On June 4, only four days after his formal adherence to the Liberals, Churchill attacked Balfour's Protectionist policies in a public speech in Manchester. Four days later, in the Commons, he was one of three Liberal speakers who denounced the Aliens Bill; the other two were the Liberal Party Leader, Campbell-Bannerman, and Asquith. It was Churchill's first speech from the Opposition benches. Then, for the next month, he led the attack on the Bill clause by clause. 'You have infused a new spirit into the younger men of the Opposition-as last night witnesseth!' the Master of Elibank, a Liberal MP since 1900, wrote to him on July 1.
The Aliens Bill was so effectively smothered with amendments, on each of which Churchill spoke against the Government, that on July 7 it was withdrawn. A leading Manchester Jew, Nathan Laski, wrote to thank Churchill 'for the splendid victory you have won for freedom & religious tolerance'. Laski also encouraged Churchill with regard to his new constituency. 'I have had over twenty years' experience in elections in Manchester,' he wrote, '& without flattery I tell you candidly-there has not been a single man able to arouse the interest that you have already done-thus I am sure of your future success.' Other local Liberal leaders echoed this sentiment. 'The people are willing to regard you not only as the Free Trade candidate for North-West Manchester,' one of them wrote to him that summer, 'but as the fighting head of the Free Trade party, and as one of the Liberal leaders in the near future.'
At the end of July, Churchill told Lord Tweedmouth of his talks with Lloyd George on the need to stimulate the Liberal leadership. From Tweedmouth came words of advice, 'Be vigorous but avoid much bitterness or sarcasm at the expense of our own molluscs on the Front Bench; be a cheering voice and a spur to them rather than a whip.' Further advice came from his aunt Lady Tweedmouth, his father's sister, who was dying. 'She begs you not to be too rampageous and aggressive & to remember there is truth in the old maxim suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.'
Churchill was prepared to spare the Liberal front bench, but not the Tory. 'It is because these Ministers are uplifted, guarded, served, praised,' he explained to Cecil that July, 'that they excite my attacks.' On August 2, in a sustained onslaught on Balfour's conduct of Government business, Churchill declared: 'There is one thing on which we may congratulate the Prime Minister. After all, we are nearly at the end of the session, and here is the Prime Minister still! The procedure of the House of Commons has been mutilated. Never mind! A great quantity of money has been expended. Never mind! No legislation of any value has been passed. Never mind! But here is the Prime Minister, at the end of the session, a great deal more than many people could have expected or hoped for. I offer to the right honourable gentleman, most sincerely, my most humble congratulations on his achievement.'
While Churchill's barbed style made him many enemies, he himself had been hurt by the private criticism against him in family circles when he had crossed to the Liberal benches. 'Had everyone adopted a tolerant line,' he wrote to his cousin Lady Londonderry, 'the present situation would be vastly different.' As for her own recent expressions of regret at his leaving the Conservatives, 'I appreciate your attitude all the more,' he wrote, 'because I had gathered from tales told that sometimes in the last few months you had commented upon my actions rather more severely than I had reason to expect from one who had known me all my life.'
That summer, as the political storm blew around him, Churchill went with his mother to a dance given by Lady Crewe, the wife of a leading Liberal. At the ball he was introduced by his mother to Clementine Hozier, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl whose mother had been a friend of Lady Randolph's for many years. The introduction having been made, Clementine expected Churchill to ask her to dance. He did not do so. 'Winston just stared,' she later recalled. 'He never uttered one word and was very gauche-he never asked me for a dance, he never asked me to have supper with him.' She had of course heard much about this controversial figure, 'nothing but ill. I had been told he was stuck-up, objectionable etcetera. And on this occasion he just stood and stared.'
Clementine had arranged to be rescued if necessary. 'A beau of hers was standing nearby,' her daughter Mary later wrote, 'and, obeying a discreet signal, he came up and asked her to dance with him.' During the course of the dance the young man asked his partner what she was doing talking to 'that frightful fellow Winston Churchill'. Nearly four years were to pass before he was to meet Clementine Hozier again.
That autumn Churchill withdrew from the political fray to try to complete his biography of his father. For three weeks he stayed at Sir Ernest Cassel's villa at Moerel, in the Swiss mountains. There he wrote his book each morning, walked each afternoon and played bridge each evening. 'I sleep like a top & have not ever felt in better health,' he told his mother. Back in England, he went to see Chamberlain to talk about his father. 'We dined alone,' he later recalled. 'With the dessert a bottle of '34 port was opened. Only the briefest reference was made to current controversies.' Chamberlain told Churchill: 'I think you are quite right, feeling as you do, to join the Liberals. You must expect to have the same sort of abuse hurled at you as I have endured. But if a man is sure of himself, it only sharpens him and makes him more effective.' Apart from this one reference to the disputes of the day, their talk, Churchill later wrote, 'lay in the controversies and personalities of twenty years before'. At one moment, Churchill told his mother, 'he got out the cup which my father gave him on his third marriage and made a great fuss about it'.
'You will laugh,' Churchill wrote to a Unionist Free Trader friend, 'when I tell you (secret) that I spent a very pleasant night at Highbury and had five or six hours very interesting and friendly conversation with the great Joe,' and he added: 'My prognostication is that he and the Prime Minister will cut their own throats and bring their party to utter destruction between them, that the Liberals will gain a gigantic victory at the Election-far greater than anything even they imagine-and that they will break into fragments almost immediately afterwards.'
Politically, Churchill had begun to make common cause with the radical wing of the Liberal Party, led by Lloyd George. At Carnarvon on October 18 he shared a platform with the 'Welsh wizard', and at Edinburgh on November 10 he declared that he was more afraid of the 'Independent Capitalist Party' than of the Independent Labour Party, telling his Scottish audience: 'No one seems to care anything but about money today. Nothing is held of account except the bank accounts. Quality, education, civic distinction, public virtue seem each year to be valued less and less. Riches unadorned seem each year to be valued more and more.'
In a sustained attack on the misuse of capital, Churchill told the citizens of Edinburgh: 'We have in London an important section of people who go about preaching the gospel of Mammon, advocating the ten per cent commandments-who raise each day the inspiring prayer "Give cash in our time, O Lord!"' The last Liberal Government had made it a rule not to allow Ministers to be directors of public companies. He calculated that thirty-one out of the present fifty-five Conservative Ministers were directors, holding sixty-eight directorships between them, 'That laxity of principle is a sign of the degeneration of the day.' So too was the recent sale of a Free Trade newspaper, the Standard, to a Protectionist proprietor. 'What shall we say', Churchill asked, 'of those who use vast wealth to poison the fountains of public information?'
When Churchill finished speaking the whole audience stood up and applauded. 'I was pleased with that meeting which was in its way a triumph!' he wrote to Lord Rosebery. 'Oh but what a labour & a battle to overturn this government, with our divided & undisciplined army!'
Former Conservative friends continued to have misgivings about Churchill's fierce onslaughts against his old Party. 'I readily admit that my conduct is open to criticism,' he wrote to one of them in November 1904, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, 'not-thank heaven-on the score of sincerity, but from the point of view of taste,' and he went on to explain: 'I had to choose between fighting & standing aside. No doubt the latter was the more decorous. But I wanted to fight-I felt I could fight with my whole heart and soul-so there it is.' Politics was, of course, 'a form of tournament in which mud-slinging & invective are recognised weapons. But taking part in such an ugly brawl does not in my mind prejudice personal relations.'
In the Commons, still pursuing his father's cause of economy in the Army, on 1 March 1905 Churchill criticised the new Secretary of State for War, Hugh Arnold-Forster, for the high expenditure on the General Staff, by which, he explained, he meant 'those gilded and gorgeous functionaries with brass hats and ornamental duties who multiplied so luxuriously on the plains of Aldershot and Salisbury'. Commented King Edward VII when he read this criticism, 'What good words for a recent subaltern of Hussars!'
A week later Churchill introduced his own motion against tariffs. In a powerfully argued speech-'the best you have ever made', wrote Lewis Harcourt, a future Liberal Colonial Secretary-Churchill told the House: 'We do not want to see the British Empire degenerate into a sullen confederacy, walled off, like a medieval town, from the surrounding country; victualled for a siege, and containing within the circle of its battlements all that is necessary for war. We want this country and the States associated with us to take their parts freely and fairly in the general intercourse of commercial nations.'
The more effectively and strongly Churchill spoke against the Conservatives, the more deeply they resented his criticisms. In April 1905 he felt obliged to leave the Carlton Club, of which, as a Conservative MP, he had been a member for the past five years. He was, he wrote to Lord Londonderry, 'in such constant conflict with the Conservative Party at all points that my membership of their club cannot be justified any longer & has become disagreeable to me'. Churchill added, 'Old friendships have been snapped & on the other hand new obligations have been contracted.'
Two months later Churchill was blackballed for the Hurlingham Club. 'This is almost without precedent in the history of the Club-as polo players are always welcomed,' he wrote to the Master of Elibank, and he added, 'I do not think you & your Liberal friends realize the intense political bitterness which is felt against me on the other side.' Churchill hit back fiercely at those he saw as his enemies, so much so that friends like Elibank became alarmed at the scathing tone of his references to the Government Ministers, and to Balfour in particular. 'You are the sole politician,' Elibank explained, 'who has moved and attracted me' during ten years in Parliament. 'I speak from the point of view of "leading".' The feeling among those 'who inevitably must rank among your backers in order ultimately to carry you and your policy to success in the country' was that continual belittling of Balfour 'conceivably may detract, in the public estimation, from the weight and general effect produced by the high level of your speeches on current problems'.
Churchill also learned, from Ian Hamilton, that at a country house weekend that summer, during which all those present 'male and female, in the smart company there assembled, were prepared to rend you to pieces', it was Balfour who 'spoke so exceedingly nicely about you, and expressed such generous hopes about your future, that no one raised a finger'.
Churchill briefly put current politics behind him in order to finish writing his father's life. 'At present,' he told Rosebery, 'the Statesman is in abeyance, and the Literary gent & the polo player are to the fore.' For the first two weeks of October, at Blenheim, he corrected the printer's proofs of his life of his father. He was also, he told his mother, 'trying to get a great deal of money for my book'. In this task he was extraordinarily successful, receiving £8,000, the highest amount yet paid in Britain for a political biography, and £350,000 in the money values of 1990.
Even as Churchill was finishing his life of his father, a Liberal writer, Alexander MacCallum Scott, published the first biography of Churchill himself. In it Scott wrote approvingly that Churchill was determined 'that capital shall be made the servant and not the master of the State', and that 'the true happiness of nations is to be secured by industrial development and social reform at home, rather than by territorial expansion and military adventures abroad'. Scott also drew attention to the fact that Churchill disagreed with Chamberlain's assertion that the future rested with the great territorial empires; if the British Empire held together, he quoted Churchill as saying, it would not be because of its size or its Army, but 'because it is based upon the assent of free peoples, united with each other by noble and progressive principles; because it is animated by respect for right and justice'.
Scott, who fifteen years later was to be Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary at the War Office, commented that after Chamberlain, Churchill was 'probably the best-hated man in English politics', but added: 'He will ever be a leader, whether of a forlorn hope or of a great Party. Already in the House of Commons he leads by a natural right which no man can dispute. He does the inevitable act which no one had thought of before; he thinks the original thought which is so simple and obvious once it has been uttered; he coins the happy phrase which expresses what all men have longed to say, and which thereafter comes so aptly to every man's tongue.'
Scott was certain that Churchill would 'rally in his own person the dispersed forces of Free Trade in one long line of battle'. It was 'a bold and ambitious idea, and the struggle will be a highly dramatic one. Will he win? Is he the destined man to bring back to Lancashire the political hegemony of the provinces? He plays for high stakes, but his nerve is steady and his eye is clear. He will at any rate make a fight for it, and the fight will be something to have lived for and to have seen.'
Free Trade was not the only issue agitating the public mind; at a meeting in North-West Manchester on October 13, Churchill and his fellow-speaker, Sir Edward Grey, were both repeatedly interrupted by two leading suffragettes, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenny. Escorted from the hall by police, the two women were fined fifteen shillings for creating a disturbance, refused to pay, and were sentenced to a week in prison. On hearing this, Churchill offered to pay the fines. The two women preferred the martyrdom of prison.
To a Liberal who was angered at what seemed to have been an over-harsh reaction by the police, Churchill wrote, 'To throw great public meetings into confusion and to disregard the chairman, cannot be defended on democratic grounds.' His letter continued: 'The power of conducting orderly discussions in very large gatherings is one of the most valuable possessions of the British people. With men who disturb such meetings it is easy to deal; but it is repugnant to anyone that any degree of physical force should ever be applied to women. But if sex confers protection, it should also enjoin restraint.' He could not believe that the interruptions would 'materially advance the cause of which these ladies are such earnest and courageous advocates'. Grey, he pointed out, was 'a life-long and active supporter' of votes for women.
On the last day of October, Churchill dined with Edward VII. It was the King's intention, he told his mother, 'to bring home to me the error of my ways'. It was the first time in three years, he told Rosebery, that the King had agreed to meet him. 'He spoke most severely & even vehemently to me about my attacks on A. Balfour. I accepted it all with meekness. In the end he became most gracious & we talked one hour.' Two weeks later Churchill was taken ill. There were rumours that he had suffered a nervous collapse; the King was among those who expressed concern. At the end of the month he cancelled all his meetings for the week and went to Camborne Manor, his Aunt Cornelia's house in Dorset. There he sought to recuperate with the help of a 'wonderful' masseuse who, he told his mother, had 'almost miraculous virtues & I am very comfortable & peaceful'.
November 30 was Churchill's birthday. 'Thirty-one is very old,' he wrote to his mother from Dorset. That week a letter of good wishes for his recovery reached him from an unexpected quarter; from Hugh Arnold-Forster, of whose Army expenditure he was a foremost critic. 'I am truly sorry to hear you are ill,' Arnold-Forster wrote from the War Office. 'Do take care of yourself. You know I don't agree with your politics but you are the only man on your side of the House who seems to me really to understand the Army problem. So from a purely selfish point of view I want you to be well again. May I add that from a personal view I entertain the same view and cherish the same life very strongly.'
On December 1, while still in Dorset, Churchill reported to his mother that the American masseuse had pointed out that his tongue was 'restrained by a ligament which nobody else has'. That, he commented, 'is the true explanation of my speaking through my nose'. He therefore travelled up to London to ask Sir Felix Semon to cut the ligament. Semon refused to do so, with the result, Churchill told his mother on December 4, that his tongue was still 'tied'.
That very day, December 4, Balfour resigned as Prime Minister, calculating that he would leave the Liberals in quarrelsome disarray, and that the Conservatives would in the end emerge all the stronger. The King sent for Campbell-Bannerman, who began at once to form a Government. The prospect of power united the divergent wings of the Liberal Party: Liberal Radicals and Liberal Imperialists alike, with the exception of Rosebery, agreed to serve under the new Prime Minister. Churchill was offered a junior Ministerial post, as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, under the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Asquith. But he preferred a department where he could show his administrative skills under a less brilliant master, and with more independence than he would have with his chief in the House of Commons.
The post for which Churchill asked was that of Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office. The Secretary of State, Lord Elgin, would be in the House of Lords, leaving Churchill to conduct the department's business in the Commons. His request was accepted. 'I am arranging for the Colonial Office, so that is all right,' Campbell-Bannerman telegraphed to him on December 9. 'I had some difficulty in securing my wish,' Churchill told Cecil, 'as it involved considerable alteration in other minor offices.' Ten days after his thirty-first birthday, Churchill was a Junior Minister. 'How things have marched since we pitched our tent in the triangle of the railway station at Estcourt!' wrote his Boer War journalist colleague, John Atkins.
On his first evening as a member of the Government, Churchill was at a party in London where he was introduced to Edward Marsh, a Colonial Office clerk two years his senior.
'How do you do?' asked Marsh. 'Which I must now say with great respect.'
'Why "with great respect"?' Churchill asked.
'Because you're coming to rule over me at the Colonial Office,' Marsh replied.
Intrigued, Churchill made enquiries. Then, on the following morning, his first full day in office, he invited Marsh to his room and asked if he would be his Private Secretary. Marsh accepted. That night the two men dined alone at Churchill's flat in Mount Street. 'He was most perfectly charming to me,' Marsh wrote to Churchill's Aunt Leonie, 'but made it quite clear what he would expect in the way of help and I almost know I can't do it.' Marsh was to remain Churchill's Private Secretary in each of Churchill's Ministerial offices during the next quarter of a century. 'The first time you meet Winston,' Pamela Plowden told him, 'you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.'
The new Liberal Government called a General Election, determined to secure a working majority in the Commons. Churchill issued his election manifesto on 1 January 1906, describing himself as the 'enemy' of any form of tariff system. He was also in favour of 'a reduction of expenditure upon armaments', and the taxation of land values. As for Ireland, while he would oppose any form of separation of Ireland from the United Kingdom, 'I would gladly see the Irish people accorded the power to manage their own expenditure, their own education, and their own public works according to Irish ideas.'
On January 2, as the election campaign began, Churchill's book Lord Randolph Churchill was published. It was described by The Times Literary Supplement as 'certainly among the two or three most exciting political biographies in the language'. From Lord Rosebery came a private letter of praise about the book, 'Good humoured, impartial, vivid, sympathetic, and written in an admirable style, with little refreshing ironies to flavour the whole composition, it is a book difficult to lay down.' In the book, Churchill referred, in a clear reference to his own thinking, to an England 'of wise men who gaze without self-deception at the failings and follies of both political parties; of brave and earnest men who find in neither faction fair scope for the effort that is in them; of "poor men" who increasingly doubt the sincerity of party philosophy.' It was to that England, he wrote, 'that Lord Randolph Churchill appealed; it was that England he so nearly won; it is by that England he will be justly judged'.
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Accompanied by Edward Marsh, Churchill went on January 4 by train to Manchester to launch his first election campaign as a Liberal. During the first day's campaigning the two men walked through the slum areas of the constituency. 'Winston looked about him,' Marsh later recalled, 'and his sympathetic imagination was stirred. "Fancy", he said, "living in one of these streets-never seeing anything beautiful-never eating anything savoury-never saying anything clever!" (the italics were his-it would be impossible to give a better rendering of italics in the spoken word).'
Churchill campaigned for eight days. At one meeting he told a heckler who quoted something he had said while a Conservative, 'I said a lot of stupid things when I was in the Conservative Party, and I left them because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.' As to the charge of being a political turncoat: 'I admit I have changed my Party. I don't deny it. I am proud of it. When I think of all the labours Lord Randolph Churchill gave to the fortunes of the Conservative Party and the ungrateful way he was treated by them when they obtained the power they would never have had but for him, I am delighted that circumstances have enabled me to break with them while I am still young, and still have the best energies of my life to give to the popular cause.'
Polling took place on January 13. The results were announced that evening. Churchill had been elected by a majority of 1,241 in an electorate of 10,000. Just as in 1900 his campaign had helped his fellow-Conservative candidates elsewhere, so now his fellow-Liberal campaigners became the beneficiaries of his electoral skill and zeal. His efforts in and around Manchester helped six other Liberal candidates to overturn Conservative seats. 'Bravo!' his cousin Ivor Guest wrote to him. 'You have given the pendulum such a swing as will be felt throughout the whole country.' The Liberal victory was a political triumph and a landslide. The Liberals won 377 seats, their Labour Party allies 53, the Irish Nationalists 83; a 'Ministerialist' total of 513. Against this formidable array were only 157 Tories, 11 of whom were Churchill's former associates, the Unionist Free Traders.
Churchill was now a Junior Minister in a Government furnished with far greater authority than it had expected. He was also the author of a much-acclaimed biography. 'There is such an obvious opening just now for a Dizzy or a Randolph,' William Moneypenny, the biographer of Disraeli, wrote in congratulating him both on his book and on the beginning of his official career, 'that I am half inclined to regret you are immured in Downing Street.' But Churchill was 'immured' nowhere; neither his proximity to power nor his Ministerial responsibilities were to prevent that same independence of action and ideas that had characterised his father, and Disraeli, in the previous century.
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At his desk in the Colonial Office, with Edward Marsh at his side, and the guidance of civil servants some of whom were twice his age, Churchill's first work as a Junior Minister was to help draft a constitution for the Transvaal. Since the surrender of the Boers more than five years earlier he had been a strong advocate of conciliation with the two defeated Republics. For more than a year he had supported the grant of self-government to Boer and Briton alike, to culminate in a single confederation. This was now his own Ministerial responsibility. On 2 January 1906, in the first State Paper of his career, he urged the Cabinet to abandon the former Conservative Government's plan for the retention of controls, and to grant the Transvaal responsible government.
'Sooner or later', Churchill pointed out, any powers retained by London would be demanded by the Transvaal. By then, however, 'the control of events will have largely passed from our hands. We may not be able, without the employment of force, to prescribe the electoral basis of the new constitution or even to reserve the functions necessary to the maintenance of public order and the King's authority. What we might have given with courage and distinction, both at home and in South Africa, upon our own terms, in the hour of our strength, will be jerked and twisted from our hands-without grace of any kind-not perhaps without humiliation-at a time when the Government may be greatly weakened, and upon terms in the settlement of which we shall have only a nominal influence.'
The Cabinet accepted Churchill's reasoning and instructed him to prepare the detailed drafts needed for a Constitutional settlement. In doing so he sought to create an equality of rights between the defeated Boer and the victorious Briton. 'Do not let us do anything,' he wrote in a note for the Cabinet on January 30, 'which makes us the champions of one race, and consequently deprives us for ever of the confidence of the other.' Churchill now participated in several meetings of a Cabinet Committee set up to decide on whether responsible government was possible. Within a month the Cabinet decided to grant self-government to the Transvaal at an early date. It was Churchill who would have to explain the reasons, and the details, to Parliament.
Another South African issue claimed much of Churchill's time during 1906; as a main part of their attack on the Conservatives during the election campaign, Liberal candidates had denounced as 'slavery' the use of indentured Chinese labour in South Africa. On coming to power, the Liberal Government was pledged to halt the recruitment of Chinese labour and to allow those labourers already in South Africa to go home. Churchill abhorred the conditions under which the Chinese were working, and wanted to press for the most rapid repatriation possible. When the Cabinet, of which he was not a member, wavered in pushing forward a measure which might alienate many South African leaders, Churchill warned Lord Elgin of the inevitable indignation of the House of Commons at the continued use by the mine owners of 'armed compulsion to maintain an immoral contract'.
The Liberal Cabinet felt bound not to go back on the final set of contracts approved by the Conservative Government in its very last months. While agreeing not to allow any further recruitment of labourers, and to encourage repatriation to China, it nevertheless decided, primarily in an attempt not to disrupt the South African economy, against any sudden ending of the indentured labour system. In a note to Elgin, Churchill proposed setting a maximum period of six years for the total elimination of Chinese labour. 'If anything can be done to let the Banks of South Africa down gently and to make them let their clients down gently, I should rejoice,' he wrote. 'Any suggestions to stop a sudden crash should be carefully considered. But crash or no crash, the policy will have to go forward, and the sooner this is realised, the better for all concerned.'
It fell to Churchill to defend in the Commons the decision to wind down indentured labour. The Chinese labour system, he said, was an 'evil inheritance it had been a 'sordid experiment'. The Liberal Government's aim was the 'gradual withdrawal' of the system. As to the Liberal Party's election charges of 'slavery', he told the Commons in a passage which provoked derisive jeers from the Conservative benches: 'A labour contract into which men enter voluntarily for a limited and for a brief period, under which they are paid wages which they consider adequate, under which they are not bought or sold, and under which they can obtain relief, may not be a desirable contract, may not be a healthy or proper contract, but it cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.'
The Conservative Opposition protested with vigour at the word 'slavery' being called a 'terminological inexactitude'. It was after all the Liberals who, during the election campaign, had made so much political capital out of the accusation of 'slavery'. Coolly, Churchill offered to withdraw the words 'terminological inexactitude'. The very coolness of his offer outraged the Conservatives even more. Then, on February 27, Lord Milner admitted in the House of Lords that while he was British High Commissioner in South Africa he had sanctioned the flogging of Chinese labourers even though they had not been convicted by a magistrate. This, Milner admitted, had been in breach of his own laws; such punishments were indeed unjust.
Churchill now spoke in the Commons of Milner's 'grave dereliction of public duty' and 'undoubted infringement of the law'. A week after this charge, a Radical MP introduced a motion censuring Milner and initiated a debate. In an effort at conciliation, Churchill, while expressing sympathy with the motion, argued that, in the interest of a settlement in South Africa, members should refrain from passing censure upon individuals. He therefore introduced an amendment of his own, condemning the flogging of the Chinese coolies, but not naming Milner.
In introducing his amendment, Churchill was careful not to refer to Milner's part in allowing the floggings. But everything he said angered the Conservatives who heard him. Milner, he told the House, had 'played a part which will leave its imprint, for good or ill, extensively upon the pages of history'. The words 'or ill' were not well chosen.
Churchill then spoke several sentences which he had intended to be moderate and judicious, but which, as he spoke them, enraged the Opposition as much as if they had been a direct attack on Milner. 'Lord Milner has gone from South Africa, probably for ever,' he said. 'The public service knows him no more. Having exercised great authority he now exerts none. Having held high employment, he now has no employment. Having disposed of events which have shaped the course of history, he is now unable to deflect in the smallest degree the policy of the day. Having been for many years, at any rate for many months, the arbiter of the fortune of men who are "rich beyond the dreams of avarice", he is today poor, and I will add honourably poor. After twenty years of exhausting service under the Crown he is today a retired Civil Servant, without pension or gratuity of any kind whatever. It is not worth while to pursue him any further.'
Newly elected Liberal MPs, Churchill continued, must not overlook or underrate 'the vexation and mortification which must be experienced by any vehement and earnest man who sees the ideals, the principles, the policies for which he has toiled, utterly discredited by the people of Great Britain, and who knows that many of the arrangements in which he has consumed all the energies of his life are about to be reversed or dissolved'. Lord Milner, he added, 'has ceased to be a factor in public events'.
'Utterly discredited', 'has ceased to be a factor these were harsh phrases, however true.
Churchill ended his speech by appealing to the Liberals not to vote for the censure of Milner, and to defuse the passions of Party politics for the sake of a settlement. The House of Commons, he said, 'can send a message to South Africa which cannot be perverted, misrepresented or misunderstood, a message of comfort to a troubled people, a message of tolerance and conciliation to warring races, a message indeed of good hope to the Cape'. This appeal for comfort, conciliation and hope was well intended. Indeed, as a result of Churchill's intervention, the Radical motion condemning Milner by name was withdrawn. But his references to Milner excited the passions of his enemies, and were to be referred to over many years as proof of his mischievousness and lack of balance. Balfour, speaking immediately after Churchill, asked that both Churchill's amendment and the original censure motion be rejected with 'equal contempt'.
'Pompous and impertinent' was the view of one Conservative MP, Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls' College, Oxford. 'Simply scandalous' was the comment of the King, who protested at Churchill's 'violent and objectionable language'. In the immediate aftermath of the Milner debate a Conservative MP brought in a motion to reduce Churchill's salary as a protest against his 'bitter and empoisoned language' in insulting Milner, 'a man whom so many of us esteem, honour and love'. The motion was unsuccessful.
Churchill was certain that he had done and said the right thing. 'After all,' he wrote to Milner's successor as High Commissioner, Lord Selborne, 'no other course but the one adopted by me would have prevented Lord Milner from being censured formally by the House of Commons.' Yet the causes of censure remained. When Selborne reported that the mine owners were continuing to flog their Chinese labourers, Churchill wrote to Elgin, 'What are we to do with people so reckless of their own interests as to continue these floggings and malpractices after all that has happened?' His answer was to continue with the repatriation scheme; it was announced by Churchill on May 3.
On July 31 Churchill announced the establishment of responsible government for the Transvaal. It was expected that a British majority would emerge at the elections and hold the balance of power. In the event, victory was secured by the Boers, and Britain's former adversary, General Botha, became Prime Minister. In his speech on July 31 Churchill asked the Opposition to support responsible government, which abandoned the Imperial controls that the Conservatives had wanted to set. 'We can only make it the gift of a Party,' he said. 'They can make it the gift of England.'
Churchill's appeal, a fellow-Liberal noted, 'struck the right note and moved this strange audience to emotion'. In defending the Transvaal settlement to the King, Churchill wrote: 'Any intelligent community will much rather govern itself ill, than be well governed by some other community: & we, whatever our intentions, have not the knowledge of their problems to enable us to give even good government.' Churchill went on to point out that all the South African business in the Commons had been left 'entirely' in his hands. He had had to speak more often than any other Minister except the President of the Board of Education '& to answer something like 500 questions, besides a great number of supplementary questions put & answered on the spur of the moment'.
Churchill told the King: 'I have had no previous experience in this kind of work. I have had a new & unfathomed House of Commons to deal with in respect of subjects upon which it is strangely excited; & at least four perfectly separate currents of opinion to consider. If therefore I have from time to time turned phrases awkwardly, or not judged quite the right time or tone, I feel certain that Your Majesty will have put the most favourable construction upon my words & will have credited me throughout with loyal & grave intentions.'
'If the dead are in any way conscious of our doings,' Churchill's former schoolmaster, C.H.P. Mayo, wrote to him that autumn, 'your father must visit the scene of his triumph with no less sense of triumph now.'
***
In August 1906, Churchill left England for a prolonged holiday. At Deauville, on the Channel coast of France, he lived on the yacht of his friend Baron de Forest, and played several polo matches at nearby Trouville. 'I have been very idle here & very dissipated,' he wrote to Marsh, 'gambling every night till five in the morning. I have made a little money-had made a lot.' To his brother Jack, he later reported: 'I took away £260 from the Deauville casino, some of which I spent in Paris on more beautiful French editions-which you might arrange provisionally in the French shelf near the window-& some of which I spent in other directions.' His gambling success at Deauville won him the equivalent of £10,000 in the money values of 1990. He was always to enjoy visiting the tables, often coming away the gainer.
From Paris, Churchill travelled by train to Switzerland, to stay once more at Cassel's mountain villa. There, he told the King, he and Cassel 'propose long walks over the glacier & mountains'. The two men climbed the 9,625-foot Eggishorn, 'a very long pull', Churchill told his mother, '& I should never have got home without the aid of a mule. Le vieillard'-Cassel was then fifty-four-'tramped it all out like a bird. Rather discreditable to me, I think'. From Switzerland, Churchill went to Berlin, then on to Silesia as the guest of the Kaiser, King Edward's nephew, at German Army manoeuvres. Campbell-Bannerman sent Churchill a word of caution; he had spoken to the King, who 'asked me to warn you against being too communicative and frank with his nephew'. Churchill wrote to his mother, 'I expect I will have to mind my Ps and Qs, so as to appear entirely candid & yet say nothing either platitudinous or indiscreet.'
During the manoeuvres Churchill spoke for twenty minutes with the Kaiser, who told him of the fighting qualities of the Herero tribe in German South-West Africa; the Germans were then ruthlessly suppressing the Herero revolt. 'I said in reply,' Churchill told Elgin, 'that in Natal on the contrary our chief difficulty had not been to kill the rebellious natives, but to prevent our Colonists (who so thoroughly understood native war) from killing too many of them.' Churchill added, 'There is a massive simplicity & force about German military arrangements which grows upon the observer; and although I do not think they have appreciated the terrible power of the weapons they hold & modern fire conditions, and have in that & in minor respects much to learn from our Army, yet numbers, quality, discipline & organisation are four good roads to victory.'
From Silesia, Churchill went by train to Venice, staying there a week before embarking on a sightseeing trip through Italy, travelling in Lionel Rothschild's motor car with Lionel Rothschild himself, Muriel Wilson and Lady Helen Vincent, at 'forty miles an hour', he told his mother. 'Such a lot of churches we have seen and saints and pictures "galore".' Nothing could exceed the 'tranquil banalité' of his relations with Miss Wilson. Then, driving back to Venice 'in one fell swoop of 330 kilometres' he took the night train to Vienna, and continued into the Moravian province of Austria-Hungary, where he was the guest of Baron de Forest at Eichhorn. All three of his hosts that summer, Cassel, Rothschild and de Forest, were Jews, reviving a gibe that used to be made against his father, that he 'only had Jewish friends'.
Churchill returned to London after nearly two months abroad. To the Kaiser, who had sent him signed photographs of the manoeuvres, he wrote of how they would remind him 'of the magnificent & formidable army whose operations I was enabled by Your Majesty's kindness to study so pleasantly, & of that beautiful Silesia which was well worth coming to see for its own sake-& so well worth fighting for'. Thirty-eight years later, at the end of the second of Britain's two wars with Germany, Churchill was to approve the transfer of Silesia to Poland, and its detachment from Germany.
***
In the autumn of 1906 the Orange Free State was granted responsible government on the same lines as the Transvaal. In announcing this to the Commons on December 17, Churchill spoke about the wider social implications of the settlement. 'The cause of the poor and the weak all over the world,' he said, 'will have been sustained; and everywhere small peoples will get more room to breathe; and everywhere great empires will be encouraged by our example to step forward into the sunshine of a more gentle and a more generous age.'
Churchill's work on the South African settlement prompted 'a special line of congratulation and recognition of the large part you have had in our success' from the Prime Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, who added that the creation of self-governing States in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was not only the 'greatest achievement' of his Government but 'the finest & noblest work of the British power in modern times. And you have so identified yourself with this courageous & righteous policy, and so greatly contributed to its successful enforcement, that a large part of the credit of it must always be attributed to you.'
The Transvaal settlement left control of native affairs in the hands of the new and predominantly Boer Government. The wisdom of this was questioned by those who felt that a Liberal Government in England could not abandon responsibility for the black population. 'I should certainly not be forward,' Churchill told a correspondent on this issue, 'in pressing upon the South African colonies views in regard to native franchise which they are at present not ready to accept. But our responsibility to the native races remains a real one, and we cannot divest ourselves of it until at least a Federal South African Government shall have placed the whole treatment of native races upon a broad and secure platform beyond the range of local panics.' Of the native grievances Churchill wrote forcefully to Lord Selborne: 'I think it highly desirable that any restrictions to which they now object would necessarily be modified-if not entirely removed-if we had an august Federal authority to deal with, instead of a group of petty governments pursuing local and selfish aims.'
Throughout his time at the Colonial Office, Churchill endeavoured to instil Liberal principles into Colonial administration. His minutes to Elgin were so outspoken that in several cases Elgin asked him to paste them over so that junior officials would not see them. The principle animating them was clear. 'Our duty,' he wrote to Elgin, 'is to insist that the principles of justice and the safeguards of judicial procedure are rigidly, punctiliously and pedantically followed.' Reading a report on the 'pacification' of the tribes of northern Nigeria, and of the Governor-General's proposed reprisals against a tribe which had burned down a Niger Company depot, Churchill told Elgin: 'Of course if the peace and order of the Colony depend on a vigorous offensive we must support him with all our hearts. But the chronic bloodshed which stains the West African seasons is odious and disquieting.'
Justice was a central theme of Churchill's interventions. When the Governor of Ceylon pleaded 'inconvenience' as a reason for refusing to respond to an appeal for reinstatement by a former head guard on the Ceylon Government railways, Churchill minuted, 'The inconvenience inseparable from the reparation of injustice or irregularity is one of the safeguards against their recurrence.' Churchill added that the Governor's explanations, 'such a jumble of confused arguments, such indifference to ordinary principles of justice and fair play, are intellectually contemptible if not morally dishonouring'. To Elgin, Churchill wrote privately of this episode, 'Let me say most solemnly that the Liberal Party cares very much for the rights of individuals to just & lawful treatment, & very little for the petty pride of a Colonial Governor.' He was concerned by 'the tone & temper which high officers of the Ceylon Government observe towards the amiable, civilised & cultivated people over whom they are set to govern'.
When Elgin declined to take up the case as Churchill wished, an angry private letter followed. 'In over-ruling me,' Churchill wrote, 'you do not assign any reasons, nor attempt to do justice to the very grave arguments I have so earnestly submitted to you.' This caused him 'the most profound disquiet'. The dismissal of a second railway guard in Ceylon and his second trial on the same charge, led to a further protest from Churchill. 'To try a man again upon the original charge,' he wrote, 'to review without any of the safeguards of justice a case already decided in a court of law, to overthrow the acquittal pronounced by judge and jury, and solidly to assert upon departmental authority that the man is guilty after all, is to commit almost every impropriety possible, and to commit them all in the stupidest way.' The administration of justice in Ceylon was 'the vilest scandal of the colonial service'.
When a Zulu revolt was crushed in Natal, Churchill protested to Elgin about the 'disgusting butchery of the natives'. But it was not only on colonial matters that Churchill defended Liberal principles. In a speech in Glasgow on 11 October 1906 he set out a broad, humane vision for the future; the 'whole tendency of civilisation', he said, was towards 'the multiplication of the collective functions of society'. The State must play an ever-widening part; it must, for example, 'increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and the aged, and, above all, of the children'.
Churchill also approved the existing determination among many Liberals 'to intercept all future unearned increment which may arise from the increase in the speculative value of land'. He wanted the State to take a lead in afforestation. 'I am sorry,' he said, 'we have not got the railways of this country in our hands.' He wanted the State increasingly to assume 'the position of the reserve employer of labour'. Above all, he declared, 'I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation as the increased energies of production may permit.'
There was a middle way between capitalism and socialism. 'I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition,' Churchill told his Glasgow audience, 'but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour, yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition to run downwards. We do not want to pull down the structures of science and civilisation; but to spread a net over the abyss.'
***
At the end of 1906 Churchill was being considered for promotion to the Cabinet, as President of the Board of Education. 'I have been dreading every post to find the rumours true and that I was to lose your help,' Elgin wrote to him on December 27. 'Of course I should like to come into the Cabinet,' Churchill replied, 'so as to be able to take my proper part in national as opposed to departmental politics. But I can easily imagine that no vacancy that would suit me will be created in the near future, & I shall be quite content & happy to go on working under you in the Colonial Office for another year, if events should so shape themselves.'
Churchill remained with Elgin, writing to him that winter, 'No one could ever have had a more trustful & indulgent chief than I have been most lucky to find on first joining a government; & I have learned a very great deal in the conduct of official business from your instruction and example which I should all my life have remained completely ignorant of, if I had gone elsewhere.' Elgin, with a sick wife, and many local obligations in his native Scotland, was glad despite their disagreements to have someone of such unexpected administrative energies in charge in London.
That winter, Churchill went on holiday to the Isle of Wight. 'Unluckily,' he told Elgin, 'the sea has been dead calm, so that there are no great waves that I could watch for hours.' He was now thirty-two years old. Among those whom he met for the first time that year was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's daughter, Violet Asquith. They were sitting next to each other at dinner. 'For a long time he remained sunk in abstraction,' she later recalled. 'Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. "And I," he said almost despairingly, "am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though." After a long oration he suddenly ended with the immortal words, "We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm."'
In March 1907 Churchill went on holiday to Biarritz, to another of the magnificent homes of his friend Baron de Forest, and the Baron's father, Baron de Hirsch. 'The King dines or lunches here daily,' he wrote to Elgin, '& seems very well disposed to us.' Churchill added: 'The weather here is glorious & there are a great many people I have known a long time-all Tories! I get a good deal of chaff & prodding, especially from high quarters, endeavouring always to frame suitable replies.' After their talks together in Biarritz, King Edward wrote to Churchill: 'We have known your parents for many years (even before their marriage), & you and your brother since your childhood. Knowing the great abilities which you possess-I am watching your political career with great interest. My one wish is that the great qualities you possess may be turned to good account & that your services to the State may be appreciated.'
***
On April 15 the Colonial Prime Ministers met in London; Churchill was closely involved in arranging the visit. The Transvaal Premier, elected less than two months earlier, was General Botha, former commander of the Boer armies, who arrived in London with his nineteen-year-old daughter Helen. 'I hear you are engaged to Miss Botha,' Muriel Wilson wrote to him; she looked forward to the day 'when you I hope-& Miss Botha, & all the little Bothas will come & see me.' It was a false rumour; that autumn, still neither married nor engaged, Churchill left Britain for a prolonged European and African journey, accompanied by his father's former servant, George Scrivings.
In France in the second week of September, Churchill attended French Army manoeuvres near Angoulême, where he was far more impressed by the French military effort than by what he called the 'crude absurdities' of the German 'theatrical display' of the previous year. From France he went to Italy for a second motoring holiday, travelling this time with a new friend, F.E. Smith, a Conservative MP of wit and brilliance who quickly became his closest companion, despite the political divide. From Italy, they drove to de Forest's castle at Eichhorn in Moravia where they shot partridge and hare. Churchill then drove back to Italy, travelling the length of the Peninsula to Syracuse, the Sicilian town in which he was to find solace in 1955, after his final retirement from public life.
From Syracuse, accompanied by Edward Marsh, Churchill went by sea to Malta, where he spent a week visiting the island's prison, dockyard, schools and hospitals. At the end of his visit he wrote to Elgin mat the complaint of the Maltese-'that they were never conquered by England, but that now we spend their money without allowing the Maltese any sort of control-is a very real, & to me at least a very painful one'. From Malta he went by Admiralty cruiser to Cyprus; confronted in Nicosia by a large demonstration demanding union with Greece, he told the demonstrators that he would be more impressed by the sound of argument than by flag-waving. As at Malta, however, he felt that British policy to Cyprus needed changing, telegraphing to Elgin, 'Island has been terribly starved by Treasury, and bears deep mark in moral and material conditions.'
Leaving Cyprus, the cruiser took Churchill across the Eastern Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and southward through the Red Sea towards Aden. 'I have two beautiful cabins to myself,' he told his mother, 'one of which is quite a large room with a delightful balcony at the end overlooking the waves.' He was spending 'a good deal of every day, and almost every dawn on the bridge; & am becoming quite a mariner'. From Aden he went to Berbera, to study the affairs of the Somaliland Protectorate 'upon which', he told his mother, 'we spend £76,000 a year with uncommonly little return'.
During this sea voyage Churchill prepared six lengthy memoranda which he sent back to the Colonial Office 'upon things I want to have done', he explained to his mother. These memoranda, closely argued and emphatic as to what he felt was needed or just, provoked Sir Francis Hopwood, the senior civil servant at the Colonial Office, to write direct to Elgin: 'He is most tiresome to deal with & will I fear give trouble-as his father did-in any position to which he may be called. The restless energy, uncontrollable desire for notoriety & the lack of moral perception make him an anxiety indeed!' Hopwood added, 'Marsh gives a vivid description of fourteen hours work in one day upon these memoranda in the heat & discomfort of the Red Sea.'
Reaching the port of Mombasa at the end of October, Churchill wrote to his mother of 'two days of functions & inspections & speeches'. He then went through the Kenya Protectorate by rail. 'Everything moves on the smoothest of wheels for me-a special train with dining & sleeping cars was at my disposal all the way, wherever I wished to stop, it stopped.' Churchill travelled with his Aunt Sarah's husband, Gordon Wilson, who was later killed in action in France in 1914. The two men enjoyed themselves immensely. Churchill told his mother that as the train travelled through Kenya 'we sat (Gordon & I) on a seat in front of the engine with our rifles, & as soon as we saw anything to shoot at-a wave of the hand brought the train to a standstill & sometimes we tried at antelope without even getting down'.
From the railway, Churchill wrote, 'one can see literally every animal in the Zoo. Zebras, lions, rhinoceros, antelopes of every kind, ostriches, giraffes-all'. At Simba, two hundred miles from the coast, their train stayed in a siding for two days while they made hunting excursions into the countryside. 'The first day,' Churchill told his mother, 'I killed one zebra, one wildebeeste, two hartebeeste, one gazelle, one bustard (a giant bird).' The third day was the 'feast of the rhino'. Churchill, Wilson and Marsh set off full of hopes for a kill. Then, he told his mother, 'On turning round the corner of a hill & coming into a great wide plain of dry grass we saw, almost five hundred yards away, a rhinoceros quietly grazing. I cannot describe to you the impression produced on the mind by the sight of the grim black silhouette of this mighty beast-a survival of prehistoric times-roaming about the plain as he & his forerunners had done since the dawn of the world. It was like being transported back into the stone age.'
While walking forward to attack the rhinoceros, the hunters saw two more 'quite close to us'. Churchill fired at the larger one with his rifle '& hit her plum in the chest. She curved round & came straight for us at that curious brisk trot which is nearly as fast as a horse's gallop, & full of surprising activity. Everybody fired & both the rhinos turned off.' They then followed the smaller one, found him later in the day and killed him. 'I must say I found it exciting and also anxious work,' Churchill told his mother. 'The vitality of these brutes is so tremendous that they will come on like some large engine in spite of five or six heavy bullets thumping into them. You cannot resist a feeling that they are invulnerable & will trample you under foot however well you shoot. However, all's well that ends well.'
As he approached the snow-clad peak of Mount Kenya, Churchill was exhilarated by the vastness and beauty of the landscape. Riding forward to the new British station at Embo, 'opened only last year in a hitherto unpenetrated country', he slept on the floor 'having nothing but what we stood up in and only a banana inside us', and telling his mother: 'What a difference to the fag of a London day. My health bounds up every day I spend in the open air.' At Thika he spent a day hunting lions, but without success, 'only finding three great fierce wart-hogs', he told his mother, 'which we killed-galloping one of them down & shooting him with my revolver'.
That night, November 5, dining in Nairobi with the Governor, Churchill told his host that he could now 'advance further into this country & establish a new station & post at Meru-fifty miles beyond Embo'. This decision, Churchill told his mother, 'will bring 150,000 more natives under our direct control & add several English counties to our administrative area. There will not I think be any bloodshed, as the native chiefs want us to come-& about 100 soldiers will be sufficient. This will operate next month: & we do not propose to consult the Colonial Office till it is an accomplished fact!' Churchill added, 'Thus the Empire grows under radical Administration!'
As Churchill travelled through Africa, his brother Jack sent news of his engagement to Lady Gwendeline Bertie, daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon. 'You were in love really once,' Jack wrote, 'and you know what that meant. But you had other things to think of. Your career and your future filled more than half of your life.' Churchill knew and liked Lady Gwendeline, 'Goonie' as she was known. Before he left England she had written to him with advice for his African journey: 'Please don't become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalism.'
While in Nairobi, Churchill had begun to send a series of accounts of his journey to the Strand Magazine, for a total payment of £1,150; more than £40,000 in the money values of 1990. The articles were later written up in book form as My African Journey. Reaching Jinja, where the Nile leaves Lake Victoria and begins its 3,500-mile journey to the sea, Churchill waxed enthusiastic in one of his articles about the possibility of a dam being thrown across the river at the Ripon Falls as a source of electric power. Forty-six years later, at that very spot, Queen Elizabeth II was to open a hydro-electric scheme, and to telegraph to Churchill, then her Prime Minister, 'Your vision has become reality.'
From Jinja, Churchill, Wilson, Marsh and Scrivings continued northward through the Uganda Protectorate, on foot and by canoe for three weeks, through country in which 200,000 people had recently died from sleeping sickness. 'Whole populous islands,' Churchill wrote to the King, 'have been swept clear.' He was also eloquent about the benefits which the railway would bring to the region, and on his return to London was to press for a policy of rapid and extensive railway building.
During the journey northward, Churchill celebrated his thirty-third birthday. Continuing by steamer for ten days down the Nile, on December 22 he wrote to the Liberal journalist J.A. Spender, stressing the need for radical social reform. 'No legislation at present in view interests the democracy,' he maintained. 'All their minds are turning more and more to the social and economic issue. This revolution is irresistible. They will not tolerate the existing system by which wealth is acquired, shared & employed. They may not be able, they may be willing to recognise themselves unable, to devise a new system. I think them very ready & patient beyond conception. But they will set their faces like flint against the money power, the heir of all other powers & tyrannies overthrown.'
However willing the working classes might be 'to remain in passive opposition', Churchill argued, 'they will not continue to bear, & they cannot, the awful uncertainties of their lives. This is why standards of wages & comfort, insurance in some effective form or other against sickness, unemployment, old age, these are the questions, and the only questions, by which Parties are going to live in the future.' On his return, he told Spender, this would be his song, 'Social Bulwarks', 'Security' and 'Standardisation'.
On December 23 Churchill and his companions were at Khartoum. That same day, Scrivings was taken ill with choleric diarrhoea. He died a day later, on Christmas Eve. 'Scrivings' death was a great shock to me', Churchill wrote to Jack, '& has cast a gloom over all the memories of this pleasant & even wonderful journey.' Churchill added, 'We all must have eaten the same dish which contained the poison-whether it was a tin of ptomaine-poisoned fish, or rotten asparagus, or what, will never be known.'
That Christmas Day at Khartoum, Churchill made the arrangements for Scrivings' funeral. 'We passed a miserable day,' he told Jack, '& I had him buried in the evening with full military honours, as he had been a Yeoman. The Dublin Fusiliers sent their band & a company of men, & we all walked in procession to the cemetery as mourners, while the sun sank over the desert, & the band played that beautiful funeral march you know so well.' Churchill told his mother: 'I thought as I walked after the coffin at Khartoum-I always follow funerals there-how easily it might have been, might then still be, me. Not nearly so much should I have minded, as you would think. I suppose there is some work for me to do.'
After the funeral Churchill and his companions spent 'rather an uncomfortable 48 hours', he told Jack, 'until the danger period was over' expecting that one or other of them would be struck down; for Scrivings, Churchill told his mother, 'ate our food always'. Churchill added: 'To me who have become so dependent upon this poor good man for all the little intimate comforts of daily life, it has been a most keen and palpable loss. I cannot bear to think of his wife & children looking forward to his return-letters by every post-and then this horrible news to lay them low.'
Before leaving Khartoum, Churchill made arrangements for a monument to be erected on Scrivings' grave and wrote an inscription for it. He also told Jack to tell Mrs Scrivings, who for ten years had been Churchill's cook, 'not to be worried about her future, as so far as my limited means allow I will endeavour to look after her & her children'. The death of his servant was 'all the more melancholy', Churchill added, 'when really all the unhealthy & dangerous part of the journey was over & we had been living for ten days on a comfortable Nile steamer. But Africa always claims its forfeits!'
The British Agent in Egypt provided Churchill with a steamer for his journey from Khartoum to Cairo. The steamer 'stops wherever we want at temples', he told Jack. At Aswan he wrote a memorandum on the need for a railway through Uganda to join Lake Victoria with Lake Albert; the 'Victoria and Albert railway' he called it. To Walter Runciman, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, he wrote from Aswan: 'I have an elaborate scheme on foot which will enable this railway to be built for about £500,000 (plus ferries) in the course of the next two years. If this be done, and the policy settled soon, I hope to catch the whole Congo trade.' His aim was 'commercial solvency'. He had discussed the railway with senior British officials in the Sudan 'and we are absolutely agreed on policy'. He would explain it all 'with maps & figures' on his return.
Reaching Cairo, Churchill elaborated on the scheme for British social policy which he had already outlined to Spender. In a letter to a senior official at the Board of Trade, enclosing a copy of the scheme, he wrote, 'Will you kindly examine, illuminate, & fortify the following.' Basing himself on the premise, 'The main need of the English working classes is Security,' he proposed the introduction of a system of social reform similar to that in Germany, where 'uniform & symmetrical arrangements exist for insurance of workmen against accidents & sickness, for provisions for old age, and through Labour bureaux etc for employment'. What had attracted him to the German system was that 'it catches everybody. The meshes of our safety net are only adapted to subscribers, & all those who are not found on any of those innumerable lists go smashing down on the pavement.'
It was this very class of people, Churchill explained, 'the residue, the rearguard, call it what you will, for whom no provision exists in our English machinery, who have neither the character nor the resources to make provision for themselves, who require the aid of the State'. What he wished to bring to an end was a situation where minimum standards of life and wages and security were 'going to the Devil through accident, sickness, or weakness of character'. His aim was 'competition upwards but not downwards'.
***
On 17 January 1908 Churchill returned to London after an absence of five months. On the following day he was the guest of honour at the National Liberal Club. 'I come back into the fighting line,' he told 250 enthusiastic listeners, 'in the best of all possible health, and with a wish to force the fighting up to the closest possible point.' That fight was to be in the social field; speaking at Manchester on January 22, he emphasised the need for 'the producing interests' to avoid, through their search for profits, 'a further impoverishment of the great left-out labour interest'. On the following day, at Birmingham, he advocated 'the organisation by the State of the proper training and apprenticeship of any persons, even though it involves large new expenditure'.
Churchill also argued at Birmingham for several other interventions by the State, including the need to promote 'proper methods of technical instruction', to 'mitigate the sorrows of old age', to open the land 'more freely to the millions', and to adjust 'more fairly the burden of taxation upon earned and unearned increment'.
On March 7 Churchill set out these radical themes in an article in The Nation entitled 'The Untrodden Field in Politics'. Political freedom, he wrote, 'however precious, is utterly incomplete without a measure at least of social and economic independence'. The State must come to the help of the individual, by technical training, by developing certain national industries and utilities-he mentioned the railways, canals and forests-by solving the 'riddles' of employment and under-employment, and by establishing a 'National Minimum' below which competition would not be allowed to create worse poverty and deprivation, but above which competition 'may continue healthy and free, to vivify and fertilise the world'.
That March, at a dinner party in London, Churchill once more met Clementine Hozier, the girl with whom he had neither danced nor dined at Lady Crewe's dance in 1904. Unknown to him, she had been secretly engaged twice since then, to a thirty-four-year-old banker, Sidney Peel, the son of the 1st Viscount Peel; but she had twice broken off the engagement. Churchill sat next to her at dinner and devoted all his attention to her, to the distress of the lady on his other side.
Had she read his life of Lord Randolph, he asked Clementine.
'No,' she replied.
'If I send you the book tomorrow, will you read it?'
Clementine agreed to read the book, but he did not send it. 'That made a bad impression upon me,' she later recalled. But it was not to be the end of the story.
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