On June 27, with Baldwin's approval, Churchill met Lloyd George to discuss a possible Conservative-Liberal compact, limited in the first instance to specific issues as they arose in Parliament. 'I am deeply impressed with the critical character of the present situation,' he explained to Baldwin two days later. 'Eight million Tories, eight million Labour, five million Liberals! Where will those five million go?' If the Conservative Party turned to Protection and if its 'anti-Liberal resentments' had their way, 'there will be only one result-very likely final for our life time, namely a Lib-Lab bloc in some form or other and a Conservative Right hopelessly excluded from power.'
Churchill repeated his plea for a Conservative-Liberal rapprochement at the Shadow Cabinet on July 11, but Amery would not give up his quest for a return to Protection and found at least a partial ally in Neville Chamberlain. Meanwhile, with the rise of nationalism in Egypt, MacDonald announced his Government's decision to withdraw British troops from Cairo to the Suez Canal, and at the same time to recall the High Commissioner, Lord Lloyd, a staunch upholder of British influence. Following Lloyd's dismissal, Churchill later recalled: 'I reacted vehemently against this rough and sudden gesture, and hoped the whole Conservative Party would have the same sentiments. But Mr Baldwin, brought up as a business man and certainly a great measurer of public feeling, did not think that this was good ground for a fight with the Government. It would unite the Liberals with them and leave the Conservatives in a marked minority.'
Lloyd had appealed to Churchill personally 'to do him justice, and I', Churchill wrote, 'declared I would confront the Government on the issue, which was one not only of weak policy but of personal ill-usage. Mr Baldwin deprecated any such championship of the High Commissioner, but I persisted. When I rose in my place on the Front Opposition Bench to interrogate the Government, he sat silent and disapproving. I immediately perceived that the Whips had been set to work the night before to make it clear to the Party that their honoured Leader did not think this was a good point to press. Murmurs and even cries of dissent from the Conservative benches were added to the hostile Government interruptions, and it was evident I was almost alone in the House.'
Churchill's championship of Lloyd was his first breach with the Conservative leadership. 'Never mind,' he wrote to Lloyd on July 28, 'you have done your best, and if Britain alone among modern States chooses to cast away her rights, her interests and her strength, she must learn by bitter experience.' Six days later Churchill left England on a journey to Canada and the United States with his son, his brother, and his nephew Johnny. 'What fun it is to get away from England,' he wrote to Beaverbrook before leaving, 'and to feel one has no responsibility for her exceedingly tiresome and embarrassing affairs.' But to Clementine, who did not feel well enough to undertake such a long journey, he wrote sorrowfully during the Atlantic voyage: 'My darling I have been rather sad at times thinking of you in low spirits at home. Do send me some messages. I love you so much & it grieves me to feel you are lonely.'
Among those on board ship was Amery, who recorded in his diary Churchill's reflections on the Dardanelles: 'Talking of the series of mis-chances which just prevented our getting through, he said jestingly that his only consolation was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war, and that therefore He had interfered with a project which would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion. His other evidence for a Deity was the existence of Lenin and Trotsky-for whom a hell was needed.'
On August 9 the Churchills reached Quebec. On their second afternoon they drove into the Canadian countryside, entranced by the hills, forests and streams. That night, looking out from their hotel window at the paper mills lit up, Churchill told his son, 'Fancy cutting down those beautiful trees we saw this afternoon to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.' Ensconced in the comfort of a private railway car put at their disposal by the American steel king Charles Schwab, who in 1915 had built submarines for Churchill in under six months instead of the usual fourteen, Churchill travelled across Canada to Vancouver. He and Jack had 'large cabins with big double beds and private bathrooms', he told Clementine. There was a parlour, an observation room and a large dining-room 'which I use as the office and in which I am now dictating', as well as a kitchen, refrigerators, fans, quarters for the staff, and a 'splendid wireless installation'.
Churchill made two speeches in Montreal, one in Ottawa and one in Toronto. 'Never in my life have I been welcomed with so much genuine interest & admiration as throughout this vast country,' he wrote to Clementine. 'All Parties and classes have mingled in the welcome. The workmen in the streets, the girls who work the lifts, the ex-service men, the farmers, up to the highest functionaries have shown such unaffected pleasure to see me & shake hands that I am profoundly touched; & I intend to devote my strength to interpreting Canada to our own people & vice versa; & to bringing about an even closer association between us.'
At Calgary Churchill visited the oilfields; after Randolph remarked that the oil magnates were too uncultured to know how to spend their money properly, he retorted, 'Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.'
From Banff, on August 27, Churchill told Clementine that if Neville Chamberlain 'or anyone else of that kind' was made Leader of the Conservative Party, 'I clear out of politics, & see if I cannot make you & the kittens a little more comfortable before I die'. His thoughts were on the Premiership. 'Only one goal attracts me, & if that were barred I should quit the dreary field for pastures new.'
After touring the Canadian Rockies and setting up his easel at Lake Louise, Churchill reached Vancouver, where he gave two more speeches before travelling south into the United States, to San Francisco, then south again to the splendours of William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. 'A vast income always overspent,' Churchill told Clementine; 'ceaseless building, & collecting not very discriminately works of art; two magnificent establishments, two charming wives'-one was Hearst's wife, the other his mistress, the actress Marion Davies-'complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million a day circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy (to us at any rate) & the appearance of a Quaker elder-or perhaps better Mormon elder.'
Hearst asked Churchill to write for his newspapers, an assignment that was to provide him with an important additional source of income for the next decade. His literary earnings were now extraordinary; that month alone the advance for his Marlborough biography, payment for three articles in Nash's Pall Mall, and royalties on the last volume of his war memoirs were the equivalent of two and a half years' earnings for a Prime Minister.
On September 20, after dinner in Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin, Churchill promised to write the film script of 'The Young Napoleon' if Chaplin would play in it. 'He is a marvellous comedian,' Churchill told Clementine, 'bolshy in politics & delightful in conversation.' During five days in Los Angeles, he spoke to several groups of American businessmen about how England and the United States 'ought to work together'. A British diplomat reported to London that these talks had produced 'wonderful and immediate results amongst those who, up to recent times, have been antagonistic to us and our interests'.
After driving through the magnificent Yosemite Valley, Churchill rejoined Schwab's train to travel through the Mojave Desert and on to the Grand Canyon. Then, reaching Chicago, he spoke of how the British and American Fleets, if ever used, 'will be together for the preservation of peace'. From Chicago, he travelled in Bernard Baruch's railway car to New York, then spent some time touring the American Civil War battlefields. 'The farm-houses and the churches still show the scars of shot and shell,' he told Clementine. 'The woods are full of trenches and rifle pits; the larger trees are full of bullets.' Nearly seventy years had passed since the Civil War; 'If you could read men's hearts, you would find that they, too, bear the marks.'
From the battlefields, Churchill went by Schwab's train to the headquarters of Bethlehem Steel, where on Tuesday October 29 he was entertained by the company's senior executives and spent three hours touring the giant plant. He then returned to New York; it was the afternoon of 'Black Tuesday', the day the stock market crashed. His own shareholdings plummeted; his losses were in excess of £10,000, more than £200,000 in the money values of 1990. That night he attended a dinner given in his honour at which more than forty businessmen were present. One of them, in proposing Churchill's health, began his remarks with the words, 'Friends and former millionaires.'
On the following day, Churchill later wrote, under his bedroom window 'a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade'. Walking down Wall Street 'at the worst moment of the panic' he was recognised by a stranger and invited on to the floor of the Stock Exchange. 'I expected to see pandemonium; but the spectacle that met my eyes was one of surprising calm and orderliness.' The members of the Exchange were walking to and fro 'like a slow-motion picture of a disturbed ant heap, offering each other enormous blocks of securities at a third of their old prices', and for many minutes 'finding no one strong enough to pick up the sure fortunes they were compelled to offer'.
Churchill sailed from New York on October 30. He was in a distressed mood; seven days earlier the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, at Baldwin's urging, had agreed to support the Labour Government's plans for India. Churchill, then in New York, had not been consulted. The decision, announced by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, on October 31, was to grant Dominion Status to India. While retaining a Viceroy appointed from London, and British military control of defence, India would be ruled within a few years by Indians at both the national and provincial levels. Churchill was certain that this was a wrong decision; that the Hindus and Muslims of India were not yet ready to govern themselves at the centre; that several more decades of British rule were needed before the peoples of the sub-continent could take charge of their destiny without division, bloodshed and inequality; and that once Dominion Status were granted, the demand for full independence, which both MacDonald and Baldwin rejected, would follow with renewed force. Only at the Provincial level, Churchill believed, were the Indians ready for self-government.
Churchill reached London from the United States on November 6. On the following day he was in the Commons to hear Baldwin pledge the Conservative Party to Dominion Status. 'Winston had sat through SB's speech glowering and unhappy,' the Chairman of the Conservative Party, J.C.C. Davidson, wrote to Irwin, while Samuel Hoare wrote to Irwin, 'Throughout the debate Winston was almost demented with fury and since the debate has hardly spoken to anyone.' But Churchill did not intend to remain silent. In an article in the Daily Mail on November 16 he stressed that British rule had brought peace and prosperity to India. 'Justice has been given-equal between race and race, impartial between man and man. Science, healing or creative, has been harnessed to the service of this immense and, by themselves, helpless population.' But the Hindus, allowed by Britain to observe their own customs, still branded sixty million of their members as Untouchables, whose very approach in the street was considered an affront and whose presence was considered 'a pollution'.
Dominion Status 'can certainly not be obtained', Churchill wrote, by those who treated their 'fellow human beings, toiling at their side', so badly. The grant of Dominion Status would be 'a crime'. As Churchill was certain it would, the Indian National Congress also rejected Dominion Status. Six weeks after he published his first critical article, the new Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who, like Churchill, had been educated at Harrow, demanded full independence for India. Nehru urged all Congress members who were serving in the central and provincial legislatures to resign their seats, and he called for an all-India campaign of total disobedience to British rule. The Congress campaign was supported by the spiritual leader of Indian nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi; both he and Nehru were arrested by Irwin and imprisoned.
On November 30 Churchill celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday. Shortly before Christmas he offered the BBC £100 if he could broadcast a ten-minute appeal against Dominion Status for India. The BBC refused. In vain he protested against the policy of 'debarring public men from access to a public who wish to hear'.
***
On 30 October 1930, Churchill published his autobiography My Early Life. It was a gentle, witty account of his school and Army days, with many reflections on life and politics. 'I wish I could do anything half as good,' Baldwin wrote. T.E. Lawrence commented on 'the ripe & merry wisdom, and the courage and flair and judgement I take rather for granted having seen you so much in action', but which a wider public could now get to know. Lawrence added, 'Not many people could have lived 25 years so without malice.' From MacDonald came a handwritten note of thanks from Downing Street: 'When I have the hardihood to put mine in the window you will have a copy in grateful exchange for this. But then there is no chance of mine ever coming unless some old fishwife turns biographer. You are an interesting cuss-I, a dull dog. May yours bring you both credit and cash.'
My Early Life was quickly reprinted and translated into many languages. But Churchill's satisfaction as an author was in contrast to his unhappiness at his growing political isolation, as the Conservative Party leaders agreed to participate in a Round Table Conference in London to work out with the Indian political leaders the details of Dominion Status. He was also upset that autumn when the Conservative Party turned its back on Free Trade. This would make impossible the Conservative-Liberal alliance which he favoured as a basic political force against Labour. He had no intention, however, of leaving the Party which he had left on this same Free Trade issue twenty-six years earlier, telling Amery, a leading advocate of Tariffs, 'I propose to stick to you with all the loyalty of a leech.'
A month before Churchill's fifty-sixth birthday, his friend Lord Birkenhead died suddenly; he was only two years older than Churchill; for twenty-five years they had been the closest of friends. In an obituary published in The Times on the following day, Churchill wrote: 'He was the most loyal, faithful, valiant friend any man could have, and a wise, learned, delightful companion. He would not, I think, have wished to live except in his full health and vigour. All who knew him well will mourn him and miss him often. But even more is our country the poorer. These are the times when he is needed most. His deeply founded sagacity, his keen, courageous mind, his experience and understanding, his massive system of conclusions, his intellectual independence, his knowledge of all grave issues now pending, make his death at this moment a national impoverishment. His happy, brilliant, generous, warm-hearted life is closed. It has closed in years when he might have made his greatest contribution to the fortunes of the England he loved so well.'
***
A week before Churchill's fifty-sixth birthday, Clementine wrote to Randolph, who was then an undergraduate at Oxford: 'Politics as you say have taken an orientation not favourable to Papa. Sometimes he is gloomy about this, but fortunately not increasingly so. The success and praise which have greeted his book counteract his sad moments.' There was a moment of gladness at the end of November, the engagement of their daughter Diana to John Bailey, the son of the South African mine-owner and millionaire, Sir Abe Bailey, whom Churchill had known for many years. But while the wedding was a high point of the social life of London, the marriage did not last; three years later Diana obtained a divorce and married a young Conservative MP, Duncan Sandys, whom she first met when Randolph was campaigning against him at a by-election.
On December 12 Churchill was the principal speaker at the first public meeting of the Indian Empire Society, set up to combat Dominion Status. His speech reflected the considerable Conservative unease at whether the time had yet come to move towards Dominion Status, particularly in the wake of the growing civil disobedience in India. Privately, Neville Chamberlain told a friend that he did not expect the Indians to be ready for self-government for fifty years or more. But Baldwin's support for Dominion Status had become a matter of Party policy, and Irwin, a lifelong Conservative and close friend of the Conservative leaders, served as a bridge between MacDonald's Government and the Shadow Cabinet.
During his speech of December 12 Churchill warned of the dangers to India 'if the British Raj is to be replaced by the Gandhi Raj'. The rulers of the Indian Native States, and the vast Muslim minority, would both have to 'make terms' with the new power. The Untouchables, 'denied by the Hindu religion even the semblance of human rights', would no longer have a protector. The way to avoid political turmoil in India, he argued, was to concentrate on practical steps 'to advance the material condition of the Indian masses', and to treat with swift severity all extremism and all breaches of the law. The Congress at Lahore, at which the Union Jack had been burnt, ought to have been 'broken up forthwith and its leaders deported'. By firmly asserting 'the will to rule' Britain could have avoided the 'immense series of penal measures' which had, in fact, been taken. Churchill added, 'Even now, at any time, the plain assertion of the resolve of Parliament to govern and to guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interests would in a few years-it might even be in a few months-bring this period of tantalised turmoil to an end.'
Churchill then proposed a two-tier solution; the Indian Provincial Governments would move towards 'more real, more intimate, more representative organs of self-government', while the central power would remain firmly in British hands. But civil disobedience must be ended. 'The truth is,' he declared, 'that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat's meat. The sooner this is realised, the less trouble and misfortune there will be for all concerned.'
Lord Irwin commented in a letter to a friend, 'What a monstrous speech Winston has just made.' Churchill was convinced that India was not yet ready to rule itself at the centre; Irwin believed that he could reconcile the needs of the Indian Princely States and the Indian Provinces through a Federal scheme. He also believed he should open negotiations with the imprisoned Gandhi and the Congress leaders whose demand for full independence was as unacceptable to MacDonald as it was to Baldwin.
In a letter to his son on 8 January 1931 Churchill wrote: 'I am going to fight this Indian business à outrance.' Nor would he join any administration 'saddled with all the burden of whole-hog Protection, plus unlimited doses of Irwinism for India'. On January 25, in an attempt to persuade Congress to negotiate, Irwin released Gandhi from prison. His one fear, Irwin told Baldwin, was that 'Winston should make mischief' in Parliament during the next day's debate. Irwin advised Baldwin, 'Send him to Epping for the day.'
Churchill did speak in the debate of January 26. It was his first Parliamentary speech against the Conservative Party since he had rejoined it in 1924, and marked a definite breach with the Party leadership. In it he pointed to a weakness in Government policy, to put the promise of self-government before 'the gleaming eyes of excitable millions', with the 'formidable' powers which would in fact be retained under the Irwin scheme. Indian nationalists would never accept such curbs, he believed, and went on to remind the House that there were at that very moment 60,000 Indians in prison for political offences. The restrictions on civil liberty then in force were 'without precedent in India since the Mutiny'. It was a delusion to believe that the Indians would be content with Dominion Status or self-government. The All-India Parliament which Britain proposed to set up would soon be dominated, he warned, 'by forces intent on driving us out of the country as quickly as possible'.
Churchill's speech made a considerable impact on the Conservative backbenchers, who had not been consulted the previous October about their Party's commitment to the Irwin Declaration. A senior Conservative backbencher, Irwin's cousin George Lane-Fox, wrote to Irwin after the debate: 'When Winston began he had not much support behind him. But I, sitting on the back benches, felt the cleverness of his speech, in the gradual growth of approval among our back benches. They began to feel that this represented their own doubts and what they had been thinking, and gradually quite a number first began to purr and then to cheer.'
It was not MacDonald, but Baldwin, who replied to Churchill's speech. If the Conservatives were returned to power, he declared, they would regard the implementation of the proposed Indian Constitution as their 'one duty'. Baldwin's pledge was cheered by the Labour MPs, but, Irwin's cousin reported, 'there was an ominous silence on our own benches'.
Following Baldwin's speech, Churchill felt he had no option but to resign from the Shadow Cabinet; this he did on the day after the debate. Two days later he began a public campaign of seeking to rally Party support against the India policy. His speeches were thorough, full of foreboding, striking chords of support among Conservatives who felt that Baldwin had committed the Party beyond its natural instincts or beliefs. In an attempt to undermine his criticisms, Conservative Central Office, under the guidance of J.C.C. Davidson, worked to destroy Churchill's credibility rather than to rebut his arguments. For his part, Churchill felt an upsurge of support among the Party rank and file, writing to Randolph on February 8, 'At a stroke I have become quite popular in the Party and in great demand upon the platform.'
Five days later Brendan Bracken wrote to Randolph about his father, 'He has untied himself from Baldwin's apron, rallied all the fighters in the Tory Party, re-established himself as a potential leader & put heart into a great multitude here & in India.' Bracken added that by a series of 'brilliant speeches' in the Commons, Churchill had shown the Conservatives 'the quality of his genius & the incredible drabness & futility of SB'.
On February 17 Gandhi met Irwin in Delhi, the first of eight meetings held over the next four weeks. Many Conservatives were outraged that the Viceroy should talk with the man whose aim was still full independence and who refused to call off civil disobedience. 'It is alarming and also nauseating,' Churchill told the West Essex Conservatives on February 23, 'to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.' Such a spectacle could only encourage 'all the forces which are hostile to British authority'.
Churchill's speech outraged Labour and Liberal opinion. But for very many Conservatives it expressed in graphic language their own deepest concerns. 'There is no doubt that the whole spirit of the Conservative Party is with me,' Churchill wrote to Clementine. This was not at all fanciful; unknown to Churchill, on February 25 the Principal Agent of the Conservative Party, Hugh Topping, wrote to Neville Chamberlain: 'Many of our supporters are worried about the question of India. They lean much more towards the views of Mr Churchill than to those expressed by Mr Baldwin.' One of the leaders of Baldwin's own constituency Party, Sir Richard Brooke, sent him a word of warning on March 2 that the Indian people were being encouraged 'to expect more concessions than they can be given'. Brooke added, 'Mr Churchill expresses the views of very many Conservatives in this Constituency.'
On March 4, as his talks with Irwin continued, Gandhi agreed to call off civil disobedience and to allow Congress representatives to go to a second Round Table Conference in London to discuss the future of India. He also accepted British 'safeguards', themselves unspecified, in defence policy, foreign affairs and the interests of minorities. This Gandhi-Irwin Pact, as it became known, was made public on March 5. Baldwin at once announced his support for it, and for the second Round Table Conference; in Parliament on March 12 he called the Gandhi-Irwin Pact 'a victory for common sense'. In reply, Churchill argued that, as a result of the Pact, 'expectations, aspirations and appetites have been excited and are mounting'. Pointing to the recent anti-British riots in Bombay, he declared that it was those who tantalised the Indians with the offer of Dominion Status, but were not willing to give them full independence, who were 'bringing bloodshed and confusion ever nearer to the masses of Hindustan'.
Churchill was convinced that his warnings were correct. Speaking at the Albert Hall on March 18 he called the current policy of negotiations with Gandhi and Nehru, with a view to bestowing 'peace and progress' on India, 'a crazy dream with a terrible awakening'. If British authority were destroyed, all the medical, legal and administrative services which Britain had created 'would perish with it', as would the railway service, irrigation, public works and famine prevention. The Hindus would seek to drive out and destroy the Muslims. Profiteering and corruption would flourish. Indian millionaires, grown rich on sweated labour, would become more powerful and even richer. All sorts of 'greedy appetites' had already been excited 'and many itching fingers were stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire'. Nepotism, graft and corruption would be 'the handmaidens of a Brahmin domination'.
Worst of all in Churchill's view, the Hindus would tyrannise the Untouchables, 'a multitude as big as a nation-men, women and children deprived of hope and of the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.' Both for the Untouchables, and for the five million Indian Christians, it would be 'a sorry day when the arm of Britain can no longer offer them the protection of an equal law'.
Churchill then denounced the part which the 'official' Conservatives had played in characterising him, and those who agreed with him, as 'a sort of inferior race, mentally deficient, composed principally of colonels and other undesirables who have fought for Britain'. But, he said 'we do not depend on colonels-though why Conservatives should sneer at an honoured rank in the British army I cannot tell-we depend on facts. We depend on the private soldiers of the British democracy.'
On the day after Churchill's speech, an official Conservative candidate won a hotly contested by-election at Westminster St George's, defeating by 5,000 votes a Conservative challenger to Baldwin's leadership. The clarion call of loyalty had been sounded. Its echoes were more damaging than arguments to Churchill's India campaign. 'We shall I fear be locked in this controversy for several years,' he wrote to Irwin on March 24, 'and I think it will become the dividing line in England. At any rate you will start with the big battalions on your side.'
At the end of March, Hindu-Muslim violence in Cawnpore led to more than a thousand deaths. Churchill was convinced that this pattern of religious strife could only worsen if self-government were proceeded with. Seventy million Muslims were in danger of being 'bled and exploited' by the Hindus, he warned. 'The feud is only at its beginning.' A month later he pointed out that Indian extremists were continuing to murder British officials, despite the imminent departure of Gandhi for the second Round Table Conference in London and Irwin's comment that the condition of India was 'sweeter' than hitherto. In the Cawnpore debate on July 9 he declared the 'outbreak of primordial fury and savagery' at Cawnpore was only a foretaste of what would happen throughout India once Britain withdrew 'its governing, guiding and protecting hand'.
Churchill's warnings were in vain; the co-operation between MacDonald and Baldwin in seeking a bi-partisan India policy ensured that even with fifty or sixty Conservative MPs willing to speak out against the Party line, he could not alter the direction of Government policy.
***
That summer Churchill went with Clementine and Randolph on a driving holiday through France. With him was Violet Pearman, a new secretary, 'Mrs P' as she was known in the Churchill household, who was to be his main secretarial help for the next six years. On August 7, in Biarritz, he made the final corrections to The World Crisis: The Eastern Front. 'Thank God it is finished,' he wrote to Edward Marsh. 'I am longing to get on to Marlborough, and am most interested to hear what you think of the two jumble chapters in which I broke into the subject.' Churchill ended on a political note, 'Everybody I meet seems vaguely alarmed that something terrible is going to happen financially.'
A week later, severe economic difficulties forced MacDonald and Snowden to propose a 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefits; this was the basic condition for an essential American loan. The Cabinet was divided on whether to accept; there was much talk about a Labour-Conservative coalition to deal with the economic crisis. When Churchill was at Avignon on August 16 he broke off his holiday and his work to return to London, hoping to persuade his fellow-Conservatives to refuse any responsibility for Labour's discomfiture. Four days later, when he returned to France, the Labour Government was still intact. Then, on August 23, while he was painting at Juan-les-Pins, the Labour Cabinet learned that the Trade Unions would not accept the proposed cut in unemployment benefit. After several senior Ministers had expressed their support for the Trade Union view, the Cabinet resigned.
Britain's second Labour Government was at an end. On the following day the King asked MacDonald to remain as Prime Minister at the head of a National Government made up of politicians of all political parties. Baldwin at once agreed to Conservative participation. Lloyd George, an opponent of participation, was unwell and could not therefore prevent his senior Liberal colleagues from joining the new Government. On August 23 Samuel Hoare, who was to become Secretary of State for India in the new Government, wrote to Neville Chamberlain, 'As we have said several times in the last few days, we have had some great good luck in the absence of Winston and LG.'
Churchill was not invited to join the National Government. When he returned from France at the beginning of September he found all Parties united in their excitement at the coming Indian Round Table Conference, and the imminent arrival of Gandhi in London. Churchill's warning in an article in the Daily Mail on September 7, that 'nothing but further surrenders of British authority can emerge', fell largely on stony ground. The Round Table Conference opened on the following day, with MacDonald pledging the new Government's continued support for full Dominion Status. In this he was supported by all his Cabinet, which now included Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Hoare.
On October 27 the National Government went to the polls. Support for the new all-Party coalition was overwhelming. The Conservatives, committed to serving under MacDonald, won 473 seats. Liberal Nationals won 35 and National Labour 13. Those Liberals who wished to be associated with the National Government, and who formed a part of it, won 33 seats. The Lloyd George Liberals, bitter opponents of the coalition, won a mere four seats. The Labour Party, outraged by what it saw as MacDonald's betrayal, was reduced to 52 seats, a staggering loss of 236. Under MacDonald's banner of national unity, the Conservative Party had achieved Parliamentary ascendancy. Churchill, who almost doubled his majority at Epping, was isolated but unbowed.
***
On November 2, within a week of polling day, the final volume of Churchill's war memoirs, The World Crisis: The Eastern Front, was published; it marked the culmination of a considerable literary effort. Three days later MacDonald announced his new Government. Baldwin was to be Lord President of the Council and Neville Chamberlain Chancellor of the Exchequer. 'I am very sorry to see that you are not in the new Cabinet,' Rear-Admiral Dewar, a former Deputy Director of the Naval Intelligence Division, wrote to Churchill on November 16. 'I had hoped that you might have gone to the Admiralty and done very necessary work for the Navy.'
As for India, only twenty of the 615 MPs were members of the Indian Empire Society which Churchill had helped to launch eleven months earlier. On December 3, in the debate on the need to continue the process towards Dominion Status, MacDonald asked for a united policy. When Churchill insisted on dividing the House, both Austen Chamberlain and Baldwin spoke against him. When the vote came, 43 MPs supported Churchill, while 369 MPs voted for the Government.
Churchill was now fifty-seven. Following his Parliamentary defeat on December 3 he left England with Clementine and Diana for a long-planned visit to the United Slates. He was determined to recoup his losses in the Wall Street crash by lecturing, and had contracted to give forty lectures for a guaranteed minimum fee of £10,000. In addition the Daily Mail was paying him £8,000 for a series of articles on life, travel and politics in the United States; together, these two sums were the equivalent of more than £375,000 in 1990.
On December 11 Churchill reached New York and on the following day lectured at Worcester, Massachusetts. 'It certainly went extremely well,' he later told Randolph. 'The people were almost reverential in their attitude.' On the following evening, after dining with Clementine at their hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria, he took a taxi up Fifth Avenue, where Bernard Baruch had gathered a group of friends to meet him.
The taxi-driver did not know the house, nor Churchill the number. After driving to and fro for an hour, Churchill saw a corner that he thought familiar. He therefore dismissed the taxi, and began to cross the road. Looking left, he saw the headlights of an approaching car some way off. He therefore began to cross. Suddenly he was struck by a car coming from the right; he had failed to remember the American rule of the road. The blow was a severe one, both on his forehead and to his thighs. He lay at the roadside, in great pain, as a crowd gathered. To a policeman who asked him what had happened, he insisted that the accident had been his fault.
Churchill was taken to the Lenox Hill Hospital, where he developed pleurisy and was in great discomfort. According to legend he had been knocked down by a taxi. But although he had left a taxi in order to cross the road, the car that hit him was a private one. Its driver had driven for more than eight years without an accident.
Recovery was slow, first in the hospital for a week and then at the Waldorf-Astoria for two weeks. But the patient was not idle; on December 28 he telegraphed a full account of the accident to the Daily Mail. 'I certainly suffered every pang, mental and physical, that a street accident or, I suppose, a shell wound can produce,' he wrote. 'None is unendurable. There is neither the time nor the strength for self-pity. There is no room for remorse or fears. If at any moment in this long series of sensations a grey veil deepening into blackness had descended upon the sanctum, I should have felt or feared nothing additional.'
Syndicated all over the world, Churchill's article brought him thousands of letters and telegrams wishing him a speedy recovery. 'Of course,' wrote his Aunt Leonie, 'you have been spared to still do great things in the future and I mean to live on to see it all!' Lady Leslie died in 1943, at the age of eighty-three, three years after her nephew had become Prime Minister.
In search of further rest, Churchill went from New York to the Bahamas. 'He is terribly depressed at the slowness of his recovery,' Clementine wrote to Randolph on 12 January 1932. Severe pains in the arms and shoulders added to his distress. 'The doctors call it neuritis,' she added, 'but don't seem to know what to do about it.' The previous night Churchill had been 'very sad, and said that he had now in the last two years had three heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the crash, then the loss of his political position in the Conservative Party, and now this terrible physical injury. He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from the three events.'
Churchill was determined, however, to get back to the lecture circuit. On January 25 he returned by sea to New York; three days later he lectured in Brooklyn. The 'great opposing forces of the future', he said, would be 'the English-speaking peoples and Communism'. It was quite wrong for Englishmen and Americans to go on as they were doing 'gaping at each other in this helpless way', and being ashamed of Anglo-American cooperation 'as if it were a crime'.
Between January 28 and February 21, travelling almost every day, Churchill lectured in nineteen American cities and his total earnings for the three weeks' work exceeded £7,500; as Prime Minister, MacDonald received £5,000 a year. Because it was thought that Indian supporters of Gandhi and Nehru living in Chicago and Detroit might attack him, Churchill was guarded in both cities by groups of armed detectives.
Just as he had earlier advised his Treasury officials to inscribe 'hope and confidence' on their memoranda, so now Churchill inscribed 'hope and confidence' in his speeches; in New York on February 8, at a meeting of bankers and industrialists, he urged them not to add to monetary deflation 'the hideous deflation of panic and despair'. To the Chairman of Associated Newspapers, Esmond Harmsworth, he wrote three weeks later that his lecture tour had made him feel 'at this great distance, the solid, enduring strength of England and her institutions'. Even the National Government he so despised had, he realised, turned Britain into 'a power respected and considered to be revivified'.
On March 11 Churchill sailed from New York for Britain; six days later, eight of his friends were at Paddington Station to welcome him back, and to celebrate his near escape from death with the gift of a luxury Daimler. The 140 donors included friends from every period of his life. Churchill returned to Chartwell; 'I feel I need to rest and not to have to drive myself so hard,' he wrote to one of his publishers on April 1. 'You have no idea what I have been through.' Three weeks later, in the Commons, he spoke during the debate on Neville Chamberlain's first budget. Much of his speech was in humorous vein, as was his address on April 30 at the Royal Academy Dinner, where, in a sustained metaphor of the art world, he admitted that he himself was 'not exhibiting this year' because of 'differences with the committee', but that he still had 'a few things' on his easel. He then contrasted MacDonald's earlier 'lurid sunsets of Empire and capitalist civilisations' with the use of blue 'in his new pictures' not only for atmosphere 'but even as foundation'. Baldwin could be criticised for lacking a little in colour 'and in precise definition of objects in foreground', but one had nevertheless to admit there was something 'very reposeful' in his twilight studies in half-tones.
'There is so much jealousy in the art world,' Baldwin replied, 'that a kind word to the painter from so distinguished an exponent of a far different style shows a breadth of mind as rare as it is delightful.' Touched by Baldwin's letter, Churchill replied: 'I was very glad that my chaff did not vex you. My shafts, though necessarily pointed, are never intentionally poisoned. If they cut, I pray they do not fester in the wound.'
***
On May 8 Churchill made his first broadcast to the United States. 'They tell me I may be speaking to thirty millions of Americans. I am not at all alarmed. On the contrary I feel quite at home.' In his broadcast he appealed for a joint Anglo-American policy to fight the economic depression. 'Believe me, no one country can combat this evil alone.'
There was another evil, a far greater danger to world stability, Churchill believed, that needed to be faced by international co-operation; this was the danger posed by Germany, now seething with a desire to regain her lost territories, but faced by a Europe committed to a substantial reduction in its level of armaments. At Geneva, the World Disarmament Conference was working towards a general reduction of all armies, navies and air forces. Nor did its work slacken after March 13, when the most vociferous German advocate of treaty revision and rearmament, Adolf Hitler, received eleven million votes in the election for President, as against eighteen million for Field Marshal Hindenburg and five million for the Communist candidate, Ernst Thaelmann.
In a second ballot on April 10, Hitler's share of the vote rose to forty per cent of the votes cast. Yet, one month later, on May 13, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, urged upon the House of Commons the need for further rapid and comprehensive disarmament. Only by reducing the level of arms, Simon argued, could the dangers of a future war be averted; nothing could be worse than for a disarmed Germany to have to face a well-armed France.
Simon's appeal for disarmament was widely and enthusiastically supported. Churchill, however, sounded a note of concern, telling the Commons: 'I should very much regret to see any approximation in military strength between Germany and France. Those who speak of that as though it were right, or even a question of fair dealing, altogether underrate the gravity of the European situation. I would say to those who would like to see Germany and France on an equal footing in armaments: "Do you wish for war?" For my part, I earnestly hope that no such approximation will take place during my lifetime or that of my children.'
On May 26, in an article in the Daily Mail, Churchill conceded that 'millions of well-meaning English people' hoped that the Disarmament Conference would succeed, and he continued, 'There is such a horror of war in the great nations who passed through Armageddon that any declaration or public speech against armaments, although it consisted only of platitudes and unrealities, has always been applauded; and any speech or assertion which set forth the blunt truths has been incontinently relegated to the category of "warmongering".'
Churchill went on to point out, however, that as the Disarmament Conference proceeded, each State in fact sought security for itself by maintaining its own existing armaments, while urging all other States to disarm down to the lowest level. But was it likely, he asked 'that France with less than forty millions, faced by Germany with sixty millions, and double the number of young men coming to military age every year, is going to deprive herself of the mechanical aids and appliances on which she relies to prevent a fourth invasion in little more than a hundred years'? Likewise, could the new states of northern and eastern Europe like Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, be expected not to seek the most effective armaments possible 'to protect themselves from being submerged in a ferocious deluge from Russia'?
The cause of disarmament, Churchill wrote, 'will not be attained by mush, slush and gush. It will be advanced steadily by the harassing expense of fleets and armies, and by the growth of confidence in a long peace. It will be achieved only when in a favourable atmosphere half a dozen great men, with as many first class powers at their back, are able to lift world affairs out of their present increasing confusion.'
On May 30, four days after this article was published, Count von Papen replaced Heinrich Brüning as German Chancellor. Although Hitler and his Nazi Party were not invited to join the new Government, Papen hoped that with Hitler's support he could remain in power for several years. On June 19, in the provincial elections at Hesse, the Nazi vote increased from 37 to 44 per cent, making the Nazis the largest single Party in the province.
***
In India civil disobedience had broken out again, fuelled by the demand for full independence; several British civilian officials had been murdered, and Irwin's successor as Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, had imprisoned Gandhi. In May, more than two hundred Indians were killed in Hindu-Muslim clashes, and 30,000 imprisoned for civil disobedience. In an attempt to lessen Indian hostility to Dominion Status, MacDonald and Baldwin now proposed increasing the Indian franchise from seven million to thirty-six million voters. Churchill thought this an unwise move, telling a private meeting of the Indian Empire Society on May 25: 'Democracy is totally unsuited to India. Instead of conflicting opinions you have bitter theological hatreds.'
***
On July 1 Churchill learned that the BBC would still not allow him to broadcast, this time to Paris, on British monetary policy. He was furious, writing to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, 'Surely such a Government containing so many statesmen, and supported by such overwhelming majorities, has no need to fear independent expressions of opinion upon the controversies of the day?' But the ban remained in force.
Confident that the American economy would recover, that summer Churchill bought £12,000 worth of American stocks, the equivalent of what he had lost in the crash two years earlier. 'If the whole world except the United States sank beneath the ocean,' he told his stockbroker, 'that community could get its living. They carved it out of the prairie and the forests. They are going to have a strong national resurgence in the near future.'
Throughout July and August Churchill worked at Chartwell on his life of Marlborough. In Germany that July, Hitler's Nazi Party won 37 per cent of the poll in the General Election. Churchill was making plans to visit Germany, as part of his intention to see the scenes of Marlborough's military victories; on August 27 he set off for Belgium, Holland and Germany. Lindemann went with him. At Brussels they were joined by a military historian, Lieutenant-Colonel Ridley Pakenham-Walsh, who was to be their guide. On the way to the battlefield at Blenheim, they spent three days in Munich, where one of Randolph's acquaintances, Ernst Hanfstaengel, a friend of Hitler, tried to arrange a meeting between Hitler and Churchill in Churchill's hotel.
Churchill said he was willing to meet the Nazi Party leader, though Hanfstaengel later recalled how, during dinner beforehand, he 'taxed me about Hitler's anti-Semitic views'. Hitler made no appearance that night. On the following day Hanfstaengel again tried to persuade him to meet Churchill, but in vain. 'In any case,' Hitler asked him, 'what part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.' Hanfstaengel replied, 'People say the same about you,' but Hitler was not to be persuaded.
Churchill left Munich for the battlefield of Blenheim. 'The battlefields were wonderful,' he wrote to Pakenham-Walsh three weeks later, 'and I was able to re-people them with ghostly but glittering armies.' From Blenheim he had intended to go to Venice for a holiday, but he was taken ill with paratyphoid fever. Too ill to be brought back to England, he spent two weeks in a sanatorium in Salzburg. But after a few days he began dictating from his sick bed twelve articles for the News of the World, which had commissioned him to retell 'The World's Great Stories'. Edward Marsh prepared the outlines for him.
On September 25 Churchill returned to Chartwell. 'It was an English bug which I took abroad with me,' he told his cousin Sunny, 'and no blame rests on the otherwise misguided continent of Europe.' That same day he began working again on his Marlborough biography, discussing historical points with Maurice Ashley and dictating the chapters to Violet Pearman. Work continued throughout the following day. But on September 27, as he and Ashley were walking in the grounds, he collapsed. It was a recurrence of the paratyphoid. An ambulance was called and he was taken up to a London nursing home. He had suffered a severe haemorrhage from a paratyphoid ulcer.
Churchill still hoped to attend the forthcoming Conservative Party Conference at Blackpool on October 7. His intention was to move a resolution against the Party's support for the proposed Indian constitution. But although at one point he contemplated going to Blackpool by ambulance, he was too ill to do so. Hoare was much relieved; he had thought that Churchill's resolution might be carried. 'We had a substantial majority,' he wrote to MacDonald when the vote was taken, 'but it is idle to blink the fact that the sentiment apart from the reasoning of the meeting was on the other side.'
Returning from the London nursing home to Chartwell, Churchill continued to work on his book. 'Mr Churchill is steadily improving,' Violet Pearman wrote to a friend, 'though progress is rather slow, but as usual nothing can keep him from work, and he busies himself a good many hours each day and gets through a lot.' But it would be 'some time before he really gets as strong as before'. By the end of October Churchill had completed half of the first of his Marlborough volumes. His mind was already looking ahead to his next literary effort, a four-volume history of the English-Speaking Peoples. A publisher was soon found willing to pay him £20,000 for this endeavour. It was a formidable sum of money for any author, the equivalent in 1990 of £420,000. A quarter was paid to him at once; the rest would come when the book was finished.
***
Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1932 von Papen's Government was demanding 'equality of status' for German armaments; this meant that Germany, having been disarmed in 1918, must now be allowed to arm up to the same point as her most heavily armed neighbour, France. The German Minister of Defence, General Kurt von Schleicher, was insistent that Germany be allowed to rearm. On September 18 the British Foreign Office issued an official Note, signed by Sir John Simon, stating that in Britain's view the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were still binding upon Germany. In protest, von Papen withdrew Germany from the Disarmament Conference.
Churchill, who had just returned from Germany, was shocked to find so many people in Britain critical of the Simon Note, and insisting that a disarmed Germany was in an unfair position of inferiority compared to France. In an article published in the Daily Mail on October 17 he argued that Simon's firm stand had 'done more to consolidate peace in Europe than any words spoken on behalf of Great Britain for some years'. Simon had 'raised the hand of warning in the interests of peace'. Such firmness was essential, Churchill wrote, as every right-wing party in Germany was trying to win votes 'by putting up the boldest front against the foreigner Hitler had to 'outdo Papen, and Papen has to go one better than Hitler, and Brüning must hurry or he will be left behind'.
Churchill pointed out in his article that General Schleicher had already declared that 'whatever the Powers may settle, Germany will do what she thinks fit in rearmament', and he went on to warn his readers, 'Very grave dangers lie along these paths, and if Great Britain had encouraged Germany in such adventures, we might in an incredibly short space of time have been plunged into a situation of violent peril.'
On November 6, in the second German General Election in five months, the Nazi Party retained its position as the second largest Party in the State, despite a drop in votes from 37 per cent to 33 per cent. Four days after this vote, the House of Commons debated the Government's continuing policy of disarmament, of which Churchill had been so critical. But he was still too weak from the effects of the paratyphoid to make the journey to London. During the debate, Simon stated that, despite his Note, British policy would henceforth take into account 'the fair meeting of Germany's claim to the principle of equality'. Closing the debate, Baldwin told the House, 'I think it well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed.'
'You were badly missed yesterday,' Amery wrote to Churchill, 'when the most incredible amount of sloppy nonsense was talked from every quarter of the House about disarmament.' On November 17, in the Daily Mail, Churchill expressed his conviction that the disarmament negotiations at Geneva would fail. As soon as this happened, the National Government should propose to Parliament 'measures necessary to place our Air Force in such a condition of power and efficiency that it will not be worth anyone's while to come here and kill our women and children in the hope that they may blackmail us into surrender'.
On November 23 Churchill was well enough to go up to London, and, in a speech of considerable power and foresight, warned MPs that if Britain forced France to disarm, Germany would take advantage of her own numerical superiority to seek revenge for the defeat of 1918. So far, every concession that had already been made to Germany had been followed by fresh German demands. It was not only 'equality of arms with France' that Germany wanted. Not only France, but also Belgium, Poland, Roumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were determined to defend their frontiers 'and to defend their rights'.
Churchill had seen the new Germany during his visit to the battlefield of Blenheim that autumn. 'All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths,' he said, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons, and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories,' and when that demand was made it would 'shake and possibly shatter to their foundations' the countries that he had mentioned. A 'war mentality' was springing up in certain countries; all over Europe there was 'hardly a factory which is not prepared for its alternative war service'. MacDonald's 'noble, if somewhat flocculent eloquence' must be replaced by greater precision. 'I cannot recall any time,' Churchill said, 'when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now. The habit of saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause, without relation to the underlying facts, is more pronounced now than it has ever been in my experience.'
Churchill continued: 'Just as the late Lord Birkenhead used to say about India-I think it the beginning and end of wisdom there-"Tell the truth to India", so I would now say, "Tell the truth to the British people". They are a tough people, a robust people. They may be a bit offended at the moment, but if you have told them exactly what is going on you have insured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are very unpleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion.' As for France's military strength, 'they only wish to keep what they have got'. No initiative in making trouble would come from France. 'I say quite frankly,' Churchill continued, 'though I may shock the House, that I would rather see another ten or twenty years of one-sided peace than see a war between equally well-matched Powers.'
'I am not an alarmist,' Churchill told the House. 'I do not believe in the imminence of war in Europe. I believe that with wisdom and with skill we may never see it in our time. To hold any other view would indeed be to despair,' and he then set out what he believed to be the only way to revive 'the lights of goodwill and reconciliation' in Europe. 'The removal of the just grievances of the vanquished,' he said, 'ought to precede the disarmament of the victors. To bring about anything like equality of armaments if it were in our power to do so, which it happily is not, while those grievances remain unredressed, would be almost to appoint the day for another European war-to fix it as if it were a prize-fight. It would be far safer to reopen questions like those of the Danzig Corridor and Transylvania, with all their delicacy and difficulty, in cold blood and in a calm atmosphere and while the victor nations still have ample superiority, than to wait and drift on, inch by inch and stage by stage, until once again vast combinations, equally matched, confront each other face to face.'
Commenting on Baldwin's remarks, in the debate he had been too ill to attend, that 'the man in the street' should realise that there was 'no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed', Churchill pointed out that this assertion had been followed by 'no practical conclusion'. It had created anxiety and also perplexity. 'There was a sense of, what shall I say, fatalism, and even perhaps helplessness about it, and I take this opportunity of saying that, as far as this island is concerned, the responsibility of Ministers to guarantee the safety of the country from day to day and from hour to hour is direct and inalienable.'
***
Churchill's advocacy of Treaty revision while the victors were still strong, and his call for the maintenance of national armed strength in the face of growing German demands and aggressiveness, remained the cornerstone of his warnings to the Government over the years ahead. Far from building up Britain's air strength, however, MacDonald and Baldwin pressed on with a scheme of European disarmament, in which Britain would give a lead by reducing its own Air Force before others did so.
***
On November 30 Churchill was fifty-eight. That winter he worked at Chartwell on Marlborough. On December 16 Lindemann arrived to keep him company. 'He was part of our Chartwell life,' Churchill's daughter Sarah later recalled. 'It is hard to remember an occasion on which he was not present. His exterior was conventionally forbidding-the domed cranium, the close-cropped iron-grey hair which had receded as if the brain had pushed it away, the iron-grey moustache, the sallow complexion, the little sniff which took the place of what normally would have been a laugh, yet he could still exude a warmth that made scientific thinking unfrightening.'
Lindemann's presence was always a source of pleasure to Churchill, and of education. Sarah recalled: 'Prof had the gift of conveying a most complicated subject in simple form. One day at lunch when coffee and brandy were being served my father decided to have a slight "go" at Prof who had just completed a treatise on the quantum theory. "Prof," he said, "tell us in words of one syllable and in no longer than five minutes what is the quantum theory." My father then placed his large gold watch, known as the "turnip", on the table. When you consider that Prof must have spent many years working on this subject, it was quite a tall order, however without any hesitation, like quicksilver, he explained the principle and held us all spell-bound. When he had finished we all spontaneously burst into applause.'
***
On 30 January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, invited to do so by President Hindenburg in an attempt to harness the extreme opinions of the Nazi Party to the more moderate politicians who were to be part of the new Coalition Government. A week later Hitler promulgated the first of a series of laws that rapidly increased and consolidated his power; this first law enabled him to silence the democratic, Socialist and Communist Press. This was followed by the arrest of several thousand opponents of Nazism, and by public and popular demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles and for German rearmament.
On February 15, at this moment of German nationalist resurgence, and an intensification of Japanese aggression against China in the Far East, the British Cabinet discussed Defence deficiencies set out by the Secretaries of State for War and Air, Lord Hailsham and Lord Londonderry. But after listening to a warning from Neville Chamberlain of the 'financial and economic risks' involved in rearmament, the Cabinet agreed to make itself 'responsible for the deficiencies in the Defence Services which are imposed by the difficult financial situation at the present time'. Economic restraints made rearmament impossible.
Churchill's mind was still very much on what he had seen in Germany five months earlier, and on all that had happened since then, including a vote in the Oxford Union supporting, by 275 to 153, the motion 'That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country'. Speaking at Oxford on February 17, Churchill contrasted this attitude with the German one: 'I think of Germany with its splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland.' He could almost 'feel the curl of contempt' on their lips when they read the Oxford Union message.
On March 2 Randolph returned to Oxford to try to reverse the Union vote. But he gained only 138 votes, against 750 upholding the original motion. 'He stood a hard test at the Oxford Union,' Churchill wrote proudly to Hugh Cecil. 'Nothing is so piercing as the hostility of a thousand of your own contemporaries, and he was by no means crushed under it.' Eight days later Churchill himself faced the hostility of his contemporaries when, in the Commons, he opposed the Government's proposal to reduce Air Force spending for the second year in succession, to close down one of the four flying training schools, and to press France to reduce the size of its Air Force. In defending British lack of preparedness in the air, Sir Philip Sassoon, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, told the Commons that pending the outcome of the Disarmament Conference the Government were 'once again prepared to accept the continuance of the serious existing disparity between the strength of the Royal Air Force and that of the air services of the other great nations.'
Churchill argued that to expect France to halve her Air Force 'in the present temper of Europe' was 'in the region of unrealities'. Without sufficient means of defence neutrality could not be preserved. 'Not to have an adequate Air Force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence.' He 'regretted very much' to hear Sassoon say that the British Government's ten-year air expansion programme was to be suspended for another year in the interests of continuing hopes for world disarmament. Churchill then called on Baldwin to abandon the Ten Year Rule for Defence preparation that assumed there would be no war for the next ten years, and to stop encouraging the 'helpless, hopeless mood'. There was no reason to suppose, he argued, that Britain could not have aircraft 'as good as any country's'. Britain's 'talent in air piloting' was as good as that of any country.
These arguments fell on stony ground; two days after Churchill's speech, MacDonald submitted Britain's disarmament proposals to the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Eight months would be the maximum period of military service in Europe; France, Germany, Italy and Poland would be limited to 200,000 troops each; aerial bombardment would be forbidden; military aircraft would be limited to 500 for each country, with the German figure left open; any excess of aircraft would be destroyed, half by 1936, the rest by 1939.
In presenting this scheme to the Commons on March 23, MacDonald said, 'I cannot pretend that I went through the figures myself.' He then reiterated that the Government's aim was 'equality of status' for Germany in the sphere of armaments. Churchill, who had followed closely the reports of Nazi demands and anti-Jewish and anti-democratic action, told the House, 'When we read about Germany, when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the grounds of race-when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in Europe, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet than Germans.'
Churchill went on to say that the British Government's failure to redress German grievances while Germany was still weak, and could not therefore demand them by force, while at the same time pressing for France to disarm, 'have brought us nearer to war and have made us weaker, poorer and more defenceless'. From both the Labour and Conservative benches came cries of 'No! No! No!' There was more furious anger when he said that responsibility should be laid at MacDonald's door.
On behalf of the Government, Churchill's speech was answered by the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Anthony Eden, who said it was unfortunate Churchill had chosen so serious a debate to practise his 'quips and jests'. For Churchill to accuse MacDonald of being responsible for the deterioration of international relations, he said, was 'a fantastic absurdity'. The causes of that deterioration 'went back to a time when Mr Churchill himself had a considerable measure of responsibility'. This charge was to become the stock-in-trade of Government attacks on Churchill; in fact, while he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, Air Force spending had been increased in four of his five budgets. He had also been a leading advocate of mutual guarantees for the French and German frontiers. In 1925 he had urged an annual review of the Ten Year Rule. In 1929 he had alerted the Cabinet to the renewed German naval rearmament. But his continual vigilance in defence matters was of no concern to those who were opposed to the policies he now advocated.
Eden went on to insist that without French disarmament 'they could not secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed'. Britain did not wish France to halve her army, as Churchill alleged. 'The reduction was nothing like that', Eden said, 'it was 694,000 to 400,000.' The Commons cheered Eden's pedantic, but effective, rebuke. 'The House was enraged and in an ugly mood-towards Mr Churchill,' reported the Daily Despatch. Churchill received only one letter of support, from Admiral Sir Reginald Custance, who wrote on March 24, 'You were really setting forth the fundamental principle of war and were talking over the heads of your audience who for the most part are quite ignorant of that principle.'
Churchill intended to speak again on European affairs on April 13. Before doing so, he consulted with Major Desmond Morton, whom he had first met on the Western Front in 1916 and whom he had brought into Intelligence work at the War Office in 1919. Since 1929 Morton had been head of the Industrial Intelligence Unit of the Committee of Imperial Defence, responsible for monitoring, throughout the world, the import and use of raw materials for armaments manufactured by the European powers. He was a near neighbour of Churchill's in Kent.
Fortified by information Morton had given him from the Government's own secret sources, Churchill contrasted Hitler's quest for rearmament with MacDonald's continuing pursuit of disarmament, reiterating his earlier warning that 'the rise of Germany to anything like military equality with France, or the rise of Germany or some ally or other to anything like military equality with France, Poland or the small states, means a renewal of a general European war.'
Churchill went on to tell the House that there were not only 'martial or pugnacious manifestations' in Germany, but also 'this persecution of the Jews, of which so many hon. Members have spoken, and which appeals to everyone who feels that men and women have a right to live in the world where they are born, and have a right to pursue a livelihood which has hitherto been guaranteed them under the public laws of the land of their birth'. He then warned of the dangers of the 'odious conditions now ruling in Germany' being extended by conquest to Poland, 'and another persecution and pogrom of Jews begun in this new area'.
Commenting on MacDonald's 'extraordinary admission' that he had not gone through the figures himself, but that he took responsibility for them, Churchill told the House: 'It is a very grave responsibility. If ever there was a document upon which its author should have consumed his personal thought and energy it was this immense disarmament proposal.'
***
The Government now announced that a Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament would examine the Indian constitutional proposals. Hoare explained to MacDonald that moderate Conservatives were delighted by the setting up of this Committee because it 'gives them an answer to Winston's most damaging line of attack, namely that Parliament was going to be edged out of the final settlement'. Sir John Simon had recently returned from India with a new proposal for Indian rule of the Provinces, but not at the centre. This Simon Report recommendation was what Churchill had long been urging as the sensible course. At the same time, he saw the proposed Joint Select Committee as a device to pay lip-service to Simon while introducing a more radical scheme.
Churchill was far from alone in his unease; on February 17 Hoare told the Viceroy, 'We are doing everything that we can to ensure a good Government majority, but there is no gainsaying the fact that the Conservative Party as a whole is very jumpy in both Houses.' When Churchill spoke at Conservative Party meetings beyond the control of the Whips, he won a far larger share of the vote than in Parliament; at a discussion on India at the National Union of Conservative Associations meeting on February 28 he secured 165 votes as against 189.
As Churchill suspected, the Government had no intention of accepting the Simon Report, but was going ahead with the plan for Indian self-government both in the Provinces and at the centre. In seeking to make this full Dominion Status more acceptable to Conservative critics of its India policy, it announced that 'safeguards' would be introduced both for the Muslims of India and for the independent Princely States, in what would be a predominantly Hindu Government. In Cabinet on March 10 Hoare explained that under the safeguards the Viceroy would have 'great powers', including 'complete control' over the Foreign Affairs and Defence Departments; 'there was no great risk of a Congress majority', he said, as the Princely States would have 30 per cent and the Muslims 30 per cent of the votes in the lower chamber of the All-India Federation.
During the Cabinet discussion, Lord Hailsham warned that under the Government's proposals 'India would be run more and more by Indians who were very clever, but not good administrators and often corrupt, as their own religion compelled them to look after their own relations. Justice would be sold, the poor oppressed, and there would be a breakdown in the services.' Hoare admitted that he 'shared many of the doubts of the Secretary of State for War'. Despite these doubts, the Cabinet agreed to make the All-India Federal scheme the basis of the White Paper.
While waiting for composition of the Joint Select Committee to be announced, Churchill attended a meeting of those MPs who had hitherto voted against the Government's India policy. The aim of the meeting, he told Lord Salisbury, was to establish 'a nucleus in the House of Commons'. The group, which called itself the India Defence Committee, consisted of fifty Conservative MPs.
On March 17 the Government issued its India White Paper. Under the proposed constitution, each Indian Province would be granted autonomy. At the centre, the previously strict Viceregal control would be replaced by a Federal Government with substantial Indian participation. The proposals would be discussed by the Joint Select Committee. Speaking in the Commons on March 30, Churchill appealed to the Government not to use the Committee as a means of prejudicing in advance the debate which the full House must hold on the future constitution of India. He was supported in the division lobby by 42 MPs. The Government had 475 supporters.
On the following day Churchill was asked to be a member of the Joint Select Committee, on which there were to be twenty-five supporters of the Government's policy, and nine opponents. On April 1, before making up his mind whether or not to serve on it, he wrote to Hoare: 'I have watched with grief and indignation the process by which during the last two and a half years you and Baldwin have turned the whole official power of the Conservative Party and of the Government of India to paralysing or overcoming the Conservative resistance at home and loyalist resistance in India in order to bring your scheme into effect.' All the loyalty of the Conservative Party to its leaders, 'added to the drift of Liberal and Socialist opinion, make a tide which may well be irresistible. You will probably have your way. But then the consequences will begin both in India and at home.'
After much thought, Churchill decided not to serve on the Joint Select Committee. On April 5 he wrote to Hoare to explain why: 'I observe that at least three-quarters of the Committee of thirty-four consists of persons of distinction who have already declared themselves in favour of the principle of the abdication at this juncture of British responsibility in the Central government of India. To this I am decidedly opposed. I believe that if the scheme of the White Paper is carried out, it can only lead after some years either to the evacuation or to the re-conquest of India. I do not wish to share the burden for such grievous events. I see no advantage therefore in my joining your Committee merely to be voted down by an overwhelming majority of the eminent persons you have selected. It is better that those who believe in the policy of the White Paper should work it out for themselves in the Joint Committee unhampered by the criticism or protest of those from whom they are unbridgeably divided.'
Several of Churchill's friends were surprised by his decision. 'Will you let me say that I deeply deplore your refusal to enter the Joint Select Committee,' Lord Burnham wrote on April 7. 'I shall especially miss your leadership and guidance.' Churchill replied: 'I am so sorry not to be able to help you, but I feel sure my work lies outside. The way in which the Committee has been picked is a scandal.'
On April 10 Hoare laid before Parliament the list of those who had agreed to serve on the Joint Select Committee. A Conservative member then moved an amendment to remove the six members of the Government who had been selected. Although the amendment was defeated by 209 votes to 118, these 118 constituted the largest vote recorded in Parliament against the National Government's India Policy. Churchill at once issued a statement, which was published in the Evening News: 'If the House had been given a free vote the Government proposal would probably have been defeated by a majority of the Conservative Party. What the Government is trying to do is to get support for its views and not to have an impartial investigation. The Government is not looking for advice but for advertisement. It is not seeking guidance but a guarantee.' Churchill was now determined to lead a public crusade against the Government's India policy. 'We are in for a hard long fight,' he wrote to a friend on April 14, 'but I do not despair.' Hoare himself was worried both about Churchill's campaign and about the Joint Select Committee. 'Very rightly,' he wrote to the Viceroy on April 28, 'we shall try and keep evidence down to the lowest possible quantity.' As for Churchill, Hoare wrote: 'His chief ally is the ignorance of ninety nine people out of a hundred. The result will be that he will get a formidable backing in Conservative circles and that he will certainly stir up a great deal of suspicion and irritation in the organisations of many constituencies.'
Hoare's fears of a constituency revolt were borne out on April 28, when the annual meeting of the Horsham and Worthing Conservative Association rejected the India White Paper by 161 votes to 17. That week, Lord Linlithgow, a friend of Churchill's since before the First World War, was appointed Chairman of the Joint Select Committee. Seeking to persuade Churchill to give up his opposition to the Federal scheme for India, Linlithgow told him that something like the White Paper scheme was 'bound to go through', and that the Indian problem 'does not interest the mass of voters in this country'.
It was against the Government's tariff policy, Linlithgow suggested, that Churchill should concentrate his future opposition. Churchill replied: 'I am so sorry to see the line you take about India. Curiously enough your remarks to me three or four years ago of the immense deterioration in the agricultural department which has taken place since the Montagu Reforms was one of the facts which played a part in forming my judgment.' The Montagu reforms had been in 1917.
Churchill continued: 'Many thanks for your suggestion that it would be better tactics for me to attack the Government upon their trade agreements and let India slide. I do not think I should remain in politics, certainly I should take no active part in them, if it were not for India. I am therefore quite indifferent to any effect which my opposition to the White Paper may produce upon my personal situation.'
Linlithgow still tried to convince Churchill that he was mistaken. The Indian Agricultural Service, he wrote on May 4, had been 'marked for 100 per cent Indianisation' since 1924, and the process had been virtually completed without anyone suggesting that it would be reversed. 'If you and those who are with you are able to recreate the India of 1900,' he wrote, 'and-what is a great deal more difficult-fit it with even reasonable success into the world of 1934, I shall be the first to admit my error of judgement, and to rejoice in your strength and wisdom.'
In his letter Linlithgow accused Churchill of being old-fashioned. 'I think we differ principally in this,' Churchill replied, 'that you assume the future is a mere extension of the past whereas I find history full of unexpected turns and retrogressions. The mild and vague Liberalism of the early years of the twentieth century, the surge of fantastic hopes and illusions that followed the armistice of the Great War have already been superseded by a violent reaction against Parliamentary and electioneering procedure and by the establishment of dictatorships real or veiled in almost every country. Moreover the loss of our external connections, the shrinkage in foreign trade and shipping brings the surplus population of Britain within measurable distance of utter ruin. We are entering a period when the struggle for self-preservation is going to present itself with great intenseness to thickly populated industrial countries.'
Churchill added: 'In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life, and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights. As long as we are sure that we press no claim on India which is not in their real interest we are justified in using our undoubted power for their welfare and for our own. Your schemes are twenty years behind the times.'
The 'times' were indeed moving rapidly; on April 7 Hitler formally imposed Nazi rule on each of the German States, ending their century-old autonomy. Six days later a law came into effect barring Jews from national, local and municipal office. During a debate in the Commons that day, Churchill warned the Government once more of the dangers involved in a militarised Germany, telling the House: 'One of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship-most grim dictatorship'.
Churchill again commented on several frightening details of the German dictatorship: militarism, appeals 'to every form of fighting spirit', the reintroduction of duelling in the universities, and the persecution of the Jews. He continued, 'I cannot help rejoicing that the Germans have not got the heavy cannon, the thousands of military aeroplanes and the tanks of various sizes for which they have been pressing in order that their status may be equal to that of other countries.' Ten days later Churchill spoke at the annual meeting of the Royal Society of St George. In his speech, which was broadcast, he declared: 'Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nations are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralysed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final.'
***
Churchill's struggle against the Government's India policy was to reach its climax on June 28, when the Conservative Central Council met in London to discuss the proposed introduction of the India Bill to Parliament. All spring and summer the Government had been busy, Hoare explained to the Viceroy, 'trying to get up an effective organisation to meet the Winston propaganda in the country'. Hoare wanted the man he had chosen to lead this organisation, Francis Villiers, to be offered a knighthood, in the hope that it would help 'in getting the most out of him'. Villiers received his knighthood. Three weeks before the meeting The Times warned Conservatives not to follow Churchill's lead. Whatever the merits of any particular proposal he might make to amend the Bill, it declared, 'there can be no permanent reversal of the broad lines of policy which it represents', and the paper went on to warn, in openly political language, that if Churchill's view prevailed 'Mr Baldwin might think it necessary to withdraw from the leadership of the Party, and even from public life.'
When Churchill spoke at the meeting his remarks were continually interrupted, making it difficult for him to unfold his arguments. He was being made 'the victim of a personal campaign', he said, and as the hostile cries continued he called out: 'It is no good being angry with me, because I have to put the case. We have an absolute duty to justify on this occasion our true opinions.' His appeal was no use. The hostility had, as he knew, been well drummed-up beforehand. 'It is easy to run propaganda to victimise a particular man,' he said. Yet even this appeal to be listened to was met, one newspaper reported, by 'cries of dissent and laughter'.
Churchill's main argument, that Provincial autonomy should be tried first, and be seen to work, before the Federal autonomy scheme was put into effect at the centre, did not in itself preclude eventual Indian self-government. Yet it too was greeted by cries of derision. The vote, however, produced the largest dissenting voice recorded against the MacDonald-Baldwin policy, 356. But this was swamped by the 838 votes in favour. Although Churchill's India campaign had not ended, it had faltered amid the uncompromising belittling of his motives by Party leaders and stalwarts who were determined not to let him influence either the Party or the future of India.
The Government's disregard of Churchill's concerns about India, and its refusal to abandon disarmament despite the German threat, marked a low point in Churchill's hopes of influencing events. In July, his friend Terence O'Connor, a Conservative MP who was soon to become Solicitor General, wrote to him with words of encouragement: 'You fill a place in many people's lives, and your own fortunes & happiness are the concern of more people than you can guess.'
As the Disarmament Conference continued its work at Geneva, both Britain and Germany rejected a French proposal for regular inspection and supervision of armaments. Before the discussion, the Cabinet had been informed by the three Service departments that they opposed regular inspection because it would 'expose to the world our grave shortage of war supplies, and we should have to spend many millions in correcting the position in this and other respects'.
The Foreign Office received regular Intelligence reports and information on developments in Germany; on June 21 the British Air Attaché in Berlin, Group Captain Justin Herring, wrote a secret memorandum setting out the evidence that Germany had begun to build military aircraft in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Herring had been told by a high official at the German Air Ministry that 'the German Government were already engaged in building a military air force'. Herring's memorandum was one of several pieces of evidence of German rearmament which the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, printed for distribution to the Cabinet on July 14. A month later, on August 12, Churchill told his constituents, 'There is grave reason to believe that Germany is arming herself, or seeking to arm herself, contrary to the solemn treaties extracted from her in her hour of defeat.'
On September 20 Churchill's concerns were echoed within the Cabinet by Lord Hailsham, the Secretary of State for War, who told his colleagues, as the minutes recorded: 'We had already disarmed to a degree that rendered our position most perilous if there were any risk of war within the next few years. Our ports were almost undefended, and our anti-aircraft defences were totally inadequate. He did not think anyone was prepared to allow that state of affairs to continue. Everyone must agree that some increase in expenditure on armaments would be required within the next few years. He thought this probably referred to the Royal Air Force, also.'
Such was the Secretary of State for War's judgment; it was also Churchill's persistent theme, which the Government of which the Secretary of State for War was a member was to deride as alarmist.
***
On October 6, amid these grave events and warnings, Churchill's first volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times was published. On receiving his copy as the author's gift, Baldwin wrote to him: 'You really are an amazing man! This last book would mean years of work even for a man whose sole occupation was writing history. Well, there is the miracle.'
Churchill always took delight in sending out inscribed copies of his books; two days after publication of Marlborough he inscribed a copy to the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal he so admired. His inscription read, 'With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.'
On the day of the publication of Marlborough, Churchill was at Birmingham, at the Conservative Party Conference, where Baldwin urged the need for a Disarmament Convention and spoke strongly in favour of 'the limitation of armaments as a real limitation'. Speaking after Baldwin, Churchill supported a motion brought in by Lord Lloyd, expressing 'grave anxieties' at the state of Britain's defences. Britain must not 'continue long', he said, 'on the course on which we alone are growing weaker, while every other nation is growing stronger'. The motion was passed unanimously. It was one thing, however, to win the support of Party members, another to influence the actual policy of the Government.
On October 14 Hitler withdrew Germany from the Disarmament Conference. Nine days later, the Cabinet decided to continue to seek 'the limitation and reduction of world armaments', and to encourage the French Minister of War, Edouard Daladier, to begin direct negotiations with Germany on the cutting back of sample weapons, and to make 'some concessions' to Germany. The Cabinet concluded, 'Our policy is still to seek by international co-operation the limitation and reduction of world armaments, as our obligations under the Covenant and as the only means to prevent a race in armaments.'
In a Cabinet memorandum on October 24, Lord Londonderry, the Secretary of State for Air, noted that Britain's air production had been halted in 1932 as a result of 'the Armament Truce' of November 1931. Although this truce had ended in February 1933, 'as a further earnest of His Majesty's Government's desire to promote the work of the Disarmament Conference, the standstill was voluntarily extended to the current year in spite of marked inferiority in air strength as compared with other great powers'. It was therefore necessary, Londonderry explained, to postpone completion of the 1923 programme from 1936 to 1940.
This decision to continue with disarmament was a secret one; it therefore failed to help the Government on the following day, when at a by-election at East Fulham the seat was won by an anti-Government candidate on a disarmament platform.
***
On November 7, as the Government continued its quest for disarmament, Churchill told the Commons, 'The great dominant fact is that Germany has already begun to rearm.' There had been imports of scrap iron and nickel and other war metals 'quite out of the ordinary'. He believed, however, that there was a sure way to curb the German thrust for revenge, and to avert war. The League of Nations should be used 'not for the purpose of fiercely quarrelling and haggling about the details of disarmament, but in an attempt to redress Germany collectively, so that there may be some redress of the grievances of the German nation, and that that may be effected before this peril of rearmament reaches a point which may endanger the peace of the world'. Meanwhile Britain had already disarmed 'to the verge of risk-nay, well into the gulf of risk'. It was up to the three Defence Ministers to make adequate provision for Britain's safety, and to ensure that Britain had both the power and the time to realise if necessary 'the whole latent strength of our country'.
On November 12, after an election in Germany in which only the Nazi Party was allowed to canvass, the Nazis won 95 per cent of the vote. 'You have heard me described as a warmonger,' Churchill told the Royal Naval Division Association luncheon audience two days later. 'That is a lie. I have laboured for peace before the Great War, and if the Naval Holiday which I advised and suggested had been adopted, the course of history might have been different.' It was the Nazis 'who declare that war is glorious, who inculcate a form of blood-lust in their children without parallel as an education since Barbarian and Pagan times'. It was the Nazis who had laid down the doctrine 'that every frontier must be made the starting point of an invasion'. There was no time to be lost. 'Here is a practical step to take. Wipe up this Disarmament Conference, sweep away the rubbish and litter of the eight years of nagging and folly and hypocrisy and fraud, and let us go to Geneva, to the other part of Geneva-to the League of Nations.'
The Cabinet were still determined to seek a comprehensive disarmament agreement. On November 29 Baldwin told his colleagues, 'If we had no hope of achieving any limitation of armaments we should have every right to feel disquietude as to the situation not only so far as concerns the Air Force, but also the Army and Navy.' Britain was 'using every possible effort to bring about a scheme of disarmament which would include Germany.' If Germany saw the Commons pass an air rearmament motion 'the effect on her would be serious'.
***
On November 30 Churchill was fifty-nine. That winter he remained as much as possible at Chartwell, working with Maurice Ashley on the second Marlborough volume. On New Year's Eve, Baldwin wrote to him enthusiastically about Volume One: 'It is A1. If I had-which God forbid-to deliver an address on you, I should say, "Read Marlborough and you may then picture yourself listening to Winston as he paced up and down the Cabinet room with a glass of water in his hand and a long cigar in the corner of his mouth." I can hear your chuckles as I read it.'
Churchill replied on 3 January 1934 that he was glad Baldwin still had 'a kindly feeling' towards him. 'India apart-you have my earnest good wishes; and I shall try to say something about it when I broadcast on the 16th. But after all it is the European quarrel that will shape our lives. There indeed you must feel the burden press.'
In his broadcast on January 16 Churchill indeed praised the efforts made by the National Government to procure a slow but steady economic recovery. He also praised President Roosevelt, for 'the spirit with which he grapples with difficulties'. He also reiterated his warnings about the need for arms and alliances to prevent a return of war. Not only with the former Allies of the war, but with neutrals like Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, 'we must bear our share in building up a confederation of nations so strong that in Europe at least no aggressor will dare to challenge them'.
During 1934 Churchill wrote fifty articles for newspapers and magazines and made more than twenty speeches; his views were thus put before the public on average once every five days. The defence of Britain was his main concern. On February 7 he told the Commons, 'I cannot conceive how, in the present state of Europe and our position in Europe, we can delay in establishing the principle of having an air force at least as strong as any power that can get at us,' and he went on to warn that unless Britain was in 'a proper state of security', a diplomatic crisis would arise 'within a measurable time, in the lifetime of those who are here', when threats would be made and pressure applied, and within a few hours 'the crash of bombs exploding in London and cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will apprise us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences'.
Churchill advised the Government 'to begin the reorganisation of our civil factories so they can be turned over rapidly to war purposes.' Every factory in Europe, he said, was being prepared so that it could be turned over quickly to war production, in order to produce material 'for the deplorable and melancholy business of slaughter and he asked: 'What have we done? There is not an hour to lose.' He went on to criticise the Government for arguing that 'they have to wait for public opinion' and that the public did not wish for rearmament: 'The responsibility of His Majesty's Government is grave indeed, and there is this which makes it all the graver; it is a responsibility which they have no difficulty in discharging if they choose. The Government command overwhelming majorities in both branches of the Legislature. Nothing that they ask will be denied to them. They have only to make their proposals, and they will be supported in them. Why take so poor a view of the patriotic support which this nation gives to those who it feels are doing their duty by it?'
In reply, Baldwin commented first on Churchill's position 'of greater freedom and less responsibility'. He then told the House, 'We are trying to get an ordered armament limitation.' If the Disarmament Conference failed, the Government would feel 'that their duty is to look after the interests of this country first and quickly', but he was confident no such emergency would arise. 'I do not think we are at all bound to have a war.'
During his speech, Baldwin described Churchill's remarks as having been 'of great interest, of excellent temper and full of sound sense'. But Herbert Samuel characterised it differently, telling the House that Churchill's policy was 'Long live anarchy, and let us all go rattling down to ruin together.'
On March 4 the Government published its Defence White Paper, which began with a pledge that the Government would not allow the size of the Royal Air Force to fall below that of Germany: 'His Majesty's Government have made their primary object the attainment of air parity in first-line strength between the principal powers.' The reason given for this was 'that a race in air armaments may at all costs be avoided', and the hope was expressed, in the next sentence, that the Government desired to achieve air parity 'by means of a reduction to the British level that is, France and Russia would have to disarm considerably.
The 'parity pledge', despite its qualifications, led to a strong protest from the Leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, who declared on March 8, in the Commons, 'We deny the need for increased air arms.' For the Liberal Party, Archibald Sinclair denounced 'the folly, danger and wastefulness of this steady accumulation of armaments'. Churchill, speaking without a Party to back him, but with men of all Parties listening to him, warned that the increase was not enough, telling a packed and attentive House, 'I have not been able to convince myself that the policy which the Government have pursued has been in sufficiently direct contact with the harsh realities of the European situation.' It was not enough to shelter behind the facts of French superiority in the air. It was from the air that the new danger would come. It was therefore necessary to 'raise up for ourselves a security in the air above us which will make us as free from serious molestation as did our control of blue water through bygone centuries'. Germany was 'arming fast, and no one is going to stop her'. No one was proposing 'a preventative war' to stop her breaking the Versailles Treaty.
Churchill went on to warn, 'Everyone is well aware that those very gifted people, with their science and with their factories, with what they call their air sports, are capable of developing with great rapidity a most powerful air force for all purposes, offensive and defensive, within a very short period of time'. Germany was ruled by a 'handful of autocrats' who had become 'absolute masters of that mighty, gifted nation', in full control, 'by every means which modern apparatus renders possible', of public opinion. 'I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany'. That day 'is not perhaps far distant. It is perhaps only a year, or perhaps eighteen months distant'. There was still time to take 'the necessary measures'. It was not the parity pledge that was wanted, but the achievement of parity. 'It is no good writing that first paragraph and then producing £130,000. We want the measures to achieve parity'.
Turning then to the Lord President of the Council, Stanley Baldwin, Churchill told the House: 'He has only to make up his mind what has to be done in this matter, and Parliament will vote all the supplies and all the sanctions which are necessary, if need be within forty-eight hours. There need be no talk of working up public opinion. You must not go and ask the public what they think about this. Parliament and the Cabinet have to decide, and the nation has to judge whether they have acted rightly as trustees. The Lord President has the power, and if he has the power he has also what always goes with power-he has the responsibility. Perhaps it is a more grievous and direct personal responsibility than has for many years fallen upon a single servant of the Crown. He may not have sought it, but he is to-night the captain of the gate. The nation looks to him to advise it and lead it, to guide it wisely and safely in this dangerous question, and I hope and believe that we shall not look in vain.'
In his reply Baldwin said he was 'not prepared to admit here today that the situation is hopeless', but that if Britain's efforts at disarmament failed, the Government would 'see to it that in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be in a position inferior to any country within striking distance of our shores'. It was with these words that Baldwin gave his authority to the parity pledge. Three days later, on March 11, Churchill wrote to Hoare, 'No time should be lost in doubling the Air Force.' But eight days after Churchill's letter, the Cabinet rejected his suggestion, partly on the grounds that Ministers felt that there was still a possibility of European disarmament, partly because of the expense involved in Air Force expansion on this scale, and partly because it was thought, as the Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon explained, that 'a German menace, if developed, was more likely to be in the east and south than the west'. It was Austria, Danzig and Memel that appeared to be 'principally menaced'.
While welcoming Baldwin's air parity pledge, Churchill warned that the Government's hopes of air disarmament would be 'very dangerous indeed' if they delayed a review of Britain's defences. On March 21, in the Commons, he advocated the creation of a Ministry of Defence, to co-ordinate the supply and planning needs of the Army, Navy and Air Force under a single Minister. The Cabinet rejected his proposal, amid much ribald comment in private about the impossibility of finding a 'superman' for the task.
The Government now delighted in mocking Churchill. A development in the India debate provided more material for derision. Churchill had accused the India Office of having used 'wrongful pressure' a year earlier to tamper with evidence submitted to the Joint Select Committee. This accusation was portrayed by the Government as so absurd as to be proof of mental aberration. It was in fact well-founded; Hoare, who as Secretary of State for India was supposed to be examining evidence impartially, from all interested groups, had managed, through the intervention of Lord Derby, to persuade one group, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, to withdraw its evidence, which was critical of certain economic aspects of the India Bill as it affected the Lancashire cotton trade, and to replace it with an innocuous submission.
Churchill was given enough details and documents to make his case that the evidence had been tampered with. But his challenge backfired; the charge seemed so improbable, and the involvement of the India Office so patently wrong, that his allegations were denounced as mere trouble-making. But when he raised the issue in the House of Commons on April 16, the corroborative detail of his charges was such that the Government was forced to set up a Committee of Privileges to examine them. Unknown even to Churchill, one piece of crucial evidence, not available to him, which would have clinched his case, was deliberately withheld from the Committee at Hoare's suggestion; that evidence was a request from one of Hoare's senior officials at the India Office that the Manchester evidence should be rewritten.
After considerable Government activity behind the scenes to ensure a favourable response, the Committee of Privileges published its report on June 9. It concluded that the Joint Select Committee had not been a judicial body 'in the ordinary sense'. This being so, the ordinary rules applying to tribunals 'engaged in administering justice' did not apply to its deliberations. There was therefore no legal basis for accusing its members of applying 'wrongful pressure'. In any case, the report added, 'what was called pressure was no more than advice or persuasion'.
Churchill was distressed at what he saw as sophistry and evasion. He was convinced that he was upholding a basic principle of Parliamentary democracy, that the Government must act honestly in its evaluation of information, and draw the correct conclusions from those facts, however embarrassing or alarming they might be, rather than twist them to fit the policy. On June 13 he told the House: 'In any other country in the world, I suppose, I should be put in a concentration camp and visited by a party of overgrown schoolboys. But here one has this right, and I would regard it as most dishonourable to have invoked this procedure unless I could offer solid reasons of duty and fact as a justification for taking that course.'
Churchill was also worried about the effect on the future relationship between Ministers, and those who sought to scrutinise their actions, of the Government's claim that the Joint Select Committee was not a judicial body. 'Many here may live to regret,' he said, 'that the custodians of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons have decided to meet a temporary difficulty by taking that course,' and he quoted with approval Hugh Cecil's criticism of witnesses to the Committee of Privileges 'being marshalled as if they were an orchestra under the baton of a conductor'.
Churchill reiterated his charges in the Commons four days later, but was mocked by many for doing so; one Conservative MP called him 'an extraordinary human being, with such power that he constitutes a definite menace to the peaceful solution of the many problems with which this country is confronted at the present time,' and he added, 'The power of that menace is not decreasing; it is increasing.'
Churchill's action in raising the matter of tampering with evidence did not go unappreciated. 'I admire you quite enormously for your action in recent events,' a friend, Lady Lambton, wrote on June 26, 'and I like to think there is a bright spot in England still, which won't bow the knee to insolent might. When I met the stalwarts of the other side last week, I asked has Winston failed in his case, they said "completely". I then asked "under the same circumstances would Hoare and Derby do what they did again". They looked uncomfortable and I knew my point was gained. And so I said how can you say he failed. He has made a standard & upheld a principle which will last longer than a momentary Parliamentary success, & which makes me and all the other lovers of England say "Thank God for Winston".'
***
At the end of June, Churchill's cousin Sunny, his friend since boyhood days, died of cancer. In an obituary published in The Times on July 1, Churchill wrote: 'Sunny did not enquire too closely about the symptoms which daily struck him new blows. He took the best advice, and lived his life without unduly focusing on the future. But he knew quite well that his end was approaching, that he was, as he said, at the end of his tether. He faced this universal ordeal with dignity and simplicity, making neither too much nor too little of it. He always had the most attractive and graceful manners and that easy courtesy we have been taught by the gentlefolk of a bygone age. At a tea party, for some of those who cared about him, on the last night of his life, when strength had almost ebbed away, he was concerned with the entertainment of his guests, and that his conversation had not been wearisome to them. Then came that good gift of the gods to those in such straits, sleep from which in this world there is no awakening.'
'You are surrounded by devoted friends,' wrote Archibald Sinclair, 'but none, I know, can replace the two whom you have so recently lost.' Lord Birkenhead-F.E. Smith-had died four years earlier. Churchill was deeply saddened by their deaths. When he himself began, for the first time, to speak of being old, Lady Lambton wrote to rebuke him: 'Please don't talk of yourself as a very old man. You are letting us all down by doing so. To me you are still a promising lad.'
***
On June 30 Hitler ordered the murder of his senior rivals in the Nazi Party, as well as the killing of a former Chancellor, General Schleicher, and several prominent Catholics. 'I was deeply affected by the episode,' Churchill later recalled, 'and the whole process of German rearmament, of which there was now overwhelming evidence, seemed to me invested with a ruthless, lurid tinge.' On August 2, a month after the murders, President Hindenburg died, at the age of eighty-seven. On the following day Hitler combined the offices of Chancellor and President. That same day the German armed forces swore a personal oath of 'unconditional obedience' to Hitler as their new Commander-in-Chief.
Throughout the summer Churchill spoke of air defence; on July 7, in his constituency, he proposed that the Government first double the size of the Air Force, and then redouble it. Six days later, in the Commons, Herbert Samuel, unaware, as indeed was Churchill, that the Chief of the Air Staff had unsuccessfully urged the Cabinet to embark on precisely such an expansion, called Churchill's proposal 'rather the language of a Malay run amok than of a responsible British statesman'. In reply Churchill said that the situation was in many ways 'more dangerous' than it had been in 1914, when he and Samuel had been Cabinet colleagues. But Anthony Eden, recently appointed Lord Privy Seal, told the House: 'Where I differ, with respect, from my Right hon Friend the Member for Epping, is that he seems to conceive that in order to have an effective world consultative system nations have to be heavily armed. I do not agree.'
Eden added that 'general disarmament must continue to be the ultimate aim'. Later in the debate Attlee questioned the need for any further rearmament at all, telling the House, about Hitler, 'I think we can generally say today that his dictatorship is gradually falling down.'
Within Government circles the debate on British air weaknesses continued. On July 16, in a note for the Cabinet, Maurice Hankey pointed out that the Chief of Staff's Annual Review for 1933 had disclosed 'considerable deficiencies in our Defence Forces', due largely to the Government's policy in connection with the 'disarmament question' since 1929. On the following day, in a letter to Baldwin, Londonderry warned that a weak Air Force would be neither a deterrent to aggression, nor an adequate defence. 'In the absence of proper defences,' Londonderry wrote, 'there would be nothing to stop the enemy concentrating his maximum bombing force against London and continuing to bombard it until he had achieved his aim'.
On July 18 the Cabinet accepted a plan whereby, by March 1939, Britain would have 1,465 first-line aeroplanes. There were those who believed that this was not enough; for the debate on air policy on July 30, Desmond Morton gave Churchill a note of the relative air strengths of Britain, Germany and the other main powers, as well as the Air Ministry's own estimate of Germany's aircraft production capacity. On July 30 Churchill told the Commons that 'at the present time we are the fifth or sixth air Power in the world'. At the existing rate of building, Britain would be 'worse off in 1939 relatively than we are now-and it is relativity that counts.'
Churchill went on to note that even for the existing 'tiny, timid, tentative, tardy' increase in air strength for which the Government had asked 'they are to be censured by the whole united forces of the Socialist and Liberal parties'. He wished to set out 'some broad facts' which in his view could not be contradicted, and ought to be countered by immediate British Air Force expansion on a substantial and decisive scale: 'I first assert that Germany has already, in violation of the Treaty, created a military air force which is now nearly two-thirds as strong as our present home defence air force. That is the first statement which I put before the Government for their consideration. The second is that Germany is rapidly increasing this air force, not only by large sums of money which figure in her estimates, but also by public subscriptions-very often almost forced subscriptions-which are in progress and have been in progress for some time all over Germany.'
Churchill continued: 'By the end of 1935 the German air force will be nearly equal in numbers and efficiency-and after all no one must underrate German efficiency, because there could be no more deadly mistake than that-it will be nearly equal, as I say, to our home defence air force at that date even if the Government's present proposals are carried out. The third statement is that if Germany continues this expansion and if we continue to carry out our scheme, then some time in 1936 Germany will be definitely and substantially stronger in the air than Great Britain. Fourthly, and this is the point which is causing anxiety, once they have got that lead we may never be able to overtake them.'
There were other facts which Churchill believed to be of importance. German civil aviation was three times the size of its British counterpart, and at the same time was designed in such a way as to be easily converted for military purposes. Indeed, the whole scheme of conversion 'has been prepared and organised with minute and earnest forethought'. The same was true of civil and amateur pilots; Germany had five hundred qualified glider pilots against fifty in Britain. Even these pilots had 'air sense' and could quickly be trained for military aviation. Weakness in the air, Churchill warned, 'has a very direct bearing on the foreign situation'. Only if Britain were strong could her Air Force, in conjunction with that of France, act as 'a deterrent' against German aggression.
As the debate proceeded, several speakers poured scorn on Churchill and his arguments. According to Herbert Samuel: 'It would seem as if he were engaged not in giving sound, sane advice to the country but as if he were engaged in a reckless game of bridge, doubling and redoubling and for terribly high stakes. All these formulas are dangerous.' A leading Socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps, remarked, 'As the Right hon Member for Epping stood in his place declaiming, one could picture him as some old baron in the Middle Ages who is laughing at the idea of the possibility of disarmament in the baronies of this country and pointing out that the only way in which he and his feudal followers could maintain their safety and their cows was by having as strong an armament as possible.'
Churchill did not allow mockery to deflect him. On August 6 he told a friend that he intended, in November, to initiate a debate on air defence by moving an amendment to the address. He would continue to assemble the facts, and during the debate would seek to 'extort more vigorous action' from the Government. 'Whether it will be too little or too late,' he added, 'is a matter upon which I am glad not to have the responsibility. I feel a deep and increasing sense of anxiety.'
***
In August 1934 Churchill spent three weeks in the South of France, at Maxine Elliott's Château de l'Horizon near Cannes. Maxine, an American-born actress, had been a friend of Churchill's mother. Randolph and Lindemann went with him, as did a mass of material for the third Marlborough volume, much of it collected by John Wheldon, a twenty-three-year-old Oxford graduate who had been working at Chartwell since the beginning of the year. Violet Pearman, who went with Churchill to France, took dictation each day for the new volume. Churchill also dictated to her twelve articles for the News of the World; they were on incidents in his life since the turn of the century.
On August 28 Churchill, Lindemann and Randolph left Cannes by car, driving to Grenoble along the recently opened highway which followed the road along which Napoleon had returned to Paris after his escape from Elba in 1815. To Clementine, who had remained at Chartwell, Churchill wrote: 'I really must try to write a Napoleon before I die. But the work piles up ahead & I wonder whether I shall have the time & strength.' During the drive home, he and Lindemann went to see Baldwin at Aix-les-Bains, and discussed with him the need for a more active air defence policy, both in research and production. As a result of their talk Lindemann was made a member of an Air Defence Research Sub-Committee which was being set up, as part of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and where he would be able to put forward his ideas for new scientific methods of air defence.
On September 25 Churchill left Chartwell for the second time that summer, with Clementine, for a cruise in the Mediterranean on board Lord Moyne's yacht Rosaura. Reaching Beirut they travelled overland through Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan, visiting the ruins of Petra, where they spent the night. Then they flew across the Sinai desert to Cairo, where Churchill spent two days painting at the Pyramids before returning by yacht from Alexandria to Naples, and from there by train to Paris. The final lap of the journey was again by air, from Paris to Croydon, only a short drive to Chartwell. His thoughts were never far from the German air challenge; on the day after his return he wrote to the Chairman of Imperial Airways, 'I am sure we must do more to support civil aviation in view of the enormous preponderance of German machines and their convertibility for war purposes.'
While Churchill had been away, his second Marlborough volume was published. Among those who wrote to congratulate him was William Darling, a leading Conservative member of the Edinburgh Town Council, who had fought at Gallipoli. 'In these confused and confusing days,' he wrote on November 3, 'I doubt if you know how frequently in ordinary experience men seem to turn half expectantly to you.'
On November 16, having been helped in preparing his speech by Orme Sargent, a Foreign Office official who shared his deep fear of German intentions, Churchill broadcast about Germany. The Nazis, he said, were seeking 'the submission of races by terrorising and torturing their civil population'. Yet disarmament was still 'the shrill cry of the hour'. Peace, however, must be founded upon military preponderance. 'There is safety in numbers. If there were five or six on each side there might well be a frightful trial of strength. But if there were eight or ten on one side, and only one or two upon the other, and if the collective armed forces of one side were three or four times as large as those of the other, then there will be no war.'
Britain could not 'detach' itself from Europe. 'I am afraid that if you look intently at what is moving towards Great Britain, you will see that the only choice open is the old grim choice our forebears had to face, namely whether we shall submit or whether we shall prepare. Whether we shall submit to the will of a stronger nation or whether we shall prepare to defend our rights, our liberties and indeed our lives. If we submit, our submission should be timely. If we prepare, our preparations should not be too late. Submission will entail at the very least the passing and distribution of the British Empire and the acceptance by our people of whatever future may be in store for small countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland, within and under a Teutonic domination of Europe.'
Churchill's broadcast was heard by tens of thousands of people who would never hear his Parliamentary or public speeches. Wrote one listener, Alexander Filson Young, who in 1900 had been a newspaper correspondent with him in South Africa: 'I am simply aching for the day (which if you keep your health will come), when you will have the power to implement your convictions. When that day comes you will have a following that will astound the scaremongers and isolationists. But oh, the wasted days and years!'
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