The election results were announced on 15 February 1910. The Liberals had retained power but by the narrowest of majorities; 275 seats as against 273 won by the Conservatives. With 84 seats, the Irish Nationalists again held the balance of political power. The Labour Party's 42 seats made it once more the smallest Party in the Commons. Churchill held his seat at Dundee with the same majority as before, just over nine thousand.
On the day the election results were announced Churchill accepted the senior Secretaryship of State, that of Home Secretary, with responsibility for the police, prisons, and prisoners. Only Robert Peel, the founder of the police force, had held the office at an earlier age, thirty-three. The prospects of the new office filled him 'with excitement and exhilaration', Violet Asquith later recalled. 'He was always eager to move on and break new ground and he was already busily exploring the possibilities of his new kingdom. He would have a fine Army to command, the Police Force, but he was mainly pre-occupied with the fate of their quarry, the criminals. His own experience of captivity had made him the Prisoner's Friend, and his mind was seething with plans for lightening their lot by earned remissions of sentence while "in durance vile", by libraries and entertainment. "They must have food for thought-plenty of books-that's what I missed most-except of course the chance of breaking bounds and getting out of the damned place-and I suppose I mustn't give them that!"'
From his first days as Home Secretary, Churchill embarked upon a comprehensive programme of prison reform. On February 21, six days after becoming Home Secretary, he went to the opening night of John Galsworthy's play Justice at the Duke of York's Theatre. With him he took Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the Chairman of the Prison Commissioners appointed by Asquith fifteen years earlier, and a supporter of solitary confinement. The play was a powerful indictment of solitary confinement and Churchill was much moved by it. Yet, he explained on March 7 to his Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Sir Edward Troup, he was also impressed 'with the importance of making the first period of prison life a severe disciplinary course, of interposing a hiatus between the world which the convict has left and the public works gang which he is to join'.
Two months later Churchill announced that solitary confinement would be reduced to one month for first offenders and those in the intermediate class, and to three months for recidivists. When the new rules were announced Galsworthy wrote to Churchill's Aunt Leonie: 'I have always admired his pluck and his capacity, and a vein of imagination somewhat rare amongst politicians. I now perceive him to have a heart, and to be very human. I think he will go very far, and the further if he succeeds in keeping the fighting elements in him at white rather than red heat.'
That March, Churchill created a distinction, hitherto unknown, between criminal and political prisoners. This move was of immediate benefit to many imprisoned suffragettes. Prison rules which were 'suitable for criminals jailed for dishonesty or cruelty or other crimes implying moral turpitude', he explained to the Commons, 'should not be applied inflexibly to those whose general character is good and whose offences, however reprehensible, do not involve personal dishonour'.
As he had indicated to Violet Asquith, Churchill also tried to set up libraries for prisoners; the committee which he appointed to examine this question recommended that the catalogue of 'a well-managed public library' should be the guide to a prisoners' book list. But his main assault on the existing system concerned those prison sentences which he considered excessive. On this he carried on a vigorous correspondence within his department, and having studied individual cases in detail, frequently expressed his dissatisfaction with individual judges. Commenting on a sentence of ten years' penal servitude for sodomy, he minuted to his officials: 'The prisoner has already received two frightful sentences of seven years' penal servitude, one for stealing lime juice and one for stealing apples. It is not impossible that he contracted his unnatural habits in prison.'
It seemed to Churchill that an upper limit was needed in sentencing. 'Only circumstances of rare and peculiar aggravation,' he minuted, 'would, in my opinion, be sufficient to justify a sentence of over ten years' penal servitude for a single offence unaccompanied by danger to life. Where wealth is deliberately employed to the systematic corruption of minors; where force is used with such brutality as to produce permanent injury; where there is vile treachery, as in the case of a schoolmaster, or where there is evidence of habitual concentration of a man's main activities upon criminal intercourse of this character, then that limit may be exceeded. But for isolated acts of bestiality, even when accompanied by violence amounting to rape, and where the full offence is committed, seven years' penal servitude would appear to me the standard sentence which should be borne in mind.'
On July 3, while preparing reforms intended to reduce the number of offenders being sent to Borstal, Churchill wrote to his advisers, 'I should certainly not consent to be responsible for any system which can be shown to aggravate the severity of the Penal Code.' On July 20 he presented his reforms to the Commons. One of his intentions was to abolish automatic imprisonment for non-payment of fines. 'Let the House see what an injurious operation that is,' he explained. 'The State loses its fine. The man goes to prison, perhaps for the first time-a shocking event. He goes through all the formalities for a four or five day sentence that would apply if he were sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. He is photographed, taken off in a Black Maria, and has his fingerprints taken. All these painful processes are gone through just as in the case of a long sentence.'
The principle Churchill wished to establish was 'time to pay'. In the year before he became Home Secretary, 95,686 people had been sent to prison for four or five days each, through not being able to pay a fine imposed by the courts. Only on account of the congestion of the Parliamentary time-table was his reform delayed until 1914. Within five years of the new rule, the number of those imprisoned for failure to pay fines had dropped to just over five thousand. The majority of those imprisoned were those who had been fined for drunkenness; their numbers dropped from 62,822 in 1908-9 to less than two thousand in 1919.
Churchill's next reform was to reduce the number of young people in prison. Each year more than five thousand between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one were imprisoned. All this was to change. Henceforth no young person could be sent to prison 'unless he is incorrigible or has committed a serious offence'. The imprisonment of young people, Churchill told the King in one of the regular letters in which he followed the tradition of a Home Secretary sending the Sovereign a full account of proceedings in Parliament, was 'pure waste'. What was needed was a system of 'defaulters' drills', based upon physical exercises, 'very healthy, very disagreeable', done possibly at Police stations. 'No lad between 16 & 21 ought to be sent to prison for mere punishment,' Churchill told his Sovereign. 'Every sentence should be conceived with the object of pulling him together & bracing him for the world: it should be in fact disciplinary and educative rather than penal.'
In the Commons, Churchill defended his cutting back on the imprisonment of young offenders by drawing Members' attention to the fact that 'the evil only falls on the sons of the working classes. The sons of other classes commit many of the same offences. In their boisterous and exuberant spirits in their days at Oxford and Cambridge they commit offences-for which scores of the sons of the working class are committed to prison-without any injury being inflicted on them.' There had been 12,376 boys under twenty-one in prison when Churchill became Home Secretary. By 1919 this number had fallen below four thousand. But Churchill's plan for defaulters' drill, though favoured by the Police and the Lord Chief Justice, did not survive the scrutiny of his officials; the principle which he tried to establish had to wait until the Criminal Justice Bill of 1948 for its implementation.
Underlying Churchill's prison reforms was a real understanding of the nature of imprisonment from the perspective of the prisoner. In the course of his speech on July 10 he referred, in moving terms, to this aspect. 'We must not forget,' he said, 'that when every material improvement has been effected in prisons, when the temperature has been adjusted, when the proper food to maintain health and strength has been given, when the doctors, chaplains, and prison visitors have come and gone, the convict stands deprived over everything that a free man calls life. We must not forget that all these improvements, which are sometimes salves to our consciences, do not change that position.'
Churchill then spoke of the considerations which he believed should guide the penal system of any progressive country, telling the House: 'The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man-these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.'
That summer Churchill advocated several further pioneering changes which were to come into effect while he was still at the Home Office. One innovation was that of entertainment in prison; henceforth a lecture or a concert would be given four times a year in every prison. 'These wretched people,' he told the King, 'must have something to think about, & break the long monotony.' Special concessions would also be made for aged and weak-minded convicts.
As well as reforms inside prison walls, Churchill abolished police supervision of ex-convicts and replaced it with a Central Agency for the care of convict prisoners after their release. Former prisoners would no longer be supervised solely by the Police, but by a separate body made up of specially nominated official members and representatives of the various existing Prisoners' Aid Societies.
In explaining this reform to a Liberal colleague while it was still in its planning stage, Churchill had pointed out that of every four convicts discharged between 1903 and 1905, three were already back in penal servitude. 'It is this terrible proportion of recidivism that I am anxious to break in upon.' Police supervision and aid-on-discharge 'fail altogether to enable or encourage a convict to resume his place in honest industry. A supervision more individualised, more intimate, more carefully considered, more philanthropically inspired, is necessary.' Hence the weaving together of all existing Prisoners' Aid Societies 'into one strong confederacy, to sustain them with funds on a larger scale than they have hitherto had at their disposal, to place them in contact with individual convicts long before these are again thrown upon the world, and only to use the ordinary methods of police supervision in cases which are utterly refractory'. Churchill's efforts were appreciated by prison reformers. 'These changes,' Galsworthy wrote to The Times on July 23, 'are one and all inspired by imagination, without which reform is deadly, and by common sense, without which it is dangerous.'
***
That summer, in pursuit of the Home Secretary's right to recommend reprieve in capital murder cases, Churchill studied the documents of a particular case in which the death penalty had been given, writing out a detailed ten-point memorandum in which he tried to test the evidence against arguments and possibilities other than those that had been put forward in the condemned man's defence. After examining the contentious points carefully, he did not feel able to recommend a reprieve.
A year after leaving the Home Office, Churchill told a friend that 'it had become a nightmare' to him having to exercise his power of life and death in the case of convicted criminals, and in a debate on capital punishment in 1948 he told the House of Commons: 'I found it very distressing nearly forty years ago to be at the Home Office. There is no post that I have occupied in Government which I was more glad to leave. It was not so much taking the decisions in capital cases that oppressed me, although that was a painful duty. I used to read the letters of appeal written by convicts undergoing long or life sentences begging to be let out. This was for me an even more harassing task.'
Churchill continued: 'I remember one capital case in particular. This was the case of a soldier of about forty-five years of age, who in a fit of rage killed his wife or the woman with whom he had long lived. After the crime he walked downstairs where a number of little children to whom he used to give sweets awaited him. He took all his money out of his pocket and gave it to them saying, "I shall not want this any more". He then walked to the police station and gave himself up. I was moved by the whole story and by many features in the character of this unhappy man. The judge who tried the case advised that the sentence should be carried out. The officials at the Home Office, with their very great experience, suggested no interference with the course of the law. But I had my own view, and I was unfettered in action in this respect.'
Churchill recommended a reprieve. Shortly afterwards the soldier committed suicide. Though shaken that the reprieved man had considered 'a life sentence is worse than a death sentence', Churchill was proud of the fact, as he told the Commons in 1948, that 'at every point in our system of criminal justice the benefit of the doubt is given to the accused. At every point in the subsequent consideration of a capital sentence, when it has been passed, the same bias is shown in favour of the convicted person. But when justice and the law have done their best within their limits, when precedents have been searched and weighed, mercy still roams around the prison seeking for some chink by which she can creep in.'
***
Confronted by the continuing challenge of the Lords against Liberal social reforms, Asquith thought of resignation, to be followed by a second election on the basis of the power of the Lords. Churchill was among those in the Cabinet who opposed any such course, arguing that the Government should fight on, despite its precarious majority. Asquith accepted this advice, announcing on March 18 that the Lords must be rebuilt on a democratic basis. At Manchester on the previous day, to the alarm of the King, Churchill had publicly advocated 'the Crown and the Commons acting together against the encroachments of the Lords'.
Government proposals to curb the powers of the Lords were introduced in the Commons on March 31. Churchill was the main Government speaker. Of the Conservative Peers who never came to the Lords except to vote against the budget, he declared: 'Nothing is more curious than the way in which they let themselves be led by the nose. Here are all these noblemen, placed in an independent station, enjoying easy and full education, and enlightened society, and well guarded and secured in all the affairs of this world, and so far from showing a spirit of independence, they allow themselves to be kept under a very strict discipline; they allow themselves to be led about and driven about, I will not say like a flock of sheep, because that would not be respectful, but like a regiment of soldiers, this way and that way.'
Churchill ended his speech: 'We have reached a fateful period in British history. The time for words is past, the time for action has arrived. Since the House of Lords, upon an evil and unpatriotic instigation-as I must judge it-have used their Veto to affront the Prerogative of the Crown and to invade the rights of the Commons, it has now become necessary that the Crown and the Commons, acting together, should restore the balance of the Constitution and restrict for ever the Veto of the House of Lords.'
'You made a most admirable speech: one of your best,' wrote Asquith. 'The only thing I regret is the last sentence-associating "the Crown" & the people: which I hope may be ignored.'
On April 28 the Lords was presented with the budget. Shirking a constitutional confrontation, it passed it without a division. Not wanting to risk further interference by the Lords in financial measures, Asquith decided to go forward with the Parliament Bill, even if it meant asking the King to create up to five hundred new Liberal peers to ensure the Bill's passage. But on May 6, as controversy raged over the possibility of the creation of so many new peers, Edward VII died.
In view of the inexperience of the new King, George V, a six-month truce was called in the constitutional struggle. Not only did Churchill support this, but called for the setting up of a National Government in which both Liberals and Conservatives, freed from the pressures and demands of their respective extremists, would work together to resolve the constitutional question, to devise a federal system for Ireland, to push forward with a general social welfare programme, and, if the European situation demanded, to introduce compulsory military service, something the Conservatives had been advocating for some time.
That summer Churchill left England with Clementine for a two-month holiday on board Baron de Forest's yacht Honor. The cruise took them through the Mediterranean and the Aegean, along the coast of Asia Minor to Constantinople. Edward Marsh, who had gone from the Board of Trade to the Home Office with Churchill, sent his master several 'pouches' of work as it accumulated; the first was waiting for him when he reached Athens. A month later Churchill wrote to Sir Edward Grey from Crete, 'I have received three substantial mails with departmental work & have chewed up a good many tough bits I had put aside for leisure days.'
At the Turkish port of Smyrna, accompanied by 'a proper escort against brigands', Churchill went on a special train the whole length of the British-built railway to Aidin, 'with a seat fitted up on the cow-catcher', a journey of 260 miles. There was 'no better way', he told Grey, 'of seeing a country in a flash'. Reflecting on his travels through Greece and Turkey, he told the Foreign Secretary, 'The only view I have formed about this part of the world of ruined civilisations & harshly jumbled races is this-why can't England & Germany come together in strong action & for general advantage?'
On his return to England, Churchill was the guest of the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, at British Army manoeuvres. 'I am thinking of you galloping about on Salisbury Plain in this delicious crisp weather,' Clementine wrote to him, '& wishing you were Commander-in-Chief on the eve of war instead of Home Secretary on the brink of an Autumn Session.' The holiday was not yet over; travelling to Wales, Churchill and Clementine were Lloyd George's guests at Criccieth, playing golf, motoring through the Welsh countryside, and deep-sea fishing.
'My wife and I will always remember your kindness and hospitality, and Wales in sunshine, shadow and sunset did the honours by sea and land not less agreeably,' Churchill wrote to Lloyd George from his final holiday stop, in Inverness-shire. In Scotland 'I have spent my days walking after horned beasts, and my nights in recovering from the effects of such exertions.' As to their political discussions at Criccieth, 'if we stood together', Churchill told Lloyd George, 'we ought to be strong enough either to impart a progressive character to policy, or by withdrawal to terminate an administration which had failed in its purpose'.
During his Mediterranean cruise Churchill had written a memorandum for Asquith, setting out those areas of prison administration and punishment which he felt still needed to be reformed. He was anxious to bring an end to the existing committal procedure whereby half of all prison committals were for two weeks or even less. Nearly half of these had been sent to prison for the first time, 'a terrible and purposeless waste of public money and human character'. No first-time offender should be sent to prison for a short sentence. 'There are two types of petty offender,' he explained to Asquith, 'the occasional and the habitual. No occasional offender ought to be sent to prison for a single trivial offence.'
Another proposal put forward by Churchill while he was at the Home Office was for curative institutions to be created for habitual drunkards, 'habitual brawlers' and petty offenders who had committed a specified number of offences within a single year. He also proposed uniformity of sentences for similar crimes, and to this end devised a classification of crimes into degrees of seriousness. Offences of the first degree were those against life; offences of the second degree, those against the person; offences of the third degree, those against property; and offences of the fourth degree, those against morals. Within each category, offences were to be distinguished according to their gravity, and appropriate penalties were suggested. A separate scheme of penalties was provided for petty crimes; occasional criminals should not be imprisoned unless the offence was serious enough to justify at least a month's imprisonment. For the habitual petty offender, he proposed a system whereby, after a certain number of unpunished offences, there would be 'disciplinary detention in a suitable institution for not less than one and not more than two years'.
Churchill wished to create a scale of offences which related to the social harm each offence created, and to attach to them an appropriate scale of penalties. He made no headway; as his civil servants pointed out, his proposals could be construed as an attempt to dictate sentences to the judges. A draft letter explaining his ideas to the Lord Chief Justice was still in the file when he left the Home Office; his successor, when asked if he would like to take up the matter, replied curtly, 'I cannot undertake to deal with the question at present.' The subject was dropped.
***
In the first week of November a coal strike broke out in the Rhondda Valley. Within a few days of the outbreak of the strike there were incidents of window-breaking in two of the villages near the pits. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan, with 1,400 county policemen at his disposal, fearing further riots and looting, appealed direct to the Army, asking the General Officer commanding Southern Command to send 400 soldiers, both cavalry and infantry, by train to South Wales. The soldiers started early the following morning, November 7.
It was not until eleven o'clock that morning that Churchill was told troops were on their way to Wales. He at once telephoned the Chief Constable and, after hearing his report, 'definitely decided', he told the King, 'to employ police instead of military to deal with the disorder'. The infantry, still on their journey, were ordered to halt at Swindon. The cavalry were halted at Cardiff. In place of the soldiers Churchill directed reinforcements of London policemen-200 constables and 70 mounted policemen-to be sent to South Wales. As the Chief Constable awaited their arrival, strikers made a number of attacks on one of the collieries, but the local police drove them off. 'When the Metropolitan Police arrived,' Churchill told the King, 'the rioters had already been beaten from the collieries without the aid of any reinforcements either of London police or military.'
Foiled in their attack on the colliery, the strikers moved into the nearby village of Tonypandy, wrecking many shops. This action, Churchill told the King, 'was not foreseen by anyone on the spot, and would not have been prevented by the presence of soldiers at the colliery itself'. Five hundred additional police were on their way from London. There appeared to be 'no reason at present why the policy of keeping the military out of direct contact with the rioters should be departed from'.
That night, the rioting appeared to be getting out of control. In response to a further appeal from the Chief Constable, Churchill allowed one squadron of cavalry to be moved to the junction of the two disturbed valleys, but no further, telling the King that he was still confident that the policemen already in the valleys would be able 'not merely to prevent attacks upon the collieries but to control the whole district and to deal promptly with any sign of a disorderly gathering large or small. No need for the employment of the military is likely to occur. They will be kept as far as possible out of touch with the population, while sufficiently near to the scene to be available if necessary.'
On November 8, in a conciliatory message, Churchill offered the strikers an interview with the senior Government industrial arbitrator. On the following day he was violently attacked by the Conservative newspapers, particularly by The Times, for his conciliatory message, and for not having allowed troops to be sent to Tonypandy. If 'loss of life' occurred as a result of the riots, The Times declared, 'the responsibility will lie with the Home Secretary', who should have supported the Chief Constable's call for troops. 'Mr Churchill hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen, which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place, but its place is not in the face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction.'
In contrast to The Times, the Manchester Guardian defended Churchill's action in withholding the troops, an action, it wrote, 'which in all probability saved many lives'. It was true, the Manchester Guardian added, that the disorders at one moment seemed so serious 'that Mr Churchill decided to allow the troops to move up into the district so as to be in readiness for anything that might happen. But he never wavered in his determination not to employ the troops unless the disorders passed beyond the control of the police.'
The strikers accepted Churchill's offer of talks; the arbitrator met them in Cardiff on November 11. But ten days later riots broke out again in Tonypandy. Again, troops were not used. 'The police were quite strong enough,' Churchill told the King, 'to scatter the rioters & beat them out of the town. The military were at hand but did not have to fire.' Six policemen had been seriously injured. Rioting continued on the following day, but was contained. 'The rioters have had a good dusting from the police,' Churchill told the King, '& it has still been possible to keep the military out of direct collision with the crowds.' As to the merits of the case, 'the owners are very unreasonable as well as the men,' Churchill wrote, '& both sides are fighting one another regardless of human interests or the public welfare.'
On November 25, in the Commons, Churchill defended his action in withholding the troops. 'It must be an object of public policy,' he declared, 'to avoid collisions between troops and people engaged in industrial disputes.' The Conservatives accepted this argument; the Liberals welcomed the statement of principle. But, for the Labour Party, Keir Hardie protested against the 'impropriety' of sending the troops at all and the 'harsh methods' of the police. It was this charge, not the original Conservative criticism of lack of ruthlessness, which created the Labour myth that Churchill had been, not the conciliator withholding troops and offering arbitration, but the belligerent sending troops and seeking confrontation. For Liberals, Tonypandy represented the success of moderation. For Labour it became part of a myth of Churchill's aggressiveness.
On November 22, at the height of the Tonypandy dispute, Churchill had been caught up in another battle in London itself. During the Cabinet meeting that day, suffragettes and their male supporters gathered in Downing Street to demand votes for women. As Ministers left the meeting there was a scuffle. Asquith had to be hustled into a taxi and another Minister was badly hurt. Churchill, watching as the police tried to cope with the scuffling, called out as they struggled with Mrs Cobden-Sanderson, 'Take that woman away; she is obviously one of the ringleaders.'
Four days later, while speaking at Bradford, Churchill was constantly interrupted by Hugh Franklin, a supporter of the suffragettes, who had overheard his remark to the police in Downing Street, and had himself been arrested. After the Bradford meeting, Franklin followed Churchill to the station and boarded the evening train to London. As Churchill made his way to the dining-car, Franklin attacked him with a whip, shouting as he did so, 'Take that, you dirty cur.' He was sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment for assault.
The suffragettes were convinced that Churchill was an out-and-out opponent of giving women the vote. This was not so; the 'sex disqualification', he told his constituents on December 2, 'was not a true or a logical disqualification', and he was therefore 'in favour of the principle of women being enfranchised'. But he was unwilling to vote for a Bill which would give 'an undoubted preponderance to the property vote', or for one which did not have behind it the 'genuine majority' of the electors. In the past, he said, whatever support for votes for women he had admitted 'in friendly discussion' on the subject, 'he had always found it was only the excuse for renewed abuse and insult'. Every step taken 'in friendship' towards the suffragettes 'had only met grosser insults and more outrageous action'. In the Commons vote in 1917, Churchill voted in favour of votes for women.
***
Parliament had been dissolved on November 18 and a General Election called, the second within twelve months. 'The Tory Party,' Churchill wrote in his election manifesto, 'regard themselves as the ruling caste, exercising by right a Divine superior authority over the whole nation.' And he told an audience in Birmingham that the veto of the House of Lords was 'harsh and cruel the powers of the Lords needed to be 'shattered into fragments so that they were dust upon the ground'.
On November 30, his thirty-sixth birthday, Churchill told an election meeting at Sheffield that once the veto power of the Lords was broken he looked forward to working with the Conservatives in harmony, to create through reconciliation and unity 'a better, a fairer, a juster, a more scientific organisation of the social life of the people, a due correction of the abuses of wealth and monopoly, religious equality and industrial progress', as well as prison reform and 'the training of our youth'.
Electioneering over, Churchill went shooting at the home of Lord Nunburnholme, Warter Priory, near York, with his uncle Lord Tweedmouth, and several other Liberal Peers. 'Tomorrow pheasants in thousands,' he wrote to Clementine on December 19, 'the very best wot ever was seen. Tonight Poker-I lost a little-but the play was low,' and he added: 'On the whole, survey how much more power and great business are to me, than this kind of thing, pleasant tho it seems by contrast to our humble mode of entertainment. I expect I will have a headache tomorrow night after firing so many cartridges. All the glitter of the world appeals to me, but not thank God in comparison with serious things.'
The election results were announced in the last week of December. The Liberal Government remained in power, but with no change in the existing stalemate. The Liberals lost three seats and the Conservatives lost two. Labour and the Irish Nationalists each gained two, holding the balance once more and sustaining the Liberal Government with their votes and demands.
Churchill still favoured a compromise with the Conservatives in order to work together both on social and imperial policy. But in a letter on 3 January 1911 he told Asquith that the veto of the Lords 'must be restricted as an indispensable preliminary to any co-operation'. The Parliament Bill should therefore go ahead and sufficient new Peers be created to ensure its passage through the Lords. The Lords must not be allowed to delay matters through 'dilatory vapourings'. Until the veto was 'out of the way there can be no peace between parties and no demonstration of national unity. The quicker and more firmly the business is put through, the better for all'. After the veto had been restricted 'I hope we may be able to pursue une politique d'apaisement'-a policy of appeasement. This would include 'a liberal grant of honours' to the leading Conservatives, the Order of Merit for Chamberlain, 'a proportion of Tory peers and baronets', and 'something for the Tory Press'.
The Liberal Government should then offer, Churchill wrote, to 'confer' with the Conservatives on Ireland, the Poor Law, boy labour, Insurance and the Navy; Balfour should be given 'full access to all Admiralty information'. As part of the compromise economic proposals, death duties ought not to fall on landed estates 'more than once in 25 years'. In framing their future plans, the Liberals should seek 'a national and not a sectional policy'. All this, he added, 'may lead us further still'.
Churchill was writing this letter at his London home, 33 Eccleston Square, when a messenger arrived from the Home Office with urgent news. During a burglary on the previous night, three men, Fritz Svaars, 'Joseph', and a Russian anarchist known as 'Peter the Painter', had shot and killed three of the six policemen trying to arrest them; now they had been tracked down to a house in Sidney Street in the East End of London. The three men were armed; as their Mauser weapons had a greater range than the police revolvers, a senior police officer had already summoned from the Tower of London a detachment of twenty Scots Guards armed with rifles. The burglars were shooting from the house and a policeman had been killed.
Churchill went immediately to the Home Office, where, after consulting his advisers, he gave his retrospective authority for the earlier despatch of the troops. It was a quarter past eleven in the morning. Unable to learn more than that a 'continuous fusillade' was going on, he later wrote, 'I thought it my duty to go and see for myself what was happening.' Driving to the scene of the siege, he arrived a few minutes before midday. 'It was a striking scene in a London street,' he told Asquith in his interrupted letter, 'firing from every window, bullets chipping the brickwork, police and Scots Guards armed with loaded weapons, artillery brought up etc.'
Churchill was subsequently accused of having taken charge of the siege, and of having given orders which ought to have been given by the police. Sydney Holland, a director of the Underground Railway, who was with him throughout, wrote to him nine days later, 'The only possible excuse for anyone saying you gave orders is that you did once and very rightly go forward and wave back the crowd at the end of the road.' If the burglars had emerged from the house while the crowd was in the road 'there would have been a lot of people shot by the soldiers'. Holland added, 'And you did also give orders that you and I were not to be shot in our hindquarters by a policeman who was standing with a 12-bore behind you!'
At no point did Churchill direct the siege. 'I made it my business however,' he noted a week later, 'after seeing what was going on in front, to go round the back of the premises and satisfy myself that there was no chance of the criminals effecting their escape through the intricate area of walls and small houses at the back.' Returning from this reconnaissance, Churchill found that the house had caught fire. At that moment a junior fire brigade officer came up to him and said that the fire brigade had arrived. He understood that he was not to put out the fire at present.
'Was that right?' the officer asked.
'Quite right,' Churchill replied. 'I accept full responsibility.'
From what he saw at that moment, Churchill later told the Coroner, 'it would have meant loss of life and limb to any fire brigade officer who had gone within effective range of the building'. In agreeing that the fire brigade should stand back, he was acting 'as a covering authority' for the police in charge, in what was clearly a situation of 'unusual' difficulty. 'I thought it better to let the house burn down,' he explained to Asquith, 'rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.' At one moment a Maxim gun was brought up, followed by the arrival of a troop of Royal Horse Artillery. Both were later said to have been brought at Churchill's instigation and to have been directed by him. 'I never directed anyone to send for a Maxim gun,' he told the inquest, 'nor did I send at any time for any further military force. The artillery came up as I was driving away.'
The fire eventually burnt itself out. On entering the building the police found two bodies; one man had been shot and the other asphyxiated. The third, Peter the Painter, was never found. Churchill's presence at the siege of Sidney Street was rapidly to become part of the Conservative mockery of his actions. 'He was, I understand,' Balfour told the Commons, 'in a military phrase, in what is known as the zone of fire-he and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?'
The Conservatives laughed at Balfour's wit. In a letter to the King, Churchill called it 'their meed of merriment'. Newsreel film showed Churchill peering from behind a wall at what was quickly known as 'The Battle of Stepney'. At the Palace Theatre, London, this film was shown night after night. Marsh, who had accompanied his master to the scene, wrote to a friend, 'I make the most gratifying appearance as almost the central figure of "Mr Churchill directing the operations" at the Palace which is nightly received with unanimous boos and shouts of "shoot him" from the gallery.' Marsh went on to ask, 'Why are the London music-hall audiences so bigoted and uniformly Tory?' Churchill himself, in a letter published in The Times on January 12, protested at the 'sensational accounts' of the siege that had appeared in the newspapers and at 'the spiteful comments based upon them'.
***
Throughout his period as Home Secretary, Churchill took up cases where he felt the sentence had been too severe. After a visit to Pentonville prison, he used his powers as Home Secretary to recommend the King to commute the prison sentences on seven young offenders. Conservative MPs, led by Lord Winterton, attacked his action in the Commons. 'I must confess,' he replied, 'I was very glad of the opportunity of recommending the use of the prerogative in these cases, because I wanted to draw the attention of the country, by means of cases perfectly legitimate in themselves, to the evil by which 7,000 lads of the poorer classes are sent to gaol every year for offences for which, if the noble Lord had committed them at College, he would not have been subjected to the slightest degree of inconvenience.'
Within the Home Office, Churchill voiced strong criticism of individual judges, and even of the Director of Public Prosecutions, whenever he felt they were imposing, or seeking to impose, penalties that were too harsh. The recently created system of preventive detention roused his deepest unease. 'I have serious misgivings,' he wrote in a departmental minute, 'lest the institution of preventative detention should lead to a reversion to the ferocious sentences of the last generation. After all preventative detention is penal servitude in all essentials, but it soothes the conscience of judges and of public and there is a very grave danger that the administration of the law should under softer names assume in fact a more severe character.'
Within the Home Office, Churchill's tenure was recognised as constructive and remarkable; he brought the business of the department to the notice of Parliament in a way that few Home Secretaries had done before, or were to do after him. His most senior official, Sir Edward Troup, later recalled, 'Once a week or oftener, Mr Churchill came into the Office bringing with him some adventurous or impossible projects; but after half an hour's discussion something was evolved which was still adventurous, but not impossible.'
***
In continuing the tradition whereby the Home Secretary sent letters to the King on the debates in Parliament, Churchill angered the new King considerably when, after reporting on a proposal to send 'tramps and wastrels' to special Labour Colonies so that they might realise 'their duty to the State', he commented, 'It must not however be forgotten that there are idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social scale.' Such a comment, the King protested, was 'very socialistic'. Churchill apologised, telling the King, 'In writing these daily letters and trying to make them interesting and reliable it is always possible that some sentiment or opinion may occur which has not received the severe and deliberate scrutiny and reconsideration which should attach to a State Paper.'
In March 1911 Churchill introduced the second reading of the Coal Mines Bill, creating stricter safety standards, building pit-head baths, and lessening cruelty to pit ponies. Less successful was his effort to improve the life of shop-workers. His Shops Bill was intended to reduce the hours of work in shops from eighty to sixty a week, to set aside intervals for the meals of shop assistants, to regulate the hours of overtime, to strengthen the existing regulations on sanitation and ventilation, and to establish one early-closing day each week. Shopkeepers strenuously opposed these measures, which in the committee stage of the Bill were taken out or emasculated one by one, becoming, Churchill complained to the Committee, 'waste paper'.
When the Bill eventually passed, all that Churchill was able to secure was the provision for one early-closing day a week, and compulsory intervals for shop-assistants' meals. By this latter section of the Act, Churchill enshrined the British tea-break into law. But nine more years had to pass before the full Act reached the statute book.
On April 4 Lloyd George introduced the Government's comprehensive Unemployment Insurance scheme. Although it was subsequently to be associated entirely with his name, many of its principles, as well as its details, had originated with Churchill and been worked out by his department. 'Lloyd George has practically taken unemployment insurance to his own bosom,' Churchill told Clementine, '& I am I think effectively elbowed out of this large field in which I consumed so much thought & effort. Never mind! There are many good fish in the sea.'
As the Parliament Bill debates continued, Churchill was called upon more and more by the Prime Minister; on one night Asquith was too much affected by drink to continue the behind-the-scenes negotiations with Balfour. As a result, Churchill conducted the negotiations in his stead. 'On Thursday night the PM was very bad,' Churchill told Clementine, '& I squirmed with embarrassment. He could hardly speak & many people noticed his condition. He continues most friendly & benevolent, & entrusts me with everything after dinner.' Up till dinner, Churchill explained, 'he is at his best-but thereafter! It is an awful pity, & only the persistent free-masonry of the House of Commons prevents a scandal. I like the old boy & admire both his intellect & his character. But what risks to run!'
The Parliament Bill proved less controversial than the Liberals had feared. Opposition to the Bill 'reached its lowest ebb last night', Churchill told the King on May 10. 'At one moment only seven Conservative members were in their places to stem the tide of revolution, & of these, two were deep in the pages of the Insurance Bill.' Eight days later, in a private room at the Savoy Hotel, Churchill was present at the inaugural dinner of a new Club, of which he and F.E. Smith were the founding members. Called the Other Club, its aim was to bring round a single dining-table, once a fortnight while Parliament was in session, up to twenty-eight MPs of both Parties, and a similar number of Peers, distinguished soldiers, lawyers, writers, artists, businessmen and journalists. One item in the rules of the Other Club stated that 'Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of Party politics'. But its aim was to assuage the bitterness that the past year's politics had created; among the members was his most recent critic, Lord Winterton.
Clementine was now expecting her second child. Learning that she might be unable to be present in Westminster Abbey for the Coronation, the King offered her a ticket for his own box in the Abbey, so that she could watch the pageantry in comfort. On May 28, less than a month before the Coronation, her child was born; a son, he was named Randolph after Churchill's father.
Two days after his son's birth Churchill made a fierce attack in the Commons on those judges whom he believed had been unfair in Trade Union cases. It was his intention, Churchill said, 'to relieve Trade Unions from the harassing litigation to which they have been exposed and set them free to develop and do their work without the perpetual check and uncertainty of frequent trials and without being brought constantly into contact with the courts'. In the past few years Trade Unions had been 'enmeshed, harassed, worried, and checked at every step and at every turn by all kinds of legal decisions, which came with the utmost surprise to the greatest lawyers in the country'.
Where 'class issues' were involved, Churchill continued, 'and where party issues are involved, it is impossible to pretend that the courts command the same degree of general confidence' as in criminal cases. 'On the contrary, they do not, and a very large number of our population have been led to the opinion that they are, unconsciously no doubt, biased.'
There were immediate cries of 'No! No!' and 'Withdraw!' from the Conservative benches. Nor did Churchill's political enemies allow his accusation to be forgotten; on June 3 the Spectator described it as 'deeply deplorable' and 'mischievous'. Churchill, meanwhile, was basking in the pleasures of parenthood. 'Many congratulations are offered me upon the son,' he wrote to Clementine from the Oxfordshire Hussars camp at Blenheim on June 2. 'With that lack of jealousy which ennobles my nature, I lay them all at your feet.'
Before Randolph was born, he had been known in his parents' private language as the 'chumbolly'. 'My precious pussy cat,' Churchill wrote in his letter of June 2, 'I do trust & hope that you are being good, & not sitting up or fussing yourself. Just get well & strong & enjoy the richness which this new event will I know have brought into your life. The chumbolly must do his duty and help you with your milk, you are to tell him so from me. At his age greediness & even swinishness at table are virtues.'
***
The Coronation of King George V and Queen Mary took place on June 22. Churchill and Clementine rode in the procession together. 'Everyone admired the cat, the carriage, the horses and the tiger,' he wrote to her when it was over. He was sure she would 'long look back' to their drive and tell the story of the day to their son and daughter, 'so it will become a tradition in the family & they will hand it on to others whom we shall not see'. Clementine had gone to the seaside to rest from the exertions of the day. Churchill had remained in London; on June 28 he gave a dinner to Lloyd George at the Café Royal. 'He was full of your praises,' Churchill told Clementine, 'said you were my "salvation" & that your beauty was the least thing about you. We renewed treaties of alliance for another seven years.'
On June 29 Churchill drove in procession with the King to the City of London and back through North London. 'Of course,' he told Clementine, 'all the whole route I was cheered and in places booed vigorously.' Riding in his carriage were the Duchess of Devonshire and the Countess of Minto: 'It was rather embarrassing for these two Tory dames. They got awfully depressed when the cheering was very loud, but bucked up a little around the Mansion House where there were hostile demonstrations. They were very civil but rather fussed. I did not acknowledge any cheering & paid no attention at all to the crowds.'
That evening Churchill dined at the Other Club, where Kitchener, who was about to go to Egypt as Agent General, was an invited guest. 'My precious one,' his letter to Clementine, written from 33 Eccleston Square, continued, 'I will come down to you on Saturday, motoring from Walton Heath and arriving for dinner. I will inspect the infantry the next day. Let them all be drawn up in line of Brigade masses. It will be so nice to see you all again. This house is very silent without you; & I am reverting to my bachelor type with melancholy rapidity.'
Within four days of the Coronation, Conservative hostility to Churchill had again surfaced in the Commons, when Alfred Lyttelton, a former Colonial Secretary, said of him that he was 'certainly not free from that which is, well, not characteristic of the Home Office, and which, I think, is generally disliked by Englishmen-I mean certain appeals to the gallery'. The cause of Lyttelton's anger was Churchill's earlier decision to release seven youthful offenders from prison. Referring to other cases where Churchill had criticised the severity of the sentences on young offenders and then reduced them, Lyttelton declared: 'All these cases go to show that the habit has grown up under the Home Secretary of altering, mitigating, and even cancelling sentences without first consulting the justices who imposed them. It is done under a claim of right by the Home Secretary, who, I think I have shown by the plainest possible evidence, has not taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the law in the cases in which he has taken it upon himself to reverse the penalty.'
Lyttelton then raised the question of the photographer who had taken the pictures of Churchill at Sidney Street, five months earlier. Churchill replied: 'I am sure he does not suppose there is a branch of the Home Office to organise the movements of photographers. It is the misfortune of a good many Members to encounter in our daily walks an increasing number of persons armed with cameras to take pictures for the illustrated Press which is so rapidly developing. I would remind the right hon. Gentleman that his own Leader (Mr A. J. Balfour), when he risked his valuable life in a flying machine was the victim of similar publicity, but I certainly should not go so far as to imitate the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Lyttelton) by suggesting that he was himself concerned in procuring the attendance of a photographer to witness his daring feat in the way of aerial experience.'
Lyttelton had a further charge to make, criticising Churchill for the way in which 'the military were stopped from going to Tonypandy'. As a result of Churchill's action, he said, 'much suffering was caused and a heavy loss of property brought about'. Even as Churchill defended his action in replacing troops by policemen, further industrial unrest broke out in ports and dockyards throughout England. A strike of dockers at Hull led him to despatch police from London; they were involved in a series of confrontations with the strikers. 'It is impossible to deny that violence has played its part in this,' he wrote to Clementine on the following day, 'but that was not my fault. The House supported me warmly today on the sending of the police.'
Extra police and also troops had been sent that week to the Manchester docks, but by July 10 the strike there was settled. 'The men have received large and justifiable concessions in regard to their wages,' Churchill told the King.
That night, before joining his wife and their two children at the seaside, Churchill went out to buy the two-year-old Diana some toys, writing to Clementine on July 11: 'She is so little it is very difficult to know what will amuse her. Be careful not to let her suck the paint off the Noah's Ark animals. I hovered long on the verge of buying plain white wood animals-but decided at last to risk the coloured ones. They are so much more interesting. The shopman expressed himself hopefully about the nourishing qualities of the paint & of the numbers sold-and presumably sucked without misadventure. But do not trust to this.'
Churchill's letter also contained a reference to his own varying moods. His cousin Ivor Guest's wife Alice, with whom he had dined on the previous night, 'interested me a great deal by her talk about her doctor in Germany, who completely cured her depression. I think this man might be useful to me-if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now-it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture. Brightest of all your dear face-my darling.'
***
That July the constitutional crisis reached its climax. In his letters to the King, Churchill gave a vivid picture of the mood of both sides, reporting on July 24 that Asquith had been subjected to 'prolonged organised insult & interruption' for nearly half an hour from a section of the Conservative Party. Churchill's own instinct was for conciliation; the Government would accept several Conservative amendments 'that are not vital', he explained to the King on August 8, 'so as to make the submission of conscientious & honourable men as little galling as possible'. The 'squalid, frigid organised attempt to insult the Prime Minister & prevent debate' came only from a section of the Conservative Party. 'Extremely good relations are maintained by persons most strongly opposed to one another,' Churchill told the King. 'Everything points to a characteristically British solution of this great crisis.'
In agreeing on August 10 to a Government resolution affirming the principle of the payment of Members of Parliament, the Lords accepted that they could not veto money bills. It was a 'memorable and dramatic' moment, Churchill told the King. The 'long drawn out & anxious constitutional crisis' was over. No new Peers would have to be created. It was to be hoped 'that a period of co-operation between the two branches of the legislature may now set in & that the settlement of several out of date quarrels may lead to a truer sense of national unity'.
On the previous day the dock strike had spread to London. The Board of Trade was attempting to arbitrate, using procedures established by Churchill two years earlier. If these negotiations were 'abortive', he told the King, 'extraordinary measures will have to be taken to secure the food supply of London, which must at all costs be maintained'. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were being held in readiness '& can be in the capital in six hours from the order being given'.
The London dock negotiations continued throughout August 12. But Churchill reported to the King that day that the situation in Liverpool was 'less satisfactory & it is possible that the military force available will have to be strengthened'. Two days later rioters rampaged through the streets of Liverpool. 'You need not attach any great importance to the rioting of last night,' the Chief Constable telegraphed to Churchill on August 15. 'It took place in an area where disorder is a chronic feature, ready to break out when any abnormal excitement is in force. The object of the riot was purely and simply attack on the police, whom they tempted into side streets where barricades of sanitary dustbins and wire entanglements were placed.'
In all, 250 soldiers, all infantrymen, had been called in to assist the police. Six of the soldiers and two policemen had been injured. There was no civilian loss of life. 'It is necessary in times like the present,' Churchill told the King, 'to make it clear that the police will be supported effectually & to warn persons in crowds not to take liberties with the soldiers.' Three days later he authorised the despatch to Liverpool of a cavalry regiment and an infantry battalion, but also of 250 London policemen, with instructions to the General in charge not to use the military 'until & unless all other means have been exhausted'.
Churchill's sympathies were again with the strikers; it was 'greatly to be hoped,' he told the King, that the Board of Trade arbitrators, who were then in Liverpool, would arrive at a settlement. 'The strikers are very poor,' he explained, 'miserably paid & now nearly starving.'
On August 17 Churchill informed the King that, in the Port of London, the shipowners had been 'dissuaded from provocative action' and that the men's leaders were urging the remaining strikers to return to work. The London docks were calm, but an infantry battalion had been sent to Sheffield, where disorder had broken out. 'Although a spirit of unusual unrest is stirring the whole Labour world,' Churchill told the King, 'due mainly to the fact that wages have not in late years kept pace with the increased cost of living, there is no ground for apprehension.' The forces at the disposal of the Government were 'ample to secure the ascendancy of the Law'. The difficulty was not to maintain order 'but to maintain order without loss of life'.
On August 18 a nationwide railway strike was called. Asquith offered the railwaymen a Royal Commission but they refused on the grounds that it would be too slow. The Government made plans to deliver food, fuel and other essential supplies under police and military escort. 'They will do this,' Churchill told the Commons, 'not because they are on the side of the employers or of the workmen but because they are bound at all costs to protect the public from the dangers and miseries which famine and a general arrest of industry would entail.' Churchill's task as Home Secretary was to protect the railways and to maintain supplies. That night he was able to report to the King that, with less than half the railwaymen having responded to the strike call, all necessary services had been maintained over the whole system. In the London docks a settlement had been reached that day 'on honourable terms for the men'. Their wages would be increased considerably.
The London dockers, Churchill told the King, had 'a real grievance, and the large addition to their wages which they have secured must promote the health & contentment of an unduly strained class of workers, charged as has been realised with vital functions in our civilisation'. The intention of the Government 'to use very large bodies of troops to maintain order & the food supply if the strike was not settled promptly,' he added, 'had a potent influence on the men's decision. They knew that they had reached the psychological moment to make their bargain, & that to go on was to risk all that they had within their grasp.'
At Churchill's urging, special civilian constables were now enrolled to augment the police forces wherever rail or dock strikes continued. At Llanelli in South Wales, rioters had taken advantage of the strike to loot and rampage. On the afternoon of August 19 they attacked a train which was passing through the station under military protection. The train was held up and the engine-driver roughly handled. Troops arrived and were pelted by stones; one soldier was wounded in the head. Shots were fired, and two civilians were killed.
When, shortly after the attack on the train, rioters burned down the business premises of the local magistrate, looted railway trucks, and damaged many small shops in the dock area, the troops took no action, leaving the police to restore order, which they did by charging the rioters with their truncheons. Later that evening a police station was attacked. Troops arrived and the attackers were driven off without loss of life. 'Much regret unfortunate incident at Llanelli,' the King telegraphed to Churchill. 'Feel convinced that prompt measures taken by you prevented loss of life in different parts of the country.'
Throughout August 19 negotiations were being conducted in London by Lloyd George, intended, Churchill told the King, 'to procure a peaceful settlement'. By nightfall the strike was over. 'The Chancellor of the Exchequer is principally responsible for the happy result,' Churchill telegraphed to the King just before midnight. Troops were already being withdrawn from the railway stations and would return to their barracks. 'Publish the fact that peace is made,' Churchill telegraphed to the Mayor of Birkenhead at 1 a.m. on August 20, 'and be specially careful to avoid collisions with those who do not know this yet.' These conciliatory instructions reflected Churchill's instinct throughout the crisis and his understanding of the strength of the workers' grievances. He had also been determined, and it was part of his Ministerial responsibility, to ensure that violence did not spread. It was 'obvious and certain', he told the Commons in the aftermath of the strikes, 'that any Government must, with the whole force of the State, exert itself to prevent such a catastrophe, and because it was certain that in taking such action they would be supported by the good sense and resolution of the whole mass of the people.'
On many occasions during the disturbances Churchill had initiated or supported prompt and forceful action, aimed at halting destructive violence. But those who wanted to use everything he did for their own political advantage, or to revenge his betrayal of the Conservative Party a mere five years earlier, and who had only just adopted two new slogans, 'Tonypandy' and 'Sidney Street', had no difficulty in adding the unrest at Liverpool and Llanelli to the list.
***
During the summer of 1911 a crisis erupted in North Africa which threatened Europe with war. In an attempt to secure a naval base on the Atlantic Ocean, the German Government sent a gunboat, the Panther, to the Moroccan port of Agadir. France, which under the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 had a predominant sphere of influence in Morocco, asked Britain to challenge the German action by sending a British gunboat.
'This would be a serious step,' Churchill wrote to Clementine from the Home Office on 3 July 1911, 'on which we should not engage without being ready to go to all lengths if necessary.' As Home Secretary, his departmental concerns were elsewhere; but his understanding of European rivalries had always been considerable; his presence at German Army manoeuvres had served only to enhance it. When the Cabinet met on July 4 it was decided, he reported to Clementine, 'to use pretty plain language to Germany and to tell her that if she thinks Morocco can be divided up without John Bull, she is jolly well mistaken'.
In a letter to Lloyd George, Churchill agreed that Germany had 'some (minor) claims about Morocco which if amicably stated we should be glad to see adjusted either there or elsewhere-subject to Britain being safeguarded'. But the German action at Agadir 'has put her in the wrong & forced us to consider her claims in the light of her policy & methods'. If Germany made war on France in the course of the negotiations, he argued, or unless Britain felt that France had chosen unjustifiable ground for any deadlock, 'we should join with France'. Nor should Britain's intended course of action be kept secret. Indeed he advised Lloyd George that 'Germany should be told this now'.
Lloyd George did in fact warn Germany openly. Peace at the price of surrender, he declared at the Mansion House on July 21, 'would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure'. The Germans reacted by denouncing Lloyd George's words as 'a warning bordering on menace'. Suddenly it seemed that war might come at any moment.
In strictest secrecy, using his authority as Home Secretary, Churchill now issued a warrant to the secret service for the 'inspection of correspondence'. The letters of anyone suspected of receiving instructions from Germany were opened. The intercepted letters, he told Grey four months later, showed 'that we are the subject of a minute and scientific study by the German naval and military authorities, and that no other nation in the world pays us such attention'.
In a letter to Grey on July 25, Churchill proposed a British effort to detach Spain from her pro-German stance, 'to make good friends with her', and to promote good relations between Spain and France. 'It is not I think too late yet.' Two days later Churchill told the King that he had been impressed in the Commons by the widespread agreement among MPs that Germany must be prevented from having her way by the threat of force. Asquith had made a statement 'careful & friendly in form & feeling, but strong & firm in substance'. Balfour had supported it, as had the Labour Party Leader Ramsay MacDonald, 'restrained, sombre but perfectly correct.' No one else had spoken. 'It may be,' Churchill concluded, 'that this episode, following upon the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will have exercised a decisive effect upon the peace of Europe. It is certain that it redounds to the credit of British public life.'
At a garden party at 10 Downing Street four days later, while talking to the Chief Commissioner of Police, Churchill learned that as Home Secretary he was technically responsible for the safety of all the reserves of naval cordite in Britain. Three of them were stored in London. Returning to the Home Office, he telephoned the Admiralty to ask that a detachment of Royal Marines be sent to guard these vital munitions. The Admiral in charge declined to act. Shocked by this attitude on the part of the Admiral, Churchill telephoned the War Office and persuaded the Secretary of State for War, Lord Haldane, to send troops to the three magazines.
Churchill himself informed the King that midnight that 'Mr Churchill has felt it his duty to take more effective measures to ensure the safety of the great naval magazines, now under the guard of the Metropolitan Police. Chattenden & Lodge Hill alone hold ⅗ths of the cordite ammunition of the Fleet.' He had arranged for a company of infantry to be sent to each magazine, writing to Clementine two days later that he had 'sent plenty of soldiers to both points I told you of, and all is safe now'. As for the news about Agadir, it seemed that 'the bully is climbing down, & it looks as if all will come out smooth and triumphant'. There was no doubt, he told her four days later, that the Germans were going to settle with the French 'on a friendly basis', and he added, 'They sent their Panther to Agadir & we sent our panther to the Mansion House: with the best results.'
In preparation for a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on August 23, Churchill set out his thoughts on the dangers facing France should Germany launch a military attack, and the part that Britain would have to play to help avert a French defeat. The German Army, he forecast, would break through the line of the River Meuse on the twentieth day of war. The French would then fall back towards Paris. 'All plans based on the opposite assumption ask too much of fortune.' The impetus of the German advance would slowly weaken, the more it was extended. From the thirtieth day the Russian Army would begin to exercise pressure on the Eastern Front. The British Army would be in place in Flanders. By the fortieth day the German forces in the West 'should be extended at full strain both internally and on her war fronts'. This strain would become daily 'more severe' and without a victory 'ultimately overwhelming'. It was then that 'opportunities for the decisive trial of strength may occur'.
Balfour was a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence when Churchill's memorandum was submitted. When he read it again in 1914, on the thirty-fifth day of the war, he commented, 'It is a triumph of prophecy!' Five days later the German forces were halted on the Marne, and thrown back.
***
On August 30, as the Moroccan negotiations continued, Churchill suggested to Grey that if the negotiations failed, Britain should propose a triple alliance of herself, France and Russia, to safeguard the independence of Belgium, Holland and Denmark. Britain should also 'tell Belgium that, if her neutrality is violated, we are prepared to come to her aid', and to take 'whatever military steps will be most effective for that purpose'. Similar guarantees should be offered to Holland and Denmark, subject to all three States 'making the utmost exertions' of their own once war had begun. To defend Belgium, Britain would be prepared to feed Antwerp and any army based upon it; also to put 'extreme pressure' on the Dutch to keep open the River Scheldt, Antwerp's supply line. If the Dutch were to close the Scheldt, 'we should retaliate by a blockade of the Rhine'.
The Admiralty had proposed joining France in a naval blockade of the Moroccan coast. Churchill opposed this. If French warships went to Morocco, he wrote to Grey on August 30, 'I am of the opinion that we should (for our part) move our main fleet to the north of Scotland into its war stations. Our interests are European, and not Moroccan.'
Churchill now examined in detail how Britain could best help France to resist a German attack. On August 31 he discussed his ideas with General Henry Wilson, the recently appointed Director of Military Operations at the War Office, who agreed that 'great strategic advantages' would be immediately derived if Britain were able to move her army into a friendly Belgium, 'and from our being able to threaten the German flank in conjunction with the Belgium Army'. In reporting on this conversation to Lloyd George, Churchill set out a principle which was to govern his thinking on foreign affairs before two world wars: 'It is not for Morocco, nor indeed for Belgium, that I would take part in this terrible business. One cause alone could justify our participation-to prevent France from being trampled down & looted by the Prussian junkers-a disaster ruinous to the world, & swiftly fatal to our country.'
On September 2 Churchill received a letter marked 'Secret: destroy' from the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Sir Charles Ottley. It contained details of the imminent concentration of the German High Sea Fleet at Kiel. 'We should not relax our vigilance for a moment,' Ottley warned. Churchill sent Ottley's letter to Lloyd George with the comment, 'I hope that McKenna is not as full of cocksureness, as his Admiral is deficient in imagination.' The Admiral was the First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson.
Scrutinising the Admiralty's dispositions in the North Sea, Churchill was deeply dissatisfied. 'Are you sure that the ships we have at Cromarty are strong enough to defeat the whole German High Sea Fleet?' he asked Asquith on September 13. 'If not they should be reinforced without delay.' The fleet concentrated in the North Sea should be strong enough 'without further aid' to fight a decisive battle with the German Navy. 'And something must be allowed for losses through a torpedo surprise.'
Churchill was angered by the Admiralty attitudes, asking Asquith: 'Are you sure that the Admiralty realise the serious situation of Europe? I am told they are nearly all on leave at the present time.' He was confident, however, that good leadership would be enough, telling Asquith: 'The Admiralty have ample strength at their disposal. They have only to be ready & employ it wisely. But one lapse, as stupid as that revealed at our meeting, & it will be the defence of England rather than that of France which will engage us.'
Admiral Wilson was about to leave the Admiralty for a holiday, telling the War Office on the night of September 13 that everything was ready for any naval emergency: all that was necessary was to 'press the button', which could as well be done by a clerk as anyone else. In reporting this to Lloyd George, Churchill commented, 'I can only say I hope this may be so.'
The Agadir crisis had given Churchill a sense of Britain's naval strengths and weaknesses. He was convinced that he had the energy and foresight, and could quickly acquire the knowledge, to make Britain invulnerable at sea. Determined to succeed McKenna at the Admiralty, he was particularly anxious to create a Naval War Staff, on the Army model, to plan for all possible war contingencies. The question of who should become First Lord was being much discussed that autumn. 'On the whole,' Asquith wrote to Lord Crewe on October 7, 'I am satisfied that Churchill is the right man, and he would like to go.'
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