‘You got the subsidy over my blood-stained corpse. I have to find the money for it now.’14 No provision for such expenditure had been made in that year’s Budget. Churchill nevertheless told the Commons on 6 August 1925, ‘I have absolutely no doubt myself that the decision … was right and wise’. His justification was that public opinion was unprepared for a dispute that would cost the nation much more. He added that temporary support for miners’ wages was justified as these had not kept pace with post-war inflation. This was, he stated, because ‘in their resistance, the Government decline to discern any challenge to the State’. A challenge inspired by different forces, ‘armed, inspired and taught by foreign propaganda, and, it may well be, in some cases, fed with foreign money’, would be, he darkly implied, a rather different matter.15 A weekly ‘Report on Revolutionary Organisation in the United Kingdom’, compiled by Special Branch, makes clear what he had in mind.16 In later reflections, Churchill also emphasized two other reasons: that he had not then sufficient confidence in the STO; and ‘in order that a Royal Commission should have time to examine the whole position, see who was in the right, and try to find some fair compromise’.17 The Royal Commission under the former Liberal Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, published its unanimous report on 10 March 1926. This was a bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies. It covered everything from the extraction to the distribution of coal, reflecting public concern about profiteering by coal merchants. The key recommendations, however, were nationalization of royalties, reorganization short of nationalization and improvements in working conditions. It also recommended a National Wages Board to regularize torturously complex pay structures within the industry. Whilst these measures gradually restored the industry to financial health, the Commission recommended cessation of the subsidy. Samuel’s view was

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

63

that: ‘It was wrong in principle that, when in some industry employers and employed could not come to terms, the taxpayer should make up the difference.’ The problem was that 75 per cent of British coal was being produced at a loss, exacerbated by the return to the Gold Standard: the resulting increase in sterling’s value meant that although 80,000 tons more of coal were exported in the first quarter of 1926, they earned £1.75 million less. Noting that living costs had fallen since the current wage settlement was fixed in 1924, Samuel’s commission therefore recommended closures of uneconomic pits and cuts in wages of 10 per cent.18 A week after the Commission reported, Baldwin established a Cabinet committee to consider its recommendations. Churchill was appointed to this and later occasionally chaired it in Baldwin’s absence. At its first meeting the committee noted that, although it did not entirely agree with the Commission’s report, it was committed to implementing it. Churchill’s initial involvement was on the royalty nationalization issue, producing a paper on 27 March 1926 on how to achieve this. Thereafter, he was busy with preparations for his Budget at the end of April. Churchill was accordingly absent when Baldwin led the committee in discussions with the MFGB on 15 April and 23 April 1926. At the latter meeting, the prime minister and minister of labour, Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, pointed out how few of the pits in the coal-exporting districts were profitable. The MGFB responded that pits should therefore close, a view Churchill had also put forward in a speech the previous November. The MFGB president Herbert Smith was prepared to countenance 200,000 being thrown out of work rather than cut wages, arguing that the resultant loss of competition would prompt a recovery in profitability. His delegation also argued that prices, which had fallen since 1925, would increase with the end of the subsidy.19 The owners’ organization, the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB), told the coal committee on 21 April 1926 that miners’ compensation could be about the same if they worked an eight- rather than seven-hour day. It suggested that if unit labour costs could be reduced in this way the industry might begin to recover. Evan Williams, secretary of the MAGB, claimed repeal of the Seven Hour Act, after a strike of a couple of months, would produce this permanent cure. Baldwin drily responded, ‘I do not think any Strike has ever been a permanent cure yet.’20 A strike was by then looming with the TUC, as in 1925, prepared to offer sympathy action for the MFGB. On 26 April 1926, as Churchill assured the House in his Budget speech that he assumed industrial peace, Baldwin, Steel-Maitland and the minister for mines, G. R. Lane-Fox, embarked on a frenetic round of meetings with the TUC and MAGB. Baldwin told the latter that he understood why owners in the export districts had published wage reductions21 to be implemented once the subsidy ran out. These, however, cost public support. Baldwin therefore urged them to sort out the national minimum wage first before pursuing increases in hours, not least to give the TUC something to offer the MFGB. He warned the MAGB, ‘If you have a

64

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

General Strike with public opinion on your side I think the struggle will be probably short and sharp. If you have public opinion against you it might be long, and it would be difficult.’22 On the grounds that its varying districts with very different profit-levels would not accept such arrangements, the MAGB was unwilling to budge. The owners remained as unmovable on costs as the miners were on wages. For the latter, reorganization, as stressed in the Samuel Report, had to be agreed before cuts. For the former, cuts had to happen to shore up the industry first. Furthermore, the wage issue was complicated by the web of profit-sharing and additional payments in cash and kind (including free coal and housing) made to various classes of miners.23 Baldwin complained at a meeting with the TUC, ‘When we get through this trouble, however we get through it, it would be a mercy if we could get a simplification of their wage system. I do not believe anyone understands it.’ It was almost impenetrable to anyone outside the industry. Baldwin’s diatribe that ‘If you ask either side what a man is getting they always give you different answers and neither believes what the other says’ prompted a sympathetic response from steelworkers’ leader and TUC Chairman Arthur Pugh that ‘We are all in the same boat.’24 This complexity made it difficult to counter Williams’ claims that 75 per cent of pits would lose money and 60 per cent would stop production if the MFGB demands were conceded. Raising prices, he argued, would merely hit the profitability and export-potential of heavy coal-using industries like steel. What the MAGB wanted was a return to something like the 1921 minimum wage with an eight-hour day. ‘That combination would be a remarkably good settlement if it could be got by agreement’, Baldwin responded, adding, ‘I do not see much chance of it in any circumstances.’25 He did, however, make clear on 29 April to the TUC and MFGB that Churchill was prepared to concede a further subsidy of around £3 million to buy time for a settlement. The following day, the MAGB was prevailed upon to make an offer around the 1921 minimum (effectively a 13.33 per cent reduction in the existing minimum) and an eight-hour day until the end of 1929. Later that afternoon the TUC responded that, until reorganization was agreed, the MFGB would not accept wage reductions. That evening Baldwin offered an advisory committee representing both sides to draw up reorganization proposals. Smith then reaffirmed that he would have to see to what that reorganization amounted before considering wage reductions. This, LaneFox noted, would require an extension of the subsidy for several years. The government considered this tantamount to rejection of the Samuel Report, and the meeting ended with Baldwin noting no clear chance of progress. That evening the King signed a proclamation of a state of emergency. The following morning the emergency TUC conference, convened two days earlier, voted with only one dissenting union to give powers and financial support to the organization of sympathy action in support of the

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

65

miners. Ernest Bevin of the Transport & General Workers’ Union described the royal proclamation as a declaration of war.26 In these circumstances, at 6 p.m. on Saturday 1 May, the TUC issued strike notices to support the miners, with rolling waves of workers to be called out, commencing from one minute to midnight on Monday 3 May. Baldwin was unaware of this when meeting a TUC delegation on the evening of 1 May. The railwaymen’s leader J. H. Thomas then explained that the TUC lacked authority to settle on behalf of the MFGB, nevertheless suggesting that a short continuation of the subsidy might buy a fortnight to reach agreement. As Baldwin pointed out, that would involve the MFGB accepting the Samuel Report. What happened next, and Churchill’s part in it, was to be a matter of some controversy. Churchill came from Chartwell for a Cabinet meeting on the situation at noon on Sunday 2 May. The afternoon passed as the TUC tried to get hold of MFGB leaders who had returned to their districts. Meanwhile, the Cabinet learnt of the strike notices. Churchill was by no means the only minister alarmed at negotiating under such a threat. As the royal proclamation was issued that evening, ministers met in Churchill’s rooms at No. 11 Downing Street to prepare a statement, partly drafted by Churchill, for those colleagues meeting with the TUC delegation. This expressed the view that, under the threat of a general strike, the miners must indicate willingness to accept the Samuel Report or negotiations should end. Baldwin, Steel-Maitland and Lord Birkenhead met the TUC at 9 p.m., but did not give this ultimatum. Instead, they retired to meet the Cabinet at 11 p.m., Birkenhead reading out Thomas’ statement undertaking to get the MFGB to negotiate on the Report if the subsidy continued for a fortnight. This prompted a furious argument between Churchill and his old friend Birkenhead. Dominions Secretary Leo Amery’s diary states that of the Cabinet Amery alone supported Baldwin and Birkenhead in thinking Thomas’ statement a basis for continuing negotiations. Steel-Maitland, indeed, told Parliament two days later that there was no sign that the MFGB accepted the Report, and therefore no sensible grounds for continuing the subsidy. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, then took a telephone call informing that the printers had refused to print the Daily Mail’s leading article for the following morning. J. C. C. Davidson, the Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner, noted that ‘Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Balfour, Bridgeman and Hogg successively made it clear that it must be the result of the General Strike instructions … and the Cabinet came to the conclusion that they could no longer negotiate under the threat of a General Strike.’27 Bevin later stated in the run-up to the 1929 election that ‘We were in a room in Downing Street … when Mr Churchill saw red, walked in and upset the Cabinet, and we had that ultimatum.’28 The New Statesman even alleged that Churchill remarked that ‘“a little blood-letting” would be all to the good’ whilst leading six other ministers in resignation threats. Contemporary diary accounts of ministers present support neither of these allegations, and demonstrate that Churchill’s view that negotiation should

66

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

not continue on such a tentative basis without withdrawal of strike notices was widely shared by his Cabinet colleagues. An incensed Churchill wrote to the Attorney-General asking if he could sue for libel. Sir Douglas Hogg replied that he probably could, but advised against.29 Churchill’s later response to Bevin argued that if the TUC really thought it had a settlement offer – and as it happened the MFGB rejected Thomas’ formula – it could have temporarily withdrawn the strike notices.30 The TUC instead called out 1.5 million workers in waves in the docks, railways, printing, iron and steel, metals, chemicals, building and electricity-generation industries. Meanwhile, on 3 May Joynson-Hicks reluctantly allowed Churchill for the first time to attend the STC. The production and distribution of a daily bulletin during the impending strike was discussed. As Churchill told a meeting with newspaper proprietors at noon, ‘something must be done to prevent alarming news from being spread about … I do not contemplate violent partisanship, but fair, strong encouragement to the great mass of loyal people.’31 The previous year the STC had considered creating an emergency news-sheet using government printing presses at Harrow. Davidson, however, considered these inadequate and arranged to use those of the Morning Post instead. Even then the fledgling venture remained under threat when the compositors at the Morning Post joined the printers on strike. Sydney Long, the night superintendent of the Daily Express, was recruited. By working almost non-stop for three days he was able to get the enterprise under way. It was the Air Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who named the newspaper the British Gazette. His ministry was also crucial for its distribution. It was, however, Churchill who oversaw the enterprise. The intention was not to replace existing newspapers but to pool their resources whilst these were no longer able to publish. The press, nevertheless, wished to return to production as soon as possible; an aim complicated by the large demands for newsprint made by the British Gazette from its first issue on 5 May. Shortages were tackled by commandeering the stocks of other newspapers, including those of the TUC-owned Daily Herald, whose presses were used to print its own journal, the British Worker. Stocks were also seized from a resentful Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, whilst a commandeered paper-mill in Northfleet was soon producing enough paper for 1.5 million copies. Such precipitate actions were justified in a constitutional emergency by Churchill, but they were also strongly criticized by some of his government colleagues.32 For Churchill the British Gazette’s first task was to put the government’s case. His article on the front page of the first edition on 5 May 1926 stressed that whilst the government remained ready to provide a temporary subsidy to help resolve the trade dispute in the coal industry, the General Strike was a wholly different matter, challenging the authority of Parliament. The second task was to provide information and support morale, hence the emphasis

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

67

on sufficiency of food supplies in Churchill’s article on the front page of 6 May. By then, the British Gazette was selling over half a million copies at 1d. each. Davidson nevertheless wrote to Baldwin complaining of Churchill’s interference in the operations side of the newspaper. He also insisted that ‘no official news should appear which was not true, and that propaganda as such should be no part of the activities’.33 Falsely reporting that, for instance, the trains were running would undermine both the effectiveness of the British Gazette and morale. Churchill had to defend the newspaper against accusations of inaccurate reporting in the STC on 11 May 1926. Davidson clearly felt that the STC steered Churchill’s energies towards the British Gazette deliberately to keep him from wider involvement in the General Strike. In this it was not completely successful, Lane-Fox complaining that Churchill was ‘belligerent and troublesome’.34 Bellicose articles were toned down, but in the STC Churchill advocated a display of military force on food convoys from the London docks to overawe communist agitators. On 12 May the Tilbury convoy was attacked in retaliation to provocations from police specials, but Churchill’s suggestions on convoys were rebuffed by the Cabinet, as were his and Birkenhead’s demands to take over the BBC. He was more successful in persuading colleagues to agree to using the Territorial Army to supplement the already stretched police.35 Churchill also led the rejection of the appeal by the Archbishop of Canterbury for a further subsidy for the mines and the resumption of negotiations, warning in the British Gazette on 11 May that acceptance would prove that the General Strike weapon had succeeded in extorting money from the Government and Parliament which both had determined to refuse … This would be accepted as proof positive by every revolutionary element in the country that they have only to … use the weapon of the General Strike … to obtain control of the whole machinery of government.36 By then, the British Gazette was selling over 2 million copies. Meanwhile, normal press activities were resuming. Davidson reported to the STC that 90 per cent of dailies and 60 per cent of weeklies outside London were maintaining production. The London dailies were also keen to resume. At a meeting with the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association on 12 May, Churchill agreed to end publication of the British Gazette the following day. He did, however, unsuccessfully explore copyrighting the title for use in future emergencies.37 Meanwhile, the TUC found it difficult running a potentially lengthy and costly dispute on behalf of the MFGB when the latter would not let it resolve the crisis. Samuel, meeting secretly with the TUC, drafted a memorandum setting out the basis of an agreement, but it was firmly rejected by Smith. Faced as well with a court ruling that sympathy action of this kind was not a legal strike under the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, making strike pay illegal

68

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

and unions liable for damages claims, the TUC decided to call the action off on 11 May. The following morning it went to tell the Cabinet, Pugh noting that the strike was not helping to resolve the coal dispute. Nonetheless, the numbers on strike actually rose the following day before falling away.38 The government now considered how to prevent a repetition of the General Strike. Emergency trade union legislation had already been considered with Churchill’s support on 8 May. It was decided not to proceed during the General Strike, but subsequently Churchill was appointed to a new Cabinet committee on the subject. His particular concern was that ‘efforts were made to get the Civil Service to strike’.39 The committee recommended banning civil service unions from affiliation to the TUC, alongside tightening up trade union rules, the prohibition of sympathy strike action and stopping the requirement for union members to contract-in to membership of the Labour Party. Churchill recommended sweetening this pill with state funding for candidates, but this was not supported by the committee.40 These recommendations formed the basis of the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act. Meanwhile, Baldwin met with both sides in the coal dispute as soon as the General Strike was over, offering a statutory national arbitration system and the £3 million subsidy in return for movement on wages and hours. This was rejected by both sides. The way forward, Churchill suggested on 20 May, was to permit a maximum of eight hours work per day. Longer hours were seen as a way of reducing the need for wage cuts. Churchill felt such a measure would help swiftly to end the dispute and the national cost involved. However, he recognized that permitting an extension of hours must be balanced by a guaranteed minimum wage. With assistance from Churchill on 14 June, the recalcitrant owners were bullied into accepting the latter. The following day a draft government statement announced new legislation allowing a maximum eight-hour day for miners for five years, balanced by national minimum standards. The statement claimed that ‘having regard to the change in the cost of living [this] would now give a real increase 30% higher’ than in 1921.41 The Coal Mines Act permitting the eight-hour day was rushed through, achieving Royal Assent on 8 July. Parallel legislation on reorganization of the industry similarly passed on 4 August. Neither, however, brought the end of the dispute nearer. It dragged on through the summer, the government making provision for coal imports to meet shortfalls. Meanwhile, miners, particularly in the inland coalfields of Nottingham and Derbyshire, were drifting back to work. The MFGB then resumed negotiations. A national agreement remained its key objective. It feared district agreements were used to divide and rule, and would result in low wage settlements in the poorer, export districts. The owners, however, who felt national settlements gave the miners power to ‘threaten and hold up the whole country’,42 rejected this when they met with the MFGB on 19 August. An ailing Baldwin meanwhile went on holiday,

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

69

leaving Churchill in charge of negotiations. Churchill met with the MFGB on 26 August, but Smith merely asked for a resumption of the subsidy. However, this option had been dropped by the coal committee in June, with the money instead allocated to resettle unemployed miners. Given that ‘Iron and Steel and shipbuilding are suffering more … it would be absolutely unfair and impossible to subsidise for any protracted period any industry … at the expense of the other industries’ was Baldwin’s argument to a churches’ delegation on 19 July.43 Churchill’s conciliatory speech in the Commons on 31 August prompted Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party, to try to reopen negotiations, securing an MFGB note that it was willing to negotiate on labour costs. To try to meet MFGB objections to district agreements, Churchill suggested placing these within a national framework. This the MAGB rejected. Attempting to break the deadlock, Churchill wrote to Williams on 8 September. Appealing on behalf of the 1.7 million families affected by the dispute, Churchill offered a formulation of ‘district settlements concluded in conformity with the agreed general principles’ under the national body suggested in the Samuel Report.44 Steel-Maitland feared this well-intentioned intervention only stiffened the resistance of an MAGB already scenting victory. As Philip Cunliffe-Lister, the President of the Board of Trade, pointed out, the inefficient owners wanted the cheapest settlement possible. Churchill suggested to the coal committee on 14 September that, faced with their refusal, the government should coerce the owners. Cunliffe-Lister’s memorandum to that same meeting, however, warned that they could not coerce the owners and then find the MFGB still rejected a settlement. He suggested instead district agreements policed by an independent tribunal, suspending the eight-hour legislation if the owners flouted this. This formed the basis of a time-limited offer drafted by Churchill for the newly returned prime minister on 17 September. The MFGB felt this went back on Churchill’s position of 8 September. Meeting with Baldwin on 21 September, however, it now indicated readiness to negotiate on the basis of the 1921 wage levels but still wanted a national settlement. Churchill was anxious to seize this opportunity, but most of the Cabinet felt the two sides remained far apart. Majority opinion amongst Conservative MPs was, Lane-Fox noted, ‘that Winston had started a new and unnecessary stage of interference’, with the proposed tribunal widely felt likely to disrupt the resumption of trade. The offer, in any case, as Churchill reminded the Commons in a vigorous speech on 27 September, would only remain open for a few more days. It was rejected by the MFGB on 7 October.45 At the start of November, Churchill suggested withdrawal of poor relief from miners’ families to hasten the end of the dispute, an idea swiftly dropped.46 By then a quarter of the men had returned to work. Pugh, meanwhile, brought a TUC delegation to see Baldwin and Churchill on 26 October to try to revive talks. He averred that the MFGB would now

70

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

accept district agreements, but that was immediately repudiated by Smith when Baldwin and Churchill met with the union on 5 November. These talks dragged on, Churchill reassuring Cook that the eight-hour day was a maximum, not a requirement. When, however, he was told that the MFGB remained committed to seven hours he responded, ‘If that is the position it is a waste of time to go on.’47 A major problem with both owners and miners was that such delegations had to go back to their districts to secure approval for any settlement negotiated. It was only on 12 November that a delegate conference of the MFGB accepted the terms. That same day the MAGB rejected them. Meanwhile, on 11 November, the coal committee discussed a draft bill to ensure certain minimum standards and an arbitration authority. Before this could be taken much further, however, the drift back to work became a flood, with the MFGB settling by the end of the month on those local agreements they had so long resisted. This brought to an end a dispute costing 162 million working days. It and the General Strike were of course linked. Yet, as Churchill put it on 4 May: There are two disputes on: there is the General Strike which is a challenge to the Government and with which we cannot compromise … There is also a trade dispute in the coal industry: on that we are prepared to take the utmost pains to reach a settlement in the most conciliatory spirit.48 This explains the very different attitude he took to each. To the General Strike he was implacably opposed. It has been suggested that he nevertheless helped to cause it by his return to the Gold Standard. Ironically, Churchill had argued that the price stability return would bring should end the series of industrial convulsions endured since the Great War.49 In the short term he was spectacularly incorrect. Yet, the role of gold in causing the events of 1926 is easily exaggerated. With the impact on real wages proving much less than Keynes feared, gold was more a factor in 1925 than in 1926. Churchill nevertheless determined the timing and to some extent the nature of the dispute that broke out then through the expiration of the subsidy conceded earlier. This bought time but not a solution to the coal industry’s problems: as he later complained, ‘Both sides lapped up the subsidy like cats drinking cream and thought no more of the future.’50 He was not directly involved in wider preparations for industrial conflict, though his public persona gave credence to the slurs about his part in ‘fighting a tremendous revolution and holding it down, fist and jaw’ subsequently put about by political opponents.51 Nor was he the only member of the Cabinet to feel that they were facing down a ‘revolutionary strike’.52 Churchill’s high profile as editor of the British Gazette nonetheless suggested that he had a much more prominent role in the management of the conflict than was the case. No wonder, in what they saw as part of the same problem, his Labour counterparts found his later efforts to settle the coal dispute surprising.

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

71

To Churchill, however, it was a wholly different matter. He warned that merely labelling Cook as a Bolshevik and siding accordingly with the owners risked giving credence to the language of class conflict. Instead, he wrote to his mine-owning cousin, the Marquess of Londonderry, ‘The duty of the Government is to occupy an impartial position in the interests of the State and of the whole community.’53 Bringing two ‘thoroughly unreasonable’ parties to compromise, however, was fraught with difficulties and ran the risk of stiffening the resistance of one or the other. Lane-Fox had a point when complaining that in attempting this duty Churchill ‘tries to find shortcuts to settlement through impassable country’.54

Notes 1

House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 199, cc. 212–24.

2

Report of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party (London: Labour Party, 1926), p. 94.

3

Even with post-war reductions, by 1925 there were still around 2,500 pits of greatly varying efficiency.

4

Confidential notes, c. 1911, CHAR 12/6/40-49 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+12/6/40-49].

5

Draft article for the News of the World, c. October 1937, CHAR 8/567/1-19 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+­ 8/567/1-19].

6

Cited in Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900–1955 (London: Pimlico, 1993), pp. 205, 213.

7

‘Supply and Transport Committee Report’, 14 July 1925, The National Archives, Kew, CAB 27/261, ST(24)5.

8

Peter Catterall, Chapter 4, this volume, www.churchillarchive.com.

9

J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 244–70, http://www.gutenberg. ca/ebooks/keynes-essaysinpersuasion/keynes-essaysinpersuasion-00-h. html#Footnote_24_24 [accessed 10 August 2015].

10 British Weekly, 28 February 1924, 6 March 1924. 11 Churchill was, however, to change his mind about taking on this cost in the straitened circumstances of 1926, and nationalization of mining royalties was not enacted until 1938. 12 Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Volume 1, Trade Union Leader 1881–1940 (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 277–8. 13 Winston Churchill to Sir George Barstow, 20 March 1926, 18/30A-B/172 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+18/30A-B/172]. 14 Walter Citrine, Men and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 142.

72

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

15 House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 187, cc. 1677–91. In 1926 Russian money was offered to and rejected by the TUC. The MFGB, however, was to receive £1,233,788 in donations from Russian trade unionists. See Daniel F. Calhoun, The United Front: The TUC and the Russians 1923–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 239–41, 250–52. 16 Metropolitan Police Special Branch, ‘Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom’, 15 April–12 August 1926, CHAR 22/148 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/148]. 17 Draft article for the News of the World, c. October 1937, CHAR 8/567/11 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+8/567/11]. 18 Viscount (Herbert) Samuel, Memoirs (London: Cresset Press, 1945), pp. 184–6; Minutes of meeting with TUC, 28 April 1926, 6.40 p.m., The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)24, p. 14; G. R. Lane-Fox, Report of the Coal Commission, 22 June 1926, The National Archives, CP251(26), CHAR 22/96/117-122 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/96/117-122]. 19 Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary: Volume II, 1926–1930, ed. Keith Middlemas (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 18. 20 The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)11, RCC(26)14. 21 Inland coalfields such as Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Warwickshire were profitable and no notices were issued: ‘Misleading Statements as the Breakdown’, undated memorandum, CHAR 22/141/51-53 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/141/51-53]. 22 26 April 1926, The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)17, pp. 3–4. 23 See CHAR 22/141/60 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+22/141/60] for a simplified explanation. 24 28 April 1926, 6.40 p.m., The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)24, p. 1. 25 27 April 1926, 6.55 p.m., The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)22; 28 April 1926, 3.00 p.m., The National Archives, CAB 27/317, RCC(26)23, especially p. 58. 26 Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, pp. 305–6. 27 John Barnes and David Nicholson (eds.), The Leo Amery Diaries: Volume 1 1896–1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 450–2; Stuart Ball (ed.), Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India 1926–31 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 29–30; cited in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V, 1922–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1976), p.150. 28 Message from Associated Press, April 1929, CHAR 2/164/11-12 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/164/11-12]. 29 ‘Should we hang Mr Churchill or not?’ New Statesman, 22 May 1926, pp. 132–3, CHAR 2/147/92-93 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/147/92-93]; Winston Churchill to Sir Douglas Hogg, 26 May 1926, CHAR 2/147/90-91 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page? contextId=CHAR+2/147/90-91]; Sir Douglas Hogg to Winston Churchill, 28 May 1926, CHAR 2/147/101 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/147/101].

CHURCHILL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

73

30 Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, pp. 311–14; CHAR 2/164/26-27 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2 /164/26-27]. 31 Notes of meeting, 3 May 1926, CHAR 22/142/35 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/142/35]. 32 Winston Churchill to Geoffrey Dawson, 8 May 1926, CHAR 22/143/1012 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+22/143/10-12]; Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 32; Barnes and Nicholson, The Leo Amery Diaries, pp. 453–4; ‘Copy of Report to the Cabinet re the “British Gazette”’, 25 May 1926, CHAR 22/142/119-132 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/142/119-132]. 33 Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 51. 34 Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 39. 35 STC 24th conclusions, 12 May 1926, The National Archives, CAB 27/260; Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V, pp. 163–4. 36 British Gazette, 11 May 1926, CHAR 2/148/1 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/148/1]. This file contains a complete run of issues. 37 W. R. Codling to E. H. Marsh, 1 June 1926, CHAR 22/143/101 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/143/101]. 38 Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 36; Samuel, Memoirs, pp. 187–91; Citrine, Men and Work, pp. 199–213; Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, p. 317. 39 Winston Churchill to Sir Warren Fisher, 22 February 1927, CHAR 18/68/1314 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/68/13-14]; The National Archives, CAB 27/325. 40 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, pp. 269–70. 41 ‘The Coal Dispute’, 15 June 1926, CP 239(26), CHAR 22/96/53-54 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/96/53-54]. 42 STC 30th conclusions, 30 August 1926, The National Archives, CAB 27/260, citing Williams’ letter to Lane-Fox, 29 August 1926. 43 Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman 1908–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 185. 44 Arthur Cook, letter to Winston Churchill, 3 September 1926, Winston Churchill, letter to Evan Williams, 8 September 1926, The National Archives, CAB 27/319. 45 Ball, Conservative Politics, pp. 89–90; Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V, pp. 213–14. 46 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 267. 47 8 November 1926, The National Archives, CAB 27/319, RCC(26)87. 48 Jones, Whitehall Diary, p.36. 49 House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 183, cc. 671–2, 4 May 1925. 50 Speaking in his constituency on 1 November 1926, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V, p. 216.

74

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

51 H. G. Wells, Meanwhile (London: Doran, 1927), p. 106. 52 Philip Williamson (ed.), The Modernisation of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman 1904–1935 (London: Historians’ Press, 1988), p.198. See also William Joynson-Hicks, ‘Russian Money’, CP 236(26), 11 June 1926, CHAR 22/96/4-15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+22/96/4-15]. 53 Winston Churchill to Marquess of Londonderry, 3 November 1926, CHAR 18/28/106-108 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+18/28/106-108]. 54 Speaking in his constituency on 1 November 1926, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume V, p. 216; Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 104.

7 Churchill and the Conservative Party Stuart Ball

University of Leicester

Parties have been the fundamental feature of British politics since the 1830s, and they were well established by the end of the nineteenth century. Any political career has to develop within and through them, and going too much against their grain will lead to marginalization, futility and ultimately failure. Winston Churchill knew this perfectly well, and it is incorrect to view him as being in some way opposed to party politics or inclined to disregard them as irrelevant. However, there is a common view of Churchill as being detached from conventional party politics, due to his changes of party (which are in fact evidence of the latter’s essential importance) and his periods of dissent. The tendency to see him in isolation from other contemporary politicians has perpetuated the myth of Churchill the maverick, the idiosyncratic and unique, the rogue elephant of British politics. The result is that the most neglected aspect of Churchill’s life is his party political role, and in particular his relationship with the Conservative Party. It is certainly true that this went through a remarkable variety of phases: critic within the party, opponent from outside it, senior Cabinet minister, rebel on its margins and, finally, party leader. It is easy to focus too much on his periods of conflict with the established leadership and therefore get this out of proportion. In fact, during his forty-three-and-a-half years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, he was a rebel for a total of only eleven-and-a-half years. Even if his twenty years outside the Conservative Party are added (and seven-and-a-half of these were in coalitions with the Conservatives), this still leaves slightly less than half of Churchill’s career as an antagonist of the Conservative establishment, and just over half as a leading figure within

76

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

it. It is worth remembering that Churchill had the second-longest term as Conservative Party leader during the twentieth century, with only Margaret Thatcher exceeding him. Furthermore, Churchill’s leadership was generally free from public dissent within the Conservative Party in comparison to the experience of other long-serving leaders since 1900, such as Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Thatcher and David Cameron. A further misunderstanding is that Churchill is often portrayed as being not really Conservative in his beliefs and principles. In fact, his outlook was broadly similar to that of most other Conservatives of his generation, placing him in the more traditionalist wing in his view of how the empire should be maintained and defended, but in the more advanced wing in his willingness to take active measures in social policy. He worked harmoniously with three past and present Conservative Party leaders in the post-war coalition Cabinet of 1918–22; with Baldwin as the latter’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–9; and with the rising younger (and similarly centrist) generation of Anthony Eden, R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan after 1945. One reason for this misconception of Churchill is that economics were not the crucial dividing line between the main parties during his formative years in the 1880s and 1890s – the line was usually drawn over constitutional questions, foreign and imperial policy, and social issues that often had a religious dynamic. Churchill’s Conservatism was always based upon his sense of history and his pride in Britain’s role in the world – past, present and future. This was fused with the ‘Tory Democracy’ of Benjamin Disraeli and his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and its parallel themes of trusting the people and supporting pragmatic reforms to improve their material conditions. In that respect, Churchill was always a ‘one nation’ Conservative, and on most domestic issues his natural territory was the middle ground. This was why he had little difficulty in supporting the social reforms of the Liberal government of 1905–15 and was not uncomfortable to serve as a minister in it or in the coalitions of 1915–22. It was the other driving element in Churchill’s outlook – the maintenance of Britain’s primacy as a world power – which led to his most belligerent phases, in which he was denounced by the left and appeared to embrace rightwing ‘diehard’ Toryism: the naval race with Germany before 1914, the anti-Bolshevism of 1919–21, the rejection of further devolution in India in 1931–5, the urging of greater rearmament in the 1930s and the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech heralding the Cold War in 1946. These were issues about which Churchill felt passionately and was willing to take political risks, and they are fundamental to understanding him. However, a truer reflection of his domestic politics can be found in the Churchill who opposed tariff reform in 1903–04 because of its likely impact on the cost of living of the working class; the moderate Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced pensions for widows and orphans in his first budget of 1925; the prime minister of a coalition which produced the landmark

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

77

commitment to full employment in 1944; and the Conservative leader who did not seek to reverse most of the domestic measures of the postwar Labour government and who, on returning to the Premiership in 1951–5, avoided anything potentially divisive and funded the welfare state even more extensively.

The young rebel: 1900–04 It was natural for Churchill to join the Conservative Party at the outset of his career, for almost every consideration pointed in that direction. First and foremost, it was the party through which the father whom he heroworshipped had become a household name, rising meteorically in the early 1880s to the pinnacle of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886. Second, many in the party sympathized with the ‘Tory Democracy’ that his father had promoted, and the organization that the latter had founded in 1883 in memory of Benjamin Disraeli – the Primrose League – was the largest and most active popular political organization in Britain. Third, the Conservatives had made themselves clearly the party of the empire, in contrast to the ‘Little Englandism’ of Gladstonian Liberalism. Finally, the Conservatives were in the ascendant from the mid-1890s whilst the Liberals languished in opposition, squabbling over issues that made no appeal to Churchill’s youthful romanticism, such as temperance reform and disestablishment of the Church of England. The only ambivalence in Churchill’s relationship with the Conservative Party at this time was the legacy of his father’s downfall and the role in this of the leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Salisbury. After his first unsuccessful attempt to enter the House of Commons as a Conservative in the Oldham by-election of July 1899, Churchill’s fame from his Boer War adventures together with the tide flowing in the Conservatives’ favour saw him elected for that seat in the ‘khaki’ general election of October 1900, which followed military successes in South Africa. On entering Parliament, Churchill first made his presence felt on the issue of army reform. This was partly filial piety, for restraining wasteful expenditure in this area had been the trigger of his father’s resignation in 1886, and partly the fact that he knew something of the army from his own short military career. The inheritance of Lord Randolph’s cross-party links and his criticisms of government policy encouraged Churchill to favour ‘the government of the middle’.1 He meant by this to be free from both the narrow self-interest of the privileged and the danger of greed from the masses, but his criticism of the defects of Toryism did not mean that he rejected its underlying values. In May 1903, the second most powerful figure in the government, Joseph Chamberlain, caused a political earthquake by calling for ‘tariff reform’: the introduction of customs duties to protect British industry from competition and encourage imperial economic integration, but with the corollary of abandoning the long-standing policy of free trade and the free import of raw

78

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

materials and food. When the controversy began in May, the course upon which Churchill embarked did not appear to lead out of the Conservative Party, even though this is where it ended a year later. Churchill was one of a substantial body of free-trade Conservatives; fifty-three MPs attended the launch of the Free Food League on 1 July 1903, and at the start they seemed to be greater in number than the tariff reformers.2 The inertia of Conservatism and the fact that Joseph Chamberlain, as a Liberal Unionist, was still something of an outsider would have suggested that the ‘conservative’ option taken by Churchill was the sensible, prudent and conformist one. It was supported by powerful figures within the Cabinet (until their dismissals and resignations in autumn 1903), whilst the Treasury, the City of London and most of the press were supporters of free trade. In taking this stance, Churchill could hardly have felt out of tune with his party or likely to hazard his position in it.3 He sensed the danger of a passive strategy and of reliance upon Balfour, who had succeeded Salisbury as party leader and prime minister in 1902, and in both respects Churchill was right. His instinct was for a realignment of parties, a prospect that would always appeal to his desire to shuffle the deck and deal a fresh hand all round. The atmosphere of crisis and the excitement of change always captured his imagination, and he hoped for the breaking up of established hierarchies, which would give buccaneering talent the chance to rise, and for boldness and imagination to reap their just rewards. Instead, the Conservative opponents of tariff reform swiftly became a beleaguered minority, as shown by Churchill’s deteriorating relations with his local Conservative association in Oldham, and he was left with only two choices – compromise and a humiliating swallowing of his words, or joining the Liberals in continued defence of free trade. He began to feel alienated from the Conservative Party; in October 1903, in the draft of a letter to his friend Hugh Cecil, which remained unsent, Churchill declared, ‘I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory Party, their men, their words & their methods’, although this should be seen as an expression of his frustration in unexpected defeat and of working up the justification for departure.4 Churchill’s decision to cross the floor was risky but not impulsive. His mentors and his own views and reading all reinforced his belief in free trade. What did separate him from other Conservatives – including some strong free traders who would not leave the party, such as Hugh Cecil – was that the religious issue of the defence of Anglicanism against Nonconformity had no hold upon him. With the prospect of action and opportunity all leading the other way, there was little to bind him to a party that had abandoned his father when he too had taken a stand for sound finance in 1886.

Liberal and coalitionist: 1904–22 A lifelong characteristic of Churchill was to throw all of his energy and imagination into the position or task in which he was currently engaged,

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

79

and this was the case with the Liberal phase of his career, which lasted for two decades. In the prewar Cabinet, he was first the effective junior partner in Lloyd George’s pursuit of radical social reform, and then from 1911 he was responsible for the navy during the height of the challenge from Germany. Inevitably, Churchill frequently crossed swords with the Conservatives in debate in the House of Commons and he was also a leading platform speaker for the government in public meetings. The five years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a period of unusually deep and bitter division between the main governing and opposition parties, and feelings ran high. Whilst Conservative hostility was focused even more on Herbert Asquith and Lloyd George, Churchill’s combative contributions during the controversies over the ‘People’s Budget’ in 1909–10, the powers of the House of Lords in 1910–11 and home rule for Ireland in 1912–14 further increased Conservative antagonism towards him. However, this was not the only – or even the main – reason for the Conservative insistence on his removal from the Admiralty when they joined Asquith’s coalition government in May 1915. It was rather the belief that Churchill was overstepping his proper ministerial role by interfering in the operational decisions of the naval war; this had led to the resignation of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, which in turn had caused the formation of the coalition. Churchill remained a minister but his minor office (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) marginalized him from the conduct of the war, and he resigned from the government in November 1915. To many – including himself – it seemed that his political career was over.5 Ironically, his career was revived due to the split in the Liberal Party caused by Asquith’s ousting from the premiership and replacement by Lloyd George in December 1916. The new coalition was supported by the whole of the Conservative Party but only by about half of Liberal MPs and very few of their leading figures. Lloyd George needed credible and effective Liberal ministers, and Churchill was the most prominent of those available. However, opposition from the Conservatives forced Lloyd George to wait until his position was stronger in July 1917.6 Even then, the vehemence of Conservative objections to Churchill’s appointment as minister of munitions shook the government.7 During the next five years, Churchill’s effectiveness in this and his two succeeding positions, in charge of the army and air force (from January 1919) and colonial secretary (from February 1921), went a long way to restoring his reputation for competence, although doubts about his judgement remained. By 1922 he was one of the leading figures in the coalition and was no longer so dependent upon Lloyd George, having forged close links with the leading Conservatives: Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and his close personal friend and kindred spirit, F. E. Smith, by then Lord Birkenhead.

80

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Return to the Conservatives and Chancellor of the Exchequer: 1922–9 When the Lloyd George coalition was overthrown in October 1922, it led to the second of Churchill’s apparent downfalls as he lost not just ministerial office but also his seat in the House of Commons. Churchill made a final outing under the Liberal banner in the general election of December 1923, mainly because the new leader of the Conservative Party, Stanley Baldwin, was seeking a mandate for tariff reform, which Churchill still opposed. He was defeated in the mainly working-class constituency of Leicester West by the Labour candidate, whilst nationally the Conservatives lost their governing majority. When the Liberal leadership decided to support the installation of a minority Labour government in January 1924, this broke Churchill’s last links with the Liberal Party. Since 1918, his dominant theme had been anti-socialism, expressed in vehement opposition to Bolshevism in Russia and the advance of the Labour Party at home, and this had naturally led him back to the Conservatives.8 Although the difference of view over free trade versus protectionism remained, most Conservatives – including Baldwin – welcomed his return, both as an asset in himself and as a symbol of moderate Liberal recognition that the Conservative Party was now the only effective defender of property, social stability and the constitution. It only remained to arrange the details of Churchill’s return to the Conservative fold, but once again his impatience caused problems. He rushed into the by-election in the safe Conservative constituency of Westminster Abbey in March 1924, standing as an ‘Independent Anti-Socialist’. However, although he secured a substantial amount of Conservative support both locally and amongst MPs, the constituency Conservative association nominated an official candidate and Churchill’s conduct seemed divisive.9 The outcome was in fact the best for Churchill’s long-term prospects: his narrow second place, only forty-three votes behind the official Conservative, showed his dynamism and appeal without doing actual damage to the party. In September 1924, the Conservative association in the safe suburban Essex constituency of Epping adopted Churchill as its candidate, although in the general election, which took place a month later following the fall of the first Labour government, he stood under the label ‘Constitutional and AntiSocialist’. Now enjoying full Conservative support, Churchill was elected with the comfortable majority of 9,763, and he was to hold this seat (and its successor, Woodford) for the remaining forty years of his parliamentary career. However, it was only after the election that he formally rejoined the Conservative Party. The reason for doing so immediately was that Baldwin – who had won a landslide victory – appointed Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Despite the shock to some Conservatives, the placing of Churchill at the Treasury had several advantages. Its extensive responsibilities would keep

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

81

even him fully occupied, but it did not bring him into direct contact with the trade unions, where his belligerency would have run counter to Baldwin’s main objective of encouraging peace and harmony in industry. More controversially within the party, putting the free-trader Churchill in charge of economic policy underscored the pledge which Baldwin had given in the 1924 election campaign that there would be no introduction of protectionism in the next parliament. Churchill maintained his belief that there should be ‘no fundamental reversal of our existing fiscal system’,10 despite increasing restiveness amongst backbench Conservative MPs in the later period of the government in 1927–9. However, the main Conservative reservation about Churchill derived from his more recent past as a prominent figure in the Lloyd George coalition of 1918–22. Together with the other leading Conservatives who had supported continuing the coalition, Churchill was constantly suspected of wishing to revive it and of intriguing to bring this about.11 In fact, Churchill was grateful for his promotion, comfortable with Baldwin’s centrist strategy and loyal to the prime minister. However, he was never the second figure in the Conservative leadership or Baldwin’s most likely successor as he did not have the confidence of Conservative MPs for that position. Churchill worked closely with Baldwin, was a constructive member of the Cabinet and an effective debater for the government in the House of Commons, where MPs flocked to the chamber to hear him speak. His budgets were generally considered successful, and there was admiration for the ingenuity of his financial juggling. However, he was unable to deliver on two of the government’s main objectives: reducing expenditure and thereby taxation, and reducing unemployment, which remained apparently intractable at a level of around one-and-a-quarter million. Churchill’s most popular success was in his first budget of April 1925, when he extended the state pension scheme to include widows and orphans.12 Churchill’s main initiative in the later years of the government was the ‘De-Rating’ scheme to relieve industry and agriculture from local government taxation, a plan which he jointly conceived with the Cabinet’s other most energetic figure, Neville Chamberlain.13 It was a complex measure about which it was difficult to arouse public enthusiasm and it came too late to show any effects upon unemployment before the general election was held in May 1929; after a dull campaign, the Conservatives were defeated and replaced by a minority Labour government for the second time.

India, appeasement and the path to the premiership: 1930–40 Churchill was not to hold ministerial office again for more than a decade, a period generally characterized as his ‘wilderness years’. However, it did not start out that way, and he remained a member of the shadow cabinet

82

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

until January 1931. In the summer of 1929 he was a respected figure within the leadership, although his career was generally considered to be winding down. Churchill was less effective as a speaker in the House of Commons in opposition in 1929–30,14 and his position in the party declined for two reasons. The first of these was the growing feeling amongst Conservative MPs that the party’s leadership needed an infusion of younger talent. Churchill was regularly identified as one of the ‘old gang’, and by the end of 1930 the pressure against their return to office had become considerable. The second factor was the renewed agitation within the party to adopt a protectionist economic policy; this left Churchill isolated, with many viewing him as an obstacle. In fact, his commitment to free trade was fading even before the impact of the Great Depression sent unemployment levels soaring during 1930 and 1931. Significantly, when Baldwin adopted an unrestricted protectionist policy in October 1930, Churchill reluctantly accepted it and did not resign from the Shadow Cabinet, although it had been widely assumed that he would do so.15 Instead, the breach came a few months later, and over another issue: India. In September 1930, Churchill had told Baldwin that he cared ‘more about this business than anything else in public life’.16 He became strongly opposed to the approach that Baldwin had adopted, of supporting the devolutionary ‘Irwin Declaration’ of November 1929 and working with the Labour government on a programme of moderate political reform in India.17 Following Baldwin’s endorsement of the outcome of the first Round Table Conference on India, Churchill resigned from the Shadow Cabinet on 27 January 1931.18 For the next four-and-a-half years, India was to be Churchill’s predominant issue, and it overshadowed the beginning of his warnings about defence in 1932. Churchill’s passionate and intemperate campaign over India was hampered by a series of misjudgements and some debating failures,19 particularly in his unsuccessful allegation in April 1934 that the India secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, had improperly influenced the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to alter the evidence that it was submitting to the parliamentary Joint Select Committee that was laboriously examining the government’s proposed reforms.20 There was some basis for Churchill’s charge, but he was unable to present any conclusive evidence; when the Committee of Privileges reported against him in June 1934, Churchill’s denunciations damaged only his own standing. The minority of ‘diehard’ Conservative MPs who opposed the India policy were reluctant to be identified with him, whilst the centre and left of the party viewed him as a reactionary alarmist.21 Churchill was also widely suspected of using India as a means of bringing down Baldwin and breaking up the government – but the latter was something that almost no Conservative wanted, as the crossparty National Government, which had been formed in the financial crisis of August 1931, was considered to be vital to economic stability and recovery. The India campaign left Churchill widely discredited and with the support of only a handful of Conservative MPs. However, his warnings

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

83

about the need for rearmament slowly restored some of his influence and prestige, particularly after 1935 when Hitler’s boasts about the size of the German air force appeared to substantiate Churchill’s criticisms and expose government complacency.22 Churchill’s language on defence and foreign policy in the 1930s was never as wild as his denunciations over India, and his speeches were based much more on factual evidence – often of wellinformed accuracy. In the autumn of 1935, he made his way back towards the party mainstream, praising and supporting Baldwin, particularly during the general election held in November.23 He nourished hopes of returning to office and so moderated his public criticisms for a time. Churchill made a further misjudgement of Conservative opinion during the Abdication Crisis of December 1936, when his romantic support for the beleaguered Edward VIII was once again misconstrued as an attempt to unseat Baldwin and displace the government, and he reached the low point of being howled down by MPs when he tried to speak in the crucial debate on 7 December 1936.24 However, after the king’s abdication, this storm blew over as quickly as it had arisen, and some more considered speeches on defence during the next few months largely restored Churchill’s standing.25 When Baldwin retired in May 1937, Churchill’s status as a senior figure in the Conservative Party was recognized by his seconding the election of Neville Chamberlain as the new party leader. There was only a minor reshuffle of the Cabinet and Churchill was not offered a position, as Chamberlain considered that including him would send an unhelpful signal of confrontation to Hitler and reduce the chance for a peaceful settlement of German grievances. Chamberlain’s determined quest for European peace through an active policy of ‘appeasement’ had extensive support in the Conservative Party at all levels, as well as amongst a public who dreaded the horrors of another war. At the same time, the small group of Conservative MPs who cautiously criticized appeasement were mainly younger men on the left of the party who were reluctant to be associated with Churchill, and instead looked to the glamorous figure of the former foreign secretary Anthony Eden.26 The period when Churchill was most isolated within the Conservative Party was the six months after the Munich Agreement of October 1938, and during this period he faced some challenges within his local constituency association, although with the support of its chairman he was able to contain them.27 The tide began to turn after Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement by seizing the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, without any warning, in March 1939. This began the process of discrediting Chamberlain and vindicating Churchill, a trend that was to continue during the following year. However, a press campaign in the summer of 1939 for Churchill’s inclusion in the Cabinet was seen as another attempt on his part to force his way in, and Chamberlain was able to resist this until the final failure of appeasement, confirmed by the German invasion of Poland that led to the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939. On the same day, Chamberlain offered Churchill the

84

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

post of First Lord of the Admiralty and a place in the inner War Cabinet. During the next eight months, Churchill’s standing rose, and his position was in many ways independent of the rest of the government. Churchill’s energy and determination was apparent in both radio broadcasts and speeches in the House of Commons, which made a striking contrast to the often uninspiring performances of Chamberlain. However, a crucial feature of Churchill’s conduct during his period in Chamberlain’s government was his visible loyalty to the prime minister, which together with his effectiveness reduced the doubts of Conservative MPs. This loyalty was reaffirmed in Churchill’s speech during the parliamentary debates of 7–8 May 1940, which followed the failure to prevent the German seizure of Norway. Concerns about the complacency and lack of drive of Chamberlain and the leading figures of the prewar Cabinet crystallized in the rebellion and abstention of around eighty government MPs, and although Chamberlain won the vote by 281 to 200, such a large loss of support fatally weakened his position. At this point of crisis, an all-party coalition was considered essential, but the Labour Party would not serve under Chamberlain – it was this, and not any action or inaction by Churchill, which forced Chamberlain to resign. The only possible successor apart from Churchill was the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, who certainly had far more support amongst Conservative MPs and in some ways was more acceptable to the Labour Party. However, as a prime minister in the House of Lords, Halifax would have been completely dependent upon Churchill to lead in the House of Commons. In the crucial meeting with Chamberlain and Halifax at No. 10 Downing Street on 9 May, Churchill remained silent when asked by Chamberlain if he would serve under Halifax, after which the latter withdrew his claim. On the next day, as Germany launched its offensive against the Netherlands, Belgium and France, Churchill took office as prime minister of a reconstructed government that now included members of the opposition Labour and Liberal parties.

Conservative Party leader in wartime: 1940–5 Although Churchill had attained his ambition of becoming prime minister, Chamberlain remained the leader of the Conservative Party and still enjoyed the strong support of most Conservative MPs – as they visibly demonstrated when the House of Commons next assembled on 13 May. Churchill was very conscious of this political reality, and immediately after taking office he had written to Chamberlain acknowledging that ‘to a very large extent I am in your hands’.28 The two men had worked well together over the previous months and Churchill was aware of Chamberlain’s administrative competence; it was this, as well as political necessity, which led Churchill to give Chamberlain the key role of coordinating the home front whilst he concentrated on the conduct of the war and diplomatic relations,

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

85

especially with the United States. There was no purge of Chamberlainite supporters from the government and only a small number of discredited or light-weight ministers were dropped, more to make space for the incoming Labour and Liberal leaders than for Churchillian ‘anti-appeasers’. It was not until the end of 1940 that Churchill was able to persuade Halifax to become ambassador to the United States, and thus appoint Eden as foreign secretary. However, by that time there had been a significant and completely unexpected change. In May, Chamberlain had been fit and well, and he seemed likely to remain Conservative leader for the duration of the war, if not longer, but in the summer he fell ill with what was discovered to be terminal cancer; in late September he retired from the government and the party leadership, dying on 9 November. Churchill was well aware of the problems that Lloyd George had encountered after 1918 as a prime minister without a party, and – despite the opposition of his wife, Clementine – he had no intention of allowing anyone else to occupy the powerful position of Conservative leader. By this time, Churchill’s leadership during the fall of France and the Battle of Britain had established his pre-eminence, and on 9 October 1940 he was formally elected as leader of the Conservative Party,29 without opposition – although certainly there were still many Conservative MPs who had doubts about his judgement and methods, and disliked his entourage. It is often said that Churchill neglected his role as Conservative Party leader during the Second World War, but this is only partially correct. Certainly, his first priorities were always the prosecution of the war and the maintenance of national unity: ‘I dread distraction of minds from the war effort’, he wrote in response to the manifesto of the Tory Reform Committee in 1943.30 However, this was also the national mood, and the inactivity of the Conservative Party in most constituencies during the height of the war from 1940 to 1944 was due mainly to the attitudes of its members. The decay of the party was not a consequence of Churchill’s lack of interest, which has also been exaggerated: Churchill addressed two of the five Central Council meetings held during his wartime leadership, which is a higher proportion than either Baldwin or Chamberlain before him, and he also spoke at the second of the two party conferences, in March 1945. Churchill delegated oversight of party affairs to capable managers, and crucially he retained in these posts the experienced figures who had loyally served Chamberlain. Churchill also ensured that he was kept informed of Conservative parliamentary opinion.31 Whilst Churchill did not get involved in the details of the post-war policies which were being worked out by a party committee, leaving the oversight of this process to the Chief Whip and the committee’s chairman, R. A. Butler, nothing was published without his approval. From the start of his leadership in October 1940, Churchill had recognized that ‘it is important that the framework of the Organisation should be kept in being, ready to start again when the time comes’.32 As the war began to draw to a close in 1944–5, he took a more active interest,

86

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

although still delegating the details and implementation to subordinates. Ralph Assheton, the chairman of the party from 1944 to 1946, later stated that during the final months before the 1945 general election, ‘Churchill took an intense personal interest in every phase … I saw him perhaps more than some of my predecessors had seen their Leader’.33 When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, the Labour and Liberal parties – to Churchill’s regret – withdrew from the coalition, and the following general election was a landslide victory for the Labour Party, whilst the Conservatives and their handful of allies were reduced to 210 MPs. The outcome of the 1945 election was due to shifts in public opinion that mainly occurred in 1940–2, as the Conservatives were blamed retrospectively for both the foreign and the domestic problems of the 1930s. Churchill could do little about this trend, but whilst the Conservatives would almost certainly have been defeated anyway, two actions of Churchill’s may have contributed to the process. The first he shared with most Conservative MPs, which was to be cautious over the welfare reforms proposed in the Beveridge Report of 1942, due to concerns about how these were to be financed. However, the reforms were very popular with the public and were enthusiastically endorsed by the Labour Party. The second factor was much less important as it occurred during the election campaign, by which time public attitudes had already largely been determined. This was Churchill’s first campaign broadcast, on 4 June 1945, in which he suggested that a socialist government would have to control public opinion by ‘some form of Gestapo’; together with Churchill’s other anti-socialist attacks on his recent Cabinet colleagues, this seemed disproportionate and was out of tune with public sentiment.34

Conservative Party leader in peacetime: 1945–55 Churchill was surprised and distressed by his rejection at the polls, but swiftly determined to stay on as party leader with the intention of reversing it. There were many, including his wife, who would have preferred him to retire but it was politically impossible to force him out, particularly at a time when Conservative supporters were outraged by the ingratitude of the electorate to the wartime saviour. He was not generally blamed for the defeat, which was understood to be primarily a verdict on his predecessors. Churchill’s tenure as leader of the opposition during the Labour governments of 1945–51 has often been criticized, with the implication that the Conservative Party’s recovery during this period owed little to its leader, who hampered the process more than he helped it. The criticisms have focused on three areas: his absences from the Commons, his disinterest in the reappraisal of policy and his imprudent speeches in debates. In the first case, there were certainly complaints about Churchill’s absences in 1945–6 as he rested, travelled and began work on his war memoirs. However, this was early in the life of the parliament when greater opposition activity would have had no more effect

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

87

and might even have been counterproductive. From the spring of 1946, Churchill began to attack the Labour government over shortages, ration cuts and mismanagement, linking these problems with the nationalization of industries. In fact, over the opposition period as a whole, Churchill spoke in most of the important debates in Parliament, addressed the party’s annual conferences and spoke at various public meetings and mass rallies. He kept control of overall strategy, with detail and routine being delegated to others; as Churchill told the 1946 party conference, ‘as Leader … it is my duty to take a long and broad view’.35 Churchill’s view of opposition strategy was to criticize the government wherever possible but to accept that public support would not erode until there were visible failures, following the truism that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win them. This waiting game was out of sympathy with his rising younger colleagues, who wanted to refresh the party’s prewar image and adapt its position to the reforms being introduced by Labour. Although unconvinced, and concerned about giving possible hostages to fortune too early in the parliament, after the 1946 party conference Churchill gave way to the pressure for a policy statement and appointed Butler to chair the committee that produced the Industrial Charter in May 1947. There is an account in the memoirs of Reginald Maudling, who was helping to draft the leader’s speech for the 1947 party conference, that when Churchill read the passage summarizing the charter his response was ‘But I do not agree with a word of this.’36 However, the important point is that despite such reservations, Churchill accepted that the statement was necessary, and he publicly endorsed it and the several other ‘charters’ that followed. This is an example of one of his strengths in this period: appointing capable and effective figures to key areas and giving them support. Butler was the central figure in the policy reappraisal, being the chairman of the revived Conservative Research Department and of the new Advisory Committee on Policy and Political Education, with Eden and Harold Macmillan also playing important roles. In July 1946, Churchill appointed the effective and popular Lord Woolton as party chairman, and over the next five years ‘Uncle Fred’ revitalized the organization and raised large amounts of funds. That Churchill’s role was not just one of passivity or indifference is illustrated by his insistence upon some amendments to the report of a committee that was reviewing the party organization, in order to prevent possible encroachments on the authority and freedom of action of the party leader. The final criticism of imprudence in speeches and errors in tactics also has substance but it is based on relatively few examples, the most significant of which were over the new health service in 1946 and 1949. However, whilst the language of Churchill’s attacks on the government was often rich and powerful, he was actually very cautious about making specific commitments. One of the few he did make was again a response to pressure from the party grassroots, when Churchill accepted a resolution passed with great

88

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

enthusiasm at the 1950 party conference to set a specific target of building 300,000 new houses a year. The key point was that under Churchill’s leadership the Conservatives had maintained a moderate position, moving towards the centre ground of politics rather than away from it.37 In fact, the main cause of the Conservative recovery was the unpopularity of the government’s continued austerity measures, which led to a shift back to the Conservatives of middle-class and women voters whom they had lost in 1945.38 The Conservatives made the largest inroads in the general election of February 1950, with a net gain of eighty-eight seats, which left the Labour government clinging onto office with an overall majority in the House of Commons of only six. This was unsustainable and, when the next election was held in October 1951, a smaller turnover of seats enabled Churchill to return to the premiership with the narrow but workable overall majority of seventeen. Although Churchill’s second term as prime minister in 1951–5 was in peacetime and in the context of normal party competition, in most accounts the Conservative Party seems to disappear from view almost as much as during the war. Churchill’s priority was the international stage, where he hoped to use his prestige to reduce the dangerous tensions of the Cold War through a summit meeting. Although, as in wartime, the conduct of domestic affairs was largely dealt with by other ministers, Churchill had again constructed an effective team. The decisions taken always tended to moderation; only the most controversial of Labour’s nationalizations – road haulage and the steel industry – were reversed, whilst the welfare state was funded even more extensively than before and a controversial plan to float the pound was rejected by Churchill due to concerns about its potential impact on both prices and employment. Although within the Cabinet there were concerns about Churchill’s health and capability, and increasing frustration at his continual postponements of his promised retirement, little of this was apparent in public. He delivered the major speeches on key occasions and crucially after his serious stroke of June 1953 made a remarkable recovery during the summer recess; he scored a triumph with his leader’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in October, where he also gave another vigorous and effective oration the following year. Churchill presided as a benignly avuncular figure over a government which removed irksome wartime controls and ended rationing, with low levels of unemployment and rising standards of living. When he finally made way for Eden in April 1955, the Conservative Party claimed a membership of more than two million, was well organized and resourced at both local and national level, was united and in good morale, and was ahead in the opinion polls. Few party leaders have handed on such a good inheritance to their successor, and it is not surprising that Eden at once called a general election in May, in which the Conservatives increased their majority, in this case to sixty seats.

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

89

Conclusion This chapter argues that Churchill was closer to mainstream Conservative opinion than is generally recognized. This is true not only for the 1920s and his term as party leader from 1940 to 1955, but it is also largely the case for the 1930s, when he supported the National Government on almost all areas of domestic policy. Where he dissented – on India, rearmament and appeasement – his outlook and reservations were shared by many Conservatives, although they did not trust his motives and judgement, or then consider him a suitable party leader. When Churchill did reach that position, during the wartime years he provided the kind of patriotic and unifying national leadership which the Conservative Party wanted, and his avoidance of partisanship was in tune with contemporary Conservative sentiment. After 1945, Churchill was a more effective party leader in opposition than is usually admitted: he maintained unity, provided an umbrella of prestige under which the party could reappraise itself and recover, and led effectively from the mainstream. As prime minister during 1951–5, he secured the centre ground for the Conservatives, remaining pragmatic and flexible in approach, and there is little doubt that his cautious and uncontroversial domestic policy was satisfactory and popular with both the party he led and the wider public. Churchill was without doubt one of the moving forces and characters of his age, but he was not a unique phenomenon. Between 1906 and 1940, he was one of the twenty or thirty most significant figures in British politics – sometimes being in the front rank and sometimes at the margins. Even before 1939, his political achievements were considerable and much greater than those of his father; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer for a full term, and apart from Neville Chamberlain, his was the longest tenure of that high office between 1915 and 1974. It was the national and world significance of Churchill’s contribution to victory in the Second World War that raised his status above that of any other British politician in the twentieth century. However, acknowledging this crucial role should not preclude assessing Churchill’s domestic political record on the same basis as other leading politicians and party leaders, not least because he comes out quite well in any such comparisons.

Notes 1

Winston Churchill to Lord Rosebery, 10 October 1902, in Randolph Churchill, ed. Winston S. Churchill: Volume 2 Companion, Young Statesman 1901–1914, Part 1 (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 168.

2

On the Conservative Free Traders, see Winston Churchill to the Duke of Devonshire, undated but c. June 1903, not sent, CHAR 2/11/41-42 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/11/41-42].

90

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

3

For Churchill’s criticisms of tariff reform, see Winston Churchill to Colonel J. Mitford, 9 July 1903, CHAR 2/11/9-11 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/11/9-11].

4

Winston Churchill to Lord Hugh Cecil, 24 October 1903, not sent, CHAR 2/8/105-106 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/8/105-106].

5

For an example of Conservative opposition to Churchill, see Lord Derby to David Lloyd George, 18 August 1916, in Martin Gilbert, ed. Winston S. Churchill: Volume 3 Companion, Part 2, Documents May 1915–December 1916 (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 1545.

6

Sir George Younger (Chairman of the Conservative Party) to David Lloyd George, 8 June and 9 June 1917, Lord Curzon (Leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords) to David Lloyd George, 8 June 1917, in Martin Gilbert, ed. Winston S. Churchill: Volume 4 Companion, Part 1, Documents January 1917–June 1919 (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 70–2.

7

Leo Amery diary, 18 July 1917, in John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds. The Leo Amery Diaries: Volume 1, 1896–1929 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 164.

8

See the letter from Churchill in The Times, 18 January 1924.

9

Sir Samuel Hoare to Winston Churchill, 17 June 1924, CHAR 2/133/73 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/133/73].

10 Winston Churchill to Henry Page Croft, c. 25 July 1928, CHAR 2/158/63-67 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2 /158/63-67]. 11 Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson’s Memoirs and Papers 1910–1937 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 213, 215, 309–10. 12 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 28 November 1924, CHAR 18/7/8994 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+ 18/7/89-94]. 13 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 6 June 1927, CHAR 18/64/3-13 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+18/64/3-13]. 14 Leo Amery diary, 26 May 1930, John Barnes and David Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries: Volume 2, 1929–1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), p. 72. 15 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 16 October 1930, CHAR 2/572AB/104-105 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/572A-B/104-105]. 16 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 24 September 1930, CHAR 2/572A-B/84-5 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/572A-B/84-5]. 17 Winston Churchill to Lord Irwin (Viceroy of India), 1 January 1930, CHAR 2/572A-B/88-91 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/572A-B/88-91]. 18 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 27 January 1931, CHAR 2/572A-B/76 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/572A-B/76].

CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

91

19 Victor Cazalet diary, 19 April 1933, in Robert Rhodes James, Victor Cazalet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 154. 20 Winston Churchill to E. A. Fitzroy (Speaker of the House of Commons), 15 April 1934, CHAR 2/213/66-70 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/213/66-70]; Carl Bridge, ‘Churchill, Hoare, Derby, and the Committee of Privileges: April to June 1934’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), pp. 215–27. 21 Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks to Winston Churchill, March 1933, CHAR 2/192/125-126 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/192/125-126]. 22 Winston Churchill to Lord Rothermere, 6 August 1934, CHAR 2/228/19-22 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/228 /19-22]. 23 Winston Churchill to Stanley Baldwin, 7 October 1935, CHAR 2/237/102 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/237/102]. 24 Winston Churchill, ‘The Abdication of King Edward VIII’, December 1936, CHAR 2/264/16-26 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contex tId=CHAR+2/264/16-26]; Leo Amery diary, 7 December 1936, Barnes and Nicholson, The Empire at Bay: Volume 2, p. 432. 25 Leo Amery diary, 10 December 1936, Barnes and Nicholson, The Empire at Bay: Volume 2, p. 433; Earl Winterton diary, 12 December 1936, in Earl Winterton, Orders of the Day (London: Cassell, 1953), p. 223. 26 Anthony Crossley diary, 20 September 1938, in Martin Gilbert, ed. Winston S. Churchill: Volume 5 Companion, Part 3, Documents: The Coming of War 1936–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 1170. 27 Colin Thornton-Kemsley, Through Winds and Tides (Montrose: Standard Press, 1974), pp. 93–7. 28 Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain, 10 May 1940, CHAR 19/2C/298299 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+19/ 2C/298-299]. 29 Winston Churchill, speech notes, Conservative Party meeting, Caxton Hall, Westminster, 9 October 1940, CHAR 9/145/1-6 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/145/1-6]. 30 Winston Churchill to Lord Hinchingbrooke, 28 March 1943, CHAR 2/480/10 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/480/10]. 31 Copies of the weekly reports from George Harvie-Watt, Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary 1941–5, are in the Harvie-Watt MSS at Churchill College Archives Centre, University of Cambridge, HARV/1/1 to HARV/5/1; for an account of their relationship, see G. S. Harvie-Watt, Most of My Life (London: Springwood Books, 1980). 32 Winston Churchill to Sir Kingsley Wood, appointing him Chairman of the Conservative Research Department, 31 October 1940, CHAR 2/402/25 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/402/25]. 33 Assheton’s comments are recorded from an interview with the long-serving Central Office official Percy Cohen in his unpublished history of the party organization, ‘Disraeli’s Child’, p. 567, Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian Library, CRD/731.

92

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

34 Richard Toye, ‘Winston Churchill’s “Crazy Broadcast”: Party, Nation, and the 1945 Gestapo Speech’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), pp. 655–80. 35 Notes for speech to the Conservative Party Annual Conference, Blackpool, 5 October 1946, CHUR 5/9A-E/136-199 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/9A-E/136-199], quote at CHUR 5/9A-E/139 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHUR+5/9A-E/139], and see also definition of aims, CHUR 5/9A-E/186-197 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHUR+5/9A-E/186-197]. 36 Reginald Maudling, Memoirs (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978), pp. 45–6. 37 ‘Statement of General Principles’, 24 July 1950, CHUR 2/105/2-9 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/105/2-9]. 38 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity, and the Conservative Party Recovery after 1945’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994), pp. 173–97.

8 Churchill and Women Paul Addison

University of Edinburgh

Churchill owed much to the three most important women in his life: his nurse Mrs Everest, his mother Lady Randolph Churchill and his wife Clementine. Neither a misogynist nor a womanizer, he enjoyed the company of women socially, delighted in feminine beauty and greatly valued the work of women secretaries in the organization of his literary and political life. However, he absorbed in youth the values of a male-dominated world in which women were still excluded from politics and his attitudes towards the enfranchisement of women were ambivalent. It was the role played by women, not least his own daughters, in the Second World War, that persuaded him to revise his opinions – if only to a limited extent. In Churchill’s youth, social convention taught that women were destined by nature for the domestic sphere of home and family whilst the public realm of politics and government was reserved for men. In practice women did play a significant role in public life, but it was mainly as wives and daughters in support of husbands and fathers, or as rank-and-file party workers helping to mobilize male voters in support of male politicians. Such influence as they did possess was indirect. They did not have the vote and could not stand for Parliament. In the course of Churchill’s lifetime this distinction between the private and public spheres began to crumble. The mass mobilization of women in two world wars, the extension of the franchise to women and the entry of women into politics and the professions began to chip away at the old orthodoxies. Since masculine supremacy was never seriously at risk, Churchill, like most of the male politicians of his day, could afford to regard ‘women’s issues’ as peripheral. When they did arise his responses varied. By no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a feminist, although it has been argued that he was a ‘wartime feminist’ between 1939 and 1945.1

94

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

The one incontestable fact is that he owed so much to the assistance of the opposite sex, beginning with the three most important women in his life: his mother Lady Randolph Churchill, his childhood nurse Mrs Elizabeth Everest and his wife Clementine.

Nurse, mother and wife Lady Randolph (1854–1921) was the daughter of the buccaneering New York financier Leonard Jerome and his wife Clara. Jeannette, or Jennie as she was known, was thirteen when she moved with her mother and her sisters, Clara and Leonie, to the Paris of Louis Napoleon. With the collapse of the Second Empire, the Jeromes moved to England, where in August 1873 Jennie met Lord Randolph Churchill at a dance during Cowes week. They fell passionately in love, married in April 1874 and had two sons: Winston (1874–1965) and Jack (1880–1947). Jennie’s affection for her growing boys was genuine but, absorbed as she was in the activities of high society, she saw little of them. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star’, wrote Churchill in his autobiography. ‘I loved her dearly – but at a distance’.2 His grandmother, Frances, Duchess of Marlborough (‘Duchess Fannie’), always made him welcome at Blenheim, but it was his nurse, Mrs Elizabeth Everest (1833–95), who lavished maternal devotion on him. ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’, as he called her, a spinster with the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, was engaged by his parents when he was only a few months old. She gave him his first lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic, nursed him through childhood illnesses, listened to his complaints of parental neglect and took him on summer holidays to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where he stayed with her sister and brother-in-law, a former prison warder.3 When she was given the sack in 1893 he was outraged to see her treated so shabbily and her death two years later caused him lasting grief.4 He paid for a headstone as well as for flowers to be placed annually on her grave. In light fictional disguise she lived on as the hero’s faithful housekeeper in his novel Savrola (1900) and he paid tribute to her again in a moving passage of My Early Life (1930). It was probably to Mrs Everest that he owed his emotional stability, his more kindly and humane qualities and his lifelong sympathy with the underdog. After the death of his father and his graduation from Sandhurst, Churchill entered into a new relationship with his mother. ‘We worked together on even terms’, he wrote, ‘more like brother and sister than mother and son’.5 Exiled in Bangalore, with his burgeoning ambitions frustrated by his absence from the metropolitan scene, he enlisted her as his literary agent and most important political ally.6 As a society hostess she was in touch with most of the leading military, literary and political figures of the day. ‘In my interest’, he wrote, ‘she left no wire unpulled, no stone unturned, no

CHURCHILL AND WOMEN

95

cutlet uncooked’.7 She was instrumental in the publication of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, and likewise in his adoption by the Conservative Party as a parliamentary candidate. She campaigned alongside him in the Oldham by-election of 1899 and again in the general election of 1900.8 During the South African war she chaired a committee of American women to raise the money for a hospital ship to treat the wounded, a first encounter for Churchill with the role of women in wartime. Exactly how much he owed to her exuberance, wit and strength of will is impossible to judge, but the debt must have been substantial. Churchill was not best pleased when his mother, whose passion for the opposite sex was rarely satisfied for long, married George CornwallisWest, a young officer only sixteen days older than Winston. (She divorced him in 1913 and married a third husband, Montagu Porch, in 1918.) Churchill’s own sexuality was less tempestuous and he was often gauche in female company, but he was entranced by female beauty, especially when accompanied by a sympathetic interest in the fortunes of Winston Churchill. One of the first to win his affections was Muriel Wilson, the daughter of a wealthy shipowner, but she turned down his proposal of marriage. In India he met and fell in love with Pamela Plowden, the daughter of the British Resident in Hyderabad, but she too rejected him. A third rejection followed at the hands of the actress Ethel Barrymore, but to Churchill’s credit he retained the friendship of all three in later life. In March 1908, shortly after his entry into the Cabinet, Churchill was invited to dinner by Lady St Helier. Seated on his right was Clementine Hozier (1885–1977), who was 23, beautiful, intelligent, an earnest Liberal and a supporter of votes for women. She was much in need of the fidelity Churchill had to offer. Her parents had separated when she was six and she had suffered two broken engagements. Churchill was captivated. In August 1908 he proposed to her in the Greek temple in the grounds of Blenheim Palace and was accepted. They were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 12 September 1908. Unlike the marriages of many of his relations, Churchill’s marriage was strong and enduring. David Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook, two of his closest political allies, both kept mistresses. It is impossible to imagine Churchill doing the same. Although tolerant of infidelity in others, he was loving and faithful if also demanding and self-centred. He and Clementine had five children, of whom only one, Randolph, was a boy. The four girls were Diana (‘The Puppy Kitten’), Sarah (‘The Mule’), Marigold (‘The Duckadilly’) and Mary (‘Maria’). Marigold was only two years and nine months old when, to her parents’ lasting grief, she died of septicaemia in August 1921. Churchill could be a doting father, playing games with the children and reading them bedtime stories, but he was absent more often than not. As Mary Soames writes, ‘Clementine was a devoted and conscientious mother, but her priorities were never in doubt: Winston came first – always’.9 In the long run the lives of Sarah (1914–82) and

96

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Diana (1909–63) were to end unhappily. Sarah’s career as an actress was wrecked by two failed marriages and a descent into alcoholism. Diana, a vivacious but mercurial personality, suffered in 1953 a severe nervous breakdown, from which she never fully recovered: she committed suicide in 1963. The most firmly grounded of the children, and the most effective guardian of her parents’ memory, was his youngest daughter, Mary (1922–), who unlike her siblings had benefited from the attention throughout her childhood of a dedicated nurse and companion, Clementine’s impoverished cousin Maryott Whyte (1895–1973). Clementine accepted that her own interests must always be subordinate to those of a husband who described himself as ‘devoured by egotism’.10 When Churchill fell from office in 1915, she helped sustain him through a phase of near despair and acted as his political agent in London whilst he was serving on the Western Front.11 When he was out of action with appendicitis in the general election of 1922, she spoke on his behalf during a rowdy campaign in Dundee. It was Churchill who, against Clementine’s inclination, insisted on purchasing Chartwell Manor in the autumn of 1922. She rightly feared that the cost of maintaining and refurbishing it would strain their finances to breaking point. In the long run the marriage imposed emotional stresses on Clementine, of which Winston had only a limited understanding. It was no wonder that she suffered long periods of nervous exhaustion at intervals from 1920 onwards. Although Clementine was a dutiful wife, she was not a passive one. Husband and wife spoke their minds to one another about everything from international crises to political gossip and family affairs. If Churchill’s outlook was that of a swashbuckling cavalier, there was a puritan streak in Clementine that prompted her to rebuke him for his gambling and his friendships with louche companions like Lord Birkenhead and Lord Beaverbrook. Churchill’s favourite holiday destination was the French Riviera but Clementine found the company there ‘shallow, vulgar and boring’.12 After 1918 they often holidayed apart. On a cruise to the Far East in 1935 she enjoyed a shipboard romance with Terence Philip, the director of the London branch of a New York art dealer. It was transitory and no doubt platonic: Churchill seems not to have noticed, writing her a series of ‘Chartwell Bulletins’, in which he gave her the latest news of home, family and his collection of farm animals and pets.13 This was Churchill at his most affectionate and domesticated, but Clementine disliked the more brutal characteristics he sometimes displayed in public life. In June 1940 she warned him of the risk that his ‘rough sarcastic and overbearing manner’ would alienate colleagues and subordinates’.14 During the general election campaign of 1945, she begged him in vain to delete from his first broadcast his warnings of a Labour ‘Gestapo’.

CHURCHILL AND WOMEN

97

Friends, relations and staff Politics and war were Churchill’s passions: intensely masculine spheres in which his most intimate friends, like his enemies and rivals, were male. Although he recognized the importance of great women in history – Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I and, of course, his ancestor Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough – no women were included amongst his biographical portraits of Great Contemporaries. He nevertheless enjoyed the social life organized by the great hostesses of the Edwardian and interwar years, and the friendships he did make with women tended to endure. Perhaps because his sex drive was moderate he had no interest in exploiting or manipulating women, nor could he be exploited or manipulated by them. In the sexual jungle he was a safe and loyal friend for a woman to have. Violet Bonham Carter wrote, I think he divided women into two categories – the virginal snowdrops, unsullied by experience, or even knowledge, of the seamy side of life, who should be sheltered and protected from its hazards; and the mature who were at home among the seams, had scrambled in and out of pitfalls and adventures and to whom he could talk without protective inhibitions in his own language. The second class was of course incomparably the most rewarding and it was amongst these that he sought – not his romances, but his female friends.15 Venetia Stanley (1887–1948) and her sister Sylvia (1882–1980, later Sylvia Henley) were friends from the Edwardian era for the rest of their lives. So, too, was the American actress Maxine Elliott (1868–1940), another tie formed in the years before 1914. Churchill was her guest at Château de l’Horizon, the house she had bought near Cannes, on four occasions in the 1930s. In advanced old age he was befriended by another glamorous American, Wendy Russell (1916–2007). A former model, she was the companion and later the wife of Emery Reves, a Hungarian Jew whose press agency had syndicated Churchill’s journalism internationally in the 1930s. Between 1956 and 1959 Churchill was a guest at La Pausa, their villa at Roquebrune, on eleven occasions adding up to about 400 days in all. Churchill adored Wendy, who looked after him as tenderly in his second childhood as Mrs Everest had in his first. Clementine, though repeatedly invited, stayed only briefly on four occasions, after which her actions led to a rift between her husband and the Reves. Churchill felt a deep loyalty to family and kin. He always kept in touch with Lady Randolph’s sisters, his aunts Clara Frewen (1850– 1935) and Leonie Leslie (1859–1943). Clara’s daughter, Clare Sheridan (1885–1970), angered him during his anti-Bolshevik campaign by taking up residence in the Kremlin and modelling busts of Lenin and Trotsky. However, amicable relations were soon restored and we find Churchill, in the middle

98

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

of the Second World War, agreeing to sit for her for a bronze portrait bust.16 His brother Jack’s wife, Gwendoline (‘Goonie’), was another favourite. The Mitford sisters – Nancy, Jessica, Unity and Diana – were second cousins of Clementine and family friends in the 1920s but estranged by the politics of the 1930s. Jessica became a communist, whilst Diana, a fanatical admirer of Hitler, married Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. One of the first actions of the Churchill government in 1940 was to lock up Diana and her husband under Regulation 18B. The servants who kept house for Winston and Clementine are virtually invisible in the biographies. The 1911 census records them as follows:17 Elizabeth Jackson

Cook

Ethel Higgs

Nurse

Nancy Baalham

Lady’s maid

Ada Robjent

Housemaid

Eva Knights

Parlourmaid

Lilian Clover

Parlourmaid (under)

Lilian Bradbury

Kitchen maid

Albert Brown

Hall boy

Neither they nor their successors left a record of their lives below stairs, with the partial exception of Mrs Georgina Landemare, the Churchills’ cook from 1940 to 1954 and author of Recipes from No. 10 (1958). Better known are the private secretaries, most of them female, who took dictation from Churchill and filed his papers. Amongst the first was Annette Anning (1876–1939), who had previously worked for Arthur Balfour and for Lady Randolph. ‘Many an auction house’, writes Martin Gilbert, ‘has sold as “Churchill manuscripts” long handwritten letters in Miss Anning’s neat script, in which Churchill’s only contribution was the words “Yours sincerely, Winston S Churchill”’.18 From 1929 to 1938 his personal secretary was Violet Pearman (1901–41), who was allowed ‘great discretion in acting for him, covering for his absences, making plausible excuses, accompanying him on exotic working visits (whether to the Riviera or Marrakesh) and generally delivering the goods’.19 When she could no longer carry on with her work after a stroke in 1938, Churchill continued to pay her salary, and after her death in 1941 he paid £100 a year for seven years towards the cost of her daughter Rosemary’s education.20 Violet Pearman was succeeded at Chartwell by Kathleen Hill (1900–92), who subsequently accompanied Churchill to the Admiralty and No. 10 Downing Street. As his work expanded she was joined by other secretaries: Elizabeth Layton in 1941, Jo Sturdee in 1942 and Marion Holmes in 1943. Grace Hamblin (1908–2002), who had begun as Violet Pearman’s assistant in 1931, graduated to become

CHURCHILL AND WOMEN

99

Clementine’s private secretary and subsequently the first administrator of Chartwell.21 Churchill was a hard taskmaster, expecting his secretaries to respond instantly to his demands, work late hours and endure his wrath when they made mistakes. They in turn – with few exceptions – were conquered by the excitement of proximity to an extraordinary character who was part Henry V, part Falstaff and a creature of moods whose anger could turn suddenly to kindness. One day when he lost his temper with Elizabeth Layton he thought she was crying. ‘Good heavens’, he said, ‘you musn’t mind me. We’re all toads beneath the harrow you know’.22 By this time, of course, there were many toads – not forgetting the typists and secretaries who staffed the Cabinet War Rooms and kept the Whitehall machine running.

The woman question By the time Churchill entered the House of Commons in 1900 the ‘woman question’ was already on the agenda, if only on the periphery, of British politics. The campaign to give women the vote had been running in peaceful and law-abiding fashion ever since 1867, and women were already active in certain aspects of public life. Churchill’s first encounter with a woman campaigner, which occurred whilst he was still a cadet at Sandhurst, arose from a controversy over public morality. Mrs Ormiston Chant (1848–1923), a suffragist and social reformer, had persuaded the London County Council to introduce canvas barriers separating the audience of the Empire Theatre from a promenade frequented by prostitutes. With some of his friends from Sandhurst, Churchill joined a crowd of up to 300 young men who tore down the barriers. Mounting the debris he made his first speech. ‘Ladies of the Empire’, he is said to have declared, ‘I stand for Liberty!’.23 Lady Randolph had been one of the 104 eminent women who signed a manifesto in 1889 opposing votes for women. Churchill, too, was initially opposed on the grounds, as he wrote in 1897, ‘that it is contrary to natural law and the practice of civilised states’.24 In the course of his transition from the Tories to the Liberals he voted in March 1904 in favour of a female suffrage bill, but he was never more than a lukewarm supporter. The suffragist demand was for women to be given the vote on the same or comparable terms as men. Since the main qualification for voting was the status of the householder, equal rights would only have enfranchised a minority of women, most of whom were likely to vote Tory. Many Liberals were therefore reluctant for party reasons to endorse this type of reform. The logical solution, universal suffrage for both sexes, was a course to which Churchill was firmly opposed when Herbert Henry Asquith first mooted the possibility in November 1911.25 In January 1912 he explained to C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, that he favoured the enfranchisement of about 100,000 specially qualified women.26

100

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Matters were also complicated by Churchill’s adoption in 1904 as the Free Trade candidate for North-West Manchester. Manchester was the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a body formed the previous year by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughters. Frustrated by the slow and apparently futile history of parliamentary debates over the issue, the Pankhursts began to adopt less lady-like tactics by disrupting political meetings. With the formation of a Liberal government in December 1905, and Churchill’s appointment to office, he became one of the Pankhursts’ favourite targets, prompting him to declare that he would not be ‘hen-pecked’ into support for the cause. After this the Pankhursts adopted more militant tactics and mutual antipathy intensified. In 1909 Churchill was attacked at Bristol station by Theresa Garnett (1888–1966), who attempted to strike him with a dog whip and called out: ‘Take that in the name of the insulted women of England.’ Churchill managed to parry the blow.27 His appointment as Home Secretary in January 1910 coincided with an uneasy truce between the government and the suffragettes. Churchill relaxed the conditions for imprisoned suffragettes, and gave his support in general terms, without committing himself to the detail, to a suffrage bill drafted by H. N. Brailsford. When the bill was debated in the House (12 July 1910), Churchill suddenly swung round and made a speech in which he ridiculed the anomalies of the proposed franchise: ‘It would be possible for women to have a vote whilst living in a state of prostitution, if she married and became an honest woman she would lose that vote, but she would regain it through divorce’.28 Brailsford and his allies were outraged.29 In November the bill ran out of parliamentary time, the truce collapsed and a deputation of 300 suffragettes laid siege to the House of Commons in protest. The brutal handling of the women by the police on ‘Black Friday’ (18 November 1910) led the women’s leaders to suspect, quite mistakenly, that Churchill had authorized more aggressive tactics.30 Churchill, however, was determined to protect the police and refused an enquiry. Churchill was now a bête noire of the suffragettes and remained so until the First World War. As minister of munitions from July 1917 until the end of the war, he was the employer of tens of thousands of women workers and paid tribute to them in his speeches. He opposed without success the restoration of the craft privileges of male workers after the war on the grounds that it would ‘entrench a number of small and close corporations in restraint of trade, and would probably meet with the resistance of the great majority of the unskilled and women workers’.31 However, the war had also removed most of the obstacles to female suffrage. In 1917 the House of Commons voted by a large majority, which included Churchill, in favour of the extension of the franchise to all men over the age 21 and virtually all women over the age of 30 – thus preserving a predominantly male electorate. As a professional politician Churchill was alive to the importance of the new female vote. His interest in post-war housing and his sponsorship as

CHURCHILL AND WOMEN

101

Chancellor of the Exchequer of pensions for widows and orphans were in part reflections of this. But when in 1927 the Cabinet of the Stanley Baldwin proposed to extend the franchise to women on equal terms with men, Churchill opposed the measure, no doubt under the impression that it would benefit the Labour Party.32 In off-the-cuff remarks to women students at the University of Edinburgh in March 1931, he warned them of ‘the shame that would be theirs’ if the extension of the franchise led to the decline of the Empire.33 Churchill was also uneasy with the presence of women in the House of Commons. When Nancy Astor (1879–1964), the first woman to enter the House, asked him in 1919 why he was so cold towards her, he replied, ‘I feel you have come into my bathroom and I have only a sponge with which to defend myself’.34 The tale has often been told of an encounter between Churchill and Nancy Astor in which she is supposed to have said, ‘If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee’, and he is supposed to have replied, ‘If I were your husband I’d drink it.’ There is no firm evidence to support the story, which would have been out of character for a man who normally treated women with courtesy and respect. Women, however, played only minor parts in his political life. The one female politician in his own social circle was Asquith’s daughter, Violet Bonham Carter (1887– 1969), a lifelong Liberal. Although often at variance with Churchill, she was a member of the ‘Focus’, the grouping formed to support his campaign against appeasement from 1936 to 1939. Churchill also found an ally in Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946), the social reformer and Independent MP for Combined English Universities. She predicted in 1936 that only a truly national government led by Churchill and supported by Labour would stand up to the fascist dictators. Katharine, Duchess of Atholl (1874–1960), the Conservative MP for Perth and Kinross, was amongst his allies over India and appeasement. When she resigned her seat after Munich and fought a by-election in opposition to Chamberlain’s foreign policy, Churchill sent her a message of support but otherwise kept his distance. Of the handful of women MPs in the wartime House of Commons none obtained Cabinet rank, although Churchill did appoint Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), a crusading socialist of the 1930s, as a junior minister at the Home Office. With the wives of allied leaders – Eleanor Roosevelt35 and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek – he was on his best behaviour, but neither made much impression on him. The only female minister in his peacetime government was his minister of education, Florence Horsbrugh (1889–1969), although she did not enter the Cabinet until 1953 and was sacked in a reshuffle the following year. The woman who made the deepest impression on Churchill at this period was the young Queen Elizabeth II, who dazzled his gaze and awoke his romantic sense of English history. Churchill’s appreciation of the importance of women in war was enhanced by the activities of his own wife and daughters. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Clementine accepted an invitation from the Red Cross to lead

102

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

an Aid to Russia campaign that raised substantial sums. Between March and May 1945 she toured the Soviet Union as an honoured guest of the regime. Diana served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), Sarah with the Photographic Interpretation Unit of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and Mary in mixed anti-aircraft batteries with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Mary attended the Quebec conference of 1943 as an aide to her father, and Sarah played a similar role at Teheran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945. ‘War’, Churchill declared in September 1943, ‘is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society’.36 He was certainly impressed by the participation of women in mixed anti-aircraft batteries, a wartime innovation introduced in 1941.37 At the end of the war, however, he argued in a note to the Cabinet that women should be demobilized as quickly as possible from the armed forces: ‘the sooner they are back at their homes the better’.38 When the House of Commons discussed R. A. Butler’s Education Bill in March 1944, MPs voted by 117 votes to 116 for an amendment, moved by the Conservative MP Thelma Cazalet-Keir, in favour of equal pay for women teachers. Churchill seized on the issue as a pretext for humiliating his backbench critics. By turning the matter into a vote of confidence in the government, he compelled MPs to reverse their decision by 425 votes to 23. The Economist commented as follows: ‘The leadership of the war is not in question but for every one elector who, two months ago, suspected that the Government was needlessly obstructing reform or who doubted whether Mr Churchill was the man to head the peace as well as in war, there must now be three or four.’39 The government did, however, appoint a Royal Commission on equal pay, which reported in 1946 in favour of the general principle but against action in the near future. One of the last decisions of Churchill’s peacetime administration, announced at the beginning of 1955, was to introduce equal pay into teaching, the civil service and local government. After his retirement from office Churchill lent his name to the foundation of Churchill College, Cambridge. At Clementine’s urging he proposed, at a meeting of the Trustees, that women should be admitted on equal terms with men. ‘When I think of what women did in the war’, he remarked to John Colville, ‘I feel sure they deserve to be treated equally’.40

Notes 1

Andrew Roberts, ‘Churchill the Wartime Feminist’, Chartwell Bulletin no 48, June 2012, www.winstonchurchill.org/publications/chartwell-bulletin/72bulletin-48-jun-2012

2

Winston Churchill, My Early Life (London: Macmillan, 1944), p. 19.

CHURCHILL AND WOMEN

3

Mrs Everest to Winston Churchill, 2 October 1891, CHAR 1/4/14 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1/4/14].

4

Winston Churchill to Lady Randolph, 29 October 1893, CHAR 28/19/2427 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+28/19/24-27].

103

5 Churchill, My Early Life, p. 76. 6

See, for example, Winston Churchill to Lady Randolph, 18 November 1896, CHAR 28/22/26-27 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+28/22/26-27].

7 Churchill, My Early Life, p. 167. 8

Natalie Adams, ‘“An Ardent Ally”: Lady Randolph and Winston’s Political Career’, Finest Hour, 98 (Spring 1998), pp. 14–16.

9

Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (London: Cassell, 1979), p. 236.

10 Soames, Clementine Churchill, p. 180. 11 See, for example, Clementine Churchill to Winston Churchill, 14 April 1916, CHAR 1/118A/136-138 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+1/118A/136-138]. 12 Soames, Clementine Churchill, p. 257. 13 Winston Churchill to Clementine Churchill, 21 January 1935, CHAR 1/273/14-18 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+1/273/14-18]; Winston Churchill to Clementine Churchill, 13 April 1935, CHAR 1/273/139-145 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+1/273/139-145]. 14 Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Doubleday, 1998), p. 454. 15 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 148. 16 Clare Sheridan to Winston Churchill, 23 January 1921, CHAR 1/138/5-6 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1/138/5-6]; Winston Churchill to Clare Sheridan, 12 November 1942, CHAR 1/368/43 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1/368/43]. 17 ‘1911 England Census’, http://www.ancestry.co.uk. 18 Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 154. 19 Peter Clarke, Mr Churchill’s Profession (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 131. 20 Clarke, Mr Churchill’s Profession, p. 159. 21 Winston Churchill, testimonial for Grace Hamblin, 20 September 1937, CHAR 1/300/16 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+1/300/16]. 22 Elizabeth Nel, Mr Churchill’s Secretary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), p. 32. 23 Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 1.

104

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

24 Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Volume I: Youth: 1874–1900 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1966), p. 337. 25 Winston Churchill to the Master of Elibank, 18 December 1911, CHAR 2/53/83 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+2/53/83]. 26 Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 161. 27 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 130. 28 Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 52-3. 29 H. N. Brailsford to Winston Churchill, 12 July 1910, CHAR 2/47/23 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/47/23]. 30 Winston Churchill to Sir Edward Henry, 22 November 1910, CHAR 12/3/43 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+12/3/43]. 31 Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume IV: Part 1: January 1917–June 1919 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1977), p. 402. 32 Winston Churchill, ‘Extending Female Suffrage’, Cabinet memorandum, 8 March 1927, CHAR 22/155/119 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+22/155/119]. 33 Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 313. 34 Richard Langworth, Churchill by Himself (London: Ebury Press, 2008), p. 320 35 Winston Churchill to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1 November 1942, CHAR 20/82/11-12 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/82/11-12]. 36 Winston S. Churchill, Onwards to Victory (London: Cassell, 1944), p. 224. 37 Winston Churchill to the Secretary for War, 18 October 1941 and 29 October 1941, CHAR 20/36/10 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+20/36/10]. 38 Winston Churchill, ‘Man-power’, Note by the Prime Minister, 5 July 1945, CHAR 20/232/10 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/232/10]. 39 Economist, 8 April 1944, p. 458. 40 John Colville, The Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 123.

9 Churchill and the Empire Richard Toye University of Exeter

Churchill’s youth coincided with the high-water mark of Victorian imperial optimism. He reached political maturity at a time when the British Empire was coming under increasing strain, and the final decade of his active career saw major steps towards its dissolution, very much against his will. Yet although he is remembered as a ‘diehard’ defender of the Empire, examination of the documentary record shows that this image – which he himself cultivated in the years after 1918 – cannot be taken wholly at face value. One of the most controversial aspects of Winston Churchill’s lengthy career is his view of Empire. This is an issue that provokes strong feelings because it is closely connected with sensitive questions of race and power. In the Western world, Churchill is generally celebrated for his leadership during the Second World War. In former British colonial territories, by contrast, he tends to be associated with an imperial legacy that is often seen as extremely damaging. There also appears to be a contradiction between Churchill’s brave, forward-looking opposition to Nazi tyranny and his seemingly retrograde and old-fashioned attitudes to non-white peoples within the British Empire. A full appreciation of Churchill, going beyond either hero worship or instinctive hostility, requires an understanding of the complexities of the imperial politics of his time. Churchill’s involvement with the British Empire was long-standing, from his involvement in small imperial wars as a young man at the end of the nineteenth century to his engagement with issues such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during his final premiership in the 1950s. Growing up during the highest phase of Victorian imperial expansion, his political maturity coincided with the Empire’s decline, which accelerated during and after the Second World War. How one views Churchill’s imperialism

106

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

depends on how one views the Empire itself. If British colonial power was, notwithstanding some abuses, essentially benign, then Churchill’s faith in the Empire may seem at worst a little quaint, even if some of his racially tinged comments are to be deplored. If, however, the Empire was a brutal system that enforced racial inequality at the point of a gun, then his racist opinions were nothing less than a prop to institutionalized cruelty. Churchill’s sympathizers see his belief in the superiority of white races as less significant than his broader role as a defender of humanity against Nazi tyranny; his critics point to the human cost of his imperial attitudes, such as his failure to act swiftly in response to the appalling Bengal famine of 1943. Churchill undoubtedly did hold racist views but it must be appreciated that racism was very widespread in the Victorian society in which he grew up. At the same time, it is also important to remember that not all Victorians held the same opinions and that some people of a similar age to Churchill opposed his attitudes to the Empire later in life. These complexities make interpretation difficult. Historians have largely divided between those such as Clive Ponting who emphasize Churchill’s racism and hostility to imperial reform and decolonization, and those such as Roland Quinault who, whilst acknowledging that Churchill held unpalatable views, suggest that he was relatively enlightened for a man of his time and background. There are also those, notably John Charmley, who have seen Churchill’s 1940s policy choices, including the pursuit of an Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, as fatal to the power of the Empire which he claimed to want to defend. Any attempt to mediate between these views requires a grasp of Churchill’s imperial career as a whole, which is most easily achieved through a straightforward chronological treatment, as presented here. Arguably, his defenders amongst historians are right to claim that the picture is more complicated than his diehard image would suggest. Nevertheless, his detractors’ arguments also have merit, for if Churchill came to be seen as a diehard, this was in part because of choices that he deliberately made, positioning himself unashamedly with reactionary elements in the Conservative Party from the 1920s onwards. Churchill spent part of his early childhood in Ireland – and this country’s problematic relationship with Empire formed a running theme throughout his career. His first memory was of the Duke Marlborough, his grandfather, unveiling a statue of the imperial hero, Lord Gough, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. In such ways, he was exposed to imperialist messages that would stay with him for decades. For example, in 1891 his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, made a well-publicized trip to South Africa. ‘I have been having a most agreeable travel in this very remarkable country’, he wrote to Winston. ‘I expect that when you are my age you will see S Africa to be the most populous and wealthy of all our colonies.’1 Formal education was also important, not least through the influence of Churchill’s Harrow School imperialist headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon. Churchill did not, however, receive all that he was told uncritically. As a young soldier in India in the late 1890s,

CHURCHILL AND THE EMPIRE

107

he set out to teach himself the things that he thought he had missed out on and puzzled out conclusions for himself. However, the general tendency of his views was clear. ‘East of Suez Democratic reins are impossible’, he wrote to his mother. ‘India must be governed on old principles.’2 Eager to see military action, Churchill succeeded in getting himself attached to an expedition sent to put down a rebellion by tribesmen on the Indian North-West Frontier. He acted as a journalistic correspondent as well as a soldier. He was shocked by some of the violent actions of the British-led Indian forces, but he accepted the need to censor his writing. Thus he told his grandmother privately of the appalling effects that the expanding ‘dumdum’ bullets used by the British had on the human body: ‘The picture is a terrible one, and naturally it has a side to which one does not allude in print.’3 An element of self-censorship is also apparent in the surviving handwritten drafts of his book about the campaign The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), on which we can see a telling Churchillian amendment: ‘the prestige of the dominant race enables them to keep up appearances before maintain their superiority over the native troops’.4 After his Indian adventures, Churchill determined to make his way to the Sudan, where the British reconquest was entering its final phase. He was present at the climactic Battle of Omdurman, and was caught up in the famous charge of the 21st Lancers. In military terms this was a fiasco, but it allowed Churchill to indulge his ‘keen aboriginal desire to kill several of these odious dervishes’.5 Churchill continued his journalism and in due course produced a substantial two-volume book The River War (1899), about the campaign. He made some criticisms of H. H. Kitchener, the British commander-in-chief, although these were less startling than is sometimes suggested. He was a more thoughtful writer on imperial issues than many of his journalistic contemporaries, but the unconventionality of his opinions should not be exaggerated. Determined to make his way in politics, Churchill now left the army. However, the outbreak of war with the South African Boer Republics saw him once more heading for the battle zone. ‘Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers’, he had written a few years earlier.6 But in the early stages of the war the British suffered humiliating reverses. Having shown great bravery, Churchill himself was captured after the armoured train he was travelling on was derailed and attacked by enemy forces. In captivity, he came to respect the Boers and to understand their point of view. After his daring escape – which turned him into a global celebrity – Churchill took up a temporary army commission and continued to believe in the justice of the British cause. However, he argued in public that the Boers should be treated generously once defeated. ‘Winston is being severely criticised about his Peaceful telegrams – and everyone here in Natal is going against his views’, noted his brother Jack, who was also serving in the campaign. ‘They say that even if you are going to treat these Boers well after their surrender, this is not the time to say so.’7

108

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill returned to Britain before the war’s end and was returned to Parliament in the general election of 1900. Like many of his contemporaries, he was concerned about ‘National Efficiency’, the fear being that poor social conditions at home would weaken Britain’s ability to enforce its power at a global level. He wrote privately at this time that he could ‘see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers’.8 In 1904 he switched from the Conservatives to the Liberals over the issue of free trade: he did not share Joseph Chamberlain’s view that the Empire needed to be bound together economically through the use of preferential tariffs. When the Liberals entered government in 1905, Churchill was appointed as a junior minister at the Colonial Office, with the former viceroy Lord Elgin as secretary of state. This was Churchill’s first experience of imperial administration, and it presented him with some puzzling complexities. Most problematic were the consequences of the Boer War. Broadly speaking, Churchill and Elgin dealt with these successfully, bringing to an end the controversial system of Chinese labour in South Africa, and devising self-governing constitutions for the former Boer Republics. Nevertheless, Churchill briefly gained a reputation as a Radical and a ‘Little Englander’ – that is, an opponent of imperial expansion – who, in the view of his critics, posed a danger to the Empire. Although he believed non-whites were racially inferior, this did not mean that he believed they had no rights at all, and he was genuinely concerned to ensure what he regarded as fair treatment (stopping short of equality). However, he quickly came up hard against a central dilemma of Liberal colonial policy. One could intervene to protect the indigenous population (and non-natives such as the Chinese) and thus stand accused of stripping white minorities of their hereditary freedoms. Or one could do nothing, which would lead to charges at home of permitting abuses under the British flag. In the end, it was generally easiest to take the path of least resistance, which meant paying lip service to native welfare, whilst allowing local white elites to run things largely as they pleased. Churchill was a hyperactive minister. His lengthy and flamboyant tour of East Africa, written up as My African Journey (1908), earned him much publicity and Elgin’s irritation. However, after he was promoted to the Cabinet – initially as president of the Board of Trade – Churchill’s engagement with imperial issues faded somewhat into the background. The exception was Ireland. Churchill was now committed to the Liberal policy of Home Rule (i.e. greater self-government) and tried to invert the traditional Unionist argument that increased freedom for Ireland would strike a blow at the heart of the Empire. Ireland in its current discontented state, he claimed, posed a risk to the Empire; addressing Irish grievances would increase the Empire’s spiritual strength. The issue was still unresolved at the outbreak of the First World War, and Churchill again had to deal with it after 1918, first in his role of secretary of state for war, and then as colonial secretary. Britain’s harsh and clumsy handling of the 1916 rebellion

CHURCHILL AND THE EMPIRE

109

had radicalized Irish opinion, and Churchill’s response to the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War in 1919 was to put his faith in a tough military policy. He praised the gallantry of the notorious ‘Black and Tans’, the Royal Irish Constabulary reserve force which was responsible for indiscriminate shootings and burnings in reprisal for attacks by the Irish Republican Army. However, when it became clear that this policy had failed, he supported Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s policy of negotiation, which resulted in the partition of Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921–2. Churchill was not especially happy as secretary of state for the colonies, in part because he yearned for a more important post, and in part because of the difficult situation that the Empire faced. Britain had occupied new territories in the Middle East, and these proved problematic. (A rebellion in Mesopotamia in 1920 had prompted Churchill, as war secretary, to write in an unsent letter of his frustration that ‘we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts’.)9 In 1921 Churchill – surrounded by colourful advisers such as T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell – held a major conference in Cairo to determine the future map of the region. This created the modern state of Iraq, and divided neighbouring Transjordan from the rest of Palestine, which Britain held under a League of Nations mandate. Many scholars have blamed these arrangements for later troubles, and the decisions certainly appear to have been flawed. It is, however, worth noting that Churchill acted in line with the expert advice he received rather than imposing his own views. With respect to Palestine, Churchill was broadly supportive of Zionism, but only insofar as it was compatible with British power; and over the coming years the aspiration for Jewish statehood was to conflict increasingly with imperial rule. After the fall of Lloyd George’s coalition government, Churchill shifted further to the right, and in 1924 joined Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. From the imperial perspective, the five years he served in that role were mainly notable for his resistance to the demands of Chamberlainite Conservatives for departures from free trade. Also during this period, under the influence of his friend the Earl of Birkenhead, he became increasingly hostile to the demands of Indian nationalists. Yet Baldwin nonetheless considered him a liberal figure and pondered appointing him as secretary of state for India in order to carry out reform. In his draft memoirs, Churchill recalled, ‘Mr Baldwin seemed to feel that as I had carried the Transvaal Constitution through the House in 1906, and the Irish Free State Constitution in 1920, it would be in general harmony with my sentiments and my record to preside over a third great measure of self-government for another part of the Empire.’ He added, ‘I was not attracted by this plan.’10 Indeed, Churchill eventually broke with the Tory leadership over this very issue, early in 1931, when the Conservative Party was experiencing a spell in Opposition. Churchill was bitterly opposed to his leader’s support

110

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

for the Labour government’s policy of Indian reform, and seems to have believed that he could use the issue to seize control of the Conservative Party himself. His vitriolic attacks on M. K. Gandhi, the charismatic figure who symbolized resistance to British rule, gained longlasting notoriety. Inevitably, when a new, cross-party ‘National Government’ was formed later in the year, Churchill was not invited to join it. He waged a long campaign against reform, which only came to an end when the Government of India Act (which granted a limited measure of self-rule) was passed by Parliament in 1935. Many historians view his actions as quixotic, and suggest that they helped ensure that his equally dire but more accurate warnings about the dangers posed by the Nazis were not listened to. In a draft for one of his Second World War speeches – which happily he was sensible enough not to deliver – he commented that ‘For ten years before the war, I warned our British people against Hitler and Gandhi.’11 Yet in his post-war memoirs the issue of India was downplayed, and his 1930s career was presented as a straightforward story of how his efforts to alert people to the ambitions of the dictators were ignored. Churchill certainly relished his imperial ‘diehard’ image, and continued to play up to it as prime minister after 1940. On one famous occasion, he declared, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’12 But in spite of his fulminations, the pressures of events were such that even he could not avoid making concessions. In 1942, as Japanese troops swept across Asia, he was forced to agree to the so-called ‘Cripps mission’, which held out the promise of Indian self-government after the war. He was not at all displeased when the negotiations with the nationalists collapsed, but humiliations such as the fall of Singapore brought home the Empire’s weakness; Churchill feared the spread of a ‘Pan-Asiatic malaise’.13 This fed tensions with Australia, a self-governing Dominion, which also feared the rise of Pan-Asianism, but felt that Britain was not doing enough to help defend it. (However, Churchill’s relations with the Canadian, New Zealand and South African prime ministers remained good.) Churchill also faced pressure from antiimperialist American opinion to abolish Britain’s imperial preference system and to move forward with colonial reform. His efforts at resistance were not completely unsuccessful, but with the rise of the United States and USSR to superpower status, Britain’s room for manoeuvre was severely circumscribed. In a certain sense, then, Churchill was actually quite lucky to lose the general election of 1945. The new Labour government gave independence to India, Burma and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and gave up the mandate in Palestine. Churchill was free to attack Britain’s imperial retreat as ‘scuttle’; but it is far from clear that he would have been able to avoid a similar path himself if he had remained in office. After he returned to power in 1951, he proved his ability to adjust (reluctantly) to new realities. He developed a good relationship with Indian prime minister – and former foe – Jawaharlal

CHURCHILL AND THE EMPIRE

111

Nehru. Behind the scenes, he encouraged the Tory rebels who opposed his own government’s attempts to negotiate a new treaty with Egypt, which required the withdrawal of British troops – but when it came to the point he bit his lip and supported the agreement. The brutal response to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was a severe blot on his government’s record, but Churchill himself did not drive this policy. In fact, he favoured negotiation and had some humanitarian impulses, but was too old, tired and concerned with other issues to make much of a difference. His racist attitudes remained. He was hostile to ‘coloured’ immigration to Britain, albeit not to the point of taking action: restrictive legislation was not passed until some years after he left office. By the time that Churchill retired in 1955 Britain was moving into the post-imperial era, although it was not yet clear quite how rapidly decolonization would come. The Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain’s invasion of Egypt prompted American anger, proved a watershed. Afterwards, and now in retirement, Churchill set out to repair relations with the United States, through visits, public statements and discussions with key American figures. His faith in Anglo-American unity was undimmed, and his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–8), published between April 1956 and March 1958, formed a testament to it. In 1963 President Kennedy awarded Churchill honorary citizenship of the United States. In his statement of thanks – probably drafted for him – the former prime minister rejected ‘the view that Britain and the Commonwealth should now be relegated to a tame and minor role in the world’. He added, ‘Mr. President, your action illuminates the theme of unity of the English-speaking peoples, to which I have devoted a large part of my life.’14 It is worth comparing these comments with a remark he made in a letter to his brother over sixty years earlier, in which he spoke of ‘this great Empire of ours – to the maintenance of which I shall devote my life’.15 Naturally, he viewed maintenance of the Empire and the unity of the English-speaking peoples as wholly compatible, indeed mutually reinforcing. But it is interesting to note how, as the Empire declined, the theme of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ eclipsed it in his public rhetoric at the last.

Notes 1

Lord Randolph Churchill to Winston Churchill, 27 June 1891, CHAR 1/2 /58-59 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1 /2/58-59].

2

Winston Churchill to Lady Randolph Churchill, 6 April 1897, CHAR 28/23/31-33A [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+28/23/31-33A].

3

Winston Churchill to Frances, Duchess of Marlborough, 25 October 1897, CV I Part 2, p. 810 (CV: A series of documentary Companion Volumes

112

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

to the official biography of Sir Winston Churchill, which are listed in the bibliography.) 4

Manuscript of The Story of the Malakand Field Force, CHAR 8/3/2.29 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+8/3/2.29], f.23. Piers Brendon drew attention to this point in The Decline of the British Empire, 1781–1997, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 205.

5

Winston Churchill to Lady Randolph Churchill, 10 August 1898, CV I Part 2, p. 963, CHAR 28/25/31 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page? contextId=CHAR+28/25/31].

6

Winston Churchill, ‘Our account with the Boers’, n.d. but 1896–7, CHAR 1/19/1-21 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+1 /19/1-21].

7

Jack Churchill to Lady Randolph Churchill, 3 April 1900, CHAR 28/32/1 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+28/32/1].

8

Winston Churchill to J. Moore Bayley, 23 December 1901, CHAR 28/115/2931 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+28/115/29-31].

9

Winston Churchill to Lloyd George, 31 August 1920 (unsent), CV IV Part 2, p. 1199.

10 Winston Churchill, draft memoirs, CV V Part 1, p. 1431. 11 Speech notes for debate on India, 30 March 1943, CHAR 9/191A/1-12 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/191A/1-12], f.10. 12 Speech of 10 November 1942, CHAR 9/158/56-68 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/158/56-68]. 13 The Secretary of State for India [Leo Amery] to the Viceroy [and GovernorGeneral of India, 2nd Lord Linlithgow], 3 February 1942, CHAR 20/69B/119 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/6 9B/119]. 14 Statement of 9 April 1963. Copy in CHUR 2/539B/157-159 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/539B/157-159] 15 Winston Churchill to Jack Churchill, 2 December [1897], CV I Part 2, p. 836, CHAR 28/152A/122 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+28/152A/122].

10 Churchill and the  Islamic World Warren Dockter

University of Cambridge

Winston Churchill did an enormous amount to shape the modern Middle East, yet relatively little academic attention has been paid to his relationship with the Islamic world. His military and political careers were often linked to matters concerning religious violence in the form of jihadists (those engaged in a holy war against non-believers), strategic calculations based around Islamic sentiments and Muslim civil rights. Despite this, a misconception has developed in Churchillian scholarship: that Churchill was little more than indifferent to matters in Islamic regions and that he was, in general, contemptuous of Islam. This notion comes from Churchill’s reflections in his book The River War (1899), his history of the British/Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan, in which he himself had taken part: How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

114

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities thousands have become brave and loyal soldiers of the queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science – the science against which it had vainly struggled – the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.1 However, the use of this passage to make broad claims about Churchill’s lifetime position on Islam is problematic. It is important to note that he was going through a particularly anti-religious phase at the time he wrote this passage. It is also worth observing that these sentences only appear in this form only in the first edition of The River War, which ran for only one year until it was condensed into a one-volume text at Churchill’s request. Moreover, Churchill was referring to the Dervish Muslims, who were followers of the Mahdiyya, a fundamentalist and violent interpretation of Islam, rather than all Muslims, though he could have been clearer on this point. Churchill reserved his most damning comments specifically for the Islamic Dervish population in Africa. In volume 4 of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in 1958, the Dervish Mahdiyya are referred to as ‘restless fanatics’ and ‘fanatical hordes’, which was in step with the thinking of orthodox Islamic authorities, or the Ulema, at the time.2 This was because the term ‘Mahdi’ (or ‘guided one’) is the prophesized redeemer of Islam and is roughly equivalent to ‘Messiah’ (or ‘anointed one’) in Christianity.3 By declaring himself Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed, the leader of the Dervish Empire, was committing a heresy against orthodox Sunni Islam. To suggest that he was guided by the Prophet (and not the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who was also the Caliph and, thus, the head of orthodox Sunni Islam), Mohammed Ahmed placed himself outside mainstream interpretations. These considerations illustrate the need to analyse Churchill’s life more thoroughly in order to fully to appreciate his view of Islam. Churchill’s earliest reflections on the topic can be found in his correspondence with Reverend J. E. C. Welldon, his former headmaster at Harrow School. On 16 December 1896, whilst he was stationed in India as a junior officer and undergoing his self-education there, Churchill explained his negative view of missionary work because ‘Providence has given each man the form of worship best suited to his environment’. He elucidated his point by exploring the limitations of Christian influence: ‘in nearly nineteen centuries [Christianity] has not spread South or East. In all that time no nation of Black or Yellow has accepted it. Centuries of missionary work in China have been barren! […] Nor have the religions of Buddha – Mahomet

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

115

[the Prophet Mohammed] – and Confucius gained a single white convert.’ Churchill concluded that ‘while religion is natural to man, some races are capable of a higher and purer form than others. I believe the Asiatic derives more real benefit from the perfect knowledge of his religion than of partial comprehension of Christianity’.4 This letter is significant because it illustrates Churchill’s early ideas on religion, including Christianity and Islam. Whilst his rebuttal was intellectually based on quasi-Darwinist concepts, it is remarkable that Churchill seems to hold Islam and Christianity as equals, each playing a part in the progress of civilization in the geographic region that best suits the religion. This was ultimately why Churchill thought missionary work was little more than a fruitless errand. The opinion was later echoed in Churchill’s account of Islam in The River War. Prior to his adventures in Sudan, Churchill was stationed in British India with the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. Whilst he was there, he began to appreciate the importance of polo in ‘strengthening the good relations’ between Indians and Englishmen.5 Churchill also praised the skill and tenacity of native Muslim and Sikh polo players. In a letter of 12 November 1896, Churchill told his mother that he would send pictures of a polo event and that she would be able to see him ‘fiercely struggling with turbaned warriors’.6 The ‘turbaned warriors’, Churchill later recalled, were the ‘famous Golconda Brigade, the bodyguards of the Nizam himself’.7 He even noted that ‘Polo has been the common ground on which English and Indian gentlemen have met on equal terms, and it is to that meeting that much mutual esteem and respect is due.’8 Underlining the importance of polo in his experience, Churchill argued that natives should be eligible for the Victoria Cross because ‘in sport, in courage, and in the sight of heaven, all men meet on equal terms’.9 During this stage of Churchill’s life he also considered fighting with the Ottoman Empire (traditionally viewed as an Islamic power) against their conventional enemy, the Greeks (traditionally viewed as a Christian people). Churchill was on a transfer boat going back towards India when the GrecoTurkish war of 1897 broke out and Churchill informed his mother that he intended to fight for the Turks against the Greeks, unlike his friend Ian Hamilton, a young officer on the boat with him at the time, who declared his intention to fight for the Greeks. There were several awkward dinners on the ship until they reached their post and realized the war had in fact come to a close, much to Churchill’s disappointment. Churchill’s support for the Ottomans was most likely influenced by his political leaning. William Gladstone and the Liberal Party viewed the Ottoman Empire as a despotic anti-Christian force which should be pushed out of Europe, whilst the Conservative Party, led by Benjamin Disraeli, saw the Ottoman Empire as an ally against Russian expansion in Asia. Churchill later reflected that Ian Hamilton was interested in classical culture and so went to the Greeks, whilst Churchill ‘having been brought up a Tory … was for the Turks’.10

116

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Whilst Churchill was in India he became eager for glory and sought action on the North-West Frontier. There he encountered fundamentalist Islam for the first time. However, the more time Churchill spent in India, the more he realized there were differences between orthodox Islam and radical jihadist Islam. Churchill voiced his disdain for the leaders and clerics of the radical Islamic movement on the North-West Frontier, such as Mullah Sadullah, in a dispatch for the Daily Telegraph on 9 November 1897 saying that the leaders’ ‘intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more dangerous, more destructive than the wild beasts. Their religion – fanatic though they are – is only respected when it incites to bloodshed and murder.’11 Whilst Churchill privately questioned the wisdom of the forward policy that brought him to the North-West Frontier, he wrote home of the bravery and skill of many Muslims and Sikhs in several regiments, including the 31st Punjabi Infantry with whom he fought. Churchill’s ‘letters and writings never refer to those on the same side as the British forces with disrespect and are almost completely devoid of racial epitaphs and common slang’.12 Churchill later recorded his thoughts regarding his attachment to the 31st Punjabi Infantry in My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930). Although he thought it was an odd experience because of the language barrier, Churchill recalled: ‘Although I could not enter fully into their thoughts and feelings, I developed a regard for the Punjabis […] If you grinned, they grinned. So I grinned industrially.’13 It is also remarkable that Churchill’s praise and respect found its way to his enemies on the North-West Frontier. Churchill recalled that the tribes there were ‘a brave and warlike race […] Nor should it be forgotten that the English are essentially a warlike people’.14 Though Churchill furiously fought those who stood against the British, he sincerely admired their remarkable courage: ‘It would be unjust to deny the people of the Mohmand Valley the reputation for courage, tactical skill, and marksmanship which they have so well deserved.’15 In 1900, Churchill won a seat for the Conservative Party in Parliament and then switched in 1904 to the Liberal Party. During the early stages of what may be called ‘the liberal phase of Churchill’s career’, his relationship with the Islamic world often came to the fore. Churchill developed an ongoing feud with the high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard, over his punitive expeditions against Islamic tribes in Nigeria. At one stage, Churchill’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, Lady Gwendeline Bertie, even feared that Churchill might convert to Islam because she thought she had detected a ‘tendency to orientalism’ in his disposition.16 Perhaps the most striking display of Churchill’s fascination with the Islamic world was his ongoing correspondence with some of the leaders of the Ottoman Empire. During a holiday in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1910, Churchill met Talaat Bey Pasha (who became the Ottoman grand vizier), Enver Bey Pasha (who later became the Ottoman minister of war) and Mehmed Djavid Bey (who later became the Ottoman minster of

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

117

finance), and they began to exchange letters. In fact, Churchill’s relationship with Djavid Bey was such that during the Tripolitanian War of 1911 Djavid Bey wrote informally to Churchill about the prospect of forming an alliance between the British and Ottoman empires. Churchill wrote to Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, and reported that he has been contacted by Djavid Bey. Churchill further urged Grey to accept the alliance on the grounds that Italy had committed atrocities in Libya. Perhaps because Churchill was weary of the threat of war in Europe, he continued: ‘Turkey has much to offer us … We are the only power who can really help and guide her … Have we not more to apprehend from the consequence of throwing Turkey … into the arms of Germany.’17 Another reason for Churchill pointing out the benefits of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire was his belief that the British Empire was ‘the greatest Mohammedan power in the world’.18 Churchill feared that the large number of Muslims in British India might develop conflicting loyalties should the Ottoman Empire find an ally in Germany. However, Grey refused to heed to Churchill. It became clear that the Foreign Office wanted to send something ‘mellifluous’ but ‘would not agree to anything substantial’ despite Churchill’s wish to send an ‘encouraging’ reply.19 This course of action taken by Grey further pushed the Ottoman Empire towards an alliance with Germany. In 1914, when Churchill was forced to sequester two Turkish dreadnoughts, the Reshadieh and the Sultan Osman I, which Britain had been building for the Ottoman Navy, the Ottoman government was furious and felt that it had no choice but to ally itself with the Central Powers, despite several personal appeals from Churchill to Enver Pasha and others in power in Constantinople. These fell on deaf ears and on 4 November 1914 the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allied powers. Seven days later the Sultan and Caliph of Sunni Islam declared jihad against Britain and the Allies. When news of this reached Churchill, he became very fearful that ‘the weight of Islam will be drawn into the struggle on the German side’.20 The fear of an anti-British political movement that called for the unification of all Muslims under one Caliphate (or a pan-Islamic movement) had been present in British foreign policy since the mid-nineteenth century, and it was a fear that Germany was keen to exploit. Aware of this, Churchill was concerned that any such movement might seriously affect the outcome of the war, especially in Asia. His personal notes continued: ‘The Mohammedan influence in Asia will carry with it all kindred forces along in Egypt and along the North-African shore. It is in Asia, through Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, and ultimately India that England will be struck at and her crown of acquisitions cancelled out. India is the target, Islam is the propellant, and the Turk is the projectile.’21 This only served to embolden Churchill’s desire for military action. He hoped to preserve British prestige in the East and put down any notions of an anti-British, pan-Islamic movement, so he pushed for operations in the straits of the Dardanelles in order to open a route to Constantinople. The

118

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

result was the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and Churchill being forced out of the Admiralty. After briefly serving in the trenches during 1916, Churchill returned to government, first at the Ministry of Munitions and then, from 1919, as the minister of war and air. However, the immediate post-war period saw Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Churchill at loggerheads over British policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, particularly Turkey. Lloyd George was a famously philhellenic Liberal and his conceptualization of Asia Minor, much like that of Gladstone, was largely predicated on orientalist and biblical literature; whereas Churchill, who had originally been a Tory, remained relatively pro-Turk and sympathetic to their plight. The two figures shared a combative correspondence in the postwar period in relation to the development of a Turkish policy. Enver Pasha, one of the recently bested leaders of the fallen Ottoman Empire, wrote to Churchill in May 1919 urging him to appeal directly to Lloyd George on the Turks’ behalf, saying: ‘Knowing your personal generosity and your chivalrous influence on your colleagues, especially Mr. Lloyd George, I pray you intervene … I have never forgotten the benefits made to this country when you have intervened in our favour.’ Remarkably, Enver warned of the risks in breaking up the Ottoman Empire and the effects this might have on the people of the Middle East; he even warned Churchill of the dangers of ‘the deep fire of Islam’.22 As the situation became more volatile in Asia Minor and the Middle East, it became apparent that the antiquated and chaotic system of colonial governance, split between the Colonial Office, Foreign Office and India Office, was no longer capable of maintaining a coherent Middle East policy. The most glaring example of Britain’s negligent foreign policy for the region was a direct result of three important promises, each of which proposed seemingly different arrangements. The Hussein-McMahon pledges (1915– 16) supported Arab national aspirations, whilst the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) split the remains of the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain. Further complicating the situation, the Balfour Declaration (1917) stated that Britain would work towards the aim of establishing a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Correcting this tangled and embarrassing fiasco would take a great deal of energy and drive. The overwhelming workload led to the retirement of the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Milner, who did not want to take on such a worrisome task, and the position was refused by Lord Derby for similar reasons. This left Churchill as the foremost candidate and Lloyd George appointed him as colonial secretary in early 1921, giving him wide-ranging powers to develop a new department focused solely on the Middle East. Churchill wholeheartedly flung himself into the task of creating the Middle East Department. He sent a flurry of letters on 23 January 1921 to Arthur Hirtzel at the India Office. In one of his letters he asked, in Churchillian fashion, for ‘a large map of Arabia and Mesopotamia’ that

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

119

illustrated where ‘all the principal Arabian potentates exercise influence’.23 He also asked for expert knowledge to explain the various feuds and ‘the principal doctrinal and ritualistic differences involved between the Shia, [and] the Sunni’.24 Undoubtedly Churchill would not have been aware that the difference between the two major sects of Islam was not a theological difference but a doctrinal one. Essentially, Sunni Muslims believe that the position of Caliph, or religious leader, should be elected from amongst those capable of the task, whereas Shia Muslims believe that the Caliphate should stay within the Prophet’s own family, amongst those appointed by the Prophet, or amongst imams appointed by Allah. Churchill’s letters are important because they illustrate how he helped shape the framework for the discussion and conceptualization of the Middle East. For instance, it is significant that Churchill chose the title ‘Middle East Department’: the term ‘Middle East’ was still not official British terminology and was not often used in Cabinet social circles, with the notable exception of Mark Sykes, who tried to ‘popularize the term from the summer of 1916’.25 Churchill also enlisted a host of experts on Middle Eastern affairs for his new department. He appointed John Shuckburgh as secretary and Major Hubert Young as assistant secretary. Both men were very sympathetic to the Arab cause. On the other hand, his adviser on military affairs in the Middle East, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, was a fierce Zionist.26 Churchill’s most significant appointment to the department was the famed T. E. Lawrence.27 Churchill immediately offered the position of adviser on Arabian affairs to Lawrence, despite apprehension from the Masterson-Smith Committee, the official Cabinet committee that defined the parameters of the Middle East Department.28 Lawrence greatly favoured Arabian self-determination, as Churchill had known ever since their first meeting at the Peace Conference in 1919. Bringing Lawrence into the department began an enduring friendship between the two men that had long-term effects on British policy in the Islamic world. With his new Middle East Department set up, Churchill swiftly called for a conference in Cairo to settle the issues between the conflicting Foreign Office policy pledges in the Middle East and to determine how exactly Britain might administer the region in a cost-effective manner. The Cairo Conference opened on 12 March 1921 at the Semiramis Hotel. It was attended by ‘some 40 British experts from London and the Middle East’, including A. T. Wilson from Persia, High Commissioners Percy Cox (Mesopotamia) and Herbert Samuel (Palestine), T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell (Cox’s oriental secretary and the only woman amongst the delegates), as well as several representatives of Somaliland and Aden.29 This conference decided to structure the region on what Churchill called the ‘Sherifian solution’, which vested power with the Hashemite family, whose patriarch was King Hussein. This ensured King Hussein would be king of the Hejaz and would be based in Mecca. It placed his son Feisal on the throne of Iraq and his

120

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

other son Abdullah on the throne of Jordan (where his direct descendants rule today). This solution had political advantages. Churchill believed that ‘Britain could bring pressure to bear in one Arab country in which a Sherifian prince reigned [in order] to achieve goals in a different region ruled by another family member’.30 For example, if Hussein knew his son’s rule in Mesopotamia was dependent on his cooperation with British interests in Mecca, he would be more likely to oblige British wishes. However, this plan had major flaws as well. It placed a Sunni regent at the head of a country predominately populated by Shia Muslims and it misunderstood the nature of internal politics and rivalries in the Hashemite family. Moreover, some of the policies of the Cairo Conference had major failings. The conference urged for the creation of an independent state for the Kurds (Kurdistan) but this was never realized owing to complications in AngloTurkish relations after the rise of the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In an effort to keep costs low, the conference approved a scheme of colonial air-policing, which was quite brutal and indiscriminate, and helped create a lasting animosity towards Britain, especially in Iraq. Finally, the ambiguous nature of the Balfour Declaration regarding the creation of a Jewish land in Palestine was not elucidated in any way and this set the stage for an enduring international crisis and a legacy of violence. It is important to note that Churchill’s relationship with Islam was not limited to the Middle East. He had several contacts with Indian Muslims as well, especially during the 1930s during his campaign to keep India firmly in the grasp of the British Empire. Churchill is typically depicted in this period as a rabid imperialist whose belief in the civilizing effects of British rule served as his only motivation for opposing Indian home rule. In this narrative, Churchill is usually squaring off against the meek and wellintentioned Mahatma Gandhi, whose policy of non-violence helped make Churchill seem all the more fanatical about imperialism. Although Churchill did say that Gandhi was ‘a seditious Middle Temple Lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace’,31 the reality of this period is far more complex than this narrative suggests. Churchill’s views were influenced by ideas and people that reinforced his own imperial ideas. A good example of this was Katherine Mayo’s book Mother India (1930), which might be understood as having ‘a profound anti-Hindu bias’; it concluded that mounting divisions and aggravations between Muslims and Hindus would end in a cataclysmic civil war and that the British presence in India was all that prevented such a catastrophe.32 This further illustrates Churchill’s Whiggish notion that since Islam shared Judeo-Christian traditions and monotheistic structure it was somehow culturally more advanced to polytheistic Hinduism. However, the most important influences that would help shape Churchill’s defence of British rule in India were his various friendships with prominent

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

121

Muslims such as the Aga Khan, Baron Headley (president of the British Muslim Society), Waris Ameer Ali (a London judge), Feroz Khan Noon (a future prime minister of Pakistan) and even M. A. Jinnah (the so-called father of Pakistan). Whilst the Aga Khan and Baron Headley connected Churchill to important pro-Islamic groups such as the British Muslim Society, the most influential figure, in terms of Churchill’s thinking regarding the Muslim population of India, was probably Waris Ali. He and Churchill became good friends and their correspondence lasted into the post-war years; they worked closely together on the Indian Empire Society, which later became a part of the Indian Defence League. Waris Ali used his connections to keep Churchill informed on Muslim opinion on the ground in India and continually sent information that Churchill would then use in the House of Commons as evidence of the necessity of British rule. For instance, on 2 June 1931, Waris Ali wrote to Churchill regarding the Cawnpore Massacre and included material from the Crescent, a Muslim weekly in India, protesting about the terrorization of the Muslim minority.33 Soon afterwards Churchill addressed an audience in Kent saying, ‘Look at what happened at Cawnpore  … A hideous primordial massacre has been perpetrated by the Hindus on the Moslems because the Moslems refused to join in the glorification of the murder of a British policeman.’34 Furthermore, the aspects of Churchill’s position that might be characterized as a concern for the Muslim minority were informed by Ali and were evident in his portrayal of the Indian Congress Party, which he later said ‘does not represent India. It does not represent the majority of people in India. It does not even represent the Hindu masses. Outside that Party and fundamentally opposed to it are 90 million Moslems in British India who have their rights to self expression.’35 Churchill himself even implied that Waris Ali had influenced his position, saying to Ali that he had ‘availed himself fully of [the letters and articles]’ and that he planned ‘to recur to him’ if he needed more help in Parliament.36 Churchill’s relationship with the Islamic world continued, of course, through the Second World War, when he sought to liberate Syria from Vichy France and worked with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia37 and King Abdullah of Jordan38 to secure the Middle East from the Nazis and their allies in the region, particularly the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin alHusayni. One of Churchill’s most interesting geopolitical strategies during the war was his efforts to keep Turkey neutral and then bring the country in as an ally in the closing days of the war. This policy reveals the extent to which Churchill’s views on Islam had become fairly antiquated by the 1940s because he still assumed that having Istanbul as an ally would mean that all of the Islamic world would also join. Whilst that was clearly predicated on Victorian notions, the remarkable thing was how serious Churchill was about garnering Islamic support. He personally directed foreign policy with Turkey, often meeting with President İsmet İnönü. In October 1940, during

122

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the darkest days of the Second World War, Churchill approved plans to build a new mosque in central London and even set aside £100,000 for the project.39 The war did not alter Churchill’s view of India either. He continued to promote British imperialism in India under the guise of equal rights for Muslims and other minorities. This was evident in his telegram to President Roosevelt in March 1942, when Churchill argued that one of the main obstacles to India obtaining dominion status was Britain’s desire not to break with ‘the Moslems who represent a hundred million people and the main army elements on which we must rely for immediate fighting’.40 However, privately Churchill had already confessed in the War Cabinet that he ‘regarded the Hindu–Moslem feud as the bulwark of British rule in India’.41 Churchill also wholeheartedly supported the creation of Pakistan, which would, in his mind, remain a dominion of the British Crown even if India became fully independent. Churchill continued his correspondence with Jinnah and they met for lunch at Chartwell in December 1946 to discuss the creation of Pakistan. Once partition began under the Attlee government in 1947, Churchill even played a role convincing Jinnah of the terms of the partition.42 After the Second World War, Churchill’s political life continued to be intertwined with issues concerning the Islamic world. Despite Churchill distancing himself from the Zionist cause because of the assassination of his friend Lord Moyne by the Stern Gang in 1944, the establishment of Israel in 1948 greatly altered how Churchill understood the Middle East. He saw the newly established Israel as an ally against Soviet expansionism in the region and as another means to draw Britain closer to the United States. Despite his support for Israel, Churchill also hoped that the new state would take ‘into account the legitimate rights of the Arabs’.43 In his post-war government, Churchill was also confronted with nationalist movements in Egypt and Iran. Although these movements were not strictly motivated by Islam, Churchill continued to view the Middle East in outmoded terms as an Islamic region, despite the presence there of numerous other ethnic and religious groups, and this resulted in lasting colonial legacies in the Middle East. In Egypt, the tension between Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist movement and the declining British Empire culminated in the Suez Crisis in 1956, whilst the Anglo-American operation to remove Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister in Iran in 1953 is cited as one of major causes of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the collapse of secular democracy in Iran. Despite this, Churchill’s fascination with the Orient still showed through. He regularly took holidays in Marrakesh throughout the 1950s. The city’s vistas were amongst Churchill’s favourite subjects for painting, as were its Islamic inhabitants.44 Churchill also enjoyed the evening feasts with the local pasha, known as T’hami El Glaoui (Lord of the Atlas), who had frequently played host to Churchill since 1935. Ultimately, Churchill’s legacy in the Islamic world is one of paradoxical camaraderie and shared interests gained through his experiences and

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

123

personal interactions. It is through exploring his private correspondence and notes that this legacy becomes most clear. Whilst strategic necessity certainly dictated aspects of his thinking, Churchill often held positions that he believed gave the Muslim subjects of the Crown a good deal. There were moments, of course, when this alliance did not harmonize. Two major failures of Churchill’s career concerned the Islamic world. First, there was the setback over Gallipoli and, second, his inflexible attitudes regarding India in the 1930s. Although Churchill’s view of political and cultural Islam was, to some extent, a Victorian construction from which he never fully divorced himself, and his typical position on matters related to Islamic regions was imperialistic, he saw British power as a means to advance civilization, which he ultimately believed helped everyone, including Muslims. Although Churchill’s views of Islam can in many ways seem patronizing and problematic, they were nonetheless a great deal more nuanced and sympathetic than is generally appreciated.

Notes 1

Winston S. Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of Soudan (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), Vol. II, pp. 248–50. For a proof of the 1902 revised edition of The River War, from which the section was omitted, see CHAR 8/4 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+8/4], images 63–206; and for source material and drafts see CHAR 8/5A-B [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+8/5A-B].

2

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume 4: The Great Democracies (London: Cassell, 1958), pp. 341, 369. It is possible that these terms were originated by Churchill’s literary assistants, but the text would necessarily have been approved by Churchill. For traditional Islamic opinion of the Mahdiyya see Heather Harkey, ‘Ahmad Zayni Dahlan’s “Al-Futuhat Al-Islamiyya”: A Contemporary View of the Sudanese Mahdi’, Sudanic Africa: A Journal of Historical Sources, 5 (1994), pp. 67–75.

3

According to tradition, the ‘Mahdi’ acts as something of a steward for a period of years until the final return of the Messiah and together they rid the world of evil. Belief in the Mahdi is more prevalent in Shia Islam. See Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi’i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi’ism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

4

Winston Churchill to J. E. C. Welldon, 16 December 1896, CHAR 28/152A/85-86 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+28/152A/85-86].

5

Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2005), p. 188.

6

Winston Churchill to Lady Randolph Churchill, 12 November 1896, CHAR 28/22/24-25 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+28/22/24-25].

124

7

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: T. Butterworth, 1930), p. 119.

8 Churchill, My Early Life, p. 188. 9 Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, p. 90. 10 Churchill, My Early Life, p. 121. 11 Winston Churchill, field dispatch from Inayat Kila, 9 November 1897, in Frederick Woods, Young Winston’s Wars (London: Leo Cooper, 1972), p. 39. 12 Douglas Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier – The Military Life of a Gentleman at War (London: Brassey’s, 2005), p. 147. 13 Churchill, My Early Life, pp. 148–9. 14 Winston Churchill, field dispatch from Inayat Kila, 9 November 1897, in Woods, Young Winston’s Wars, pp. 52–7. 15 Winston Churchill, field dispatch from Inayat Kila, 16 November 1897 in Woods, Young Winston’s Wars, p. 52. 16 Lady Gwendeline Bertie to Winston Churchill, 27 August 1907, CHAR 1/66/15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+1/66/15]. 17 Winston Churchill to Sir Edward Grey, 4 November 1911, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II: Young Statesman: 1901–1914 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), Vol. II, pp. 1369–70. 18 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume II, pp. 1369–70. 19 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III: The Challenge of War, 1914–1916 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 190. 20 Winston Churchill, personal notes, January 1916, CHAR 2/71/6-9 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/71/6-9]. 21 Winston Churchill, personal notes, January 1916, CHAR 2/71/6-9 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/71/6-9]. 22 Enver Pasha to Winston Churchill, 3 May 1919, CHAR 16/7/23-24 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+16/7/23-24]. 23 Winston Churchill to Arthur Hirtzel, 23 January 1921, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume IV: Part 2: July 1919–March 1921 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1977), pp. 1320–21. 24 Winston Churchill to Arthur Hirtzel, 23 January 1921, in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume IV: Part 2, pp. 1320-1. 25 James Renton, ‘Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient: Britain and the Invention of the Middle East 1917–1918’, Historical Journal, 50.3 (2007), p. 653. 26 Meinertzhagen is not always a reliable source as he fabricated several elements surrounding his life. For more information see Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007); N. J. Lockman, Meinertzhagen’s Diary Ruse (Ann Arbor, MI: Falcon, 1995); P. H. Capstick, Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (London: St Martin’s Press, 1998).

CHURCHILL AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

125

27 For more on T. E. Lawrence, see T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Oxford: Privately printed, 1922); Richard Perceval Graves, Lawrence of Arabia and His World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976); Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1989); David Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia (London: Spring Books, 1964). 28 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume IV: World in Torment, 1916– 1922 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1975), p. 510; David Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989), p. 497. 29 Timothy J. Paris, Britain, the Hashemites and Arab Rule 1920–1925: The Sherifian Solution (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 137. For more on Gertrude Bell see Janet Wallach, The Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (London: Anchor, 1996); Gertrude Bell, The Letters of Gertrude Bell (London: Ernest Benn, 1927). 30 Paris, Britain, the Hashemites and Arab Rule, p. 2. 31 Winston Churchill, Speech at Winchester House, 23 February 1931, CHAR 9/95/34-36 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+9/95/34-36]. 32 Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made (London: Macmillan, 2010), p. 173. 33 Waris Ali to Winston Churchill, 2 June 1931, CHAR 2/180B/175 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/180B/175]; Crescent subscriber letter, [April] 1931, CHAR 2/180B/176 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/180B/176]; ‘The Cawnpore Debate’, Crescent, 12 April 1931, CHAR 2/180B/177 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/180B/177]. 34 Winston Churchill, ‘India: Government Policy’ speech, 10 June 1931, in James Robert Rhodes, ed. Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (New York: Bowker, 1974), Vol. 5, pp. 5044–8. Waris Ali wrote to Churchill explaining ‘all Muslims and Law abiding people in India’ will thank Churchill for his move to debate the Cawnpore riots in the House of Commons. Waris Ali to Winston Churchill, 2 June 1931, CHAR 2/180B/175 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/180B/175]. 35 Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill (London: Hutchinson, 2008), p. 562. 36 Winston Churchill to Waris Ali, 3 June 1931, CHAR 2/180B/180 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/180B/180]. 37 See Winston Churchill to Abdul Aziz bin Saud, 16 May 1945, CHAR 20/227B/194-196 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/227B/194-196]. 38 See Winston Churchill to Abdullah bin Hussain, 24 October 1944, CHAR 20/138B/136-137 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/138B/136-137]. 39 See Cabinet Minutes, 24 October 1940, CAB 65/9/38 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CAB65/9/38], National Archives, Kew, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9110640.

126

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

40 Winston Churchill to President Roosevelt, 4 March 1942, CHAR 20/71A/27 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/7 1A/27]. On this point Churchill was undoubtedly misinformed: by January 1941 the Indian Army’s total strength was about 418,000, with 37 per cent Muslim and 55 per cent Hindu. See James Lawrence, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 542. 41 Winston Churchill, War Cabinet minutes, 2 February 1940; Winston S. Churchill, WP, Vol. 1, pp. 715–16. 42 See Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London: Henry Holt, 2007), pp. 148, 168. 43 Winston Churchill, speech at the House of Commons, 10 December 1948, in James Robert Rhodes, ed. Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (New York: Bowker, 1974), Vol. 7, p. 7766 and CHUR 5/228/437440 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/228/437-440]. 44 For examples of Churchill’s paintings of Marrakesh and elsewhere in the Middle East, see David Coombs with Minnie Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill’s Life through His Paintings (London: Chaucer Press, 2003). Churchill painted more than twenty artworks of Middle Eastern scenes, including at least seven that specifically focus on the bazaars and markets of Marrakesh.

11 Churchill and Airpower Richard Overy University of Exeter

Churchill was an enthusiast for the military use of aircraft throughout his long public career and a keen amateur aviator. This chapter explores his relationship with military aviation from the early days of the naval air force established when he was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, through his role as minister of munitions in 1917–18 and then air minister in 1919–20, to his eventual position in the Second World War as prime minister and minister of defence when he could play a full part in shaping Royal Air Force strategy and development. The major question remains Churchill’s part in approving and sustaining the bombing of German cities and civilians, and particularly the controversial question of Dresden. The chapter explores Churchill’s wavering support for bombing and his eventual view that it was useful as a political tool as much as a strategic necessity. The moral implications of bombing, including the atomic attacks, played little part in his calculations. From the very onset of the air age in the decade before 1914 to the end of the Second World War, Churchill was an enthusiast for the aeroplane as a military instrument. He ordered the first long-range air attacks in 1914– 15 against the German Zeppelin threat, was air minister shortly after the post had been created in 1917 and later went on to help set up and sustain the major air campaign against Germany between 1940 and 1945. In the 1930s, in his so-called ‘wilderness years’, it was the threat posed by the new German Air Force that set him on the campaign trail for more rapid and large-scale rearmament. The air is one of the important threads running through Churchill’s long public career. Churchill found the advent of powered flight exhilarating in the extreme. Unlike most other politicians of his experience and age, he decided on appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty that he should try out flying

128

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

for himself. In early 1912 he had his first flight in a naval seaplane, seated behind Commander Spenser Gray. It was to be the first of many. He later wrote that he had taken up flying from a sense of duty mixed with curiosity, but then continued ‘for sheer joy and pleasure’.1 Churchill admitted to an early sense of profound trepidation, but then adjusted to the dangers. He led what in retrospect seems a charmed life; aircraft in which he had been flying just hours before often crashed on their next flight, killing the pilot. As minister of munitions in 1917 he was flown back and forth to France in poorly serviceable machines. On one occasion the engine failed. ‘I thought extinction certain and near’, he wrote, but the engine spluttered back to life. In 1919 the aircraft he was in crashed, leaving him with no more than bruising, but bringing his aerial adventures to a close.2 Later, in the Second World War, in a converted bomber on his way to the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, he found the cold hard to bear. A small paraffin stove was lit for him, until the danger of fire became acute. He arrived safely, but he might easily on many other occasions have become a victim of the technology he so much admired. It is hard not to see his survival as providential or his fascination with flight as both fearless and reckless. As a result of his strong personal interest in flight, the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was formed in the spring of 1914 under his authority as First Lord of the Admiralty, though he would have preferred to call it the ‘Flying Wing’.3 The RNAS had the distinction of carrying out the first long-range air attacks against targets on the home front in September and October 1914 when naval aircraft, with Churchill’s firm approval, undertook raids against the sheds and repair facilities of the German Zeppelin airships. Churchill feared the role that the airships would play in naval warfare in observing the bombing of the British fleet. On 22 September 1914, four naval aircraft attacked targets in Cologne and Düsseldorf; on 9 October just two aircraft were sent off, this time hitting a Zeppelin hangar; in November, the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen was attacked, a ‘fine feat of arms’, Churchill told the House of Commons.4 The RNAS continued to plan longrange bombing of economic and military targets in Germany after Churchill had left the Admiralty in 1915.5 As minister of munitions in David Lloyd George’s government in 1917–18, Churchill once again tried to sponsor long-range bombing plans. He was a member of two ad hoc committees set up in autumn 1917 to investigate air defence and retaliation against German raids: the Aerial Operations Committee and the Air Raids Committee.6 On 21 October 1917 he drafted a memorandum on ‘Munitions possibilities of 1918’ in which he argued for long-range raids (what became known as strategic bombing) against enemy industrial centres, a strategy that he was to pursue energetically twenty-five years later during the Second World War.7 The government indeed approved the establishment of an Independent Force of the newly founded Royal Air Force for a campaign against German industry, but it had little chance to demonstrate what bombing might do before the end of the war.

CHURCHILL AND AIRPOWER

129

After the election of December 1918, Churchill returned to the Cabinet as secretary for war, but at Lloyd George’s insistence he accepted the additional post of air minister, succeeding Lord Weir in a post first created only in January 1918. Lloyd George hoped that the joint post of secretary of state for war and air, which Churchill took up on 10 January 1919, might lead to a reintegration of the army and air force, but Churchill was committed to the ‘separate independent state’ of the RAF, and succeeded in deflecting naval and military pressure to create two separate air forces, one for army support and one for naval aviation, each under their control.8 He appointed General Hugh Trenchard as the first peacetime chief-of-staff, a man who shared with Churchill a passionate defence of air independence. Already in February 1919 Churchill had approved a different set of rank titles for the RAF – air commodore, group captain and so on.9 In November 1919 a White Paper was published on the ‘Permanent Organisation of the Royal Air Force’ and the future independence of the RAF was guaranteed.10 Under a minister other than Churchill this outcome might have been uncertain, though he was unable to devote more than a fraction of his time to air affairs as minister given the pressures on him as secretary for war. Although not quite the father of the force, Churchill played a critical political role in securing its survival as an independent service, an outcome that shaped the way in which British airpower developed over the twenty years before the coming of a second war. Churchill also presided over the first experiments in ‘air policing’. Late in 1919, an insurgency in the East African territory of British Somaliland made necessary an expensive army expeditionary force for which the Colonial Office was unwilling to pay. The Air Ministry suggested a squadron of DH9 aircraft as a cheap way of projecting colonial power. In January 1920 a series of air operations brought the revolt to an end at only modest cost. A year later, on 7 January 1921, Churchill was moved to the Colonial Office where air policing, in collaboration with a modest military presence, became a standard way of coping with insurgency.11 Almost all the senior air officers who collaborated with Churchill later in the Second World War had gained experience of air policing in the interwar years. Churchill’s own later confidence about what airpower could achieve may well have derived from this early experiment in the projection of airpower. Late in 1941, the chief of the air staff, Sir Charles Portal, tried to explain to Churchill the current strategy against Germany as an adaptation ‘though on a greatly magnified scale, of the policy of air control’.12 Churchill maintained his interest in air matters, but from January 1921 onwards, when he left the post of air minister, he had no direct responsibility for airpower until he became prime minister and minister of defence in 1940. Nevertheless in the 1930s, on the back benches, and a regular critic of the National Government’s slow rearming and uncertain foreign policy, Churchill latched on to the arms race in the air as the means to illustrate what he saw as a failure of government responsibility in the face of the rapid

130

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

rearmament of Hitler’s Germany. Much of the intelligence information was superficial and impressionistic, and Churchill seems to have had access to the principal source, former RAF Group Captain Malcolm Christie, who had been British air attaché in Berlin in the 1920s. Christie passed on unreliable information to the Foreign Office, and in turn Ralph Wigram, in the Central Department of the Office, passed on information to Churchill.13 In 1935, when German rearmament in the air was formally declared by Hitler, Churchill harried Stanley Baldwin’s government to speed up British air preparations. ‘From being the least vulnerable of all nations’, he told the House of Commons in March 1935, ‘we have, through developments in the air, become the most vulnerable’.14 In spring 1936 he wrote in response to an enquiry about his air statistics that ‘we are really in great danger’, and he seems certainly to have believed it.15 Most of Christie’s suggested figures greatly overstated German readiness in the air (trainer aircraft were regularly defined as frontline aircraft), and Churchill earned for himself a reputation as a warmonger amongst a largely anti-war public. The concern over airpower did, however, push Neville Chamberlain, when he became prime minister in May 1937, to pump additional funds into the development of RAF defences (monoplane fighters and radar), which bore fruit in the later Battle of Britain, for which Churchill has always taken the credit. Churchill entered the Second World War with the same office, First Lord of the Admiralty, that he had held at the start of the First. It was only when he became prime minister on 10 May 1940 that he was in a position for the first time since 1920 to influence the way British airpower was to be deployed. He appointed his close friend, the Liberal politician Archibald Sinclair, as his secretary for air, a post he held until May 1945. One of the first decisions that Churchill’s new Cabinet had to make concerned whether to send British bombers to attack targets in German cities to relieve pressure on the front in Belgium and France. The German Air Force had not yet attacked the British home front, and Churchill was aware of what this meant in both moral and legal terms. On 12 May the Cabinet discussed what they called ‘unrestricted air warfare’. Churchill claimed that the Hitler regime had proved itself so inhuman that there was ‘ample justification’ for retaliation. On 13 May approval was given to a raid against oil and rail targets, and two days later, despite Churchill’s anxiety about what effect it might have on American opinion (though not about the damage it would cause German civilians), a general policy was agreed to mount a bombing offensive. For more than 100 days across the summer months, RAF medium bombers raided targets in German towns by night.16 There can be no argument that Churchill, with the agreement of the War Cabinet, gave formal political approval in May 1940 for a campaign against Germany which lasted right down to the last raid, against Kiel on 2–3 May. He had great expectations of what bombing could achieve. In 1918 he had favoured developing a heavy bomber capable of undermining German morale by raids designed ‘to harry [the enemy’s] hungry and

CHURCHILL AND AIRPOWER

131

dispirited cities without pause or stay’.17 In May and June 1940 he hoped for the same morale impact and seems to have had no moral qualms about ordering a campaign that was bound to inflict civilian casualties, perhaps heavy casualties. The decision to bomb was taken in his belief that the Nazis (or Huns, as he so often called them) could have no cause to complain, given their moral record, but also because the emergency following Dunkirk and French defeat meant that bombing was the only way to get at the German enemy. He readily accepted the view that bombing was likely to produce very rapidly a social or political crisis amongst the menaced people. On 8 July, in a much-quoted letter, he wrote to his friend Max Beaverbrook, now minister of aircraft production, that he could see only one way of defeating Hitler: ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers’.18 Great play has been made of Churchill’s use of the word ‘exterminating’, which was an unfortunate choice for a campaign that was still on paper aimed at military and economic targets. It was not the only time during the war that Churchill would put a literary flourish before any moral considerations that might have influenced his view. For Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the future chief of Bomber Command, the letter was, in his words, ‘the RAF mandate’ for area bombing.19 Given Churchill’s identification with the bombing campaign, it is something of an irony that the defence of British air space against German bombers in the Battle of Britain (to which he had unintentionally given the title in a speech on 18 June 1940) came to symbolize British resistance to the German threat.20 It was Churchill who fortunately insisted that Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, should remain in post rather than be forced to retire in July 1940.21 Churchill was easily affected by the damage being done during the battle and had little grasp of air force realities. At one point he wanted every pilot capable of flying, including overage pilots and the staff of all the training schools, to be mobilized into frontline units. He harried the Air Ministry to explain why every fighter produced could not be in the air at once, when they were needed for training, or were under repair, or were stored as reserves. On 19 August, the day when he famously visited the headquarters of Air Marshal Keith Park, commander of 11 Group RAF, he became aware of how limited British air strength appeared to be, and the monstrous odds against it. In the car back he muttered the phrase that he immortalized in a speech to a halfempty and sleepy House of Commons a day later, that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’.22 There is a good case for saying that the Battle of Britain was won in spite of Churchill, whose understanding of how an air force worked – the long training hours, the importance of reserves, the conservation of strength, the complex logistical tail – remained rudimentary both then and throughout the war. He pressed the RAF to prepare for a possible poison gas war from the air, which would have been politically and strategically disastrous had it ever been unleashed.23 This did not prevent him from identifying himself

132

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

closely with the service. He was pleased to be made an Honorary AirCommodore of 615 squadron of the Auxiliary Air Force in March 1939, and later, in April 1943, was awarded honorary pilot’s wings by the Air Council (partly, it was rumoured, to formalize Churchill’s unofficial use of the insignia earlier in the war).24 He liked to be seen in his RAF uniform, and wore it at both the Casablanca and the Teheran Conferences with Stalin and Roosevelt. In the end, it did not matter that his knowledge of an air force was limited. His great strength was to inspire resistance, and the Battle of Britain has remained embedded in the historical memory of the West as a symbol of Churchill’s defiant bellicosity. Indeed, Churchill’s ability to make the Battle of Britain and its heroic ‘Few’ a beacon for Western resistance against totalitarianism contributed to the growth of American support for the British war effort and gave hope to the millions of Europeans now under German domination. For Churchill the Battle of Britain and the subsequent Blitz presented a paradox. They both demonstrated the real limits of a modern bombing campaign at just the time that the RAF, with Churchill’s strong support, was busy expanding its own operations against Germany. He became increasingly critical of the British bombing campaign, and although he promised the public, particularly in his speech at County Hall in London at the end of the Blitz, that the Germans would be repaid in their own coin, he could see that the prewar fantasies about the collapse of the civilian front under bombing had been, after all, merely fantasies.25 In October 1941 Churchill wrote to Portal with his new view of the bombing war and it is worth quoting here: Before the war we were greatly misled by the pictures they [the Air Staff] painted of the destruction that would be wrought by Air raids. This picture of Air destruction was so exaggerated it depressed the Statesmen responsible for pre-war policy … Again the Air Staff, after the war had begun, taught us sedulously to believe that if the enemy acquired the Low Countries, to say nothing of France, our position would be impossible owing to Air attacks. However, by not paying too much attention to such ideas, we have found quite a good means of keeping going.26 A few weeks before this, his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, had demonstrated, with the help of the young statistician David Butt, that most RAF bombs missed their target by a wide margin. A further investigation requested by Churchill in the spring of 1942 – the Singleton Report – showed little improvement. The RAF moved to a strategy of bombing entire urban areas, concentrating deliberately on the most congested residential zones as the best that could be expected from night bombing. Cherwell was a strong advocate of what he called ‘de-housing’ as a means to break the German economy and undermine morale, and although Churchill remained sceptical that airpower could do more than support the eventual land war,

CHURCHILL AND AIRPOWER

133

he did nothing to oppose the shift to the deliberate targeting of civilians and the civilian milieu.27 In the end Churchill’s own doubts about what bombing might do to the enemy economy and morale were borne out by the post-war surveys, which showed that area bombing had inflicted no more than the loss of a few percentage points of German war production, and had failed to provoke the social or psychological collapse of the German population. There has been a great deal of historical argument about the extent to which Churchill did or did not have moral qualms about the bombing campaign conducted in his name against German cities. He saw Harris infrequently, though they got on well when Harris was a guest at Chequers; he told Harris on a number of occasions not to exaggerate the claims Bomber Command was trying to make about the effects of airpower, but he did not suggest that the campaign should not be continued. Throughout the war he remained optimistic that bombing, used in the right way, would produce a political dividend of some kind and he used bombing to help maintain the political support of both major allies, the Soviet Union and the United States, and to deflect criticism from the failure to open a ‘Second Front’.28 For Churchill, bombing was a useful tool even when its effects were open to criticism. When Bulgaria was wavering in support for the Axis in late 1943, it was Churchill who insisted on bombing Sofia to give the Bulgarians ‘a sharp lesson’.29 When his colleagues and the RAF hesitated to bomb Rome because of its associations with the Catholic Church and its artistic heritage, Churchill was indignant that any immunity should be granted to the city. When the Allied air forces in Italy asked for permission to raid the marshalling yards at Florence one mile from the famous cathedral, it was Churchill who insisted to the chiefs-of-staff ‘certainly bomb’.30 And it was Churchill who angrily pressed the Air Ministry and the Air Staff in January 1945 to keep up the heavy bombing of cities in Eastern Germany in the path of the oncoming Red Army, which resulted in the firebombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945. The bombing of Dresden has always been regarded as a turning point in Churchill’s view of British air policy. When news leaked out that the bombing had been aimed deliberately at the residential centre of the city, there was an evidently unfavourable reaction in both Britain and the United States to the report. It has often been claimed that this caused Churchill to write a minute to Sir Charles Portal on 28 March 1945 deprecating the continued bombing ‘for the sake of increasing the terror’. Harris responded vigorously in rejecting the claim that he bombed for the sake of terror, and Portal persuaded Churchill to moderate his original minute.31 It seems more likely that Churchill was affected not just by Dresden but by a growing realization of just what an instrument he had helped unleash against German civilians. He sat on the banks of the Rhine lunching with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery on 26 March 1945 looking across at the ruins of the Ruhr cities just two days before he wrote his memorandum. It is possible that the sight provoked in him deep memories of walking through ruined British cities

134

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

during the Blitz. Whatever the cause, Churchill chose to distance himself in the post-war period from his own involvement in supporting the bombing campaign. The bombing of Dresden and its aftermath is scarcely mentioned in his Second World War. Asked about Dresden in May 1950 he commented that he thought ‘the Americans did it’. 32 Harris, at the height of the Cold War, wrote that it was not his decision to bomb Dresden, but a response to pressure from the Soviet leadership. When the biographer Anthony Boyle asked Harris, shortly before his death, about the rift with Churchill after Dresden, Harris responded forcefully that Churchill’s attitude to him and to the bombing campaign did not alter ‘in any perceivable way’ between 1942 and 1945. 33 Churchill had certainly given fulsome acknowledgement to Harris in May 1945, after the German surrender, when he thanked him ‘for the glorious part which has been played by Bomber Command in forging the victory’. 34 Churchill also had no qualms at the time about supporting the American decision to use the atomic bombs against Japan, operations that marked in an acute form the extent to which the air weapon could now be used to obliterate whole cities at a stroke. On this point, too, he equivocated later in his career, but at the time of the atomic test and the dramatic discussions at Potsdam, Churchill seems to have given his full approval. 35 What seems evident from this example, like the decision to begin bombing German cities in 1940 and his pressure on the RAF to bomb Dresden and other east German cities, is his willingness to endorse the exercise of airpower as a strategic desirability without interrogating very closely its ethical implications. He was always ready to order bombing if it seemed militarily necessary or politically expedient, and he did understand what its effects would be. When the decision came to bomb French transport targets prior to D-Day, Churchill was the stumbling block in the Cabinet and in the chiefs-of-staff discussions because of the French casualties that would result. He deplored, as he told the Defence Committee on 5 April 1944, ‘the butchery of large numbers of helpless French people’, though this did not prevent him from reluctantly granting approval. 36 The result was that Churchill, at one level the most humane of men, was capable of suspending his moral scruples for the greater moral good, as he saw it, of Allied victory. Churchill and airpower present an ambiguous legacy. From the First World War to the Second he was persuaded that the advent of the aeroplane would transform war and was willing to argue that the enemy home front was a legitimate and strategically worthwhile objective. At the same time he thought that the German bombing of Britain was a terrible crime and worried at times that if the British indulged in the same tactic, they might be accused of descending into similar immoral depths. ‘Are we beasts?’ he asked rhetorically when he watched a film of the raids in June 1943, ‘Are we taking this too far?’ 37 This was a circle that Churchill failed to square throughout the Second World War.

CHURCHILL AND AIRPOWER

135

Notes 1

Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 153.

2 Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, pp. 158, 166–7. 3

Winston Churchill, minute to Captain Murray Sueter, 31 May 1914, CHAR 13/6B/265 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+ 13/6B/265].

4

Winston Churchill, draft statement in the House of Commons, 23 November 1914, CHAR 13/29/194 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?conte xtId=CHAR+13/29/194].

5

Stephen Roskill (ed.), Documents Relating to the Naval Air Service: Vol. 1, 1908–1918 (London: Naval Records Society, 1969), pp. 179, 309, 408–9; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III: The Challenge of War: 1914–1916 (London: Heinemann, 1971), pp. 88, 122–3.

6

Aerial Operations Committee, Draft Minutes of First Meeting, 26 September 1917, CHAR 27/5/2-4 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?conte xtId=CHAR+27/5/2-4]; War Cabinet Air Raids Committee, Minutes of First Meeting, 1 October 1917, CHAR 27/6/1-7 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+27/6/1-7].

7

Winston Churchill, ‘Munitions possibilities of 1918’, in H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Appendices (London: HMSO, 1937), Appendix IV, pp. 19–21.

8

Winston Churchill, letter to David Lloyd George, 10 January 1919, CHAR 2/105/3 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+2/105/3]. See too Robert McCormack, ‘Missed Opportunities: Winston Churchill, the Air Ministry and Africa, 1919–1921’, International History Review, 11 (1989), pp. 207–12.

9

Winston Churchill, letter to the Admiralty, 8 February 1919, CHAR 16 /1/45-50 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+16/1/45-50]; ‘the future independence of the Air Force and Air Ministry will be in no way prejudiced’, he wrote.

10 John Sweetman, ‘Crucial Months for Survival: The Royal Air Force 1918– 1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), pp. 529–32, 540. 11 See Sebastian Ritchie, The RAF, Small Wars and Insurgencies in the Middle East 1919–1939 (Northolt: Air Historical Branch, 2011), pp. 2–7. 12 Charles Portal to Winston Churchill, 25 September 1941, Portal Papers, Christ Church, Oxford, Folder 2/File 2. 13 Ralph Wigram, letter to Winston Churchill, 3 May 1935, CHAR 2/235/67 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+2/235/67]. 14 Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 542. On Christie see Wesley Wark, ‘British Intelligence on the German Air Force and Aircraft Industry, 1933–1939’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 636–7. 15 Winston Churchill, letter to Eleanor Rathbone MP, 13 April 1936, CHAR 2/274/12-13 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/274/12-13].

136

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

16 Martin Gilbert (ed.), The Churchill War Papers: Volume II: Never Surrender: May 1940–December 1940 (London: Heinemann, 1994), pp. 17–18, 25, 38–41. 17 Cited in Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, p. 394. 18 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume II: Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1951), p. 567. 19 Arthur Harris, in conversation, 18 July 1979, Cambridge University Library, Boyle Papers, Add 9429/2c. 20 Winston Churchill, notes for a speech to the House of Commons, 18 June 1940, CHAR 9/172 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=]: ‘the battle of Britain is about to begin’. 21 Winston Churchill, letter to Sir Archibald Sinclair, 10 July 1940, CHAR 20/2A/27–28 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+2/274/12-13]. 22 Winston Churchill, notes for a speech to the House of Commons, 20 August 1940, CHAR 9/141A/37-68 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/pa ge?contextId=CHAR+9/141A/37-68]; Jock Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 227, entry for 20 August; on the origin of the phrase, John Winant, A Letter from Grosvenor Square: An Account of a Stewardship (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947), pp. 29–30. 23 Winston Churchill to General Hastings Ismay, 26 December 1940, CHAR 20/13/9 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+20/13/9]. Churchill returned to the possibility of gas warfare regularly throughout the Second World War. 24 On his appointment as air commodore, Air Council to Winston Churchill, 27 March 1939, CHAR 2/568B/199 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/pa ge?contextId=CHAR+2/568B/199]. 25 Winston Churchill, notes for a speech at County Hall, 14 July 1941, CHAR 9/152/A/1-16 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+9/152/A/1-16]. 26 Winston Churchill to Charles Portal, 7 October 1941, Portal Papers, Christ Church, Folder 2/File 2. 27 Winston Churchill to Charles Portal, 7 October 1941, Portal Papers, Christ Church, Folder 2/File 2. 28 Winston Churchill, telegram to Sir Archibald Sinclair and Sir Charles Portal, 17 August 1942, CHAR 20/87/40 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+20/87/40]: ‘Stalin attaches special importance to attacking Berlin … Let me know what your intentions are’. 29 Minutes of Chiefs-of-Staff meeting, 19 October 1943, National Archives, PREM 3/79/1. 30 Conclusions of Chiefs-of-Staff, 2 March 1944, National Archives, AIR 19/215. 31 Norman Bottomley (Deputy Chief-of-Staff) to Air Marshal Arthur Harris, 28 March 1945, Harris Papers, RAF Museum, Hendon, H98; Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Norman Bottomley, 29 March 1945, Harris Papers, RAF Museum, Hendon, H98.

CHURCHILL AND AIRPOWER

137

32 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 480–1. 33 Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Anthony Boyle, 13 June 1979, Boyle Papers, Cambridge University Library, Add 9429/1B. 34 Winston Churchill, Air Ministry telegram to Air Marshal Arthur Harris, 15 May 1945, CHAR 20/229C/329 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+20/229C/329]. 35 Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 481–4. 36 Minutes of the Defence Committee, 5 April 1944, Zuckerman Papers, University of East Anglia, SZ/AEAF/7. 37 Christopher Harmon, ‘Are We Beasts?’: Churchill and the Moral Question of World War II ‘Area Bombing’ (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 1991), pp. 3–4.

12 Churchill as Strategist in the Second World War Jeremy Black

University of Exeter

Churchill’s reputation as war leader is less secure in strategy and policy than in politics and polemic, and notably in the United States, where Britain’s wartime strategy is frequently criticized. He had a difficult hand to play, not least because of the views of the United States and the Soviet Union, but because he sought to advance national interests and to protect the Empire, and did so with much greater success than could have been anticipated in 1941, let alone 1940.1 Churchill’s reputation hinges largely on the Second World War but, as such, it is curiously bifurcated. Essentially two views of Churchill as war leader are offered. The first presents him as the key figure who rallied domestic opinion and kept Britain determined in the dark days of defeat and isolation in 1940–1. This is the Churchill of resolve and fortitude, the Churchill of great and defiant speeches, a man who was both national symbol and the force of national resolve.2 Indeed, Churchill’s conviction that the struggle was a great moral cause had been there from the outset. Having just entered the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he held until he became prime minister, Churchill told the following to the House of Commons on 3 September 1939: This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent

140

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

quality, to establish on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. (Speech in the House of Commons, 3 September 1939) Great words but not strategy, of course. Strategy, understood as the pursuit of policy, although rarely as readily divisible as that phrase might suggest, is a field in which Churchill’s reputation is more mixed. This is the second view, and one that is surveyed in this chapter. In doing so, Churchill has to be located in terms of the politics of conflict – both the domestic and international politics of particular conjunctures during the Second World War and the politics arising from interpretations of Britain’s supposedly inherent strategic culture, politics shaped by competing ‘lessons’ drawn from the First World War. Although proud of his ancestor, John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, a general whose fame rested on direct engagement with the French main battle army during the War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century (and on whom Winston wrote a three-volume study), Churchill favoured a more navalist account of British strategic culture, one that looked back to the ‘blue water policy’ of eighteenth-century Tories and opposition Whigs. Aside from securing naval mastery and pursuing transoceanic operations against French and Spanish colonies, this strategy rested on directing amphibious operations against vulnerable European targets and, thus, on avoiding conflict with the French main battle army. The Duke of Wellington’s operations in Iberia in 1808–13 proved a key instance, whilst, looking towards the field of operations in the Second World War, so did Sir Ralph Abercromby’s invasion of French-held Egypt in 1801. Churchill was certainly part of that strategic culture. He favoured an indirect or peripheral strategy in both world wars, alternating in both between the Baltic/Scandinavia and the eastern Mediterranean. As First Lord of the Admiralty in the opening stages of both wars, the indirect approach played a key role in Churchill’s strategic vision. This approach seemed to make best use of the Royal Navy, and gave it an active role that was more significant than sea-denial and economic blockade. Most of the discussion of Churchill as strategist focuses, understandably, on his years as prime minister, 1940–5. However, it is also worth devoting attention to his period as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939–40. This role was important in itself, first, because at sea Britain played a more significant role in the Anglo-French coalition than on land; second, because Churchill had established strategic views, having been First Lord before in the early stages of the First World War; and, third, because he retained a navalist interest and commitment throughout the Second World War. However, both as First Lord and as prime minister, Churchill revealed serious flaws as a strategist that repay consideration. In many senses, these were flaws in execution, because the policy pursued was consistent. Churchill was determined to preserve national greatness, a greatness that for

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

141

him included the Empire as a central force, and also to destroy Germany. In 1939, with the fate of war in the opening balance, he presented the struggle as a moral one. In 1940, with defeat apparent to many foreign commentators, he pressed to fight on. In early 1941, with defeat still apparent, he again pressed to fight on. In 1945, with victory imminent, he underlined the need for total victory. On 18 January 1945, Churchill told the Commons, I am clear that nothing should induce us to abandon the principle of unconditional surrender, or to enter into any form of negotiation with Germany or Japan, under whatever guise such suggestions may present themselves, until the act of unconditional surrender had been formally executed. Indeed, Josef Goebbels recorded that, on his visit to Hitler on 11 March 1945, the latter had argued that, due to what he saw as Churchill’s determination to exterminate Germany and refusal to ally against the Soviets, and President Roosevelt’s wish that the Europeans destroy themselves through war, it was necessary for Germany to fight sufficiently well to lead Stalin to seek a separate peace. As First Lord, in 1939–40, however, Churchill repeated his strategic failure of 1914–15. The largest and most powerful navy in the world, at a stage when it was only opposed by Germany, could not be used with strategic effect to influence, let alone direct, the course and politics of the war. Germany was not intimidated into responding to British wishes. This represented a major failure for navalism, a failure that was difficult for Churchill to accept precisely because he understood the importance of the Royal Navy to British greatness. This failure was also more specific in that particular plans and operations were misconceived or misguided. The war began with Britain and France unable to have any impact on the war in Poland, which rapidly fell to German attack. Churchill’s desire to act was understandable, but also unwise. He advocated the dispatch of a fleet to the Baltic specially prepared to resist air attack, but this rash idea, which would have exposed the fleet to air attack in confined waters, was thwarted by his naval advisers. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy fought a real, not a ‘phoney’, war. It was energetic against German surface raiders, notably the Graf Spee, and U-boats. When the Royal Navy did act in strength, it did so with less success than anticipated. On 9 April 1940, Denmark and Norway fell victims to a surprise German attack. The failure of the poorly directed Royal Navy to prevent the initial German landings in Norway or, subsequently that day, to disrupt them was a serious problem, and was part of a more general failure of British naval management. On 9 April the British were initially convinced that the Germans were planning to sail into the Atlantic, and made dispositions accordingly. Moreover, a Luftwaffe attack ended moves by the Royal Navy on invasion day, although British submarines had an

142

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

impact on the German surface fleet. The possibility of naval action was displayed on 10 and 13 April when British warships sailed into Ofotfjord to wreck the German squadron that had attacked and occupied Narvik. This success simply highlighted the failure on 9 April. More generally, the Royal Navy had been shown to be unable to cope effectively with German air power, and a doctrine of reliance on anti-aircraft fire had been revealed as inadequate. The navy also took hard knocks from the German surface warships, especially when covering the forces returning from Narvik. Sunk with heavy casualties on 7 June, the Glorious was the only British carrier ever lost to battleships. Norway, however, was not to be a second Gallipoli. Instead, Churchill’s reputation as a resolute opponent of Hitler, his ability to convey determination, his war experience and the impression that he could do the job helped ensure that he succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on 10 May; rather as David Lloyd George had replaced Herbert Asquith in 1916. Lloyd George saw himself as a possible prime minister in 1940, ‘when Winston is bust’, but in the autumn of 1939 he had pressed for a compromise peace and in 1940 he supported war as a means to a compromise settlement with Germany. In May 1940, Churchill also became minister of defence, and thus gained complete political control over running the war. Churchill’s appointment was not entirely unprecedented. In 1936, Sir Thomas Inskip was appointed minister for coordination of defence, and he was followed by Lord Chatfield in January 1939. However, they were minor figures who were appointed to mute the growing demand for Churchill to be given a central defence role. The power and authority he obtained as minister of defence were much greater. British strategy in 1914, and again in 1939, assumed that the French would bear the brunt of the land war on the Western Front, whilst Britain contributed in the air and by sea. The Fall of France in June 1940 was a massive shock and totally overthrew British strategy. It meant that Churchill had to create a mass army, which would take years. This need increased his reluctance to risk crossing the Channel. Moreover, not only would it be necessary to find new allies as a substitute for France, but there would also need to be a reconfiguration of British strategy to match the assumptions of the new allies. Having tried and failed to keep France in the war, Churchill was forced to focus on the defence of Britain. Churchill was fully aware of the risk, including ‘heavy barge concentrations at the invasion ports’.3 Again, reality scarcely matched his rhetoric or, indeed, the drive the latter represented. On 4 June 1940, Churchill told the Commons, ‘we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’; but, if the first two had failed, it is difficult to see how resistance at his subsequent stages could have succeeded. Nevertheless, alongside optimism, a key characteristic of Churchill’s strategy was a determination to attack. Driving the Vichy French from

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

143

their possessions was regarded as a crucial way to win the global struggle for power. In September 1940, Churchill wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare, the ambassador to Spain, explaining his support for the French attempt to gain Dakar, the capital of the French colony of Senegal (the leading French colony in West Africa), presenting a classic account of the strategy of the indirect approach to attacking an opponent. He observed that if Charles de Gaulle was to establish himself in Dakar and become ‘master of Western and Central Africa’, ‘Morocco may automatically follow’.4 In the event, due to firm resistance, the expedition failed. Churchill was very upset, and for his wife Clementine, looking back on the war, it was ‘the progressive and sickening disappointment’ she remembered most, ‘a classic example of Hope deferred making the Heart sick’.5 Fortunately, the port of Duala, and with it the French colony of Cameroon, fell to the Free French in October 1940 – news Churchill greeted by promising de Gaulle, ‘We shall stand resolutely together.’6 Italy’s entry into the war on Germany’s side on 10 June 1940 provided a clear opportunity to link attack to imperial interests, notably protecting the key British colony of Egypt and, more particularly, the Suez Canal, the vital axis of British imperial power. The defeat of the Italian invading force in December 1940 owed much to Churchill’s decision to send to Egypt tanks that were a key part of Britain’s strategic reserve. In October 1940, Churchill wrote, ‘It should be possible to provide by the end of July [1941] a striking force for amphibious warfare of six divisions, of which two should be armoured.’7 This reflected his determination to strike at the Axis where possible, but also his confidence that a German invasion of Britain would not come. Churchill’s move had been prefigured in 1758–9 when William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, sent forces to conquer the French colony of Canada despite the risk of a French invasion of England that was, indeed, to be thwarted by the Royal Navy in 1759. In October 1940, Churchill wrote the foreword to an edition of The War Speeches of William Pitt the Younger (prime minister 1783–1801 and 1804–6) pressing the case for ‘our determination to fight on, as Pitt and his successors fought on, till we in our turn achieve our Waterloo’.8 Chamberlain’s cancer opened the way for Churchill to become leader of the Conservative Party in October 1940. In his speech of 9 October accepting the leadership, Churchill offered an account of his broadest concerns: ‘I have always faithfully served two public causes which I think stand supreme – the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historical continuity of our Island life.’9 Churchill was strong enough politically to send his major Conservative political rival, the Earl of Halifax, as ambassador to Washington. Churchill’s interventionism was less successful when forces were sent to Greece in April 1941 in a failed attempt to help resist German invasion. The dispatch of forces there greatly weakened the British in North Africa. Churchill, who had backed the policy for political reasons, in order to show

144

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

that Britain was supporting all opposition to the Axis, swiftly recognized it as an error. Criticism of him increased that May when the British defence of Crete against German invasion proved a major failure. Relations with the military leadership were put under strain, not least due to disputes over how best to balance between commitments in the Mediterranean and the Far East. In the dire circumstances of 1940–1, choices had to be made as Britain could not simultaneously face three enemies – two actual (Germany and Italy) and one apparently imminent (Japan). Obsessed with Egypt and complacent about the Japanese threat to Singapore, and thus the Indian Ocean and the route to Australia, Churchill pressed the case for advancing against the Italians in North Africa. Field Marshal Sir John Dill and the War Office took the opposite view, which was behind a serious clash in May 1941. An angry Dill wrote the following to Churchill on 15 May 1941: I am sure that you, better than anyone else, must realise how difficult it is for a soldier to advise against a bold offensive plan. One lays oneself open to charges of defeatism, of inertia, or even of ‘cold feet’. Human nature being what it is, there is a natural tendency to acquiesce in an offensive plan of doubtful merit rather than to face such charges. It takes a lot of moral courage not to be afraid of being thought afraid. Be this as it may, the responsible military advisers, both in this country and in France, under-rated the Germans … My only concern in this particular problem is that we should not repeat our previous mistake of under-rating the enemy.10 At the same time, the German hope that the British people would realize their plight, overthrow Churchill and make peace proved a serious misreading of British politics and public opinion. The German bombing offensive had led, British Intelligence reports suggested, to signs ‘of increasing hatred of Germany’ as well as demands for ‘numerous’ reprisals.11 Hitting back was a theme of Churchill’s strategy, in the shape of a bombing offensive designed to show that Britain was not dependent on the less direct means of blockading Germany, supporting resistance in lands conquered by her and attacking Italy and Vichy France. Moreover, from the summer of 1941, strategy was shaped by the Allies and their apparent requirements. As in the First World War, there was the question of how best to keep Russia/the Soviet Union in the war. Appeasing Stalin’s demands for a Second Front in Western Europe was a constant factor. This issue was accentuated after American entry into the war in December 1941 as the Americans pressed for an early invasion of France across the English Channel. The resulting strategic debates with the Americans in 1942 proved contentious but eventually ended in a compromise with the decision to mount an American-dominated invasion of French North Africa in late 1942, Operation Torch.

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

145

Meanwhile, military failure in 1942 brought fresh criticisms of Churchill in Britain, again affecting the context for strategic debate. The fall of Singapore to Japan in February was a great humiliation. The British loss, with 33,000 prisoners, of Tobruk in Libya in June to the Afrika Korps under Rommel led to a censure motion in the House of Commons on 1 July. Churchill easily survived this mishandled attack, winning a division in the Commons by 475 to 25 votes, but the attack reflected widespread political concern about military failure and his leadership. At the same time, the controversy revealed that parliamentary critics of the government held differing views, lacked coordination and found it difficult to voice criticism without causing offence and risking appearing unpatriotic. Victory at El Alamein in Egypt on 23 October–4 November 1942 turned the tide for Britain, both militarily, in the then key area of British engagement, and politically. The key role of conflict in the political framing of strategy was seen in Churchill’s ability, thanks to El Alamein, to ensure that the growing political crisis of the autumn did not become as serious as that in July. The autumn had seen widespread criticism, and intrigues by Stafford Cripps, the left-wing Lord Privy Seal, who wanted to replace him. Cripps proposed the formation of a War Planning Directorate, which was intended as a body to circumvent Churchill. There was also a public call for Churchill’s resignation from the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, although he was more prominent as a speaker than a politician. After El Alamein, Churchill was able to demote Cripps and his political position was far less vulnerable. Churchill announced on 10 November 1942 that recent successes signified not ‘the beginning of the end’, but ‘the end of the beginning’. Indeed, at the Casablanca conference, held from 14 to 24 January 1943, Churchill was pushed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt into supporting the demand for unconditional surrender. Churchill, instead, had sought a way to ease Italy out of the war. From late 1942, the Allies could move over to the offensive, not as a series of counterattacks, but as part of a planned attempt to regain Axis conquests, and then to take the war to the Axis states themselves. Thanks to success at El Alamein, Britain was able to complement the Torch invasion of French North Africa on 8 November by advancing on Tunisia across Libya. The shift to the offensive highlighted questions of prioritization and therefore strategic choice. In particular, Churchill sought to thwart the Soviet Union and to preserve the British Empire. He was able to persuade the United States to keep going in the Mediterranean, invading first Sicily and then mainland Italy in 1943, despite the effects of these efforts on the resources available for any cross-Channel attack that year. Churchill was anxious not only to invade Italy12 but also to use the Mediterranean as a staging point for amphibious operations into the Balkans. To the Americans, who had been persuaded to persevere in a ‘Germany First’ rather than a ‘Japan First’ policy, this was a distraction

146

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

from defeating the Germans in France and also a logistical nightmare. To Churchill, however, the Balkans presented an opportunity not only to harry the Germans but also to pre-empt Soviet advances. This policy reflected his suspicion of the Soviet Union, but also his strong sense that the war was a stage in the history of the twentieth century, a formative stage but one that would be succeeded by challenges and rivalries that had only been partly suspended during the conflict. To Churchill, who had played a key role supporting intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919–20, the cause of freedom meant keeping the Soviets at bay. On 30 September 1940, broadcasting to the people of Czechoslovakia then under German tyranny, he had promised, ‘The hour of your deliverance will come. The soul of freedom is deathless; it cannot, and will not, perish.’13 By 1943, however, particularly in Poland, there was the danger that one tyranny would replace another. Churchill, nevertheless, failed to prevail with the Americans, who, by 1944, were clearly taking the leading role in the Western alliance. Despite his concerns about the Soviet Union, Churchill was sceptical about the idea of a post-war Western bloc, not least because he was worried about French intentions. Reluctant to see a fragmentation of Europe into hostile blocs, Churchill wrote to General Franco in December 1944, ‘I should be seriously misleading you if I did not at once remove any misconception that His Majesty’s Government are prepared to consider any grouping of powers in Western Europe or elsewhere on the basis of hostility towards or of the alleged necessity of defence against our Russian allies.’14 Churchill’s Balkan strategy also caused tension in the coalition at home. British intervention in Greece at the expense of the Communists in 1944–5 led to serious strains, in large part because anger over British military support for the royalists interacted with tensions within the Labour Party.15 More than politics was involved. British strategic concerns in the Mediterranean were also a legacy of conflict with the Axis in the Mediterranean from 1940. The British had military resources in the region, as well as territorial and strategic commitments to protect, notably the Suez Canal, and the resources could not be readily relocated.16 There were issues of practicality in Churchill’s strategic options. The boldness of his strategic planning paid insufficient attention to logistical and other military realities. This was a particular problem in Churchill’s case, as in his plans in 1942 to invade Norway and in August 1943 to gain ‘partial control’ of the Dardanelles.17 Indeed, it could be argued that Churchill was poor at military strategy but better at the geopolitical strategies of coalition warfare. Churchill’s emphasis on operations in the Mediterranean had serious logistical implications as it was more distant from British bases than France. Instead, the American preference for concentrating on a crossChannel invasion of France was more appropriate in terms of resource availability and the resulting logistical capability. Discussion of Churchill’s role in Anglo-American wartime strategy continues to be contentious, not least because it is linked to counterfactuals

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

147

relating to post-war geopolitics, notably the claim that more commitment to a Mediterranean strategy might have restricted subsequent Soviet control of the Balkans, affecting the Cold War, an issue that melds politics and morality. Moreover, it is argued that greater success in Italy could have been obtained had American pressure to allocate resources to an invasion of southern France in 1944 been unsuccessful. Churchill hoped that a presence in Italy would encourage resistance in Yugoslavia, hold down German forces in the Balkans and serve as the basis for advancing into Austria and southern Germany. His expectations that a forward policy in the Mediterranean would affect the post-war situation possibly did not take sufficient note of the realities on the ground in Yugoslavia, both during and after the war. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government thought of joining the Allies in 1943–4 if their forces invaded the Balkans, whilst Romania and Bulgaria also switched sides in 1944 when the Soviets advanced. Yet, Churchill failed sufficiently to appreciate the difficulties of campaigning in Italy, both those posed by the terrain and those due to the German defenders. Moreover, the amphibious force sent to secure the formerly Italian-held Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean in late 1943 proved a disaster, with the Germans successfully regaining the islands in October– November. The Americans had opposed the commitment. It appealed, however, to Churchill’s interest in bold steps, his commitment to action and his long-standing belief in the importance of Turkey; indeed, in some respects it was Gallipoli 1915 redux. He hoped that the operation would lead Turkey to enter the war. In the event, the British lost about 4,800 troops, six destroyers and 113 planes. Churchill’s emphasis on the Mediterranean risked an East–West iron curtain that left more economically advanced areas under Soviet control,18 although, looked at differently, this was potentially a valuable supplement to a Second Front invasion of France. Churchill was sensible in supporting a delay in the launching of the Second Front by means of an invasion of France. The deliberative, controlled style of attack supported by clear superiority in artillery, which Montgomery had used at El Alamein, could not be replicated in an amphibious attack. In 1943, many key German units were allocated to the unsuccessful Kursk offensive on the Eastern Front; the Germans lacked the advantages of the build-up in munitions production that 1943 was to bring and their defensive positions in France were incomplete. The Soviets, indeed, mentioned their suspicion of their Allies’ failure to open a Second Front to the Germans when probing the possibility of a separate peace. Nevertheless, there was only limited equipment for, and experience in, amphibious operations, whilst it was also still unclear how far, and how speedily, it would be possible to vanquish the U-boat threat and thus control the Atlantic shipping lanes. Aside from the need to build up forces and experience for an invasion of France, there was also the requirement of assured air and sea superiority to support both landing and exploitation. Moreover, delaying the invasion until 1944 enabled the Allies to benefit from

148

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the problems that hit the Germans in 1943: failure at Kursk and subsequent large-scale Soviet advances chewed up part of the German army and air force. Aside from wanting to invade the Balkans in order to pre-empt or, at the least, influence Soviet advances, Churchill, in late 1944, supported a ‘Narrow Front’ advance on Germany designed to lead to a rapid advance across the Rhine. This opposition to a ‘Broad Front’ campaign was seen as the best way to get to Berlin before the Soviets. As with the Mediterranean sphere, there were, however, questions about military practicality as well as the competing views of British and American generals. Churchill supported a prudent stance over the Second Front, but his sometimes cavalier failure to note the constraints within which the military operated could lend an air of fantasy to some of his strategic speculations. For example, in March 1944, the Chiefs of Staff successfully responded to pressure from Churchill that they plan for a year’s campaigning to restore British power in Malaya and Singapore, before British forces were switched to join the Americans in the Pacific in attacking Japan: This assumes a flexibility which would not, we fear, prove practicable. The administrative preparations for whatever operations may be decided upon, whether in the East or in the West, will be on a vast scale, indeed not beyond our power, to make these preparations in both areas. There is thus no question of retaining indefinitely an option in this matter. It is essential to make a decision within the next three months as to which policy is to be adopted, and to adhere to it. As a salutary rejoinder to Churchill’s hopes, the Chiefs of Staff also argued that there was a lack of necessary resources, unless they were lent by the Americans, and claimed ‘we shall not have sufficient British aircraft to equip the full number of fighter carriers required’. Churchill, in contrast, had written: It is in the interest of Britain to pursue what may be termed the ‘Bay of Bengal Strategy’ at any rate for the next twelve months … All preparations will be made for amphibious action across the Bay of Bengal against the Malay Peninsula and the various island outposts by which it is defended, the ultimate objective being the reconquest of Singapore. A powerful British fleet will be built up based on Ceylon, Adu Atoll [in the Indian Ocean] and East India ports.19 In the event, a powerful British fleet was to be sent to the Pacific, where, whilst opposing Japan, it did not greatly contribute to Britain’s imperial interests. When the Eastern Fleet was divided in November 1944, the British Pacific Fleet got the best capital ships, including the fleet carriers, whilst the new East Indies Fleet made do with escort carriers and only one battleship. The Chiefs of Staff had argued that a focus on the Pacific would make it easier to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, but it did not do so in the way Churchill had wished.

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

149

Churchill’s interest in regaining control of Malaya and Singapore reflected his passionate commitment to the Empire. Under American pressure, the Atlantic Charter, issued by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Placentia Bay conference (9–12 August 1941), had declared ‘the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The Roosevelt administration was opposed to colonial rule and, instead, in favour of a system of ‘trusteeship’ as a prelude to independence. Roosevelt pressed Churchill on the status of both Hong Kong (which he wanted returned to China) and India. In 1943, at the Tehran conference, Roosevelt told Churchill that Britain had to adjust to a ‘new period’ in global history and to turn their back on ‘400 years of acquisitive blood in your veins’.20 Churchill, however, did not accept these views. On becoming leader of the Conservative Party, he had declared, ‘Alone among the nations of the world we have found the means to combine Empire and liberty.’21 Aside from being determined to protect the Empire, a major theme already in his policies in office in the 1910s and early 1920s and in heated opposition to the Government of India Act in 1935, Churchill also sought gains, again continuing his earlier policy. He considered the annexation of Libya, whilst Italian Somaliland remained under British administration. Churchill was also interested in the Kra isthmus in southern Thailand, which would provide a continuous land route between the neighbouring British colonies of Burma and Malaya. At present, there are Chinese plans for a canal across the isthmus in order to improve maritime routes to the Indian Ocean. At the same time, Churchill made significant concessions. Article seven of the Lend-Lease agreement of 1942 affected imperial preference, the commercial adhesive of the Empire, although imperial preference continued until 1973 and Roosevelt assured Churchill that the article did not mean its abolition. In 1944, Britain and the United States signed treaties with China ending the extraterritorial rights acquired the previous century. Hopes of imperial gains capture the war as opportunity, a theme differently pushed by Stalin and (less crudely) Roosevelt, but again suggest a degree of hubris in the face of Britain’s relative decline and difficulties. Indeed, there was, and is, good cause for criticizing Churchill. In particular, he bore some of the responsibility for the humiliating failure of the strategy for confronting Japan, and the diary of Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke), the chief of the Imperial General Staff from December 1941 to January 1946, made it clear that he could be very difficult as far as military planning was concerned. For 6 July 1944, Alan Brooke recorded, At 10 p.m. we had a frightful meeting with Winston which lasted till 2 a.m.!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody,

150

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped.22 However, although his confidence in Churchill having the necessary grip lessened, Brooke’s overall judgement was that Churchill was crucial to the winning of the war, whilst command failures in Malaya and Singapore were fundamentally responsible for disaster there. More generally, Churchill’s main objective was to get the Americans to fight the Germans and then defeat the Japanese later; and, despite his fears,23 that was how the situation worked out.

Notes 1

I am most grateful to Andrew Roberts, Daniel Johnson and Richard Toye for their comments on an earlier draft.

2

For Churchill’s concern with his record, see D. Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

3

Winston Churchill to Lord Trenchard, 26 September 1940, CHAR 20/2A/59 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/2A/59].

4

Winston Churchill to Sir Samuel Hoare, 23 September 1940, CHAR 20/14 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/14].

5

Clementine Churchill, notes in the margin of Churchill’s draft war memoirs, CHUR 4/170/90-105.

6

Winston Churchill to Charles de Gaulle, 10 October 1940, CHAR 20/14 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/14].

7

Winston Churchill, minute for Chiefs of Staff Committee, 13 October 1940, CHAR 20/13/7 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+20/14].

8

R. Coupland (ed.), The War Speeches of William Pitt the Younger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).

9

Winston Churchill, speech notes, 9 October 1940, CHAR 9/145/1-6 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/14].

10 J. R. M. Butler, History of the Second World War: Grand Strategy, Vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1957), p. 580. 11 War Cabinet, Chiefs of Staff Committee, Weekly Résumé No. 56, 19–26 September 1940, CHAR 23/6/86-99 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+23/6/86-99]. 12 Winston Churchill to Harry Hopkins, 9 April 1943, CHAR 20/109/100 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+20/109/100]. 13 Winston Churchill, speech notes, 30 September 1940, CHAR 9/144/71-75 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9 /144/71-75].

CHURCHILL AS STRATEGIST IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

151

14 Winston Churchill to General Franco, 20 December 1944, CHAR 20/138B/227-232 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/138B/227-232]. 15 A. J. Foster, ‘The Politicians, Public Opinion and the Press: The Storm over British Military Intervention in Greece in December 1944’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), pp. 453–94; A. Thorpe, ‘In a Rather Emotional State? The Labour Party and British Intervention in Greece, 1945–6’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 1075–105. 16 S. Ball, The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean, 1935– 1949 (London: Harper Press, 2009). 17 Winston Churchill to General Ismay, 6 August 1943, CHAR 20/104/2 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/104/2]. 18 G. L. Weinberg, ‘Some Myths of World War II’, Journal of Military History, 75 (2011), p. 709. 19 Chiefs of Staff to Winston Churchill, 28 March 1944, CHAR 20/188B/8488 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/1 88B/84-88]; Winston Churchill to Chiefs of Staff, 20 March 1944, CHAR 20/188A/64-68 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHAR+20/188A/64-68]; and King’s College London, Liddell Hart Library, Alanbrooke papers, 6/3/9, 8. 20 N. Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 360; W. R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); A. J. Whitfield, Hong Kong, Empire, and the Anglo-American Alliance at War, 1941–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 21 Winston Churchill, speech notes, 9 October 1940, CHAR 9/145/1-6 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/145/1-6]. 22 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, ed. A. Danchev and D. Todman (London: Phoenix, 2002), p. 561. 23 Winston Churchill to General Jan Smuts, 12 December 1941, CHAR 20/46/90 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/46/90].

13 Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ David B.Woolner Roosevelt Institute

The political relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt is one of the most celebrated in British and American history. The two men are widely credited with crafting the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ that helped propel the Allies to victory during the Second World War. Yet, as this chapter shows, the relationship between the two men – and their two nations – was not without its difficulties. There were tensions; tensions over a host of issues from wartime strategy to the make-up of the post-war economic order. Nor did the two men always see eye to eye on the question of how best to deal with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the bonds that were established between Churchill and Roosevelt would not only survive the stress of war but also lay the basis for the strong ties that still exist between the British and American people. I come here today to reaffirm one of the oldest and strongest alliances the world has ever known. It has long been said that the United States and the United Kingdom share a special relationship … The reason for this close friendship doesn’t just have to do with our shared history and heritage; our ties of language and culture; or even the strong partnership between our governments. Our relationship is special because of the values and beliefs that have united our people through the ages. (Barack Obama, Address to the British Parliament, 25 May 2011) Nearly 50 years ago Winston Churchill told our two countries that together there is no problem we cannot solve … Together let us prove him right. (Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan, 26 February 1981)

154

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

The bond of friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill remains one of the most celebrated – perhaps the most celebrated – political relationships in modern history. Forged in the dark days of the Second World War, when the two men led the American and British people to victory in their desperate struggle against the ‘monstrous tyranny’ of fascism, their friendship would eventually epitomize what became known as the ‘special relationship’ between Great Britain and the United States. As numerous presidents and prime ministers have acknowledged since then, there is much to celebrate in the special bond that emerged between the two countries during these difficult days. Still, thanks in part to the somewhat romanticized view of the Churchill–Roosevelt friendship found in the former’s war memoirs, the true nature of the ties between the two men – and the larger Anglo-American alliance – has not always been fully apparent. For much of the public, in fact, the wartime relationship between the two leaders – like the relationship between their respective governments – seems devoid of serious controversy. Yet, as we know from the exhaustive research and analysis of such historians as Warren F. Kimball, David Reynolds, Alan Dobson and others, there were tensions in the alliance: tensions over a host of issues from military strategy to the nature of the economic structure of the post-war world, and tensions that sometimes became so intense as to threaten a breach not only between Churchill and Roosevelt but also between London and Washington. This is not to say that these two remarkable personalities did not enjoy each other’s company – each most certainly shared the sentiment once expressed by President Roosevelt that it was ‘fun to be in the same decade’ with the other.1 But in spite of their strong ties, and equally strong desire for Anglo-American cooperation, neither man could entirely escape the maxim uttered by Lord Palmerston roughly a century earlier that nations don’t have permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. The much celebrated correspondence upon which the Churchill– Roosevelt friendship was built began in 1939. The two had met briefly, once before, in September 1918, when Roosevelt was in London following his tour of the Western Front as undersecretary of the navy in the Wilson administration. Although Churchill, much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, did not recall this meeting, he certainly came to recognize Roosevelt’s importance on the American political stage well before the latter became president and on at least one occasion tried to set up a meeting with Roosevelt whilst visiting New York when the latter was governor of the state. Churchill also sent the newly elected president a copy of his biography of Marlborough in October 1933 with a personal inscription. But it would not be until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, and Churchill’s return to government as First Lord of the Admiralty, that the two men would begin their famous correspondence.2 This time it was Roosevelt who first reached out to Churchill, sending him a letter that was penned less than two weeks after the German attack on

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

155

Poland. Here, Roosevelt indicated that he wanted the First Lord and Prime Minister Chamberlain to know he would ‘at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about’, suggesting at the same time that Churchill could ‘always send sealed letters’ to him via diplomatic bag.3 Roosevelt’s decision to reach out directly to Churchill was not all that unusual; the president often bypassed normal diplomatic channels in an effort to gain information from key posts abroad. Nor was it unusual for Roosevelt to request such information. As a man who from the age of thirty-nine had been unable to walk or stand unaided, Roosevelt frequently reached out to others to provide him with a picture of what was going on outside of the White House. What was unusual was that the president had initiated such an exchange with a Cabinet minister in a foreign government. Indeed, although he was careful to mention the British prime minister in his letter, the fact that Roosevelt reached out at this moment to Churchill – and not Chamberlain – is revealing. It reinforces the notion that Roosevelt never really trusted Chamberlain; that he did not possess a great deal of confidence in the latter’s ability to carry on as Britain’s war leader; and that he suspected, correctly, that Churchill would replace Chamberlain at some point in the near future.4 Roosevelt, like Churchill, also possessed a great interest in and love for the navy, and as he considered the naval balance of power critical to America’s interests and had spent the last war serving as Wilson’s undersecretary of the navy, it was perhaps natural for him to reach out to the First Sea Lord. Churchill responded to Roosevelt’s initiative with alacrity and immediately sought Chamberlain’s approval to open a personal line of communication with the president. Long convinced that Great Britain would need America’s help in any showdown with the Nazis, Churchill quickly recognized the advantages that such an exchange might provide in developing closer AngloAmerican ties. Churchill also relished the chance to cultivate a personal relationship with the president, and over the course of the next eight months ‘the Naval Person’, as he called himself, would send Roosevelt about a dozen messages, mostly to do with naval matters that Churchill suspected would be of great interest to him. At this point the correspondence between the two men, though cordial, had not as yet taken on its much celebrated weight. But all this would change dramatically with Churchill’s assumption of power on 10 May 1940, and the sudden, catastrophic Fall of France a mere six weeks later. It is difficult for today’s generation to grasp the profound sense of trepidation that came with the news that one of Europe’s leading democracies had fallen under the yoke of Nazi rule. Writing in the New York Times, in the wake of the French defeat, Anne O’Hare McCormick observed that Americans in June 1940 suddenly woke up to the fact that ‘Government of, by and for the people actually is being banished from the earth’.5 For many, the Nazi war machine seemed unstoppable; the fear now was that England

156

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

would be next, and should Hitler gain access to the British and French fleets as a consequence of his military prowess, the Atlantic would prove small comfort to an unprepared and under-armed America. In Washington, Roosevelt’s military advisers now issued an urgent demand for the build-up of America’s land, sea and air forces so that the United States – whose army, smaller than Romania’s and ranked 18th in the world – could prepare for the defence of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt shared this view, but he also held out the hope – soon to turn to conviction – that Great Britain would be able to hang on against any Nazi onslaught. In London, meanwhile, the Fall of France meant that there was an urgent need for two critical commodities: the war materiél needed to re-equip the British Army that had been clutched from the jaws of defeat at Dunkirk, and – far more important – the courage to carry on the fight against all odds. Not everyone in Whitehall, however, was prepared to embrace the valour required to meet the Nazi challenge. Some members of the British Cabinet, fearing that all was lost, began to advocate a negotiated settlement with Hitler. But Churchill would have none of this, and in a series of the most important orations of the twentieth century ‘armed’ the British – and American – people with the power of his words. Here, he insisted that even though ‘large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule’, the British people would ‘not flag or fail’, but would ‘fight on the beaches … fight on the landing grounds … fight in the fields and in the streets … fight in the hills’; and would ‘never surrender’.6 The world would soon learn that Churchill was prepared to stand by his conviction to go to whatever lengths necessary to defend his beloved island when the Royal Navy, under his orders, launched an operation to seize a number of powerful French warships stationed in French North Africa to prevent them from falling into German hands. At one installation near Oran, after the French commander refused the British demand that he scuttle or surrender his ships, the British Admiral on the scene opened fire, killing 1,297 French sailors. It was a brutal decision, and one that led to enormous strains between Britain and the recently established Vichy French regime, but it drove home the point that Churchill’s government was determined to carry on the war even to the point of launching an attack on its erstwhile ally.7 Churchill’s cold but courageous move greatly impressed Roosevelt, who informed the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, of his view that the attack was justified under the circumstances.8 It also helped bolster the president’s belief that Great Britain would survive. In response to a series of urgent pleas Roosevelt had already received from the ‘Former Naval Person’, as Churchill now called himself, Roosevelt had ordered his service chiefs to make ‘surplus’ rifles, ammunition, field guns and aircraft available for purchase for the British war effort. Churchill had also asked for ‘the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers’ to bridge the gap

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

157

between what Great Britain had in hand and the large new construction that had been put in place at the start of the war.9 Roosevelt was unsure whether he could make such a transfer without Congressional approval, but by August had come up with the idea that in exchange for the warships, the British might provide the Americans with the gift of two naval bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda as well as long-term leases on other territory in the British Caribbean. Under these terms, the president could make the argument that he was making the transfer as part of his effort to bolster hemisphere security, thus avoiding a statutory prohibition on the release of military equipment deemed vital for national defence.10 Strengthened, as such, in his desire to avoid a showdown with Congress on the question, Roosevelt decided to proceed with the swap on his own authority, via an exchange of diplomatic notes and an Executive Agreement that allowed the destroyer deal to be consummated on 2 September 1940, even though, as he said to one aid, he ‘might get impeached’.11 Roosevelt’s decision to sign the destroyers-for-bases deal and provide materiél support for the British war effort in the summer of 1940 was – like Churchill’s order to seize the French fleet – a bold move. To insist on such a policy in the face of opposition from his own Chiefs of Staff and at the height of his campaign for an unprecedented third term showed real courage and leadership. So too did Roosevelt’s decision to press ahead with the Selective Service Act, which passed through Congress at roughly the same time.12 But as Roosevelt and Churchill both realized, the summer of 1940 was one of the most critical moments of the war, not merely from a materiél point of view but also from a psychological point of view. In the wake of the French defeat it was vital that the last two major democracies left on the planet demonstrate their resolve not to give in to defeatism. And even though few of the destroyers would be ready in time to take part in the defence of the United Kingdom at this decisive moment and it would take the full-scale Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to ultimately bring the United States into the war, Roosevelt’s decision to move ahead with the destroyers-for-bases deal served as the first major public indication that the United States had begun to throw its weight behind Great Britain. As Churchill later wrote, this was the first in a long succession of ‘decidedly un-neutral Acts’ that Roosevelt would carry out over the next fifteen months that would prove of great benefit to the survival of Britain and the future of the world.13 By September 1940, then, it was clear that the Roosevelt administration had embarked on a wartime policy that was increasingly built around continued British belligerence. But we must remember that under the terms of US neutrality laws all of the provisions that the British obtained from the United States – with the exception of the destroyers-for-bases deal – had to be acquired on a cash-and-carry basis. This placed a tremendous strain on British finances and by the end of 1940, after fifteen months of total war, the British Treasury no longer had the gold or dollar reserves to sustain the purchases needed to carry on the war – a fact somewhat casually though

158

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

shockingly admitted when Ambassador Lothian informed the American press on 9 December that Great Britain was ‘broke’.14 The next day, Roosevelt, vacationing in the Caribbean aboard the USS Tuscaloosa in the wake of his 1940 election victory, received what Churchill described as ‘one of the most important’ letters he had ever written. In it the prime minister (with the help of officials from the British Treasury, Foreign and War Offices) laid out in brutal detail the ‘mortal danger’ in which His Majesty’s government now found itself. Simply put, the cash-and-carry provisions of the US aid to Britain policy were no longer sustainable: in the first place because of the increased shipping losses in the Atlantic, where, if current loss rates continued, Churchill wrote, the results would be ‘fatal’, and in the second place because the moment had finally arrived when the British government ‘no longer was able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies’.15 Although Roosevelt never issued a direct reply to this letter, his response – articulated over the next few weeks to the press, public and Congress in some of his most memorable statements of the war – was vintage Roosevelt. At a 17 December press conference, for example, after alluding obliquely to the fact that Great Britain no longer had the means to continue its purchases of US war materiél, Roosevelt took note of the fact that In the present world situation … there is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans that the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Great Britain in defending itself; and that, therefore … it is equally important from a selfish point of view … that we should do everything to help the British Empire.16 The dilemma was how to accomplish this without reverting to the accumulation of the controversial war debts that so plagued the world’s economy in the wake of the First World War. One way, Roosevelt insisted, would be ‘for the United States to take over British orders, and … turn them into American orders. And thereupon … either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage, to the people on the other side’; based on the ‘general theory that … these materials would be more useful to the defense of the United States if they were used in Great Britain.’ This way, Roosevelt said, it would be possible ‘to get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign’.17 He then offered a famous illustration to make his point, which was made all the more poignant by the images of burning buildings in the London Blitz so many Americans had seen of late in photographs and in news reels. If ‘my neighbor’s house catches fire’, the president said, and that neighbour comes to me to ask ‘for a length of garden hose’ to put it out, you are not going to quibble about the price, or refuse him; you would loan him the hose, knowing that you may not get it back in perfect condition, but that your neighbour would replace it if it were ‘all smashed up’. In the same spirit, the president went on, the United States should supply Great Britain with the supplies it needs to carry on the war ‘with the understanding that

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

159

when the war was over we would get paid sometime in kind, thereby leaving out the dollar mark in the form of a dollar debt and substituting for it a gentleman’s obligation to repay in kind.’18 It was out of this basic idea that the policy of Lend-Lease was born. Under its terms, the president was granted the authority to sell, transfer, lend or lease ‘any defense article’ to ‘any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States’. To make LendLease possible, however, the president would need to convince both the Congress and the American people that the sacrifices needed to make the United States ‘the great arsenal of democracy’ were necessary. Hence, on 6 January 1941, at a time when Hitler had just declared the establishment of a ‘new order’ in Europe, Roosevelt went before the Congress and the people to issue a call not only for their support of the legislation needed to make Lend-Lease a reality but also to offer a fundamental definition of the ethical purposes that stood behind what Churchill called this ‘most unsordid Act’.19 The ultimate goal, Roosevelt insisted, was the establishment of a world that represented the ‘very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny’ that the dictators sought to create in Europe. Instead, Roosevelt proposed ‘a greater conception’ – a ‘moral order’ – founded on four fundamental human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear – ‘everywhere in the world’.20 In articulating this vision, Roosevelt confirmed that the political and religious freedoms widely recognized as fundamental to democracy were no longer enough; equally important was the need to protect a suffering humanity from the economic depravity that had so plagued the world in the Great Depression and in turn helped give rise to fascism. These simple yet eloquent expressions of fundamental human rights became the war aims of the United States – war aims that inspired a generation not only to ‘win through to absolute victory’ but also to commit themselves to the establishment of a more prosperous and peaceful world once the guns fell silent.21 As the year 1941 progressed, Churchill continued to hope for and urge a US declaration of war against the Nazis. But even though the year was punctuated by increasing US involvement in the war effort – through the passage of the Lend-Lease bill in March, the extension of ‘naval patrols’ to the mid-Atlantic in June, the occupation of Iceland by US troops in July and the much celebrated ‘first summit’ meeting between the two leaders at the Atlantic Charter conference in August – no declaration of war was forthcoming. The best Roosevelt could do was issue his famous shoot-onsight order in September, when, following the USS Greer’s engagement with a German U-boat in the mid-Atlantic, the president finally authorized American warships to escort foreign shipping between the United States and Iceland.22 In the meantime, the German attack on Russia on 22 June 1941 meant that Great Britain – and her Commonwealth – no longer had to face the Nazi menace alone. Churchill and Roosevelt were relieved by the news of the

160

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

attack, and in an early sign of what was to come (the extension of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union), Roosevelt indicated in a press conference two days later that the United States would give all possible aid to Russia. Over the course of the summer and autumn of that year, however, the German assault on the Red Army seemed to portend another great victory for the Wehrmacht. Moreover, 1941 also brought heightened concerns about Japan, which took advantage of its traditional enemy’s preoccupation with the German attack – and the Fall of France a year before – to move troops into Indochina, threatening British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.23 Japan’s increasingly aggressive posture led the Roosevelt Administration to take measures to try to deter Japan from taking further action through the stationing of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, an embargo on the sale of high-octane aviation fuel, the freezing of Japanese assets and eventually a de facto oil embargo. For some time, Churchill had also been pressing Roosevelt to send a US naval squadron to the Far East as a show of American force; but convinced that the Atlantic remained the decisive theatre, Roosevelt steadfastly refused to do so – agreeing instead to the reinforcement of the US naval position in the Atlantic so that the British might then send their own naval reinforcements to the Pacific. All of these manoeuvres were rendered moot, of course, by the sudden overwhelming Japanese attack of 7 December 1941 – Roosevelt’s famous date of infamy – which left much of Pearl Harbor in ruins, along with the attacks on Hong Kong, Guam, Wake Island and the Philippines.24 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ushered in a new phase in the Churchill–Roosevelt relationship. Tied together by the urgent demands of what had truly become a ‘world war’, it was during the period of the next eighteen months that the relationship between the two men reached its zenith. It began with Churchill’s much celebrated visit to the White House over the Christmas holidays in December 1941 and would last until the middle of 1943, when the superiority of American military power and the need for the United States to establish closer ties with the Soviet Union rendered the relationship between Britain and America less vital than it had been in early stages of the conflict. Nevertheless, the level of trust between Churchill and Roosevelt and the degree of cooperation that was established between Britain and the United States during this period are unique in the annals of history. Witness, for example, the creation of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which was established to set overall strategy for the war and which controlled not only British and American forces but also troops drawn from many other countries in all theatres of operation. Witness also the extraordinarily high level of Anglo-American intelligence sharing, and the combined effort to develop the atomic bomb under the auspices of the Manhattan Project.25 It is also during this period that we see numerous manifestations of the friendship and affection that had developed between the two men – and the two peoples – including the warm reception Churchill received when addressing a joint session of Congress; the free access that Churchill had

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

161

to Roosevelt whilst staying in the White House (including the famous ‘bath incident’, when a startled Roosevelt wheeling himself into Churchill’s bedroom encountered the naked prime minister, who, emerging from his bath, is reported to have exclaimed that he had ‘nothing to hide’ from the president of the United States!); and the swapping of jokes and stories during Roosevelt’s ‘children’s hour’ – the daily 5.00 p.m. break where policy discussion was forbidden and where the president would mix and serve his famous (or infamous) cocktails that Churchill found so abhorrent!26 Churchill’s purpose in coming to Washington so soon after the Japanese attack stemmed in large part from his desire to place a British stamp on the future direction of the war. His primary concern was to ensure that the United States adhered to the Germany-first strategy that had been agreed to roughly a year earlier in the so-called ABC 1 talks – the secret staff conversations that took place between American, British and Canadian officials in Washington over the potential approach the Allies would take if and when America entered the war.27 Much to Churchill’s relief, he soon discovered that Roosevelt and his military chiefs – with the possible exception of Admiral King – were in broad agreement about the need to hold fast to the Germany-first approach, even though war was raging in the Pacific. But as the weeks and months progressed, the question of how best to carry out the Germany-first strategy led to some sharp differences of opinion. On the one hand, Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, argued that the best way to defeat Germany was to land a large army in France as soon as possible. Thanks to the need for an American build-up, however, such a move was highly unlikely until sometime in 1943. As an alternative, both Churchill and Roosevelt suggested an invasion of North Africa in 1942 – though for different reasons. Churchill saw such a move as a means to defeat General Rommel and clear the Mediterranean as part of his ‘closing the ring’ strategy; Roosevelt saw it as a means to engage the American public in the Atlantic – as opposed to Pacific – theatre and also as a means to meet his ‘second front in 1942’ promise to the Russians. Concerns over the ability and willingness of the Russians to carry on the war were of course upmost in Roosevelt’s mind when he made the pledge about a second front in 1942 to Soviet foreign minister Molotov during the latter’s visit to Washington in May of that year.28 Equally important, however, was Roosevelt’s strong desire to establish a special relationship with the Soviet leadership – especially Joseph Stalin. Indeed, as the war progressed, and the relationship between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets became more complex – and more important – Roosevelt began to seek out an opportunity to meet Stalin one-on-one. Roosevelt, like Churchill, was a great believer in personal diplomacy (especially personal diplomacy carried out by him), and he firmly believed that he would have more success than Churchill in dealing with Stalin on both wartime and post-war issues. Roosevelt was also wary of British wartime motives. He had no desire to see the British Empire restored after the war and, like his crusading secretary of

162

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

state, Cordell Hull, preferred to seek a post-war world based on freer trade and open access to raw materials, all of which would require an end to colonialism and the closed spheres of influence – including the British system of Imperial Preference – that had so hampered the global economic recovery during the Great Depression.29 Roosevelt saw US–Soviet cooperation as a vital component of this effort and he was most anxious to impress this view upon his Soviet counterpart. Churchill, however, was adamantly opposed to a Roosevelt– Stalin tête-à-tête, and his opposition to such a meeting – and his frustration over the growing realization that Great Britain was becoming very much the junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance – led to real tensions between him and the president.30 In the end, Churchill got his way, and Roosevelt dropped his plans for a private summit with the Soviet leader. In lieu of this, however, Roosevelt made it a point to show his independence from Churchill when the ‘Big Three’ finally did meet at the Teheran Conference near the end of 1943. Here, the three leaders reached general understandings about such issues as the future borders of Poland, the establishment of a European Advisory Commission to produce plans for the occupation of Germany and support for the Yugoslav partisans. But Roosevelt’s behaviour both before and during the conference made it clear that his relationship with Churchill – like the relationship between London and Washington – was undergoing a change. The president, for example, refused Churchill’s repeated requests for a pre-Teheran discussion to develop an Anglo-American approach to the summit when the two men were in Cairo prior to travelling to the Iranian capital. Moreover, once at Teheran, Roosevelt avoided long meetings with Churchill, whilst seeking out private conversations with Stalin. During the tripartite discussions, Roosevelt also refused to back Churchill’s ardent desire to maintain and enhance Anglo-American operations then underway in Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean (off-shoots of the North African invasion) and instead agreed with Stalin that the focus of the Anglo-American war effort must now be geared towards the long-awaited landings in France – including a landing in southern France that would ultimately render any expansion of the Mediterranean campaign impossible. The imperative, in short, was Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion), which Stalin insisted had to occur no later than May 1944. As Warren Kimball notes in his magisterial work on the Churchill– Roosevelt correspondence, following the Tehran Conference we see another subtle-yet-important indication of the change in the personal relationship between the president and the prime minister: the cessation of the two men’s use of the moniker ‘Former Naval Person’.31 Perhaps they had simply grown tired of this form of address, but it is interesting to note that their shift to more formal language coincides with the heightened state of tension that had crept into the Anglo-American alliance as the end of the war drew nearer. Here, questions over the continuation of Lend-Lease, the post-war structure of the world’s economic system, the future of Greece and how best

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

163

to settle the political make-up of liberated Poland and other territories in Eastern and Central Europe all created their own set of challenges. So too did the question of how best to prosecute the war in the Far East. Given Churchill’s concern over the diminution of British power within the ‘Grand Alliance’, and the potential loss of British influence that would result as a consequence, it is perhaps not surprising that the Anglo-American victories in France in the summer of 1944 tended to increase – rather than diminish – his anxiety about the shape of the post-war world. It was this anxiety that led to his insistence on a meeting with Roosevelt in Quebec in September 1944 and with Stalin a month later.32 Here, Churchill did his best to hammer out understandings with Roosevelt over the British and American zones of occupation in defeated Germany, the continuation of Lend-Lease beyond the achievement of victory in Europe, participation of the Royal Navy in the final push against Japan and adherence to the illfated Morgenthau Plan.33 Churchill also secured Roosevelt’s support for the possible expansion of the British-led Mediterranean campaign through a potential landing on the Istrian Peninsula at the head of the Adriatic.34 In Moscow, Churchill sought to further secure the British position in the Eastern Mediterranean through the negotiation of the so-called percentages agreement, by which Stalin and Churchill approved a formula that gave Britain the upper hand in Greece, split British and Russian influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary and ceded Russian preponderance in Romania and Bulgaria.35 Churchill kept Roosevelt informed about his activities in Moscow, but like Roosevelt’s decision to distance himself from the prime minister in his negotiations with Stalin at Teheran, what emerges from all of this activity is the clear sense that Churchill had reached the point in the war where he was determined to do what he could to assert British interests.36 Given Roosevelt and Stalin’s tendency to do the same, Churchill’s efforts in this regard are certainly understandable. Yet it is important to remember that he pursued these aims within the context of the wartime alliance, as did his Russian and American counterparts. Indeed, it is this often overlooked determination to keep the alliance together that is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the relationship between not only Churchill and Roosevelt but also between the two of them and Stalin. This brings us to the last of the ‘Big Three’ summit meetings attended by Roosevelt – the Yalta Conference of February 1945. Of all the wartime conferences, Yalta remains the most prominent – and controversial – in the public’s mind. The truth, however, is that much of what took place at Yalta merely represented putting the final touches on what was already agreed to at Teheran over a year earlier. We must also remember that the hard reality that the Soviet regime would hold a predominate position in Eastern Europe following the war was decided not at Yalta, but long before: on the battlefields of Russia in 1942–3 and by the Allied failure to land in France until June 1944.37 Both Roosevelt and Churchill recognized this, and as such,

164

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

what the two men sought to accomplish at Yalta was not the elimination of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, but rather its amelioration. It was for this reason that they worked to secure Stalin’s signature on the Declaration of Liberated Europe and the Declaration of Poland, both of which called for adherence to the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live and which, in the case of Poland, specifically called for ‘the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot’.38 Roosevelt was also anxious to confirm Stalin’s earlier promise to commit Russian forces to the war against Japan as well as to secure Soviet participation in the United Nations Organization (UNO), both of which were accomplished. Most important, of course, was the continuation of wartime cooperation, which Roosevelt in particular saw as critical to future peace and to the success of the new world organization that he and his administration had worked so hard to achieve. Sadly, Franklin Roosevelt would not live to see either the end of the war or the birth of the UNO. He died at his Warm Springs cottage on 12 April 1945 whilst resting up from the physical exhaustion that was brought on in part by the demands of the Yalta Conference. The news of his death sent shock waves right around the world, especially for the more than 15 million Americans who served in the US Armed Forces during the war. Churchill described the news as a ‘physical blow’ and in a letter to King George V observed that, with Roosevelt gone, ‘ties have been torn asunder which years have woven’.39 Churchill also delivered a moving eulogy to Roosevelt in the House of Commons where he recounted not only their mutual friendship but also Roosevelt’s determination to help Great Britain at its critical hour, inspired by ‘the beatings of that generous heart which was always stirred to anger and to action by spectacles of aggression and oppression by the strong against the weak’.40 In the same address, Churchill also took rare note of Roosevelt’s struggle with polio, observing that the president’s ‘physical affliction lay heavily upon him’. It was, he said, a marvel that he bore up against it through all the many years of tumult and storm. Not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion and of hard, ceaseless political controversy. Not one in ten millions would have tried, not one in a generation would have succeeded, not only in entering this sphere, not only in acting vehemently in it, but in becoming indisputable master of the scene.41 And so, with Roosevelt’s death, one of the most remarkable political relationships in history came to an end. Between its inception, in September 1939, and its close, in April 1945, the two men would exchange nearly 2,000 written messages and would meet no less than eleven times. When one adds telephone conversations and third-party indirect exchanges to this mix,

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

165

it seems reasonable to argue that the two leaders were in almost constant contact. Given the size of the task at hand – the defeat of Axis forces on a global scale – and the degree to which the two men had engineered an alliance in which both sides were, as Churchill once said, all ‘mixed up together’, the differences and disagreements highlighted here seem, if not natural, at least understandable.42 Perhaps the true nature of their friendship can be found in Roosevelt’s taking the time to write out and send a line of verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that he thought might serve as inspiration for Churchill and for the British and American peoples at one of the bleakest moments of the war – January 1941, when Great Britain was desperate for supplies and the battle of the Atlantic raged. Well aware of this, and having witnessed the London Blitz and just received intelligence indicating that a German invasion of England might be attempted in the near future, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill that he thought ‘this verse applies to you people as it does to us’: Sail on, Oh Ship of State Sail on, Oh Union strong and great. Humanity with all its fears With all thy hope of future years Is hanging breathless on thy fate.43 Churchill was deeply moved by his gesture and in response told the president that he was going to have the verse framed ‘as a mark of our friendly relations which have been built up telegraphically but also telepathically’ under all the stresses of war.44 He also took to the airwaves to deliver Roosevelt’s message to the British people, and to ask, after reading the verse aloud, ‘what answer’ he should give, in the name of the people of the British Commonwealth, ‘to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty millions?’ Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.45 It would take many years, and the joint effort of the British, American and Russian peoples and their Allies to ‘finish the job’ of which Churchill spoke. But without the support of Franklin Roosevelt at this critical moment, when the world watched with baited breath as Great Britain stood alone against the Nazi fury, and many doubted her ability to survive, it is hard to see how ultimate victory could have been achieved had not this remarkable leader been at the helm of the American government.

166

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill, as promised, soon had the Longfellow inscription from Roosevelt framed and hung on the wall of his beloved country home at Chartwell, where it would remain until his death in 1965.

Notes 1

Churchill to Roosevelt, 30 January 1942, CHAR 20/69A/65 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/69A/65].

2

Letter from Henry Morgenthau, Jr to Churchill, 23 October 1929, CHAR 1/208/92 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?cont extId=CHAR+1/208/92]; Churchill, Winston S. ‘Roosevelt from Afar’, 1933 Draft, CHAR 8/338 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+8/338]; Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 427.

3

Roosevelt to Churchill, 11 September 1939, CHAR 20/15/13 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/15/13].

4

As Roosevelt noted to Joseph Kennedy, in December 1939, he wanted to get his ‘hand in now’, because there is ‘a strong possibility that he [Churchill] will become the Prime Minister …’ Michael Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 200.

5

Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘The Lessons for Our Parties in the Fall of France’, New York Times, 24 June, 1940: A14.

6

Churchill to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940, CHAR 9/140A/9-28 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/140A/9-28].

7

On 22 June 1940, France signed an Armistice Agreement with Germany, bringing the fighting in France to an end and dividing the country into two zones: a German occupation zone which included the north and west of the country, including the entire Atlantic seaboard, and an unoccupied zone in the south of France, where a newly established government was formed in the French city of Vichy. The Vichy Government also controlled French North Africa and other French colonial possessions around the world, including Indochina. Under the terms of the Armistice, the French fleet, then scattered in various ports around the world, was to sail home to metropolitan France for the duration of the war, with the understanding that French warships would remain out of action except for coastal patrols and mine sweeping. Not willing to risk the possibility of the French fleet falling into German hands, Churchill issued an order for its seizure, Operation Catapult, on 3 July 1940. See the printed copies of personal telegrams from Churchill, May to December 1940, CHAR 23/4/11 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH AR+23/4/11].

8

Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, Volume I, Alliance Emerging (London: Collins, 1984), p. 56.

9 Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, p. 88; Churchill to Roosevelt, 8 December 1940, CHAR 23/4/11 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHAR+23/4/11].

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

167

10 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 460. 11 David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume 1, The TVA Years, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 209. 12 The Selective Training and Service Act, which was signed into law by the president on 16 September 1940, represented the first peace-time draft in US history. Although the idea was endorsed by the Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, it nevertheless aroused considerable opposition from a number of leading isolationists and non-interventionists. For more on this and on the narrow passage of the extension of the law in 1941, see Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 375–79. 13 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 2, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 404. 14 Churchill, The Second World War, p. 558. 15 Churchill to Roosevelt, 8 December 1940, CHAR 23/4/11 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+23/4/11]. 16 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Presidential Press Conference, 17 December 1940, President’s Personal File 1-P: Franklin D. Roosevelt Press Conferences, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 17 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Presidential Press Conference, 17 December 1940, President’s Personal File 1-P: Franklin D. Roosevelt Press Conferences, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 18 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Presidential Press Conference, 17 December 1940, President’s Personal File 1-P: Franklin D. Roosevelt Press Conferences, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. Senator Robert Taft, who opposed Lend-Lease in the Senate, offered Roosevelt the rejoinder that ‘lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don’t want it back!’ 19 Churchill, The Second World War, p. 569. See also Churchill to the House of Commons, 12 March 1941. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), The Complete Speeches of Winston Churchill 1897–1963, Vol. VI, 1935–1942 (London: Chelsea House, 1974), p. 6360. 20 Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, 6 January 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Master Speech File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 21 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress, 8 December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Master Speech File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 22 Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, p. 236. The USS Greer was an American destroyer that, whilst on a mail run to Iceland, was alerted to the presence of a German submarine by a British patrol plane. The Greer tracked the U-boat, which eventually came under attack from the British plane and in response fired a brace of torpedoes at the Greer, which responded with depth charges. Neither ship was hit in the engagement.

168

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

23 In the summer of 1940 the Japanese took advantage of the Fall of France to move troops into northern French Indochina. In September Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany and roughly a year later they moved troops into southern Indochina. All of these moves were viewed with alarm by the Roosevelt administration, which in response slapped an embargo on the sale of scrap iron and high octane aviation fuel to Japan in August 1940 and an oil embargo a year later. For more on US–Japanese relations in the prewar period, see Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 24 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress, 8 December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Master Speech File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 25 The Manhattan Project was the US-led effort to develop the atomic bomb. The close relationship between the British, Canadian and American intelligence communities continues to this day. See, for example, Richard J. Aldrich, ‘British Intelligence and the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” during the Cold War’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 331–51. 26 Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William & Morrow, 1997), pp. 131–2. Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory, Winston S. Churchill, 1941–1945 (London: Minerva, 1986), p. 28. 27 The American-British-Canadian secret staff conversations took place in Washington from January to March 1941. See David Reynolds, The Creation of the AngloAmerican Alliance, 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Cooperation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 182–5. 28 Soviet foreign minister Molotov visited London and then Washington in May and June 1942. One of the chief fears of Roosevelt and Churchill was the possibility that Stalin might conclude a separate peace with Hitler as he had in the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. For more on this, see Mark A. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning in Coalition Warfare, 1941–1943 (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1977). 29 The British system of Imperial Preference drastically reduced tariffs and other impediments to trade within the British Empire. The system was set up in part as a reaction to the establishment in 1930 of the US Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the highest tariff in American history. Roosevelt’s secretary of state was adamantly opposed to both the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the British System of Imperial Preference and would use Lend-Lease and Britain’s dependence on US aid as a lever by which he hoped to convince the British to abandon the system. For more on this, see Randall B. Woods, ‘FDR and the New Economic Order’, in David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball and David Reynolds, eds. FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 30 As early as 25 June 1943 Churchill informed Roosevelt that a meeting between the president and Stalin ‘with the British Commonwealth and Empire excluded’ would be ‘serious and vexatious, and many would be bewildered and alarmed thereby’; CHAR 20/113/119-120 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/113/119-120].

CHURCHILL AND THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

169

31 Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, p. 17. 32 For more on this, see David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball and David Reynolds (eds), The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace: Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in 1944– 1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press), 1998. 33 At the Second Quebec Conference, US Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr, put forward a plan calling for the pastoralization of Germany. For more on this, see Woolner, David B. ‘Coming to Grips with the German Problem’, in David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball and David Reynolds, eds. The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace: Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in 1944–1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 65–101. 34 This operation never took place. 35 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 227. 36 Churchill to Roosevelt, 11 October 1944, CHAR 20/173/30-31 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/173/30-31]. 37 David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 148–50. 38 The United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington: Government Printing Office (GPO), 1955), p. 973. 39 David B.Woolner, ‘Epilogue: Reflections on Legacy and Leadership – the View from 2008′, in David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball and David Reynolds, eds. FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 227. 40 Churchill to the House of Commons, 17 April 1945, CHAR 9/167/206-207 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+ 9/167/206-207]. 41 Churchill to the House of Commons, 17 April 1945, CHAR 9/167/206-207 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+ 9/167/206-207]. 42 Churchill to the House of Commons, 20 August 1940, CHAR 9/141A/3768 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/14 1A/37-68]. 43 Roosevelt to Churchill, 20 January 1941. Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Additional Papers, WCHL 13/1. 44 Churchill to Roosevelt, 28 January 1941, CHAR 20/49/10 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+20/49/10]. 45 Churchill Broadcast, 9 February 1941, CHAR 9/150A/52-75 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHAR+9/150A/52-75].

14 Churchill and Nuclear Weapons Kevin Ruane

Canterbury Christ Church University

In 1898, as a young soldier in the Sudan, Winston Churchill participated in the Battle of Omdurman and in one of the last cavalry charges in British military history. Such was the longevity of his subsequent political career that, half a century later, as prime minister of his only peacetime administration, he had to deal with the implications of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon of such vast destructive power that it could lay waste to entire cities, killing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in the process. In the popular memory Churchill remains the classic Cold Warrior, determined to stand up to Soviet power, but in truth, by the time he retired in 1955, he had transformed himself into a committed advocate of détente. Still a firm anti-communist, he had become convinced that in nuclear war, unlike the battle of Omdurman, there would be no winners, only losers.

Churchill and the wartime development of the atomic bomb At the start of the Second World War, British scientists were aware at a theoretical level of the military potentialities of atomic energy, but for a time they struggled to convince the government that an atomic bomb was a realistic proposition. In August 1941, however, Lord Cherwell, the prime minister’s personal scientific adviser and an atomic convert, helped persuade Churchill to give atomic weapons research the very highest priority. As is well known, Churchill had always been fascinated by war, but his interest

172

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

also extended to advances in the science of warfare. As far back as 1909, as a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence, he recommended getting in touch with the American Wright brothers to see whether their new-fangled invention, the flying machine, could be utilized for military purposes.1 But science, in and of itself, devoid of military application, also exerted a powerful and long-lasting hold on his imagination.2 His enduring friendship with Cherwell – or Frederick Lindemann, professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford, as he was before being raised to the peerage in 1941 – did much to feed his enthusiasm. As early as 1924, under the influence of the ‘Prof’ (as Lindemann was known to those close to him), Churchill wrote an article in Nash’s Pall Mall magazine which, in retrospect, is striking in its atomic prescience: ‘Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings – nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?’3 In 1931, Churchill confessed to enjoying reading the science-fiction books of H. G. Wells so much that ‘I could pass an examination in them’.4 A decade or so later, the atomic bomb may well have struck Churchill, as it did his personal physician, Lord Moran, as ‘H.G. Wells stuff’.5 At any rate, in August 1941, when Cherwell put the case to him in favour embarking on atomic research and development, Churchill found the combination of warfare, new weapons and science irresistible. Such doubts as he possessed about the project were extinguished by Cherwell’s sombre warning: ‘It would be unforgiveable if we let the Germans develop a process ahead of us by means of which they could defeat us in war or reverse the verdict after they had been defeated.’6 Although ‘personally quite content with existing explosives’, Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff, ‘we must not stand in the path of improvement’, and he immediately authorized a full-scale effort, codenamed Tube Alloys, to harness the power of nature in a bomb.7 Tube Alloys would be the most closely guarded of secrets: not even the War Cabinet or the service ministers were told about it.8 The American pursuit of atomic weapons, the equally secret Manhattan Project, got going in earnest in 1942, prompted in part by British research findings. Tube Alloys soon became subsumed by the US project as the British (and Canadians) melded their research with that of the Americans. Eventually around two dozen UK scientists, together with a number of European émigré physicists who had made England their home before the war began, crossed the Atlantic to join the Manhattan Project at its weapons development headquarters in Los Alamos.9 By mid-1943, the Americans were starting to exhibit what, to Churchill, was a decidedly proprietorial attitude towards the atomic venture, even seeking to exclude the British, and consequently he sought to protect the UK’s position by cementing a formal Anglo-American partnership.10 A conventional treaty requiring Congressional endorsement was ruled

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

173

out because of the secrecy involved, so he settled instead for a private understanding with the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Quebec Agreement of August 1943 confirmed the pooling of US and UK ‘brains and resources’ as well as the principle of mutual ‘consent’ if it came to using atomic weapons against a third party.11 A year later, in September 1944, another secret understanding, initialled at Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park in upstate New York, confirmed that US–UK atomic collaboration would continue after the cessation of hostilities.12 Churchill believed that these agreements not only protected Britain’s rights but ‘almost amounts to a military understanding between us and the mightiest power in the world’.13 In retrospect, implementation depended on the two signatories remaining in political office, but Roosevelt died suddenly in April 1945, Churchill lost the July 1945 general election, and in 1946 the US Congress passed the McMahon Act prohibiting the United States from sharing atomic intelligence with any other country. Churchill regretted this ‘breach of faith’ but vented his frustration less on the Americans than on Clement Attlee’s Labour government for its failure to protect the position he had won for Britain.14

The atomic bombing of Japan Meanwhile, in May 1945, the German surrender brought an end to hostilities in Europe, but in Asia the war against Japan continued. In July, Churchill attended the last Big Three conference of the Second World War at Potsdam, close to the ruins of Berlin.15 On the second day – 17 July – the Americans informed him that an atomic bomb had just been successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert with an explosive yield exceeding all expectations. A fortnight earlier, in keeping with the Quebec Agreement, Churchill had given Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, his consent for the new weapon to be used against Japan, and the destructive force revealed by the subsequent Trinity test did not occasion any moral or ethical doubts.16 On the contrary, he likened the atomic bomb to ‘the Second coming’, a deliverance in the sense that the war might now be ended without the need for an invasion of Japan and thus without excessive Anglo-American casualties.17 ‘Bombs are as old as hatred itself’, Gerard DeGroot reminds us, but only since August 1945 have people spoken of ‘the Bomb’.18 On 6 August, the US Air Force dropped an atomic bomb (equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT) on the city of Hiroshima. A second bomb (with the power of 22,000 tons of TNT) was used against Nagasaki on 9 August. The combined death toll was well over 100,000, with thousands more dying in the months and years that followed from burns, injuries and radiation-related illnesses.19 On 14 August, Japan surrendered. In a public statement, Churchill, now leader of the opposition, expressed his hope that the scientific endeavour that had created ‘these awful agencies’ would henceforward be channelled

174

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

into peaceful purposes.20 It was not to be. For even as the Second World War ended, the contours of another conflict, the Cold War, were becoming visible.

Churchill, the Soviet Union and atomic diplomacy Publicly, Churchill might extol the peaceful potential of atomic energy, but in private he was interested in the Bomb as a military instrument for thwarting Soviet expansionism. By mid-1945, the USSR was in occupation of much of Eastern and Central Europe, including half of Germany, and the worry on the British and American side was that Stalin, despite earlier promises to permit democratic freedoms in countries liberated by the Red Army, was intent on carving out a sphere of domination. To Churchill, the wartime alliance with the USSR had always been a means to an end: a committed anti-communist, he nonetheless realized back in 1941 that Britain and the Soviet Union needed to set aside their ideological differences and combine to defeat their shared enemy, Nazi Germany. Now, with that job accomplished, his mistrust of Moscow’s intentions resurfaced.21 The problem was that the United Kingdom and the United States lacked any real leverage when it came to persuading Stalin to pull back his armies from Eastern Europe. Until, that is, the Trinity test. At Potsdam on 23 July 1945, the Americans gave Churchill a detailed briefing on the test results. ‘We now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians’, he told Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke afterwards, and contemplated telling Stalin that ‘we can just blot out Moscow’ if the Red Army refused to leave Eastern Europe.22 Throughout the war, the British and Americans had sedulously avoided telling the Soviets anything about the Manhattan Project, but on 24 July, Truman, with Churchill’s blessing, casually remarked to Stalin that the United States had lately acquired a bomb of ‘unusual destructive force’. The Soviet leader appeared unperturbed, a reaction that convinced Truman and Churchill that he did not understand the significance of what he had been told.23 Historians continue to debate the reasons behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with one of the more controversial explanations revolving around the idea of ‘atomic diplomacy’. The argument here is that by the summer of 1945, with Japan essentially defeated and putting out peace feelers, the Bomb was used primarily to impress the USSR with America’s new military might and therefore to strengthen the United States’ diplomatic hand in negotiations with the Soviets over the future of Eastern Europe.24 For his part, Churchill certainly hoped that the Bomb would shorten the war, but he was also attracted by atomic diplomacy: had he still been prime minister, he reflected following the Hiroshima

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

175

bombing, he would have urged the Americans to have a ‘show-down’ with Stalin and to ‘use this power to restrain the Russians’.25 As for Stalin, despite his poker-faced performance at Potsdam he knew a great deal about atomic weapons development thanks to spies at Los Alamos, and the failure of his allies to share the atomic secret convinced him of their baleful intentions (‘A-bomb blackmail’, he attested, ‘is American policy’) and reinforced his determination to obtain a Soviet Bomb as soon as possible.26

The showdown strategy: Churchill and the Bomb, 1945–9 As the Cold War began to bite over the next few years, Churchill’s public statements blended warnings about the gravity of the Soviet menace, appeals for Western unity and military strength and periodic calls for a negotiated settlement of East–West differences. Privately, however, he seems to have looked on negotiations as an occasion for the United States to flaunt its atomic advantage. In November 1947, he wanted to issue an ultimatum to Stalin to relinquish his grip on Eastern Europe or else ‘we will attack Moscow and your other cities and destroy them with atomic bombs’.27 Similarly, in April 1948, he was inclined ‘to tell the Soviets that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon East Germany … we will raze their cities’.28 The closest he came to expressing such views in public was in October 1948 when he told the Conservative Party Conference at Llandudno that the West was more likely to secure a satisfactory negotiated settlement ‘if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too’.29 This kind of talk went down well with the Tory faithful but The Times dismissed his view that ‘the threat of the bomb would make Russia consent to a settlement on western terms’ as ‘dangerously simple’.30 A corollary of Churchill’s interest in atomic diplomacy was a rejection of international control of atomic power: in his March 1946 ‘iron curtain’ speech he condemned as ‘criminal madness’ the idea, then being mooted, that the United States should surrender its atomic secrets to the United Nations.31 On the contrary, he consistently argued that it was only the ‘deterrent power of the atomic bomb’, held solely and safely in American hands, that prevented the ‘enslavement’ of all of Europe.32 But the credibility of this deterrent depended on more than possession. ‘You have not only to convince the Soviet Government that you have superior forces’, he declared in March 1949, ‘but that you are not restrained by any moral consideration … from using that force with complete material ruthlessness’.33 Moreover, grateful as he was for American atomic protection, Churchill often criticized the Attlee administration for failing to build a British Bomb and for what he

176

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

held to be its broader neglect of national security.34 In truth, the government did its best to maintain the momentum of the Tube Alloys programme, but the McMahon Act meant that the UK Bomb took longer, and cost more to make, than might otherwise have been the case.35

A nuclear Cold War On 29 August 1949 the US atomic monopoly was shattered when the USSR successfully tested its first atomic weapon. Two months later, with the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, the global balance of power seemed to have shifted in favour of the communist bloc. In consequence, Churchill’s Cold War outlook also shifted. Speaking in Edinburgh on 14 February 1950 in the midst of a general election campaign, he added a twist to his now ritual denunciation of the USSR, namely the ‘idea’ of seeking to reduce ‘the hatreds of the Cold War’ through ‘a parley at the summit’.36 This was the first time that the word ‘summit’ had been used to describe a meeting of the leaders of the great powers, and though Labour was quick to accuse him of an electoral stunt, in fact the old Cold Warrior was beginning to transform himself into an advocate of détente.37 The process had some way to go before it was complete: for example, he remained confident that the superior size and power of the US atomic arsenal would enable the West to approach a summit from a position of great strength and therefore achieve a satisfactory settlement. At the same time, though, the prospect of a growing Soviet atomic stockpile, and Stalin’s related capacity ‘to terrorise the free world, if not, indeed, to destroy it’, prompted fears for Britain’s vulnerability and led him gradually to abandon all thoughts of a showdown.38 In May 1950, Churchill warned Attlee that the UK would soon become ‘a prime target for attack’ by atomic-laden Soviet bombers, partly because of the government’s 1948 decision to grant the US Air Force base rights in East Anglia for its atomic-capable B-29 bomber, and partly because of Labour’s ‘perilous and strange’ lack of investment in air defence. Urgent remedial action was required.39 The outbreak of the Korean War the following month and the attendant danger that this local Asian crisis could trigger global war confirmed for Churchill the wisdom of ‘a resolute effort to come to a settlement’.40 In the meantime, the worry that the USSR might take advantage of the distraction of Korea to mount a conventional military assault on Western Europe encouraged the Attlee government to join with the other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers in the kind of large-scale defence build-up that Churchill had been urging. When, as part of this programme, Washington committed several divisions of US troops to the garrisoning of Western Europe, he was even more gratified. ‘What reason and foresight could not achieve the Soviet aggression in Korea has accomplished’, he reflected.41

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

177

Korea, however, remained a dangerous Cold War flashpoint in its own right. At the end of 1950, President Truman, responding to communist China’s entry into the conflict, admitted publicly that the use of the atomic bomb was under active consideration.42 In December, a troubled Attlee flew to Washington for emergency talks, but before he left he informed Churchill that the Quebec Agreement, including the mutual consent clause, had been allowed to lapse following passage of the McMahon Act.43 Churchill was outraged that the government had failed to defend the undertakings he had obtained from Roosevelt, not just on consent but on collaboration. When Attlee returned from Washington to tell Parliament that he had secured satisfactory (though unspecified) assurances from Truman concerning the Bomb, Churchill criticized the vagueness of this arrangement at a time when the UK was in the bullseye of Soviet atomic targeting.44 He even sought Truman’s permission to publish the Quebec Agreement to prove how well he had defended the national interest compared to Attlee, but the request was rejected and he was left to nurse his grievance.45 The Korean situation stabilized somewhat with the start of armistice talks in July 1951, but fears about global war still lingered. In the autumn, during the British general election campaign, the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror portrayed Churchill as a warmonger, itching to press the metaphorical atomic button and attack the USSR. If the charge had been levelled two years earlier it might have had some substance, but now it was out of date. Badly frightened by the Soviet Bomb, and increasingly of the view that in an atomic war there would be no winners, only losers, he avowed that détente was ‘the last prize I seek to win’.46 A majority of the British electorate, albeit a small one, shared his outlook, and in October 1951 he was back in No. 10 Downing Street.

The British Bomb Although Churchill continued to see the Bomb as the ‘supreme deterrent’ as well as the ‘most effective guarantee’ of victory if war came, one of his first priorities as prime minister was to firm up Attlee’s loose arrangements with the Americans over its use.47 In talks with the Truman administration in January 1952 he achieved some success: opposed to giving the UK a general veto, the Americans accepted that in the specific case of their atomic-laden B-29 bombers based in East Anglia, their deployment should be a matter for joint Anglo-American decision.48 Shortly after resuming the premiership, Churchill discovered – much to his delight – that the previous government had done far more than he realized in developing a British Bomb. In October 1952 the UK successfully tested its first atomic weapon at Monte Bello off the north-west coast of Australia, and in November 1953, the Blue Danube A-bomb was incorporated into

178

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the RAF’s arsenal.49 Churchill seized on British membership of the exclusive atomic club to press the Americans to revise the McMahon Act, and in August 1954 the US Congress consented to a greater, but by no means full, exchange of information with states such as Britain that had independently achieved a high degree of atomic know-how.50 Meanwhile, the Monte Bello test was quickly overshadowed by the US Atomic Energy Commission’s announcement in November 1952 that a thermonuclear device had been successfully detonated at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and that manufacture of an American hydrogen bomb – a weapon at least a thousand times more powerful than those used against Japan – was only a matter of time.51 The United States had been working on the so-called ‘super bomb’ since 1950, but Churchill considered the prospect ‘so awful that I have a feeling it will not happen’.52 He was wrong. Worse still, it was the Soviet Union that won the race, with Moscow announcing its hydrogen bomb breakthrough in August 1953.53 ‘[W]e were now as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow’, Churchill sombrely judged.54

The spectre of the H-bomb The spectre of the H-bomb made Churchill even more determined to bring about an easement in East–West tensions, but the Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which took office in January 1953, as well as ministers in his own government, opposed the convening of a great power summit until NATO’s defence build-up was complete.55 Nearing eighty years of age, Churchill did not have time on his side. Nor did he feel that a world threatened by the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons had that luxury either. Accordingly, he reacted to the news of Stalin’s death in March 1953 by renewing his public campaign for a summit: it ‘might well be that no hard-faced agreements would be reached’, he conceded, but ‘there might be a general feeling among those gathered together that they might do something better than tear the human race, including themselves, into bits’.56 Over the next year, the United States emerged as the main obstacle to the fulfilment of Churchill’s summitry ambitions and he grew anxious lest Eisenhower, under pressure from institutionalized anti-communists in his administration, agree to an atomic showdown with the Soviets whilst the American arsenal remained the larger and more destructive of the two. The president himself was personally convinced that nuclear weapons, through a process of military evolution, had acquired conventional status and should be used accordingly, and in his letters to Churchill he was sometimes worryingly apocalyptic.57 A few years earlier, a showdown had been Churchill’s hope. Now it was his fear. Mindful also of the fact that Soviet bombers had the range to reach London but not Washington, he set

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

179

out to resist the more bellicose aspects of US policy, especially in Asia where American involvement in local crises in Korea and Indochina could easily spill over into war with communist China and ultimately with the Soviet Union.58 In February 1954, the United States confirmed that it now possessed a deliverable hydrogen bomb, much more powerful than its Soviet counterpart and reportedly capable of laying waste to a city the size of New York.59 An agitated Churchill wrote to Eisenhower to remind him that US bases in East Anglia made the UK a priority target for Soviet nuclear attack and how ‘several million people would certainly be obliterated by these latest H-bombs’ if war came.60 Secretly, the British Chiefs of Staff were even more pessimistic: depending on the size of the H-bombs, they put the death toll at anywhere between five and twelve million.61 It is little wonder, then, that the hydrogen bomb became for Churchill ‘a nagging pain in his head, robbing him of all peace of mind’.62

Reflections In April 1955, a combination of age, infirmity and political pressure brought about Churchill’s retirement. To his great regret, his quest for a summit failed – although, ironically, one took place at Geneva just three months after he left office. Nor did he succeed in his attempt to ‘lift this nuclear monster from our world’ so as to allow the wonders of science and technology to be diverted from killing people to ushering in ‘a golden age of peace and progress’.63 At first sight, Churchill’s decision (in July 1954) to approve production of a British hydrogen bomb sits uneasily alongside his search for détente, yet there was a logic to his reasoning. Leaving aside his interest, as a patriot, in the H-bomb as the status symbol of a great power, he wanted Britain to possess the most up-to-date weapons so that if or when it became necessary to counsel restraint in Washington, the UK would be taken seriously. Furthermore, to the extent that the British H-bomb helped to deter Soviet aggression, it left the door open to détente, still Churchill’s overriding objective.64 Despite his fear of nuclear war, Churchill belatedly recognized the Bomb’s potential as a source of stability in East–West relations. When ‘the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else, nobody will want to kill anyone at all’, he suggested in November 1953.65 In March 1955, in one of his last speeches in the House of Commons, he juxtaposed the revelation that his government was working on a hydrogen bomb with a vision of hope for the future. By a ‘process of sublime irony’, he declared, the world appeared to be approaching ‘a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’.66 The Cold War would continue for another thirty-five years, but it never became a hot war largely because, as Churchill recognized well before the

180

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

term ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD) became popular, weapons of war could also double up as weapons of peace.

Notes 1

Martin Gilbert, ‘Churchill and Bombing Policy’, Fifth Churchill Centre Lecture, Washington, DC, 18 October 2005, p. 1, http://www.winstonchurchill. org/images/pdfs/for_educators/Gilbert%20TCC%20Lecture%20 CHURCHILL%20AND%20BOMBING%20POLICY.pdf

2

A lifelong affinity with science and scientists was crowned in 1958, when Churchill, then in his mid-eighties, agreed to become the chairman of a trust to establish a new university college devoted to science, technology and engineering. Churchill College, named in his honour and a constituent college of Cambridge University, opened its doors to students at the beginning of the 1960s, and remains to this day ‘the national and Commonwealth memorial to Sir Winston Churchill’ and the ‘embodiment of his vision of how higher education can benefit society in the modern age’. It has also been the home of the Churchill Archives Centre since the early 1970s. See the Churchill College website for more on its origins and history: http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/ archives/about

3

Winston S. Churchill, ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’ Nash’s Pall Mall, September 1924, CHAR 8/200B/202-206 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHAR+8/200B/202-206].

4

Winston S. Churchill, ‘H.G. Wells’, Sunday Pictorial, 23 August 1931, cited in Paul K. Alkon, Winston Churchill’s Imagination (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2010 edition), p. 173.

5

Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–65 (London: Constable, 1966), pp. 280–81, diary, 23 July 1945.

6

Lord Cherwell, minute to Winston Churchill, 27 August 1941, UK National Archives, Kew, London, CAB 126/330. Hitler’s atomic bomb project would in fact grind to a halt by the end of 1942. Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 32.

7

Winston Churchill to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 30 August 1941, CHAR 20/36/8 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHAR+20/36/8]. In general on Churchill and nuclear arms, see Kevin Ruane, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

8

Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 edition), p. 199.

9

See, in general, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012 edition).

10 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VII: Road to Victory 1941– 1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), pp. 415–19. 11 Roosevelt–Churchill Quebec Agreement, 19 August 1943, full text at the Avalon Project, Yale University, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/q003.asp

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

181

12 Roosevelt–Churchill Hyde Park Agreement, 19 September 1944, in State Department’s Office of the Historian, The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944: Volume II (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 1026–8. 13 Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, n.d., October 1945, CHUR 2/3/105 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+ 2/3/105]. 14 US Department of Energy, full text of the McMahon (Atomic Energy Act) of 1946, http://www.osti.gov/atomicenergyact.pdf; Moran, Churchill, p. 359, diary, 8 January 1952. 15 The conference went into recess on 26 July so that Churchill could return to England for the declaration of the general election results. Following the Labour victory, it was Attlee who returned to Potsdam as prime minister. 16 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume VI, Triumph and Tragedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 edition), pp. 551–3. 17 Moran, Churchill, pp. 280–81, diary, 23 July 1945. Churchill feared that there might be as many as 500,000 Allied casualties in the invasion. See J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 3. 18 DeGroot, The Bomb, p. 2. 19 Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939–1945 (London: Harper Press, 2011), p. 650. 20 Winston Churchill, pre-prepared statement on the atomic bomb, August 1945, CHUR 2/3/42-50 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+2/3/42-50]. Published in ‘First Atomic Bomb Hits Japan’, The Times, 7 August 1945. 21 In March 1946, Churchill recalled that his support of the USSR during the war ‘in no way weakened my opposition to Communism, which means in fact the death of the soul of man’. Winston Churchill, press release, New York, 20 March 1946, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII: Never Despair, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 219. 22 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, ed. Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2001), pp. 710–11, diary, 23 July 1945, and Brooke’s retrospective commentary. 23 Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, p. 67; Churchill, The Second World War: Volume VI, pp. 578–9. 24 For the classic statement of ‘atomic diplomacy’, see Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam – The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), and his updated version, Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995). See, in general, J. Samuel Walker, ‘Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision’, Diplomatic History, 29 (2005), pp. 311–34.

182

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

25 Winston Churchill to Lord Camrose, 7 August 1945, as quoted by Camrose in his notes on a meeting with Churchill, in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII, p. 119. 26 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 502. See, in general, David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 27 J. W. Pickersgill and D. F. Forster (eds), The Mackenzie King Record: Volume IV, 1947–48 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), pp. 112–13, diary, 26 November 1947. 28 State Department’s Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948: Vol. III, Western Europe (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 90–91, Ambassador Lew Douglas report, London to Washington, 17 April 1948. 29 Winston Churchill, speech notes, Llandudno, 9 October 1948, CHUR 5/21A/1-68 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+ 5/21A/1-68]; Winston S. Churchill (ed.), Churchill’s Speeches: Never Give In! (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 448. 30 Editorial, The Times, 11 October 1948. 31 Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, speech notes, 5 March 1946, CHUR 5/4A/51-100 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/4A/51-100]. For full text and video footage of ‘The Sinews of Peace’, go to http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/biography/in-opposition/qironcurtainq-fulton-missouri-1946/120-the-sinews-of-peace 32 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 28 October 1948, CHUR 5/21B/338-441 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/21B/338-441]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 457, col. 257, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1948/oct/28/debate-onthe-address 33 Winston Churchill, ‘The Communist Menace’, New York, speech notes, 25 March 1949, CHUR 5/24E/726-741 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/24E/726-741]; see also Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII, p. 464. 34 Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, 6 October 1946, CHUR 2/4/61-63 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/4/61-63], and Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, 10 October 1946, CHUR 2/4/48-50 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/4/48-50]; Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 834–6. 35 S. J. Ball, ‘Military Nuclear Relations between the United States and Great Britain under the Terms of the McMahon Act, 1946–1958’, Historical Journal, 30 (1995), pp. 439–54. 36 ‘Churchill’s Call for Approach to Russia’, The Times, 15 February 1950. 37 John W. Young, Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 29–31. 38 Winston Churchill, speech, 30 November 1950, CHUR 5/39B/275-302 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/3

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

183

9B/275-302]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 481, col. 1332, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/nov/30/foreignaffairs 39 Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, 24 May 1950, National Archive, PREM 8/1160. Also Winston Churchill, speech, 16 March 1950, CHUR 5/33B/217-272 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/33B/217-272]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 472, Cols 1295, 1297–8, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/ mar/16/defence 40 Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, 6 August 1950, CHUR 2/28/4546 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/28/45-46], and enclosures; Winston Churchill, note, 4 August 1950, CHUR 2/28/47-49 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contex tId=CHUR+2/28/47-49]; Lord Cherwell, note, n.d., August 1950, CHUR 2/28/50-51 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/28/45-51] (all at CHUR 2/28/45-51 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/ explore/page?contextId=]). See also Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 5 July 1950, CHUR 5/36A/114-133 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/36A/114-133]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 477, Cols 495, 501–3, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/jul/05/korea 41 Winston Churchill to Lord Salisbury, 2 July 1953, National Archives, PREM 11/405. 42 Harry S. Truman, news conference, 30 November 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents, Volume XXXIII: Truman 1950 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1966), http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/ viewpapers.php?pid=985. See, in general, Kevin Ruane, ‘Britain, the United States and the Issue of “Limited War” with China, 1950–4’, in John W. Young, Effie Pedaliu and Michael Kandiah, eds. Britain in Global Politics Volume 2: From Churchill to Blair: Essays in Honour of Saki Dockrill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 43 Clement Attlee to Winston Churchill, 3 December 1950, CHUR 2/28/121-124 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2 /28/121-124]; and Clement Attlee, note, ‘Atomic Energy: the Quebec Agreement of 1943’, 2 December 1950, CHUR 2/28/124 [http://www. churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/28/124]. 44 Clement Attlee, Parliamentary statement, and Winston Churchill reply, 14 December 1950, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 482, Cols 1350–62, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1950/dec/14/thewashington-talks 45 Winston Churchill to Harry S. Truman, 12 February 1951, CHUR 2/28/132134 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2 /28/132-134]; Harry S. Truman to Winston Churchill, 16 February 1951, CHUR 2/28/127-128 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?context Id=CHUR+2/28/127-128], Harry S. Truman to Winston Churchill, 24 March 1951, CHUR 2/28/126 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contex tId=CHUR+2/28/126].

184

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

46 The Daily Mirror ran a notorious front page on polling day, ‘Whose Finger on the Trigger’, Daily Mirror, 25 October 1951. See the writ issued on behalf of Churchill against the Daily Mirror, alleging libel, 25 October 1951, CHUR 2/221/64 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/221/64]. Also ‘Churchill’s Broadcast’, The Times, 9 October 1951, and ‘Churchill’s Aims’, The Times, 10 October 1951; Winston Churchill, Plymouth, speech notes, 23 October 1951, CHUR 5/44B/197-241 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/44B/197-241], and in Churchill (ed.), Churchill’s Speeches, p. 470. 47 Command Paper Cmd. 8488, Mr Churchill’s Speech to the Congress of the United States of America, January 17th, 1952 (London: HMSO, 1952). 48 Young, Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign, p. 80. 49 Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 202; Winston Churchill, statement, 23 October 1952, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 505, Cols 1268– 71, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1952/oct/23/atom-bombtest-australia-1#S5CV0505P0_19521023_HOC_236. 50 Atomic Energy Act, 30 August 1954, http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/ treaties/atomic-energy-act/trty_atomic-energy-act_1954-08-30.htm 51 ‘Hydrogen Bomb Research’, The Times, 17 November 1952. 52 Moran, Churchill, p. 451, diary, 16 August 1953. 53 ‘Russia Explodes Hydrogen Bomb’, The Times, 21 August 1953. 54 John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), pp. 675–6, diary, mid-August 1953. 55 See, in general, Daniel C. Williamson, Separate Agendas: Churchill, Eisenhower and Anglo-American Relations 1953–1955 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005); Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 56 Winston Churchill, speech, 11 May 1953, CHUR 5/51C/260-320 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/51C/260-320]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 515, Cols 883–98, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1953/may/11/foreign-affairs 57 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 9 February 1954, CHUR 6/3C/241-242 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+6/3C/241-242]; Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 685, diary, 6 December 1953. 58 See Matthew Jones, ‘Great Britain, the United States, and Consultation over Use of the Atomic Bomb’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 797–828; Foreign Office memorandum, ‘Korea: Action in the Event of Renewed Communist Aggression’, 1 February 1954, National Archives, CAB 131/14 D(54)8; and John Colville’s record of the meeting between Winston Churchill and Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, 26 April 1954, National Archives, FO 371/112057/360G. 59 ‘Hydrogen Explosion “Not Out of Control”’, The Times, 1 April 1954. 60 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 9 March 1954, in Peter G. Boyle, ed. The Churchill–Eisenhower Correspondence 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 123.

CHURCHILL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

185

61 Chiefs of Staff memorandum, ‘United Kingdom Defence Policy’, 31 May 1954, circulated as a Cabinet Paper on 23 July 1954, National Archive, CAB 129/69, C(54)249, http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-129-69.pdf 62 Moran, Churchill, p. 634, diary, 1 March 1954. See also Winston Churchill memorandum, ‘Two-Power Meeting with the Soviet Government’, 3 August 1954, National Archive, CAB 129/70, C(54)263, http://filestore. nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-129-70.pdf 63 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 9 March 1954, in Boyle, The Churchill–Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 124; Winston Churchill, speech, 28 March 1950, CHUR 5/33C/578-622 [http://www.churchillarchive. com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/33C/578-622]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 473, Cols 201–2, http://hansard.millbanksystems. com/commons/1950/mar/28/foreign-affairs 64 Winston Churchill, Cabinet Paper C(54)390, ‘Notes on Tube Alloys’, 14 December 1954, CHUR 2/217/15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHUR+2/217/15]. On the hydrogen bomb decision see the Cabinet records at the National Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/cabinetpapers/default.htm?WT.ac=Cabinet%20Papers%20Home, in particular, CAB 128/27, CC(54), 47th, 48th and 53rd meetings, 7, 8 and 26 July 1954; and CAB 129/69 C(54)249, Chiefs of Staff memorandum, ‘United Kingdom Defence Policy’, 23 July 1954; and C(54)250, Lord Salisbury memorandum, ‘Report by the Committee on Defence Policy’, 24 July 1954. 65 Winston Churchill, speech, 3 November 1953, CHUR 5/52A/1-44 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/52A/1-44]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. 520, Cols 28–31, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1953/nov/03/debate-on-the-address-first-day 66 Winston Churchill, speech, 1 March 1955, CHUR 5/57A/33-89 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/57A/33-89]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 537, vol. 1899, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/commons/1955/mar/01/defence

15 Churchill and the Cold War Kevin Ruane

Canterbury Christ Church University

In the popular perception, Winston Churchill is widely regarded as the original Cold Warrior – the man who popularized the term ‘iron curtain’ in 1946 and urged firm resistance to the Soviet Union in Europe and elsewhere. This might have been the Churchill of the late 1940s, but to define him as a wholly unremitting Cold Warrior on the basis of his ‘iron curtain’ speech is to overlook the fluidity and evolving nature of his outlook. Back in power in 1951, and now deeply troubled by the prospect of nuclear war, he dedicated much of the final phase of his long political career to trying to bring about a top-level East– West summit that would help reduce international tensions. Although his quest for a summit failed, the fact remains that the so-called original Cold Warrior had become, by the mid-1950s, a committed advocate of détente.

The road to Fulton On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill, the former British prime minister and now leader of the Conservative opposition, delivered one of his most memorable speeches. Troubled by events in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union had been extending its military and political control in the months since the end of the Second World War, Churchill sounded the alarm. He told an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the

188

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Formally entitled ‘The Sinews of Peace’, Churchill’s address is better remembered as the ‘iron curtain’ speech and helped establish his popular reputation as the original Cold Warrior.1 Churchill had kept a close eye on Soviet behaviour following his July 1945 election defeat, and by the autumn he was predicting a future for Eastern Europe ‘full of darkness and menace’.2 The United States might have stood up to the USSR but most ordinary Americans were uninformed about – or uninterested in – the European situation. Nor was there much support in the US Congress for a robust anti-Soviet policy. Churchill nonetheless looked to the United States to show leadership and, to this end, he determined to educate American opinion about international realities. His opportunity came when he was invited to lecture at Westminster College. US president Harry S. Truman added a personal endorsement: ‘This is a wonderful school in my home State … Hope you can do it.’3 Churchill gladly accepted, telling Truman on his arrival in America, ‘I have a Message to deliver to your country.’4

The Sinews of Peace What, then, was his message? The formal title of the speech is instructive. Churchill mapped out a route to peace, not war, and emphasized in this regard the role of the ‘special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States’. Like many people, he hoped that the recently founded United Nations (UN) would ensure peace, in which case this ‘special relationship’ would complement the UN’s work, but if the UN proved to be as ineffectual as its predecessor, the League of Nations, the US–UK–Commonwealth partnership would come into its own. As for the USSR, whilst avowing admiration for the Soviet peoples and sympathy for their security needs, Churchill warned that the Kremlin’s expansionist policies constituted a grave threat to peace. To counter this danger, the free world needed to unite under US leadership. But Churchill was careful to stress that armed conflict was not inevitable: he believed that the USSR wanted ‘the fruits of war’, not war itself, which meant that negotiations had a role to play. Indeed, he anticipated an international settlement that would safeguard Western interests, provide the USSR with adequate security and restore independence to the countries behind the iron curtain. The military strength of the US–UK alliance, which rested on the American atomic

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

189

monopoly, would either help to bring about such a settlement or else offer ‘an overwhelming assurance of security’ if relations with the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate. In his speech, Churchill trailed a number of themes that would inform his approach to the Cold War over the ensuing decade: the seriousness of the Soviet threat and the need to counter it; the vital necessity of close Anglo-American cooperation; the importance of Western military strength, especially in atomic weapons; and yet, at the same time, the hope for some kind of negotiated settlement. Churchill’s anti-communism ran deep, but he was pragmatic enough to recognize the value of compromise with the USSR whenever it stood to benefit Britain’s strategic interests; in 1941, for example, when Germany invaded the USSR, he had immediately proposed an Anglo-Soviet alliance against the common Nazi enemy. A similar blend of resistance and accommodation, along with an abiding faith in the concept of a balance of power in international relations, would characterize his approach to the USSR in the Cold War.

The onset of the Cold War The Fulton speech drew predictable criticism from the Soviet authorities (which dubbed Churchill a ‘firebrand of war’), but the reaction in the United States, the main target of his oratory, was decidedly mixed: whilst there was support for Churchill’s criticism of Soviet behaviour, the idea of an entangling alliance with the UK and Commonwealth against an erstwhile ally, the USSR, was not one that many Americans were ready to entertain.5 However, over the next twelve months, as Soviet disregard for freedom in Europe became more pronounced, the Truman administration continued the public education process begun by Churchill until, in March 1947, the president was confident enough to declare to Congress that henceforward the policy of the United States was ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.6 Arguably it was this speech, ‘The Truman Doctrine’, not the one at Fulton a year earlier, that marked the start of the Cold War. At any rate, from this point onwards US opinion increasingly accepted (as Churchill hoped it would) that primary responsibility for coordinating the free world’s resistance to Soviet communism rested on American shoulders. Soon after, in June 1947, the Truman administration unveiled the Marshall Plan, its scheme to revive the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe through a massive injection of US dollars. The Soviet Union interpreted the plan as a US attempt to organize an anti-communist bloc and responded by promulgating the ‘two camps’ theory of a world divided into irreconcilable spheres: the communist and capitalist. Then, in June 1948, reacting to American, British and French plans to convert their occupation zones in Germany into a single West German state, Stalin launched the Berlin

190

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

blockade with the aim of eliminating the Western presence in the city (Berlin itself being deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany). In April 1949, the United States and Britain, along with ten other states, signed the pact from which emerged the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The following month, when the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) came into being, Stalin lifted the blockade, but there was no escaping the fact that the Cold War was now fully joined. But it began in 1947, not in 1946. The Fulton speech was not a declaration of Cold War, either on Churchill’s part or that of the West generally, but a prophesy of what might – and did – come to pass.

The Cold War deepens, 1947–9 Between the onset of the Cold War and his retirement from front-line politics in 1955, Churchill would transform himself from the scourge of Soviet communism into a high-profile advocate of détente. To understand this process of evolution, his Cold War career needs to be considered as a series of interlocking phases. During the first of these – which ran from 1947 to 1949 – he continued to warn publicly of the dangers posed by the Soviet Union and to urge military preparedness to counter the Red Army threat in Europe. In 1947 he warmly welcomed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as confirmation that the United States had assumed the leadership role he had called for at Fulton; in September, he wrote to Truman saying, ‘how much I admire the policy into which you have guided your great country; and … [I] thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from famine and war’.7 In contrast, Churchill was often critical of the British Labour government for failing (as he saw it) to maintain a sufficiently strong UK defence capability and for relying too much on the protection of the US atomic monopoly instead of forging ahead with developing a UK atomic bomb.8 He also promoted the idea of a United States of Europe as a ‘potent factor for world peace’, and in a celebrated speech at Zurich in September 1946, he called on France and Germany to bury past enmities and work together to build a united (in practice, Western) Europe.9 This interest in continental unity dovetailed with his thinking on Germany: anxious to avoid the mistakes of the post–First World War settlement, when the apportioning of ‘war guilt’ fuelled German resentment and assisted in the rise of Hitler, he advocated a policy of reconciliation and rehabilitation rather than revenge.10 Interestingly, in many of his public statements Churchill balanced warnings about the Soviet threat with calls for a peaceful resolution of East–West differences, but in private he ventilated more confrontational views. The time had come, he avowed in November 1947, to tell Stalin to free Eastern Europe or ‘we will attack Moscow and your other cities and destroy them with atomic bombs’.11 In practice, the negotiations he publicly

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

191

championed were not ‘negotiations’ in the strictest sense of the word; rather, they were to be the occasion for coercing the Soviets into accepting Western terms under threat of atomic destruction, for the ‘only vocabulary they understand is the vocabulary of force’.12 The Truman administration, however, preferred the less aggressive strategy of ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment’ of Soviet communism.13 If Churchill found this caution frustrating, he took consolation in the US atomic monopoly. ‘[W]e and the Americans will be much stronger this time next year’, especially in atomic weaponry, he wrote to Anthony Eden in September 1948, and he was ‘not therefore inclined to demand an immediate showdown, although it will certainly have to be made next year’. Ending his letter, he reminded Eden that ‘None of this is fit for public use.’14 Less than a year later, in August 1949, the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, far sooner than many in the West, including Churchill, expected.

The Soviet A-bomb, the ‘fall’ of China and the Korean War, 1949–50 The Soviet A-bomb test was quickly followed by the communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the Cold War balance of power appeared to shift in favour of the communist bloc, Churchill’s outlook shifted with it.15 The time when the West could dictate terms to the USSR was fast disappearing. Although the American atomic arsenal would be superior to that of the Soviets for some time to come, Churchill became increasingly nervous about the UK’s vulnerability in the event of a Soviet (atomic) air offensive and his interest in a showdown consequently lessened. In February 1950, in the midst of a British general election campaign, he delivered a speech in Edinburgh in which he called for a ‘talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level … a parley at the summit’.16 This was the first time that the word ‘summit’ had been used to describe a meeting between the leaders of the great powers, and though the Labour government accused Churchill of promoting détente as an electoral stunt, the gap between his public rhetoric and private outlook had narrowed in the six months following the Soviet A-bomb test.17 The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the accompanying danger that this local Asian conflict could escalate into global war, confirmed Churchill in his view that a top-level summit was urgently necessary. At the same time, he fully supported American plans, prompted by the fighting in Korea, to develop NATO into a fully fledged defence organization. Controversially, the Truman administration also wanted a West German contribution to the common defence, but whereas the French and the smaller European states were much alarmed at the prospect of German rearmament,

192

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Churchill felt that this was a small price to pay for the US pledge to defend Western Europe that went with it.18 Until the NATO build-up was complete Churchill accepted that the ‘deterrent effect of the atomic bomb’ was ‘almost our sole defence’, whilst the threat of its use was ‘the only lever by which we can hope to obtain reasonable consideration in an attempt to make a peaceful settlement with Soviet Russia’.19 This kind of frank talk was used against him in the October 1951 British general election campaign when the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror newspaper depicted him as a warmonger. Churchill vigorously denied the charge, insisting that one of the main reasons he remained in public life was the belief that he could play a constructive role in helping prevent a third world war: rearmament and the US atomic arsenal were needed to ‘parley’, not to fight, and he described détente as ‘the last prize I seek to win’.20

Churchill back in power In the event, the Daily Mirror’s jibes did not prevent Churchill’s return as prime minister, albeit with a slim parliamentary majority. For the next three-and-a-half years – the most important phase of his Cold War career insofar as he could directly influence events – he waged a dogged campaign to bring about ‘an abatement of what is called “the cold war”’, defying age and infirmity in the process.21 He was sustained in his mission by faith in the value of personal diplomacy (the interaction of the top leaders on both sides, and their ability to rewrite the Cold War script) and by a deep-seated fear of nuclear war.22 Churchill had been delighted to discover on becoming prime minister again that the previous Labour government had done far more than he realized in secretly developing a British atomic bomb, and in October 1952, just a year into his peacetime administration, the UK became the world’s third atomic power. But to Churchill, the bomb had become less a weapon of war than a deterrent and, by extension, a means of strengthening the West’s negotiating position with the USSR. He was also interested in harnessing atomic energy for peaceful purposes and hoped that an ‘easement’ in the East–West contest would allow the major powers to ‘divert our riches and our scientific knowledge to ends more fruitful than the production of catastrophic weapons’.23 Nearly seventy-seven years old when he won the 1951 general election, the knowledge that he probably had limited time in which to achieve détente did not mean that he favoured peace at any price: on the contrary, he remained a believer in summitry from strength. However, he had been shaken by the Soviet A-bomb test and was readier to make concessions to Moscow than he had been in the late 1940s.24 The difficulty for Churchill was that whilst he believed that the West was already strong enough to negotiate safely, the Americans not only

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

193

disagreed but made the completion of NATO’s military expansion, the Federal Republic of Germany’s integration into the Western Cold War alliance system and West German rearmament within the framework of a European Defence Community (EDC) essential preconditions to any formal approach to Moscow. Churchill also faced opposition closer to home from his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and a number of other Cabinet ministers, who suspected that Moscow’s public remarks on the need for ‘peaceful coexistence’ were intended to derail the NATO build-up. In France and other West European countries, the view that an East–West settlement would eliminate the need for the EDC (hence rearmed Germans) gained ground. For the Truman administration, and for Eden, détente was a question of timing: negotiations with the USSR should follow, not precede, the completion of NATO’s defence plans as well as an end to the Korean War.25 Churchill was disappointed by American hesitancy, but the election of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as US president in November 1952 offered the chance for a fresh start. However, the Republican Eisenhower soon proved to be as unenthusiastic about a leaders’ summit as the Democrat Truman. Worse still, the strident anti-communism of the Republican Party, including some of Eisenhower’s top advisers, left Churchill worrying about a US-inspired showdown with the USSR.26 His hope of the late 1940s had now become his fear. Indeed, he came to see détente as a means of curbing the United States’ more bellicose tendencies.

The death of Stalin, 1953 It was a change at the top in Moscow rather than Washington that most boosted Churchill’s hopes for détente: on 5 March 1953 the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died and was succeeded by a collective leadership whose early statements on international matters spoke of the potential for the peaceful reconciliation of East–West differences.27 Churchill wrote to Eisenhower asking him to consider a top-level conference to explore ‘the apparent change for the better in the Soviet mood’, but his proposal was rejected.28 With or without Stalin, American policy-makers felt that the USSR was looking to seduce Western opinion into believing that détente was imminent and, by so doing, to erode popular support for the EDC and German rearmament.29 At a minimum, Eisenhower wanted ‘concrete Soviet actions’, not just words, as proof of Moscow’s sincerity.30 American guardedness was shared by the British Foreign Office, but when Eden was taken ill in the spring of 1953, Churchill took advantage of his absence to make one of his most important Cold War speeches. In the House of Commons on 11 May he called for ‘a conference on the highest level’ with the new men in the Kremlin. It ‘might well be that no hardfaced agreements would be reached’ but ‘there might be a general feeling

194

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

among those gathered together that they might do something better than tear the human race, including themselves, into bits’.31 Churchill had acted independently of the Americans and the UK’s other allies – as well as his own Cabinet – and even though his summit proposal was warmly received by public opinion, his unilateral manoeuvre dismayed Western governmental decision-makers. In Washington, the Eisenhower administration worried that the illusion of détente he had conjured into being would be used by opponents of the EDC, especially in France, to scupper the scheme. Eden agreed. It ‘must be long in history’, he reflected, ‘since one speech did so much damage to its own side’.32 Knowing that popular opinion was on his side, and with ‘no more intention than I had at Fulton or in 1945 of being fooled by the Russians’, Churchill considered visiting Moscow on his own as a precursor to a wider summit.33 Neither the Americans nor his own government were keen: a highlevel bilateral UK–Soviet meeting could raise false hopes amongst NATO public opinion of a general East–West agreement, whereas a lower-level encounter between foreign ministers, limited to a small number of precise agenda items, would be good public relations (proving that the Western powers were interested in negotiations) and pose little risk to the EDC.34 Churchill, though, cared nothing for the EDC (which he derided as a ‘bucket of wood pulp’), complained that a foreign ministers’ meeting would get bogged down in dreary diplomatic detail and continued to believe that only a leaders’ summit could change the course of Cold War history.35

Illness and recovery In June 1953, Churchill suffered a severe stroke, but went on to confound his doctors with his recuperative powers and by October he was back at his desk in No. 10. The quest for détente, which played a psychologically sustaining role in his recovery, was now more than ever a personal mission and became, in part, the justification (or excuse) for his refusal to honour several promises to Eden, his anointed successor, to hand over the premiership and retire gracefully.36 The Americans, however, remained a major obstacle. At a meeting in Bermuda in December 1953, Eisenhower scornfully dismissed Churchill’s suggestion that Soviet policy had changed for the better since Stalin’s death.37 Adding to Churchill’s discomfort was Eisenhower’s revelation that if the communists broke the Korean armistice, signed the previous July, the United States would react with widespread atomic bombing of China.38 The Americans doubted whether the USSR would honour its 1950 treaty pledge to support the Chinese, but Churchill was not so sure. If global war broke out, the UK, which in 1948 provided bases in East Anglia for US atomic-capable aircraft, would be a primary target (‘and perhaps the bull’s eye’)39 of a Soviet attack, and he was greatly upset at the thought of the consequent loss of life. Even the few people who

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

195

managed to survive ‘under mounds of flaming and contaminated rubble’ would, he feared, have ‘nothing to do but to take a pill to end it all’.40 Yet even the Americans accepted that it had become necessary to make a gesture to placate détente-hungry West European opinion and they duly agreed to take part with the UK, France and the USSR in a foreign ministers’ meeting in Berlin at the start of 1954. When deadlock ensued on the conference’s principal agenda items involving Germany and Austria, Churchill was confirmed in his view that only the heads of government, meeting on the Second World War model of Yalta or Potsdam, could make real progress.41

The spectre of the H-bomb Churchill’s search for a summit acquired added urgency in February 1954 when the United States announced that it was in possession of a workable thermo-nuclear weapon – a hydrogen bomb. Press reports of the hideously destructive power of this ‘super bomb’ fuelled alarm in the UK and elsewhere that nuclear developments were getting out of hand.42 Churchill was also unsettled at this time by an emotive letter he received from Eisenhower, expressing his fear of communist world domination, denouncing the ‘savage individuals in the Kremlin’ and seeking ‘renewed faith and strength from … God’ in order to ‘sharpen up his sword for the struggle that cannot possibly be escaped’. Might that sword have a thermo-nuclear tip?43 The USSR had acquired its own H-bomb in 1953, and this development, when added to Eisenhower’s apocalyptic vision, left Churchill ‘more worried about the hydrogen bomb than by all the rest of my troubles put together’.44 In his reply to the president he pointedly remarked on Britain’s ‘smallness and density of population’ and how, in consequence, ‘several million people would certainly be obliterated by four or five of the latest H-bombs’ if war came.45 Arguably, the need for a summit had never been more pressing. Yet, despite his dread of nuclear holocaust, in 1954 Churchill still gave the goahead for the production of a British hydrogen bomb, a decision that might appear at odds with his push for peace. In fact, it fitted well with his plans. At a military-strategic level, he recognized that ‘the only sane policy in the next few years is Defence through Deterrents’, and this is where the H-bomb played a part. For if Britain’s enhanced military power served to buttress the West’s overall deterrent capacity, and thus helped maintain general peace, the prospect of negotiations with the USSR, still Churchill’s overarching objective, would be kept alive.46 To this end, in June 1954, Churchill revived his old idea of a solo mission to Moscow and travelled to Washington in search of American approval. Eisenhower encouraged him only to the extent that he did not veto outright a unilateral UK initiative, but Churchill seems to have taken this amber light as a green one.47 Returning home aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he cabled

196

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

the Kremlin asking for a meeting ‘with no agenda and no object but to find a reasonable way of living side by side in growing confidence, easement and prosperity’.48 Eden, who had accompanied him to North America, might have blocked the cable but was apparently bought off by a promise from Churchill that he would retire after a summit meeting, but the foreign secretary nonetheless urged his chief to seek advance Cabinet clearance.49 Churchill ignored the advice and consequently found himself embroiled in a major political row on his return to London, with many of his ministerial colleagues outraged at his disregard for the principles of cabinet government and unimpressed by his argument that his message to Moscow was both informal and private.50 Churchill was also upset by Eisenhower’s irritation: the president’s light had indeed been amber and he continued to express his ‘utter lack of confidence in the reliability and integrity of the men in the Kremlin’.51 A Cabinet split – even the collapse of the government – was only averted when the Soviets responded to Churchill’s cable by proposing a multilateral foreign ministers’ conference on European security issues rather than the bilateral and agenda-less Anglo-Soviet leaders’ summit he had wanted. The Kremlin’s veto allowed both sides in the Cabinet dispute to disengage.52 By now, Churchill was almost a ‘one-issue premier’.53 Harold Macmillan, a close observer, worried about his ‘Russian monomania’ and felt that, since his stroke, his ‘judgement is distorted … He thinks about one thing all the time – the Russia visit and his chance of saving the world – till it has become an obsession … He has forgotten what barbarians the Russians are.’54 Churchill’s hopes suffered a further setback on 31 August 1954, when the French parliament threw out the treaty that would have given life to the EDC and sovereignty to West Germany; with the future of the US security commitment to Western Europe suddenly in doubt – the Americans had repeatedly stated that their continued support for NATO hinged on the success of the EDC – and the entire Atlantic Alliance in disarray, there was no chance whatsoever of Churchill meeting with the Soviets in the near future. At this point, Eden emerged as the crisis manager-in-chief. Thanks to the foreign secretary’s diplomatic skill and direction, at the start of October 1954 an intergovernmental organization, the Western European Union (WEU), was substituted for the supranational EDC, which allowed for German rearmament under safeguards and eliminated the danger of US desertion of Europe. In May 1955, the WEU ratification process was completed and the Federal Republic joined NATO.55

Reflections Two months later, in July 1955, the first East–West heads of government summit since Potsdam took place in Geneva. Churchill, though, was not there: physical infirmity and political pressure had combined to force his

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

197

resignation in April, and it was Eden who led the UK team. ‘How much more attractive a top-level meeting seems when one has reached the top’, he quipped, a reference to Eden’s previous opposition to his summitry.56 But Churchill, too, might have had his summit if the EDC had been approved during his time in office, and it was his misfortune that its successor, the WEU, was only launched the month after he retired.57 The ‘Western nations could not, with self-respect, have earlier consented to a … Summit meeting’, Eisenhower wrote to him on the eve of Geneva, but ‘your long quest for peace daily inspires much that we do’.58 ‘I have never indulged in extravagant hopes of a vast, dramatic transformation of human affairs’, Churchill replied, ‘but my belief is that, so long as we do not relax our unity or our vigilance, the Soviets … will be increasingly convinced that it is in their interests to live peaceably with us’.59 Then again, at over eighty years of age, in poor health, lacking the energy and concentration to master complex briefs, easily led to abandon logic and embrace emotion and displaying a near mystical faith in the notion that great deeds are accomplished only by great men, Churchill might have been a liability in any direct encounter with hard-nosed and well-drilled Soviet negotiators.60 Eisenhower sometimes felt that ‘Winston is trying to relive the days of World War II’ when he had the enjoyable feeling that he and our president were sitting on some rather Olympian platform with respect to the rest of the world and directing world affairs from that point of vantage … Even if this picture were an accurate one of those days, it would have no application to the present.61 By mid-1954, Harold Macmillan considered the prime minister ‘physically and mentally incapable of serious negotiation’ and ‘with the Russians up against him, he would … be absolutely lost’.62 Moreover, recent research on the USSR side of the story suggests that Soviet decision-makers, remembering Churchill’s virulently anti-communist reaction to the Bolshevik revolution, never really trusted him: ‘He was an imperialist to the core’, Molotov avowed. Nor did the USSR rate the UK highly as a factor in international politics, and when it came to détente it much preferred to do business with the United States.63 In the event the Geneva summit failed to advance the cause of détente in any meaningful way and the Cold War continued until, in the 1960s, the two sides reached the point of Mutually Assured Destruction. This, of course, was precisely the kind of incendiary development that Churchill had hoped to prevent; the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the prize he really wanted was the one for peace. It was not to be. Still, it is important to set his quest for détente alongside his ‘iron curtain’ speech and his interest, in the late 1940s, in using atomic diplomacy to dictate terms to the USSR, in order to appraise his Cold War record in the round.

198

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

Thanks to Fulton, the popular perception of Churchill as the original Cold Warrior persists, but as with many other aspects of his long career in public service, he went on to reinvent himself. Deeply disturbed by the increasing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he reshaped his Cold War outlook, and though he was dogged by accusations from political opponents of warmongering, the fact is that from 1950 onwards he was much more of a peace-monger.64 It is true that even in the final phase of his career his hatred of communism was wont to bubble to the surface. It is equally true that his hankering after a meeting with the Soviets was employed, sometimes brazenly, as an excuse for clinging to power. Yet there is still no reason to doubt the essential sincerity of what he told the Conservative Party Conference in October 1953, in his first major speech following his stroke four months earlier, namely, that ‘what I care about above all else [is] the building of a sure and lasting peace’.65

Notes 1

Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, speech notes, 5 March 1946, CHUR 5/4A/51–100 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR +5/4A/51–100]. For full text and video footage of ‘The Sinews of Peace’ go to http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/biography/in-opposition/qiron-curtainqfulton-missouri-1946/120-the-sinews-of-peace. Churchill had already used the phrase ‘the iron curtain’ in a letter to Clementine Churchill, 24 September 1945. See Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Black Swan, 1999), p. 541. Prior to this letter, the phrase ‘iron curtain’ had been used in German wartime propaganda to describe the frontier of Soviet-controlled territory, including by Joseph Goebbels in ‘Das Jahr 2000’, Das Reich, 25 February 1945.

2

Winston Churchill letter to Clementine Churchill, 24 September 1945, in Soames, Speaking for Themselves, p. 541.

3

Harry S. Truman, additional handwritten note attached to Franc L. McCluer (Westminster College) to Winston Churchill, 3 October 1945, CHUR 2/230B/349–350 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+2/230B/349–350].

4

Winston Churchill to Harry S. Truman, 29 January 1946, CHUR 2/158/68–69 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/158/68–69].

5

‘Pravda’s Attack’, The Times, 12 March 1946; ‘Stalin’s Reply to Churchill’, New York Times, 14 March 1946; Michael Howard, ‘Churchill: Prophet of Détente’, in R. Crosby Kemper III, ed. Winston Churchill: Resolution, Defiance, Magnanimity, Good Will (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 178.

6

Harry S. Truman, ‘56. Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine’, 12 March 1947, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–53, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index. php?pid=2189&st=&st1=

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

199

7

Winston Churchill to Harry S. Truman, 24 September 1947, CHUR 2/158/47 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/158/47].

8

Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII: Never Despair: 1945–1965 (London: William Heinemann, 1988), p. 422. See also Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 14 December 1950, CHUR 5/39C/539–574 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/39C/539–574]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 483, cols 368–70, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/dec/14/ prime-ministers-visit-to-usa; Winston Churchill, press statement, 19 February 1951, CHUR 2/28/99–100 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?co ntextId=CHUR+2/28/99–100].

9

Winston Churchill to Viscount Cecil, 9 June 1946, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood Papers, cited in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII, p. 243; Winston Churchill speech, Zurich, 19 September 1946, http://www.churchill-societylondon.org.uk/astonish.html

10 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 5 June 1946, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 423, cols 2028–30, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1946/jun/05/foreignaffairs#S5CV0423P0_19460605_HOC_329 11 Mackenzie King diary, 26 November 1947, J. W. Pickersgill and D. F. Forster (eds), The Mackenzie King Record: Volume IV, 1947–48 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), pp. 112–13. 12 US ambassador to London, Lew Douglas, letter to Robert Lovett, State Department, 17 April 1948, recounting Churchill’s views, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948: Volume III, Western Europe (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 90–1. See also David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 151–2, 154. 13 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 4. 14 Winston Churchill to Anthony Eden, 12 September 1948, CHUR 2/68A/84– 89 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+2/6 8A/84–89]. 15 ‘I hoped that we might come to terms with them before they gained the secret of the atomic bomb’, he reflected in 1950. ‘Now I hope that we may come to terms with them before they have so large a stockpile of these fearful agencies, in addition to vast superiority in other weapons, as to be able to terrorise the free world, if not, indeed, to destroy it.’ Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 30 November 1950, CHUR 5/39B/275–302 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+5/39B/275–302]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 481, col. 1332, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/nov/30/foreign-affairs 16 ‘Churchill’s Call for Approach to Russia’, The Times, 15 February 1950. 17 Martin Gilbert, ‘From Yalta to Bermuda and Beyond: In Search of Peace with the Soviet Union’, in James W. Muller, ed. Churchill as Peacemaker

200

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

(Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 310. 18 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 30 November 1950, CHUR 5/39B/275–302 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR +5/39B/275–302]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 481, cols 1332–4, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/nov/30/foreign-affairs. See also Command Paper Cmd. 8488, Mr Churchill’s Speech to the Congress of the United States of America, January 17th, 1952 (London: HMSO, 1952). 19 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 14 December 1950, CHUR 5/39C/539–574 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/39C/539–574]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 483, cols 368–70, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/dec/14/ prime-ministers-visit-to-usa. 20 The Daily Mirror ran a notorious front page on polling day, ‘Whose Finger on the Trigger’, Daily Mirror, 25 October 1951. See the writ issued on behalf of Churchill against the Daily Mirror, alleging libel, 25 October 1951, CHUR 2/221/64 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/221/64]. See also ‘Churchill’s broadcast’, The Times, 9 October 1951, and ‘Churchill’s aims’, The Times, 10 October 1951; Plymouth speech, 23 October 1951, Winston S. Churchill (ed.), Churchill’s Speeches: Never Give In! (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 470. 21 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 6 November 1951, CHUR 5/45A/6–52 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR +5/45A/6–52]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 493, cols 79–80, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commoons/1951/nov/06/debateon-the- address#S5CV0493P0_19511106_HOC_94 22 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 24 March 1954,CHUR 6/3A/60–64 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=C HUR+6/3A/60–64], and Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 129–31. In general on nuclear issues, see Kevin Ruane, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 23 Diary entry for 24 June 1954, John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 691. 24 See Winston Churchill, remarks at British Embassy dinner, Paris, 10 September 1951, CHUR 2/221 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHUR+2/221] (in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII, p. 636). There were ‘concessions we could make’, he suggested. ‘For instance, he would give the Russians access to warm waters by instituting international control of the exits of the Baltic and the Dardanelles. He believed the Russians might gain assurance and be more willing to co-operate with the outside world.’ In addition, he told Lord Moran in 1953 that if a summit had materialized he would have met the Soviets ‘more than halfway … We would have promised them that no more atomic bombs would be made, no more research into their manufacture. Those already made would be locked away. They would have had at their disposal much of the money now spent on armaments to provide better conditions for the Russian people’; diary entry

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

201

for 10 July 1953, Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1945–1965 (London: Constable, 1966), p. 428. 25 John W. Young, Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951– 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 31, 49. 26 Diary entry for 9 November 1952, Colville, Fringes of Power, p. 654. 27 ‘Mr Malenkov’s speech’, The Times, 17 March 1953. 28 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 5 April 1953, CHUR 6/3A/124 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/124]. 29 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 11 April 1953, in Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 43. 30 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 25 April 1953, CHUR 6/3B/209– 210 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/ 3B/209–210]. In a major speech on 16 April 1953, Eisenhower demanded proof of Soviet ‘good faith’ – the promotion of peace in Korea, for one thing, or an Austrian State Treaty – before he would take Moscow’s overtures seriously. Dwight D. Eisenhower speech, ‘50 – Address “The Chance for Peace” Delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors’, 16 April 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents, Vol. XXXIV Eisenhower 1953, http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9819&st=&st1= 31 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons (final copy), 11 May 1953, CHUR 5/51C/260–320 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contex tId=CHUR+5/51C/260–320]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 515, cols 883–98, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1953/ may/11/foreign-affairs 32 Anthony Eden diary, 27 November 1953, Avon Papers, University of Birmingham Special Collections, AP20/1/30. 33 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 4 May 1953, CHUR 6/3A/113 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/113], and Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 48; Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1 July 1953, CHUR 6/3A/92-93 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/92-93]. 34 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 5 May 1953, in Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 49. 35 Kevin Ruane, The Rise and Fall of the European Defence Community: Anglo-American Relations and the Crisis of European Defence, 1950–1955 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 10. 36 His personal physician, Lord Moran, noted in his diary on 17 August 1953 that Churchill’s ‘plan for meeting Malenkov has so far helped him to face the uncertainty of this wretched, drawn-out illness’. Moran, Churchill, p. 454, also 21 August 1953, p. 458. 37 ‘Russia was a woman of the streets’, Eisenhower declared, ‘and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present “beat” into the backstreets’. Diary entry for 4 December 1953, Colville, Fringes of Power, p. 683. 38 Diary entry for 6 December 1953, Colville, Fringes of Power, p. 687.

202

WINSTON CHURCHILL: POLITICS, STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT

39 Winston Churchill, speech to House of Commons, 15 February 1951, CHUR 5/40B/269–320 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+5/40B/269–320]; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 484, col. 630, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1951/feb/15/ defence-government-policy 40 Winston Churchill cited in Matthew Jones, ‘Targeting China: US Nuclear Planning and “Massive Retaliation” in East Asia, 1953–1955’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 10 (2008), p. 47. 41 ‘Indochina – Plans for the Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina: Quadripartite Communiqué of the Berlin Conference, 18 February 1954’, The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch018.asp 42 ‘Hydrogen Explosion Not “Out of Control”’, The Times, 1 April 1954. 43 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 9 February 1954, CHUR 6/3C/241–242 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+6/3C/241–242]. 44 Diary entry for 26 March 1954, Moran, Churchill, p. 530. 45 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 8 March 1954, CHUR 6/3A/6668 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/ 3A/66-68], and Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 123. The British Chiefs of Staff estimated the loss of life in the United Kingdom following a hydrogen bomb attack at anywhere between five and twelve million. The COS memorandum, ‘United Kingdom Defence Policy’, 31 May 1954, UK National Archives, Kew, London, CAB 129/69, C(54)249, circulated as a Cabinet Paper on 23 July 1954, http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ pdfs/large/cab-129-69.pdf 46 Winston Churchill, ‘Notes on Tube Alloys’, Cabinet Paper C(54)390, 14 December 1954, CHUR 2/217/15 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/ page?contextId=CHUR+2/217/15]; on the hydrogen bomb decision see the records of the Cabinet which are available online at the UK National Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/default.htm?WT. ac=Cabinet%20Papers%20Home. See in particular 47th, 48th and 53rd meetings, 7, 8 and 26 July 1954, CAB 128/27, CC(54); Chiefs of Staff memorandum, ‘United Kingdom Defence Policy’, 23 July 1954, CAB 129/69 C(54)249; Lord Salisbury memorandum, ‘Report by the Committee on Defence Policy’, 24 July 1954, C(54)250. 47 Gilbert, ‘Yalta to Bermuda’, p. 310; Young, Churchill’s Last Campaign, pp. 268–70. 48 Winston Churchill to Dwight E. Eisenhower, 7 July 1954, CHUR 6/3A/42 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/42], and Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, p. 152. 49 Diary entry for 2 July 1954, Colville, Fringes of Power, pp. 697–8. 50 UK National Archives, 48th and 49th meetings, 8–9 July 1954, CAB128/27 CC(54), Confidential Annexes, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ cabinetpapers/default.htm?WT.ac=Cabinet%20Papers%20Home 51 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 7 July 1954, CHUR 6/3C/234– 235 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/

CHURCHILL AND THE COLD WAR

203

3C/234–235]; Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 22 July 1954, CHUR 6/3B/176–180 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextI d=CHUR+6/3B/176–180]; and Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 8 July 1954, CHUR 6/3A/40–41 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page ?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/40–41]. 52 See Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 318–56. 53 Young, Churchill’s Last Campaign, p. 290. 54 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 8 August 1954, CHUR 6/3A/28– 29 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6 /3A/28–29]; Harold Macmillan, 10 July 1954, unpublished diary, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS.Macmillan.dep.c.16; Churchill Note, ‘Two-Power Meeting with Soviet Government’, National Archives, CAB 129/70, C(54)263, http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-128-27.pdf 55 Ruane, European Defence Community, pp. 152–74. 56 Harold Macmillan, Memoirs: Tides of Fortune 1945–1955 (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 587. 57 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 12 January 1955, CHUR 6/3A/9–12 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+ 6/3A/9–12]. 58 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 15 July 1955, CHUR 2/217/79 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CH UR+2/217/79]. 59 Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18 July 1955, CHUR 2/217/75– 78 [http://www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId= CHUR+2/217/75–78]. 60 Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (London: Hambledon, 2001), p. 300. ‘I can even imagine that with a few simple words’ the leaders of the great powers ‘might lift this nuclear monster from our world’. Winston Churchill to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 9 March 1954, CHUR 6/3A/66-68 [http:// www.churchillarchive.com/explore/page?contextId=CHUR+6/3A/66-68], and in Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, pp. 123–4. 61 Diary entry for 6 January 1953, Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 222–4. 62 Diary entry for 10 July 1954, Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950–1957 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), p. 325. 63 Albert Resis (ed.), Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics – Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), p. 59; Uri Bar-Noi, The Cold War and Soviet Mistrust of Churchill’s Pursuit of Détente 1951–1955 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007). 64 Best, Churchill, p. 275. 65 Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume VIII, p. 896.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Natalie Adams, ‘“An Ardent Ally”: Lady Randolph and Winston’s Political Career’, Finest Hour, 98 (Spring 1998), pp. 14–16. Paul Addison, ‘Churchill and the Working Class’, in J. M. Winter, ed. The Working Class in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). Paul Addison, Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Paul Alkon, Winston Churchill’s Imagination, (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). Dennis Bardens, Churchill in Parliament (London: Robert Hale, 1967). Christopher Bell, ‘The “Singapore Strategy” and the Deterrence of Japan: Winston Churchill, the Admiralty, and the Dispatch of Force Z’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 604–34. David Bercuson, One Christmas in Washington: The Secret Meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill That Changed the World (Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2005). Geoffrey Best, Churchill and War (London: Hambledon, 2005). Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (London: Hambledon, 2001). Geoffrey Best, ‘Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and Nuclear Disarmament’, History Today, 55 (2005), pp. 38–43. Peter Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Robert Blake and W. Roger Louis (eds), Churchill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (London: Cassell, 1995). Stefan Buczacki, Churchill and Chartwell: the Untold Story of Churchill’s Houses and Gardens (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007). Raymond A. Callahan, Churchill: Retreat from Empire (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1984). David Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow (London: Penguin, 2003). David Cannadine (ed.), Churchill in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965). Christopher Catherwood, Winston’s Folly: Imperialism and the Creation of Modern Iraq (London: Constable, 2004).

206

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950–1957 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003). John Charmley, Churchill, The End of Glory: A Political Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993). John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940–57 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Volume I: Youth: 1874–1900 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1966). Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Volume II: Young Statesman, 1901– 1914 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967). Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: T. Butterworth, 1930). Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1942, first published 1937). Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 5 volumes (London: Thornton Butterworth, first published 1923–31). Winston Churchill, The Second World War, 6 volumes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Ian Clark and Nicholas Wheeler, The British Origins of Nuclear Strategy, 1945– 1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007). Peter Clarke, Mr Churchill’s Profession (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Joseph Codali, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill: The Return to Gold (1925) and the 1931 Crisis (Vancouver: Simon Fraser University Press, 1990). Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 2003). Michael J. Cohen, ‘The Churchill–Gilbert Symbiosis: Myth and Reality’, Modern Judaism, 28 (2008), pp. 204–28, John Colville, The Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds), Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945 (London: Phoenix, 2002). Kenneth Davis, FDR: Into the Storm, 1937–1940 (New York: Random House, 1993). Kenneth Davis, FDR the War President, 1940–1943 (New York: Random House, 2000). Robert MacGregor Dawson, ‘The Cabinet Minister and Administration: Winston S. Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–15’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 6 (1940), pp. 325–58. David Day, Menzies and Churchill at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, first published 1986). David Dilks, ‘The Great Dominion’: Winston Churchill in Canada, 1900–1954 (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2005). Robert Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). Warren Dockter, ‘Winston Churchill and the Islamic World: Early Encounters’, The Historian, 101 (2009), pp. 19–21.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

207

Charles Eade (ed.), Churchill by His Contemporaries (London: Reprint Society, 1955, first published 1953). Robin Edmonds, The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Peace and War (London: Penguin, 1992). Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Kirk Emmert, Winston S. Churchill on Empire (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1989). Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). Brian Farrell (ed.), The Last Lion and the Lion City: Churchill and the Making of Modern Singapore (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011). Herbert Feis, Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Robert Ferrell (ed.), The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: Norton, 1981). Adrian Fort, Prof: The Life and Times of Frederick Lindemann (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003). Graham Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia (Sydney: Macmillan, 2008). David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1989). John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). John Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Allen Lane, 2005). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. III: 1914–1916 (London: Heinemann, 1971). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. IV: 1917–1922 (London: Heinemann, 1975). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. V: 1922–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1976). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. VI: Finest Hour, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. VII: Road to Victory, 1941–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. VIII: ‘Never Despair’, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume III: The Challenge of War: 1914–1916 (London: Heinemann, 1971). Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000). Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (London: HarperCollins, 1994). Sean Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War 1945–1991 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Fraser Harbutt, Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 edition). Probert Henry, Bomber Harris: His Life and Times (London: Greenhill, 2003).

208

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (New York: Bantam Books, 2008). Trumbull Higgins, Winston Churchill and the Dardanelles (London: CollierMacmillan, 1963). Richard Hough, Winston and Clementine: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Churchills (London: Bantam Books, 1991). Ian Hunter (ed.), Winston & Archie: The Collected Correspondence of Winston Churchill and Archibald Sinclair (London: Politico’s, 2005). Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1968). Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006). Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 8 volumes (London: Chelsea House/New York: Bowker, 1974). Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001). Neville Jones, The Origins of Strategic Bombing (London: William Kimber, 1973). R Kemper (ed.), Winston Churchill: Resolution, Defiance, Magnanimity, Good Will (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996). Warren Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 volumes: Alliance Emerging; Alliance Forged; Alliance Declining (London: Collins, 1984). Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (New York: Princeton University Press, 1984). Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow, 1997). Martin Kitchen, ‘Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union during the Second World War’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), pp. 415–436. Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Wm. Roger Louis, In the Name of God, Go! Leo Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992). Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). James Marchant (ed.), Winston Spencer Churchill: Servant of Crown and Commonwealth (London: Cassell, 1954). Kevin Matthews, Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics, 1920–1925 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004). John Maurer (ed.), Churchill and Strategic Dilemmas before the World Wars. Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel (London: Frank Cass, 2003). John Maurer, ‘Churchill’s Naval Holiday: Arms Control and the Anglo-German Naval Race, 1912–1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 15 (1992), pp. 102–27. Michael McMenamin and Curt J. Zoller, Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor (Oxford/Westport CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). Jon Meacham Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2004).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

209

Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997). R. J. Moore, Churchill, Cripps and India, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–65 (London: Constable, 1966). Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Forgotten Indian Famine of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). James Muller (ed.), Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997). James Muller (ed.), Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). Elizabeth Nel, Mr Churchill’s Secretary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958). Vincent Orange, Dowding of Fighter Command: Victor of the Battle of Britain (London: Grub Street, 2008). Richard Overy, ‘German Air Strength 1933 to 1939: A Note’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), pp. 465–471. Richard Overy, ‘“The Weak Link?”: The Perception of the German Working Class by RAF Bomber Command, 1940–1945’, Labour History Review, 77 (2012), pp. 11–34. Tony Paterson, Churchill: A Seat for Life (Dundee: David Winter, 1980). G.C. Peden, Keynes and His Critics: Treasury Responses to the Keynesian Revolution 1925–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Clive Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994). Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). Mark Pottle (ed.), Daring to Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1946–1969 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000). Roland Quinault, ‘Churchill and Black Africa’, History Today, June 2005, pp. 31–6 John Ramsden, Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2002). David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004). David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2007). David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2008). Andrew Roberts, ‘Churchill the Wartime Feminist’, Chartwell Bulletin, 48 (2012), www.winstonchurchill.org/publications/chartwell-bulletin/72-bulletin-48jun-2012. Brian Roberts, Churchills in Africa (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970). Kevin Ruane, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Douglas S. Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier (London: Conway, 2006, first published 2005).

210

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Sand (ed.), Defending the West: the Truman-Churchill Correspondence, 1945– 60 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). Celia Sandys, Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive (London: HarperCollins, 1999). Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981). Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). Justin Davis Smith, The Attlee and Churchill Administrations and Industrial Unrest, 1945–1955 (London: Pinter, 1990). Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (London: Cassell, 1979). Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Doubleday, 1998). Mary Soames, A Daughter’s Tale (London: Doubleday, 2011). David Stafford, Roosevelt & Churchill: Men of Secrets (New York: Overlook Press, 2000). Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party (London: Phoenix, 2000). Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978). Richard Toye, Lloyd George & Churchill; Rivals for Greatness (London: Macmillan, 2007). Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (London: Macmillan, 2010). Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). M. S. Venkataramani and B. K. Shrivastava, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Churchill: America and the Last Phase of India’s Freedom Struggle (London: Sangam Books, 1997, first published 1983). Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Philip White, Churchill’s Cold War: The Iron Curtain Speech That Shaped the Postwar World (London: Duckworth, 2012). Frederick Woods (ed.), Young Winston’s Wars: The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill, War Correspondent, 1897–1900 (London: Leo Cooper, 1972). Chris Wrigley, David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976). Chris Wrigley, ‘Churchill and the Trade Unions’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 11 (2001), pp. 273–93. Chris Wrigley, Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2002). Chris Wrigley, Churchill (London: Haus, 2006). John Young, Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). John Young, Effie Pedaliu and Michael Kandiah (eds), Britain in Global Politics Volume 2: From Churchill to Blair: Essays in Honour of Saki Dockrill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

INDEX

Note: The letters ‘n’ and ‘t’ following locators refer to notes and tables. Abdication Crisis, 1936 5, 54, 83 Abdullah, King 120, 121 Abercromby, Ralph 140 Addison, Paul 10, 52 Aden 119 Admiralty. See also Royal Navy Churchill’s appointment to 4, 5, 18, 84, 127–8 Churchill’s leadership of 10, 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 23–34, 38, 40, 127, 128, 130, 139, 140, 154 Churchill’s removal from 31, 79, 118, 128 McKenna’s leadership of 25 Adriatic 163, 187 Adu Atoll 148 Aegean Sea 147 Aerial Operations Committee 128 Afghanistan 117 Africa. See also Boer War; South Africa British violence in 129 Churchill’s tour of 106, 108 European power struggle in 143, 144–5, 156, 161, 162, 166 n.7 Muslims in 114, 117 Afrika Korps 145 Agadir, Morocco 26 Ahmed, Mohammed 114 Air Council 132 Air Ministry 129, 131, 133, 135 n.9 air policing 120, 129 Air Raids Committee 128 Air Staff 129, 132, 133 Alexander, A. V. 54 Ali, Waris Ameer 121 Amalgamated Union of Building Workers 49

Amery, Leo 38, 65 Amin al-Husayni, Mohammad 121 amphibious operations 140, 143, 145, 147, 148 Amritsar massacre, 1919 4 anarchism/anarchists 4, 18, 50, 53 Anglicanism 78 Anglo-American alliance. See under Britain Anglo-Irish War, 1919–21 109 Anning, Annette 98 Anti-Nazi Council 54 Antwerp, Belgium 30 Appeasement policy 1, 5, 14, 23, 83–5, 89, 101, 144 Archbishop of Canterbury 67 aristocracy 50, 55 Armistice of 1918 4 Army, British and air force reintegration plan 129 airpower 127–37 in Boer War 107 Churchill’s service in 2–3, 14, 50, 77, 79, 106–7, 117–18 defence of Greece 7 in Egypt 111 in Gallipoli campaign 4, 30–1, 118 in the General Strike, 1926 61 in Mediterranean campaign 147 in North-West Frontier 107 re-equipment of 156 reform 15, 77 in Russia 53 in Tonypandy Incident 18 Asia Minor 118 Askwith, George 53 Asquith, Herbert

212

INDEX

appointment of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty 26–7 Churchill’s relationship with 26–7, 28 coalition government of 30, 79 Conservative hostility towards 79 and Gallipoli campaign 31 naval policy 28, 31 as prime minister 16, 18 resignation of 79, 142 and universal male suffrage 18, 99 Assheton, Ralph 86, 91 n.33 Astor, Nancy 101 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 120 Atlantic, 141, 147, 156, 158, 159, 160, 165, 172 Atlantic Charter 7, 149, 159, 196 atomic bomb (A-bomb) 134, 168 n.25, 171–85 development of 171–3 Hiroshima–Nagasaki explosions 173–5 tests 173, 176–8, 191, 192 Attlee, Clement 9, 54, 122, 173, 175–7, 181 n.15 austerity 88 Australia capital ships laid down in Britain 25 Churchill’s relations with 110, 144 coastal defence 28 intervention in Gallipoli campaign 31 Monte Bello test in 177 Austria 24, 147, 195 Austrian State Treaty 201 n.30 Auxiliary Air Force 132 Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) 102 Axis powers 133, 143, 144, 145, 146, 165 Baalham, Nancy 98 balance of power 155, 176, 189, 191 Baldwin, Stanley appointment of Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer 5, 19, 35, 61, 76, 80–1, 109 Churchill’s relationship with 81, 82, 83, 109

Conservative leadership of 76, 109, 130 on equal franchise for both sexes 101 and the General Strike, 1926 59, 61–70 and Indian self-government 5 as prime minister 5, 35, 61 protectionist policy 35, 81, 82 retirement from office 83 in tariff reform debate 39, 40, 80, 81, 82 Balfour, Arthur J. Conservative leadership of 76, 79 and Gallipoli campaign 31 and the General Strike, 1926 65 private secretaries of 98 relationship with Churchill 28–9, 78, 79 Balfour Declaration, 1917 118, 120 Balkan strategy 145–6, 147, 148 Baltic region 140, 141, 187 bankruptcy 41, 54, 157–8 Barham, HMS 24 Barrymore, Ethel 95 Battenburg, Prince Louis of 27 Battle of Britain 85, 130, 131–2 Battle of Omdurman 107, 171 Bay of Bengal strategy 148 BBC 6, 67 B-29 bomber 176, 177 Beaverbrook, Lord 10, 38, 95, 96, 131 beer duties 40 Belfast, Churchill’s speech at 19, 21 n.21 Belgium 29, 30, 84, 130 Bell, Gertrude 109, 119 Bellerophon, HMS 24 Bengal famine, 1943 7, 106 Berlin 130, 148, 173, 175, 188, 189–90 Bermuda 157, 194 betting tax 40–1 Bevan, Aneurin 145 Beveridge, William 13 Beveridge Report 8, 14, 86 Bevin, Ernest 53, 54, 65–6 Birkenhead, Lord 65, 67, 79, 96, 109 Black, Jeremy 11 Black Friday 17, 100

INDEX

Blenheim 2, 9, 94, 95 Blitz, the 132, 134, 158, 165 Blood, Bindon 3 Blue Danube A-bomb 177–8 ‘blue water policy’ 140 Board of Trade Churchill’s presidency of 3, 13, 15, 16, 25–6, 27, 32 n.10, 50, 51, 108 Cunliffe-Lister’s presidency of 69 Lloyd George’s presidency of 51 Boer War. See also South Africa Churchill as war correspondent during 3, 13, 14 Churchill’s experiences in 13, 14, 77, 107, 108 Joseph Chamberlain’s role in 14, 15 Bolshevik Revolution 49, 53, 55, 197 bookmaking 41 Booth, Charles 14 Botha, Louis 28 Boudicca 97 Boyle, Anthony 134 Bradbury, John 37 Bradbury, Lilian 98 Brailsford, H. N. 100 Bridgeman, Francis 27, 65 Bridgeman, W. C. 40, 65 Bristol 100 Bristol Temple Meads 17 Britain in Agadir dispute 26 airpower/air policy 54, 127–37 arms race 24, 25, 76, 129–30 decline of 8, 39, 101, 149, 163 economy 36, 41–2 financial crisis of 1931 82 and France 14, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 36, 42, 118, 121, 128, 130, 132, 140, 141, 142–3, 146, 156, 163, 194, 195 geopolitical position of 14 gross domestic product 36 and Italy 24, 36, 42, 144, 145, 147, 162 and Japan 14, 38, 40, 144, 145–6, 148, 149, 161, 163 National Government of 1930s 5, 82, 89, 101, 110, 129

213

naval supremacy 14, 15, 18, 24, 25, 27 nuclear weapons 171–3, 177–8, 179, 192 in Pacific War 148 and Russia 14, 26, 145, 159–60, 163, 174–5, 187–203 strategic culture 139–51 and United States special relationship 7, 8, 9, 11, 122, 127–37, 139–51, 153–69, 171–85, 187–203 war debts 36, 38, 39–40, 41–2, 95, 157–9 British constitution 5 British Empire 7, 9 Churchill’s view of 11, 76, 105–12, 139, 141, 143, 149 decline of 101, 105, 110, 122 Gold Standard in 37 Imperial Preference system 162, 168 n.29 Joseph Chamberlain’s view of 108 naval superiority of 25, 28 and Ottoman relations 114–18, 120 remedy for unemployment 38 security of 25, 28 tariff policy issue in 14, 38, 40 British Gazette 5, 53, 59, 66–7, 70 British Muslim Society 121 British Union of Fascists 98 British Worker 66 Brooke, Alan 7–8, 149–50, 174 Brown, Albert 98 Buddha 114–15 Budget League, Churchill’s presidency of 16–17 Bulgaria 133, 147, 163 Burma 110, 149 Butler, R. A. 76, 85, 87, 102 Butt, David 132 Cabinet, Conservative approach to Moscow 193, 194, 196 Churchill’s appointment in 5, 6, 53, 61, 63, 108, 139 Churchill’s criticism by 67–8, 75

214

INDEX

Churchill’s prominence in 65–6, 75–6, 78–9, 81–6, 88, 101, 155, 193, 194, 196 extending female suffrage 100–1, 102 and the General Strike, 1926 60, 61, 65–70 on Middle Eastern affairs 119 naval programme committee 40 Cabinet, Labour 52, 61 Cabinet, Liberal Agadir crisis debate in 26 Churchill’s appointment in 3, 15, 95 Churchill’s prominence in 16, 31, 32, 129, 130 friction amongst members 18 naval expansion dispute in 40 Caird, James 17 Cairo Conference, 1921 109, 119–20, 162 Caliphates 117, 119 Cameron, David 76 Cameroon, French colony of 143 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 16 Canada and Anglo-American special relationship 161, 172 atomic weapons development 172 Churchill’s relations with 28, 110 defeat of Naval Aid Bill 28 French colony in 143 Gold Standard in 37 Cannes 97 Carter, Violet Bonham 97, 101 Casablanca Conference, 1943 128, 132, 145 cash-and-carry provisions, US 157–8 Cassel, Gustav 37, 42 Catholic Church 133 Catterall, Peter 10 Cawnpore Massacre 121, 125 n.34 Cazalet-Keir, Thelma 102 Cecil, Lord Hugh 16, 78 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 110, 148 Chamberlain, Austen 79 Chamberlain, Joseph Churchill’s relationship with 15–16 as colonial secretary 14

tariff reform campaign 14, 15–16, 77–8 view of British Empire 108 Chamberlain, Neville appointment of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty 83–4 Churchill’s relationship with 5, 10, 39, 81, 83–4 Conservative leadership of 83, 84–5, 109 development of airpower 130 foreign policy 101 and the General Strike, 1926 65 political downfall of 6 as prime minister 5, 130, 142 resignation of 84 and Roosevelt relationship 155 social reform 5, 81 suffering from cancer 143 Chanak Crisis, 1922 4 Chancellor of the Exchequer. See Treasury Chant, Laura Ormiston 99 Charmley, John 106 ‘Chartwell Bulletins’ 96 Chartwell Manor 9, 49, 96, 98, 122, 166 Chatfield, Lord 142 Chequers 133 Cherwell, Lord 132, 171–2 Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame 101 China birth of PRC 191 Chinese labour in South Africa 108 civil war 176, 191 Japanese attack on 160, 168 n.23 missionary work in 114 treaty for ending extraterritorial rights in 149 US involvement in 149, 179 as US nuclear target 177, 194 Christianity, Churchill’s view of 3, 114–15 Christie, Malcolm 130 Churchill, Clementine Hozier and Aid to Russia campaign 101–2 devotion of and career support to Winston 16, 31, 95–6 domestic helpers of 98

INDEX

letter to Asquith 31–2 marriage of 9, 95 Mary’s biography of 10 romance with Terence Philip 96 Churchill, Diana (daughter) 10, 95, 96, 102 Churchill, Gwendoline (‘Goonie’) 97, 116 Churchill, Jack (brother) 94, 97, 107 Churchill, John (First Duke of Marlborough) 2, 106, 140 Winston’s biography of 154 Churchill, John (Seventh Duke of Marlborough) 2 Churchill, Lady Randolph (née Jennie Jerome; mother) 2 career support to Winston 2, 95 Cornwallis-West’s marriage to 95 divorce of 95 early life of 94 Lord Randolph Churchill’s marriage to 94 Montagu Porch’s marriage to 95 opposition to votes for women 99 relationship with Winston 94–5, 107, 115 sisters of 97 as Winston’s literary agent 94–5 Winston’s relationship with 94–5, 115 Churchill, Lord Randolph (father) 2 as Chancellor of the Exchequer 2, 35 death of 94 defender of Ulster Unionism 18 opposition to Irish home rule 19 political activities and reputation 2 promotion of Tory Democracy by 76, 77 relationship with Winston 2, 76, 77, 106 resignation of 2, 35, 77 trip to South Africa 106 Winston’s biography of 2 Churchill, Marigold (daughter) 10, 95 Churchill, Mary (daughter) 10, 95, 96, 102 Churchill, Randolph (son) biography of Winston 10 death of 10 Winston’s relationship with 10

215

Churchill, Sarah (daughter) 10, 95, 96, 102 Churchill, Winston Admiralty appointment of 4, 5, 18, 84, 127–8 advocacy of détente 171, 176, 177, 179, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197 affinity with science 171–2, 180 n.2 as air minister 127–37 ambitions of 94 anti-Bolshevik campaign 4, 76, 97 anti-communism 49, 53, 171, 174, 178, 181 n.21, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198 anti-socialist stance of 5, 8, 35, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 80, 86 approach to Cold War 175–6, 187–203 army reform 3, 15, 77 Asquith relationship with 26–7, 28 aviation interest of 127–8 and Baldwin’s relationship 81, 82, 83, 109 and Balfour relationship 28–9, 78, 79 birth and upbringing of 2 ‘black dog’ of 9–10 at Board of Trade 3, 13, 15, 16, 25–6, 27, 32 n.10, 50, 51, 108 brutal characteristics of 96, 99 captivity and escape from South Africa 1, 3, 107 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 19, 31, 79 as Chancellor of the Exchequer 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 19, 35–48, 53, 59, 76, 77, 80–1, 89, 100, 109 at Colonial Office 3, 16, 40, 108, 118, 129 critics of 6, 7–8, 18, 26, 30, 50, 59, 66, 71, 75, 86–7, 102, 106, 107, 108, 139, 144, 145, 149, 189 death of 1, 9, 10, 50, 166 depression of 9–10 distrust for 6, 197 drinking habit of 149 early life of 94, 106 education of 2, 94, 106

216

INDEX

effort to end Cold War 9, 174–7 egotistic nature of 9, 96 erratic behaviour of 5 extravagance of 2 failing health of 6, 9, 88, 196–7, 201 n.36 fascination with war technology 128, 171–2 fatherhood of 95 favourite holiday destinations of 96, 98, 116, 122 financial position of 35–6 as First Lord of the Admiralty 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 23–34, 40, 84, 127–8, 130, 139–41, 154 flying lessons of 30, 127–8 friendships of 7, 16, 95, 97–9, 119, 120–1, 153–4, 160–1, 162, 164–6, 172 and Gallipoli campaign 4, 23, 30–1, 118, 123, 142, 147 and the General Strike, 1926 5, 53–4, 59–74 at Home Office 50, 101 as Home Secretary 1, 4, 13, 15, 17–18, 26, 27, 50, 52, 60, 100 humour and wit of 6 imperial legacy of 1, 105–12 India campaign 81–3 interest in polo 115 in Irish Home Rule conflict 19 Jennie Churchill’s relationship with 2, 94–5, 107, 115 Joseph Chamberlain’s relationship with 15–16 literary assistants of 123 n.2 literary earnings of 2 literary style of 3 Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with 2, 76, 77, 106 love of English language 6 marriage of 9, 95 memory power of 2 military failures of 1, 4, 7–8, 30–1, 41, 139–51 military service of 2–3, 4, 31, 94, 106–7, 114, 115, 116, 142, 171 as minister of munitions 4, 31, 52–3, 79, 100, 127, 128

Moscow visit 194, 196, 198 as MP for Epping 35, 80 as MP for North-West Manchester 16, 17, 99–100 as MP for Oldham 3, 9, 15, 16, 50, 52, 77, 78, 95 myths about 6 in naval expansion debate 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 23–34 naval technical knowledge of 27 Neville Chamberlain’s relationship with 5, 10, 39, 81, 83–4 and nuclear technology 171–85 opposition to protectionism 15, 35, 80 painting hobby of 4, 122, 126 n.44 parliamentary career of 1, 13–21, 35–48, 50, 59, 61, 77, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86–7, 95, 100, 108, 145, 192 party politics of 75–6 paternalistic concern of 49, 50 personal charm of 7 personal crises of 9–10 political downfall of 6, 80, 82 political failures of 1, 2, 8, 123 political opponents of 59 political views of 3 presidency of the Budget League 16–17 as prime minister 1, 6, 8, 9, 14, 28, 59, 62, 76–7, 84, 88, 89, 105, 127, 129, 130, 139, 140, 155, 161, 162, 163, 171, 174, 177, 187, 192, 197 private secretaries of 98–9 racist views of 105–6, 108, 111, 120 religious beliefs of 3, 113–14 reputation as Cold Warrior 11, 171, 176, 187, 188, 198 resignation of 19, 79, 145, 197 retirement from office 102, 111, 171, 179, 190 as Secretary of State for War and Air 4, 60, 108–9, 118, 129 sexuality of 95, 97 skills and character traits 6

INDEX

social reforms of 3, 5, 8, 13–21, 23, 26, 76–7 speeches of 6–7, 8–9, 19, 23, 27, 29, 38, 41, 54, 59, 63, 69, 76, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 99, 100, 110, 131, 132, 139, 140, 143, 149, 159, 175, 176, 179, 187–90, 191, 194, 197, 198 strategic views of 139–51 stroke and recovery of 194, 196, 198, 201 n.36 suffragette attacks on 17, 100 in tariff reform debate 16, 76, 78, 80 temper of 18, 82, 99, 149 tour of East Africa 108 US visits of 111, 154, 160–1, 187–8, 195–6 view of war 102 war experiences of 6, 84–6, 127–37, 139–51 warmongering reputation of 130, 177, 192, 198 wartime broadcasts 6–7, 165 ‘wilderness years’ 5, 14, 35, 81–2, 127 writings of 1, 3, 8, 9, 107, 116 WSPU attacks on 17 at Yalta Conference 8, 102, 163–4, 195 Churchill Archives Centre 180 n.2 Churchill College, Cambridge 10, 102, 180 n.2 Church of England 77 Citrine, Walter 54 City of London 78 class tensions 36, 71 Clover, Lilian 98 Clynes, J. R. 52, 53, 54, 55 coal industry 38–9, 61, 66, 70. See also General Strike, 1926 Coal Mines Act 68 Cohen, Percy 91 n.33 Cold War 2, 76, 174–80, 187–203 Anglo-American resistance to the Soviets 175–6, 178–9, 187, 193–4 Asian crisis and 176–7, 191–2 Churchill’s approach to 175–6, 188–9, 190–3

217

fears about global war 176–7, 187, 191, 192, 194–5 Germany’s integration into Western alliance 191–2, 193 onset of 175, 189–90 phases of 190–1 Colonial Office, Churchill at 3, 16, 40, 108, 118, 129 Colossus, HMS 24 Colville, John 102 Colwyn, Lord 39 Combined Chiefs of Staff 160, 172 Combined English Universities 101 Committee of Imperial Defence 28, 172 communism 49, 190, 191, 198 Conciliation Act 17, 51 Conciliation Committee for Women’s Suffrage 17 Confucius 115 Congo 26 Conservative Central Office 41 Conservative Party and betting tax 41 Churchill’s criticism of 77–8 Churchill’s membership in 75–92 Churchill’s Oldham by-election campaign 3, 9, 15, 16, 50, 52, 77, 78, 95 Churchill’s return to 5, 19, 35, 53, 54, 80–1, 109 Churchill’s split with 3, 5, 15–16, 75–6, 77–8, 106, 108, 109–10 decay of 85, 88 free trade issue in 3, 77–8, 108 in industrial disputes 52, 59–74 leadership of 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84–8, 143, 149 membership size of 88 in mining strikes 59–74 MPs 69, 75, 78, 81 1929 election defeat of 5 1945 election defeat of 8 1950 election victory of 9 opposition to Churchill 3–4, 5, 16, 75, 79, 82, 83, 86 post-war period 86–8 Reform Committee 85 in Second World War 84–6, 88

218

INDEX

support for appeasement policy 83 in tariff reform issue 16, 77–8 Unionist alliance with 14 wartime leadership 84–6 Conservative Party Conference 55, 88, 175, 198 Conservative Research Department 87 Constantinople 117. See also Istanbul contingency funding 40 Cook, Arthur 62, 70, 71 Cornwallis-West, George 95 cotton industry 15–16, 51 County Hall, London 132 Cox, Percy 119 Crescent 121 Cripps, Stafford 145 Cripps mission 110 Crown, British 122, 123 Cuba, Churchill’s military service in 3 Cunliffe-Lister, Philip 69 Daily Express 38, 39, 66 Daily Graphic 3 Daily Herald 66 Daily Mail 65 Daily Mirror 177, 184 n.46, 192, 200 n.20 Daily Telegraph 116 Dakar 143 Dalton, Hugh 54 Dardanelles 4, 19, 30, 31, 117, 146, 200 n.24. See also Gallipoli Dardanelles Commission of Inquiry 31 Davidson, J. C. C. 65, 66, 67 Dawes Plan 36, 42, 61 Dawson, Geoffrey 66 D-Day 134 Declaration of Liberated Europe 164 Declaration of Poland 164 decolonization 106, 111 de Gaulle, Charles 143 DeGroot, Gerard 173 Denmark, German invasion of 141 derating scheme 39, 41, 81 Derby, Lord 118 Derbyshire coalfields 68, 72 n.21 Dervish Empire 114 DH9 aircraft 129

Dill, John 144 Disraeli, Benjamin 52, 55, 76, 77, 115 DjavidBey, Mehmed 116–17 Dobson, Alan 154 Dockter, Warren 11 Dodecanese Islands 147 Dominions, naval policy for 25, 28 Dowding, Hugh 131 Dreadnought, HMS 24 Dresden, bombing of 127, 133–4 Duala port 143 Dundee, Churchill’s parliamentary representation of 5, 16, 17, 52, 96 Dunkirk 6, 131, 156 Dutch East Indies 160 East Africa 50, 108, 129 East Anglia 176, 177, 179, 194 East End, London 18, 50 Eastern Europe 9, 163–4, 174, 175, 187, 188, 190 Eastern Mediterranean 116, 118, 140, 162, 163 East India 148 East–West relations 9, 147, 175, 178, 179, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198 n.1 Economist 102 Eden, Anthony 8, 76, 83, 85, 87, 88, 191, 193–4, 196, 197 Edinburgh 176, 191 Edwardian era 10, 13–15, 19, 97 politics of 14–15 Edward VIII 5, 83 Egypt British imperialism in 111, 113, 140, 143, 144 nationalist movements in 117, 122 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 178–9, 193–7, 201 n.30 El Alamein, Egypt 6, 145, 147 elections, British of 1899 1, 50, 77, 95 of 1900 3, 15, 77, 95, 108, 116 of 1906 3, 13, 14, 16 of 1910 17

INDEX

of 1922 4–5, 16, 80, 96 of 1923 35, 54, 80 of 1924 5, 35, 80, 81 of 1929 5, 41, 65, 81 of 1935 83 of 1945 8, 54, 86, 110 of 1950 9, 191 of 1951 192 11 Downing Street 65 Elgin, Lord 108 Elizabeth I 97 Elizabeth II 101 Elliott, Maxine 97 Emergency Powers Act (EPA), 1920 60 Empire Theatre 99 English Channel 144 Eniwetok Atoll test 178 EnverBey Pasha 116 Epping, Churchill as MP for 35, 80 Essex 80 European Defence Community (EDC) 193, 194, 196, 197 European Union 9, 196 European war, Churchill’s thoughts on 8, 24 Everest, Elizabeth 2, 50, 93, 94, 97 fall of France 85, 142, 155, 156, 160, 168 n.23. See also France Far East 8, 96, 144, 160, 163 fascism 49, 98, 101, 154, 159 Feisal, King 119–20 ‘fight on the beaches’ speech, Churchill’s 6 financial crisis, 1931 82 First World War Britain’s war preparedness 29–30, 30t British strategy in 142, 144 Churchill’s account of 5 Churchill’s experience during 1, 3, 4, 6, 19, 23–4, 29, 30, 54, 100, 134, 140 end of 100, 102, 128 impact on Churchill’s political career 19 industrial crisis since 70

219

outbreak of 24, 28, 29, 79, 108, 158 post-war period 53–5, 60, 190 war debts 158 Fisher, Lord Churchill’s split with 4 as First Sea Lord 27, 30 resignation of 4, 31, 79 Fisher, Warren 38 Florence 133 Foreign Office 117, 118, 119, 130, 193 Forestry Commission 38 France Anglo-American invasion of 140, 142–8, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163–4, 166 n.7, 168 n.23 and Anglo-German naval expansion 24 Armistice Agreement with Germany 166 n.7 army 26, 140 Britain and 14, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 36, 42, 118, 121, 128, 130, 132, 140, 141, 142–3, 146, 156, 163, 194, 195 Britain’s support for 26, 27, 130, 134 colonial possessions of 166 n.7, 168 n.23 and German hostilities 6, 26, 29, 84, 85, 147, 161, 162, 190 in Second World War 85, 130, 140, 142–3, 147, 155, 156, 160, 168 n.23 Vichy 121, 142–3, 166 n.7 view of East–West settlement 190, 193, 194, 196 war debts 36, 42 Frances, Duchess of Marlborough (‘Duchess Fannie’) 94, 107 Franchise Bill, 1912 18 Franco, General 146 Free Food League 78 free trade, issue of 3, 14–17, 40, 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 99, 108, 109 French Revolution 50, 55 Frewen, Clara 97 Fulton Missouri speech. See ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, 1946

220

INDEX

Gallipoli, Churchill’s role in 4, 23, 30–1, 118, 123, 142, 147 Gandhi, M. K. Churchill’s relationship with 10, 110, 120 non-violence policy 120 Garnett, Theresa 100 General Strike, 1926 5, 10, 40, 53, 59–74 aftermath of 68–9 announced by TUC 65, 66 Baldwin’s intervention 61–4 causes of 59–61, 69 Churchill’s role in management of 59–74 Churchill’s view of 60–1 and coal dispute 66, 68–70 emergency news production and distribution 66–7 end of 68 impact of return to the Gold Standard 61–2, 63, 70 negotiations and renegotiation of 63–5, 68–70 press reports 65, 66–7 preventive measure against repetition of 68 Royal Commission’s report 60, 62–3 Samuel Report 64, 65, 69 state of emergency 59, 60 Geneva summit 42, 179, 196–7 George V 164 German Air Force (Luftwaffe) 83, 127, 130, 141–2 Germany airpower 127–37 Anglo-American occupation zones in 163 Anglo-American operations against 127–37, 139–51 Armistice Agreement with France 166 n.7 army, government spending on 18 atomic bomb project 180 n.6 British raids against 127–37 Churchill’s national defence against 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 18, 23–34, 83, 127–8

Churchill’s relationship with 14, 23 defeat of 146, 163, 173 economy 26 Franco-Belgian occupation of 61 Gold Standard in 37 industrial power 14, 51 integration into Western Cold War alliance 191–2, 193 invasion of Czech parts 83 invasion of France 6, 85 invasion of Middle East 121 invasion of Poland 5, 83, 141 invasion of Soviet Union 7, 101 labour exchanges 51 modernization measures 23 ‘naval holiday’ offer to 23, 29 naval power and expansion 14, 18, 23–34 Ottoman alliance with 117 rearmament of 5, 130, 191–2, 193, 196 in Second World War 11, 84, 127–37, 139–51 seizure of Norway 84 Social Democrats 50 social reforms 23, 26 Soviet-controlled 189–90, 198 n.1 threat posed by 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 23–34, 79 Tripartite Pact 168 n.23 US investment in 42, 191–2 war reparation payments 36, 60, 61 Gestapo 8, 54, 86, 96, 156 Gibbon, Edward 3 Gilbert, Martin 10, 31, 98, 99, 100 Gladstone, William Ewart 77, 115, 118 Glasgow, Churchill’s speech at 18, 27 Glorious, HMS 142 Goebbels, Josef 141, 198 n.1 Gold Standard, Britain’s return to the 5, 10, 35–48, 61, 62, 63, 70 Gough, Lord 106 Government of India Act, 1935 5, 110, 149 Graf Spee 141 Grand Mufti of Jerusalem 121 Gray, Spenser 128 Great Depression 82, 159, 162 Greco-Turkish war, 1897 115

INDEX

Greece British defence of 7, 143, 144, 146 Churchill’s fight against 115 future of 162–3 and Turkey 115 Greer, USS 159, 167 n.22 Grey, Edward 31, 117 Guam 160 Halifax, Lord 6, 84, 85, 143 Hamblin, Grace 98 Hamilton, Ian 115 Harris, Arthur 131, 133, 134 Harrow School 2, 66, 99, 106, 114 Hashemite family 119–20 Headley, Baron 121 Helgoland, SMS 24 Henderson, Arthur 53, 55 Henry V 99 Higgs, Ethel 98 Hill, Kathleen 98 Hinduism, Churchill’s view of 120–1 Hiroshima–Nagasaki, bombing of 173–5 Hirtzel, Arthur 118 History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Churchill) 9, 111, 114 Hitler, Adolfh 83, 98, 101, 110, 130, 131, 141, 142, 156, 159, 168 n.28, 180 n.6, 190 Hoare, Samuel 66, 82, 143 Hogg, Douglas 65, 66 Holmes, Marion 98 Home Fleet 18 Home Office, Churchill’s leadership of 50, 101 Hong Kong 149, 160 Horsbrugh, Florence 101 House of Commons Cawnpore riots debate in 121, 125 n.34 Churchill crossing the floor of 3, 80 Churchill’s election to 1, 13, 77, 99, 145 Churchill’s eulogy to Roosevelt in 164 Churchill’s return to 5 Churchill’s speeches/debates in 54–5, 59, 62, 69, 79, 81, 82, 84, 100, 128, 130, 131, 139–40, 141, 149, 179, 193–4

221

Education Bill debates in 102 Labour Party’s rise in 50 naval expansion debate in 28 ‘People’s Budget’ debate in 79 suffragette protest in 100–1 House of Lords Churchill’s position on 16–17, 79, 84 opposition to ‘People’s Budget’ 16–17 Hull, Cordell 162 Hungary 24, 97, 147, 163 Hussein, King 119–20 Hussein-McMahon pledges 118 Hyde Park, Roosevelt–Churchill agreement at 173 hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) 171, 178–9, 195–6 estimated loss of life with 202 n.45 Iberia 140 Ibn Saud, King 121 Iceland 159, 167 n.22 Imperial Conference, 1926 38 Imperial Preference system 40, 110, 149, 162, 168 n.29 Independent Force, RAF 128 India Britain’s withdrawal from 9 British imperial reform in 7, 54, 109–10, 122 Churchill’s defence of British rule in 120–1, 122 Churchill’s military service in 3, 94, 106–7, 114, 115, 116 Churchill’s opposition to selfgovernment in 5, 76, 110 Hindu-Muslim tensions 120, 121, 122 independence of 110, 122 Muslims in 115, 116, 120, 121, 122 partition of 122 polo played in 115 resistance to British rule 110 Sikh-Muslim harmony 115, 116 Indian Army, strength of 126 n.40 Indian Congress Party 121 Indian Defence League 121 Indian Empire Society 121

222

INDEX

Indian Ocean 144, 148, 149 India Office 118 indirect taxes 40 individualism 55 Industrial Charter 87 industrial unrest 13, 15, 16, 51–3, 59, 61, 62, 70. See also General Strike, 1926 İnönü, İsmet 121 Inskip, Thomas 142 Iran 122, 162 Iranian revolution, 1979 122 Iraq 109 Churchill’s actions against rebellions in 4, 120 creation of modern 109 Faisal on the throne of 119–20 Ireland Churchill’s concern for issues in 4, 19, 23, 106, 108–9 home rule for 14, 15, 19, 79 partition of 109 peace settlement 4 trade unions 50 Irish Free State 109 Irish Free State Constitution 109 Irish rebellion, 1916 108–9 Irish Republican Army 109 iron and steel industry 39, 40, 66, 69 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, 1946 9, 76, 175, 187–90, 194, 197–8 Iron Duke, HMS 24 ‘Irwin Declaration’ of November 1929 82 Islam/Islamic Churchill’s view of 113–17, 120, 121, 122, 123 fundamentalist interpretations of 114, 116 imams 119 Indian Muslims 115, 116, 117, 120, 121 jihadist 113, 116 sects of 119 Shias 119 Sunnis 114, 119 tribes in Nigeria 116 view of the Mahdiyya/Mahdi 114,

123 nn.2–3 Islamic world anti-British/pan-Islamic movement, 117–18 British policy in 118–20 Cairo Conference policies 119–20 Churchill’s relationship with 113–26 failures of Churchill in 123 Mediterranean region 116, 118 Middle East 113, 118–22 national aspirations of 118 nationalist movements in 122 Northern Nigeria 116 Ottoman Empire 114–18 during Second World War 121–2 Isle of Wight 94 Israel 122 Istanbul 121. See also Constantinople Istrian Peninsula 163 Italy Anglo-American operations in 133, 144, 145–7, 162 atrocities in Libya 117 British concern of 24 colonies 144, 147, 149 defeat of 143, 144, 147 and German alliance 143, 144 in Second World War 143, 144, 145, 147 Tripartite Pact 168 n.23 war debts 36, 42 Jackson, Elizabeth 98 Japan Anglo-American attacks on 7, 134, 145–6, 148, 149, 150, 160, 163, 164, 173–4, 178 attack on Pearl Harbor 7, 157, 160, 161 bombing of Hiroshima–Nagasaki 134, 173–4 and British alliance 14, 38 invasion of Asia 110, 160 invasion of Singapore 7, 144, 145 naval power 38, 40 Tripartite Pact 168 n.23 US declaration of war upon 7 Jerome, Clara 94

INDEX

Jerome, Leonard 94 Jews 97, 109, 118, 120 jihadists 113, 116, 117 Jinnah, M. A. 121, 122 Joan of Arc 97 Jordan 120, 121 Joynson-Hicks, William 65, 66 Kaiser, SMS 24 Kaiser Wilhelm 14, 18, 24, 29 Katharine (Duchess of Atholl) 101 Kennedy, John F. 111 Kennedy, Joseph 166 n.4 Kerensky, Alexander 49 Keynes, John Maynard 36–7, 38, 61, 70 ‘khaki’ election 77 Khan, Aga 121 Kiel, air raid against 130 Kimball, Warren F. 154, 162 King George V, HMS 24 Kinross 101 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 31, 107 Knights, Eva 98 König, SMS 24 Korean War and Cold War 176–7 outbreak of 191 US involvement in 179, 191, 193 Kra isthmus, Thailand 149 Kremlin 97, 188, 193, 195–6 Kurds/Kurdistan 120 Kursk, failure at 147, 148 Labour Exchanges Act 51 Labour Party Churchill’s criticism of 9, 87, 88, 173, 175–7, 190 Churchill’s relationship with 5, 49–58, 82 conferences 59, 87 criticism of Churchill 176, 191, 192 defence policy 54 fall of government 80 in First World War 50 Indian policy 82–3 leadership of 53, 54, 55, 69 and Liberal coalition 80, 84, 85, 86

223

membership of 68 MPs 50, 145 1945 election victory 86 rise of 50 social reforms of 87 Landemare, Georgina 98 Lane-Fox, G. R. 63, 64, 67, 69, 71 Lawrence, T. E. 109, 119 Layton, Elizabeth 98, 99 League of Nations 109, 188 Leicester West, working-class constituency of 80 Lend-Lease agreement, 1942 149, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168 n.29 Lenin, V. I. 97 Leslie, Leonie 97 Liberal Party Churchill’s drift from 35, 53, 80, 109 Churchill’s joining 3, 15, 16–17, 78–9, 99, 100, 108, 116 Churchill’s support for 76, 78 Churchill’s view of 3, 5 colonial policy 108 Conservatives’ hostility toward 18, 79 criticism of Churchill 18 fall of 4 and Labour coalition 80, 84, 85, 86 1906 election victory 13, 14, 16 1910 election victory 17 1913–14 by-election defeats 18 resistance from Unionists 15 social reforms 51, 76 split in 79 Libya 117, 145, 149 Lindemann, Frederick 172 ‘Little Englandism’ 77 Llandudno 175 Llanelli riots, 1911 52 Lloyd George, David air defence policy 128, 129 appointment of Churchill as minister of munitions 31 as Chancellor of the Exchequer 15, 29 Churchill’s relationship with 3, 15, 16, 19, 31, 39, 51, 52, 54, 55, 79, 95, 109, 118

224

INDEX

coalition governments 4, 53–4, 60, 78–9, 81, 109 Conservative hostility towards 79 fall of government 4, 79, 80, 109 and the General Strike, 1926 60 and the Liberal Cabinet 18 in naval expansion debate 18, 19, 29 against Ottoman Empire 118 People’s Budget 16 as president of the Board of Trade 51 as prime minister 4, 85, 118, 142 social reforms of 16, 79 suffragette attack on 17 Lloyds Bank 35–6 London 18, 50, 52, 67, 96, 119, 121, 122, 132, 154, 156, 158, 162, 165, 168 n.28, 178–9, 196 London County Council 99 Londonderry, Marquess of 71 Long, Sydney 66 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 165, 166 Lord Privy Seal 145 Los Alamos 172, 175 Lothian, Lord 156, 158 Lugard, Frederick 116 Macassey, Lynden 53 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3 MacDonald, Ramsay 55, 69 Macmillan, Harold 9, 41, 76, 87, 196, 197 Mahdiyya 114 Malaya 148, 149, 160 Malaya, HMS 24 managed currency, Keynes’s idea of 37, 38 Manchester Churchill’s by-election campaign in 3, 16, 17, 99–100 free trade movement in 99–100 military recruits in 14 Manchester Chamber of Commerce 82 Manhattan Project 160, 168 n.25, 172, 174 Marlborough family 2, 94, 97, 106, 140, 154 Marrakesh 98, 122, 126 n.44

Marshall, George C. 161 Marshall Plan 189, 190 Masterson-Smith Committee 119 Maudling, Reginald 87 Mau Mau uprising, Kenya 105, 111 Maurer, John 29 Mawdsley, James 50 Mayo, Katherine 120 McCormick, Anne O’Hare 155 McKenna, Reginald 18, 25, 37 McKenna duties 40 McMahon Act, 1946 173, 176, 177, 178 Mecca 119, 120 media and press American press reports 158, 160 Blitz reports in 158 Churchill’s portrayal in 18, 83 during General Strike, 1926 66–7 reports on nuclear developments 195 rise of 14 support of free trade 78 Mediterranean Anglo-American operations in 140, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 163 British policy in 118 Churchill’s holiday in 116 withdrawal of British ships from 18, 26, 28, 161 Meinertzhagen, Richard 119, 124 n.26 Mesopotamia 117, 118–20 rebellion, 1920 109 Middle East border issues 4 British imperialism and Churchill’s involvement in 109, 113–26 Middle East Department 118–19 militancy suffragette 13, 15, 17 trade union 49–58 Milner, Lord 118 miners, strikes by 18, 53, 55, 59–74 Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 60, 61–70, 71–2 n.15 minimum wages 16, 49, 51, 61, 63, 64, 68 Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB) 63–4, 69, 70

INDEX

Ministry of Munitions 54, 118 Mitford sisters 98 Mohammed, Prophet 114–15, 119 Mohmand Valley 116 Molotov, Vyacheslav 161, 168 n.28, 197 Monkton, Walter 55 Monte Bello test 177–8 Montgomery, Bernard 133, 147 Moran, Lord 172, 200 n.24 Morgenthau Plan 163, 169 n.33 Morning Post 3, 66 Morocco 26, 143 Morrison, Herbert 54 Mosaddegh, Mohammad 122 Moscow 163, 174, 175, 178, 188, 190, 192, 193–6 Mosley, Oswald 98 Mother India (Mayo) 120 Moyne, Lord 122 Munich Agreement, 1938 83, 101 ‘Munitions possibilities of 1918’ 128 Muslims 113–17, 119, 120–3, 125 n.34, 126 n.40. See also Islam/ Islamic Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 180, 197 My African Journey (Churchill) 108 My Early Life (Churchill) 9, 50, 94, 116 Napoleon, Louis 94 Narvik, German invasion of 142 Nash’s Pall Mall 172 Nassau, SMS 24 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 122 National Government, 1930s 5, 82, 89, 101, 110, 129 National Insurance Act 18, 51 National Liberal Club 35 National Wages Board 62 nation state 26 naval limitations 23, 27–8, 29 navy, German Anglo-German expansion programme 23–34 defence policy 18, 24 dreadnought battleships 24–5, 26 laws 18, 26, 27

225

North Sea position of 24, 27 supremacy of 18, 24, 25 Navy Estimates of 1912–13 27, 28 of 1913–14 18–19, 29 of 1914–15 19, 29 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939 168 n.28 Nehru, Jawaharlal 110–11 Newfoundland 7, 157 Newspaper Proprietors’ Association 66, 67 New Statesman 65 New York 42, 94, 96, 154, 173, 179 New York Times 155 New Zealand capital ships laid down in Britain 25 Churchill’s relations with 110 coastal defence 28 intervention in Gallipoli campaign 31 Niemeyer, Otto 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Nigeria 116 Nobel Prize 197 Nonconformity 78 Noon, Feroz Khan 121 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 176, 178, 190, 191–4, 196 North Sea 24, 27 North-West Frontier, Churchill’s military service in 3, 107, 116 Norway British strategy towards 5–6, 146 German invasion of 84, 141, 142 Nottingham coalfields 68, 72 n.21 nuclear weapons 171–85 Britain 171–3, 177–8, 179, 192 Soviet Union 175, 177, 178–9 US 168 n.25, 172–5, 176, 179 Obama, Barack 153 Ofotfjord 142 oil 19, 30, 130, 160, 168 n.23 Oldham, by-election 3, 9, 15, 16, 50, 52, 77, 78, 95 Operation Catapult 166 n.7 Operation Overlord 162 Operation Torch 144, 145 Oran 156

226

INDEX

Orange River Colony 16 Orion, HMS 24 Ottoman Empire Britain’s relationship with 114–18, 120 entry into First World War 117 Overy, Richard 11 Oxford University 172 Pakistan 121 creation of 122 Palestine 9, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120 Palmerston, Lord 154 Pan-Asianism 110 pan-Islamic movement 117 Pankhurst, Christabel 17 Pankhurst, Emmeline 100 Panther 26 Paris Commune 50 Paris Peace Conference, 1919 119 Park, Keith 131 Parliament British 1, 13, 15, 17, 27, 35, 38, 50, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 84–7, 93, 95, 100, 108, 110, 116, 121, 145, 153, 177, 192, 196 Canadian 28 Passenger Duty 39 Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack at 7, 157, 160 Pearman, Rosemary 98 Pearman, Violet 98 pensions 5, 39, 76, 81, 100 People’s Budget 16–17, 79 ‘Permanent Organisation of the Royal Air Force’ 128 Persia 117, 119 Perth 101 petrol duty 40 Philip, Terence 96 Philippines 160 Phoenix Park, Dublin 106 Photographic Interpretation Unit, WAAF 102 Pitt, William (First Earl of Chatham) 143 Placentia Bay Conference, 1941 149 Plowden, Pamela 95

Poland German attack on 5, 83, 141, 154–5 independence of 163, 164 Soviet domination of 8, 146, 162 police 4, 17, 18, 52, 67, 69, 100, 121 polo 115 Ponting, Clive 106 poor relief 69 Porch, Montagu 95 Portal, Charles 129 Posen, SMS 24–5 Potsdam Conference, 1945 134, 173, 174, 175, 195, 196 press reports. See media and press Pretoria 3 Primrose League 16, 77 Prior, Robin 10 protectionism 15, 35, 80, 81, 82 Prussia 25 Pugh, Arthur 64, 68, 69 quasi-Darwinism 115 Quebec Agreement 102, 163, 169 n.33, 173, 177 Queen Elizabeth, HMS 24, 195–6 Quinault, Roland 106 railways derating of 39 workers strike 52, 60, 65, 66 Ramsden, John 10 Rathbone, Eleanor 101 Reagan, Ronald 153 realpolitik 8 real wages 60, 61, 70 rearmament 5, 38, 49, 76, 83, 89, 127, 129–30, 191–3, 196 Recipes from No. 10 (Landemare) 98 Red Army 133, 160, 174, 190 Red Cross 101 ‘Report on Revolutionary Organisation in the United Kingdom’ 62 Reshadieh 117 Reves, Emery 97 Reynolds, David 10, 154 Rheinland, SMS 24 Rhine 133, 148

INDEX

Rhondda Valley coalminers’ strike 18 River War, The (Churchill) 3, 107, 113, 114, 115 Riviera 96, 98 Robjent, Ada 98 Romania 147, 156, 163 Rome 114, 133 Rommel, Erwin 145, 161 Roosevelt, Eleanor 101 Roosevelt, Franklin D. Churchill’s relationship with 7, 8, 122, 132, 145, 149, 153–69, 173, 177 death of 8, 164, 173 favour of ‘trusteeship’ 149 Hyde Park residence of 173 Lend-Lease policy 149, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168 n.29 love for the navy 155 opposition to British colonial rule 149, 161–2 polio disability of 155, 164 Stalin’s relationship with 132, 161, 162, 163 tours of 154, 158 view of the Second World War 141 Roquebrune 97 Rowntree, Joseph 14 Royal Air Force (RAF) air strength 131 atominc arsenal 178 Churchill’s support of 127–8, 132 Neville Chamberlain’s role in development of 130 raids against Germany 127–37 rank titles 128 ‘separate independent state’ of 128 Singleton Report 132 training schools 131 uniform 132 Royal Assent 68 Royal Commission 60, 62, 102 Royal Irish Constabulary 109 Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) 30, 128 Royal Navy air arms 19, 40 arms race 24–34 battleships laid down 25

227

construction programme 23–34, 156–7 defence of home waters 24, 28, 29, 30t dreadnought battleships 24, 25, 27, 30t failure of management 141–3 in First World War 24, 30 government spending on 18–19, 24, 27–9 modernization of 19, 24, 29 oil reserves/supplies 19, 30 operations against French colonies 156, 157 operations against Japan 163 rebuilding programme 18 in Second World War 141–2, 163 service personnel 28 strength of 30t support from the Dominions 28 supremacy of 18, 24, 25 Royal Sovereign, HMS 24 Ruane, Kevin 11 Ruhr cities 133 Russell, Wendy 97 Russia. See Soviet Russia Sadullah, Mullah 116 Salisbury, Lord 14, 15, 77, 78 Salvation Army 51 Samuel, Herbert 62–3, 67, 119 Samuel Report 64, 65, 69 Sandhurst 2, 94, 99 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough 97 Saudi Arabia 121 Savrola (Churchill) 50, 94 Scandinavia 140 Scott, C. P. 99 Scrivings, George 50 Second World War British strategy in 139–51 Churchill’s leadership in 1, 7, 54, 84–6, 89, 105, 127–37, 139–51 end of 127, 162, 164, 173, 174, 187 outbreak of 83, 154 Second Front advance 147–8 Selective Service Act 157, 167 n.12 Senegal, French colony of 143 Seven Hours Act, 1919 60, 63

228

INDEX

Shadow Cabinet 5, 81–2 Sheridan, Clare 97 ‘Sherifian solution’ 119–20 Shia Muslims 119, 120, 123 n.3 Shipyard Labour Department 53 Shuckburgh, John 119 Sicily 145 Siege of Sidney Street, 1911 4, 18, 50 Sikhs 115, 116 silk duty 40 Simon, John 18 Simonstown 28 Sinclair, Archibald 130 Singapore 7 British imperialism in 7, 40, 148, 149, 150 fall of 110, 144, 145 naval base 40 Smith, F. E. 79 Smith, Herbert 63, 64, 67, 69, 70 Smoot-Hawley Tariff, US 168 n.29 Snowden, Philip 35, 41 socialism 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 80 Sofia 133, 188 Somaliland 119, 129, 149 South Africa Chinese labour in 108 Churchill’s relations with 106, 110 Churchill’s role in 1, 3, 14, 16, 77, 107, 108 Soviet Russia. See also Bolshevik Revolution A-bomb test 191, 192 and Anglo-American alliance 163–5 and Anglo-American operations against 174–5, 191–2, 194 and Anglo-German naval expansion 24 army 26, 174 and Britain alliance 14, 24, 26, 146, 189 and British atomic diplomacy 174–5 Churchill’s anti-Bolshevist stance 4, 53–4, 76, 80 Churchill’s efforts to end the Cold War 187–203 Churchill’s visits to 194, 196, 198 Civil War 146

expansionism of 115, 122, 163, 174, 187–8, 189–90 in First World War 144 and German hostilities 7, 26, 29, 101, 159–60 nuclear weapons 175–7, 178, 191 occupation zones in Europe 174 in Second World War 141, 145, 146 socialism 49, 50, 51, 54, 55 superpower status of 110, 191, 196 TUC and 71–2 n.15 US aid to 101, 160, 161, 162 war against Japan 164 war debts 36 Spanish colonies 140, 143 Special Branch, Metropolitan Police 62 Special Industrial Conference 62 special relationship, Anglo-American 7, 8, 9, 11, 106, 122, 139–51, 148, 153–69, 171–85, 187–203 ABC 1 talks 161 anti-Soviet policy 175–6, 178–9, 187, 188, 190–1 differences and disagreements 157–8, 162, 165, 168 n.30, 172, 173, 175–6, 177, 178–9, 193, 194, 195–6 Eisenhower–Churchill relationship 193, 194, 195–6, 197 intelligence sharing 160, 167 n.22, 168 n.25, 168 n.27, 173, 175 military cooperation 153–60, 188–9, 190–1 Morgenthau Plan 163, 169 n.33 nuclear weapons development and atomic diplomacy 171–85, 187–203 press conference references to 158, 160, 161 Roosevelt–Churchill relationship 153–4, 160–1, 162, 164–6 and Roosevelt–Stalin relationship 161, 162, 163, 168 n.28 Truman–Churchill relationship 188–93 US–UK–Commonwealth partnership 188, 189 Yalta Conference 163–4

INDEX

Stalin Berlin blockade 189–90 Churchill’s relationship with 8, 132, 141, 144, 149, 163, 164, 168 n.28, 168 n.30, 174–5, 190 death of 178, 193–4 Roosevelt’s relationship with 8, 161–4, 168 n.28, 168 n.30 Stanley, Sylvia 97 Stanley, Venetia 97 staple industries 39, 60 Steel-Maitland, Arthur 63, 65, 69 Stern Gang 122 St Helier, Lady 95 stock exchange crash, 1929 42 Story of the Malakand Field Force, The (Churchill) 3, 95, 107 Sturdee, Jo 98 St Vincent, HMS 24 Sudan. See also Battle of Omdurman Britain’s reconquest of 3, 107, 113 Churchill’s military service in 50, 108, 115, 171 Suez Canal 143, 146 Suez Crisis, 1956 111, 122 suffragettes 13, 15, 17–18, 99, 100, 164 Sultan Osman I 117 summits 159, 176, 191. See also specific summits Sunni Muslims 114, 117, 119, 120 Supply and Transport Committee (STC) 61, 66, 67 Supply and Transport Organisation (STO) 61, 62 sweated trades 16, 49, 51 Sydney 28 Sykes, Mark 119 Sykes–Picot Agreement, 1916 118 Syria, liberation of 121 Taff Vale Judgement, 1902 52 TalaatBey Pasha 116 tariff reform 14–16, 40, 76, 77–8, 80, 108, 168 n.29 Tariff Reform League 16 taxation policy derating scheme 39, 41, 81 on imported goods 14, 41

229

indirect tax revenues 40–1 and national debt 36, 39–40 and naval expenditure 29 relief schemes 39–40 tea duty 41 Teheran Conference, 1943 102, 132, 162, 163 10 Downing Street 1, 6, 9, 35, 84, 98, 177 Territorial Army 67 Tewson, Vincent 55 Thackeray, David 10 Thailand 149 T’hami El Glaoui 122 Thatcher, Margaret 76, 153 Thomas, J. H. 53, 65, 66 Thornton, Martin 10 Times, The 37, 54, 66, 175 Tirpitz, Admiral Alfred von 14, 24 Tobruk, Libya 145 Tonypandy Incident 18, 52, 53 totalitarianism 132 Trade Boards Act, 1909 16, 51 Trade Disputes Act, 1906 67–8 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, 1927 68 Trade Facilities Act (TFA), 1921 38 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 52, 54, 55, 62–70, 71–2 n.15 trade unions Churchill and 15, 49–58, 81 Churchill’s tribute to 54–5 cooperation 61 and the General Strike, 1926 60–70 growth of 50 leadership of 55 rules 68 Transjordan 109 Transport & General Workers’ Union 65 Transvaal 16, 109 Treasury Churchill’s leadership of 35–48, 78, 80–1, 158 Lloyd George’s leadership of 29 Niemeyer as financial controller of 37 Warren Fisher as permanent secretary of 38

230

INDEX

Trenchard, Hugh 129 Trinity test 173, 174 Triple Alliance 60, 117 Tripolitanian War, 1911 117 Trotsky 97 Truman, Harry S. 173, 174, 177, 188–93 Truman Doctrine 189 Tube Alloys 172, 176 Tunisia 145 Turkey. See also Gallipoli Churchill’s relationship with 115, 117–18, 120, 121–2, 147 in First World War 4, 30–1 Greco-Turkish war of 1897 115 turnover tax 41 Tuscaloosa, USS 158 Tweedmouth, Lord 27 U-boats 141, 147, 159, 167 n.22 Ulema 114 Ulster Hall 19, 21 n.21 unemployment Churchill’s policies for combating 13–14, 16, 36, 38–9, 41, 51, 69, 81, 88 cyclical and seasonal 51 impact of Gold Standard 5 post-war 36, 38–9 rise in 36, 39, 41, 82 unemployment insurance 13–14, 16, 51 Unionists Churchill and 19, 21 n.21, 108 and Conservative alliance 14 and Conservative split 16, 78 Joseph Chamberlain’s leadership of 78 opposition to Irish home rule 15 Salisbury government 14 tariff reform issue 16 United Nations 164, 175, 188 United States Anglo-American operations against 127–37, 139–51 attacks on Japan 7, 134, 145–6, 148, 149, 150, 160, 163, 164, 173–4, 178 cash-and-carry provisions 157–8

Churchill’s diplomacy with 84–5, 139–51, 153–69, 171–85, 187–203 Churchill’s visits to 111, 154, 160–1, 187–8, 195–6 Congress 8, 157, 158, 159, 160, 173, 178, 188, 189 and German relationship 42, 191–2 Gold Standard in 37 involvement in China 149, 177, 179, 194 involvement in Korean War 179, 191, 193 naval disarmament initiatives 42 neutrality laws 157 nuclear weapons 8, 172, 174, 175–6, 178, 194, 195 opposition to British imperialism 110, 111, 149 press conferences, Roosevelt 158, 160 in Second World War 7, 127–37, 139–51 Smoot-Hawley Tariff 168 n.29 and Soviet relations 8, 101, 161–4, 168 n.28, 168 n.30, 174 special relationship with Britain 9, 11, 127–37, 139–51, 153–69, 171–85, 187–203 stock exchange crash of 1929 42 superpower status of 110 and UK–Commonwealth partnership 188, 189 war aims of 159 war loans to Britain 36, 42, 156–9 University of Edinburgh 101 US Air Force 173, 176 US Armed Forces 164 US Army 159, 160, 176 strength of 156 US Atomic Energy Commission 178 Valiant, HMS 24 Vancouver 28 Vickers and Armstrong 39 Victorian era 3, 50, 55, 105–6, 121, 123 Wake Island 160 War Cabinet 5, 6, 79, 84, 122, 130, 172

INDEX

War Council 31 War Office 31, 144, 158 War of the Spanish Succession 140 War Planning Directorate 145 Warspite, HMS 24 Warwickshire coalfields 72 n.21 Washington 143, 154, 156, 161, 162, 168 nn.27–8, 176–9, 193, 194, 195 Washington Naval Conference, 1921 38 Waterloo 143 weapons of mass destruction 198. See also nuclear weapons Wehrmacht 160 Weir, Lord 129 welfare state 1, 8, 13–14, 77, 88 Welldon, J. E. C. 2, 106, 114 Wellington, Duke of 140 Wells, H. G. 172 Western Europe 9, 144, 146, 176, 189, 190, 192, 196 Western European Union (WEU) 196, 197 Western Front, Churchill’s military service on 4, 31, 96, 142, 154 Westfalen, SMS 24 Westminster 31, 80, 95 Westminster College 187, 188 Whitehall 156 White House 155, 160, 161 White Paper 129 Whyte, Maryott 96 Wilkinson, Ellen 101 Williams, Evan 63, 64, 69 Willkie, Wendell 167 n.12 Wilson, A. T. 119

231

Wilson, Muriel 95 Wilson, Woodrow 154, 155 women. See also suffragettes in Churchill family 94–5, 97–8 Churchill’s attitudes towards 10, 93–103 Edwardian 14–15 equal pay for 102 labour force and Trade Boards Act 51 post-war policy 100–1 traditional roles of 93 wartime roles of 54, 93–4, 95, 100–1, 102 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) 102 Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) 102 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) 17, 100 Woodford 80 Woolner, David B. 11 Woolton, Lord 87 working class 41, 50, 52, 54, 76, 80 World Crisis, The (Churchill) 5, 23–4, 31 Wright brothers 172 Wrigley, Chris 10 Yalta Conference, 1945 8, 102, 163–4, 195 Young, Hubert 119 Yugoslavia 147, 162, 163 Zeppelin airships 127, 128 Zionism 109, 119, 122 Zurich, Churchill’s speech in 9, 190