By July 4 Churchill could walk a short distance unaided. Two days later he felt well enough to have a visitor from the Foreign Office, Sir William Strang, with whom he discussed the French desire for a Three-Power meeting of Foreign Ministers, to win support for the continuing French struggle in Indo-China. 'Today,' he told Strang, 'we should have been at Bermuda.' With the prospect of a meeting with the Russians still very much on his mind, on July 17 Churchill telegraphed to Eisenhower, explaining why he would have preferred any Four-Power meeting of Foreign Ministers to be preceded by a meeting of Heads of State and Prime Ministers. 'Above all,' he explained, 'I thought that you and I might have formed our own impression of Malenkov, who has never seen anybody outside Russia.' It was only after such a meeting that they should 'set our State Secretaries to work along less ambitious, if more hopeful, easier lines'.
Eisenhower was still unwilling to contemplate a meeting at the summit; Churchill was equally unwilling to abandon the idea. Colville, lunching alone with him on July 24, noted in his diary: 'Still very wrapped up with the possibility of bringing something off with the Russians and with the idea of meeting Malenkov face to face. Very disappointed in Eisenhower whom he thinks both weak and stupid.' That afternoon Churchill was well enough to go from Chartwell to Chequers, a three-hour drive.
On July 27 a very frail Anthony Eden, just returned from Boston after his third operation, went to see Churchill at Chequers. That day the Korean War came to an end with the signing of an armistice agreement; a summit seemed even more hopeful. Three days later Elizabeth Gilliatt told Lord Moran that his patient was 'clamouring for work'. During the August Bank Holiday, Eden returned to Chequers. Colville noted in his diary: 'Winston is firmly hoping for talks which might lead to a relaxation of the Cold War and a respite in which science could use its marvels for improving the lot of man and, as he put it, the leisured classes of his youth might give way to the leisured masses of tomorrow. Eden is set on retaining the strength of NATO and the Western Alliance by which, he believes, Russia has already been severely weakened. W is depressed by Eden's attitude (which reflects that of the FO), because he thinks it consigns us to years more of hatred and hostility.' Still more depressing, Colville wrote, was that Lord Salisbury, after a visit to Washington, reported that he found Eisenhower 'violently Russophobe, greatly more so than Dulles, and that he believes the President to be personally responsible for the policy of useless pinpricks and harassing tactics the US is following against Russia in Europe and the Far East'.
On August 8 Churchill was well enough to preside, at Chequers, over a meeting of Ministers to discuss the Soviet reply to a Three-Power note inviting them to a conference of Foreign Ministers. 'Apart from his unsteady walk,' Colville wrote in his diary, 'the appearances left by his stroke have vanished, though he still tires quickly.' Four days later the Russians announced that they had developed an atom bomb. 'The PM still inclining to think we should have another shot at understanding,' Colville wrote. Churchill's words to him were, 'We must not go further on the path to war unless we are sure there is no other path to peace.'
Eight weeks had passed since Churchill's stroke. 'Cheering beyond telling is this marvellous recovery,' Brendan Bracken wrote to Beaverbrook on August 14. Four days later Churchill was driven up to London, where, for the first time since the morning after his stroke, he presided at a Cabinet meeting. On the following morning he saw the British Ambassador to Moscow. That same day he laid the foundations of yet another literary effort, the rewriting of his pre-war history of the English-speaking peoples, which had been set up in print on the eve of war but never published. His principal helper, who came to see him in the Cabinet Room that day, was to be Alan Hodge, editor of the monthly magazine History Today. 'I've been living on the Second World War,' Churchill told Lord Moran that day. 'Now I shall live on this history. I shall lay an egg a year-a volume every twelve months should not mean much work.'
Returning to Chartwell, Churchill worked to finish the last chapters of the sixth volume of his war memoirs. Commodore Allen and Denis Kelly both came down to help him. Walter Graebner of Time-Life, who went to visit Churchill on a day when he was working on his account of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, later recalled: 'Work began at the luncheon table after the second bottle of champagne was emptied and cigars were lighted. "Now let's get down to it," Churchill said. We were still sitting there at a quarter to five, Churchill having gone over every word in the manuscript to make sure that he understood the full story of the battle and that he had related it clearly and in his best words. In the years that I knew him, his mind was never sharper than on that grey August afternoon in 1953.'
Churchill now felt well enough to travel up to London whenever necessary; he did so on August 25 for an afternoon Cabinet meeting, after which he worked on the proofs of his sixth volume until dinner. On the following day he stayed up until a quarter to two talking to Eden and Macmillan. All was not entirely well, however, as Clementine wrote to Mary on September 5: 'I am sad about Papa; because in spite of the brave show he makes, he gets very easily tired & then he gets depressed. He does too much work & has not yet learnt how & when to stop. It just tails off drearily & he won't go to bed. He is making progress, but now it is imperceptible. If no set-back occurs the improvement can continue for 2 years. I expect you have seen from the newspapers the tremendous "va-et-vient" of ministers. Papa enjoys it very much. Incidentally they are even more tired than he is by the sitting over the dinner table till after midnight!'
Churchill was back at No. 10 on September 8, for a Cabinet discussion about possible Egyptian action against the British forces on the Suez Canal. There was talk of a military response, but Churchill urged caution. It should 'not be forgotten', he said, that there were economic and financial sanctions that could be applied 'without having recourse to active intervention by British forces'. It was always open to Britain, he pointed out, by blocking Egypt's sterling balances, to 'control the flow of oil to Cairo'.
On September 11, against Clementine's advice, Churchill went north to the races at Doncaster. From there he travelled in the Royal Train to Balmoral. That Sunday he accompanied the Queen to Crathie Kirk, where he had last worshipped with King Edward VII forty-five years earlier, when President of the Board of Trade. 'What an innings he has had!' was Lord Moran's comment. After returning to London for another Cabinet meeting, Churchill left England on September 17 for a two-week holiday in the South of France. Once more, he stayed at Beaverbrook's villa. At first all did not go well. 'The PM has been in the depths of depression,' Jane Portal wrote to R.A. Butler, her uncle, and she went on to explain: 'He broods continually on whether to give up or not. He was exhausted by Balmoral and the Cabinets and the journey. I sometimes feel he would be better engaged on his history of the English-Speaking Peoples which is already very remarkable. He greatly likes your messages telling him all the news and you are in high favour. He is preparing a speech for the Margate conference but wonders how long he can be on his pins to deliver it. He has painted one picture in tempera from his bedroom window.'
Slowly, but only slowly, Churchill's mood improved. 'The kittens are very kind to me,' he wrote to Clementine on September 21, 'but evidently they do not think much of my prospects. I have done the daily work and kept check on the gloomy tangle of the world, and I have dictated about 2,000 words of a possible speech for Margate in order to try & see how I can let it off when it is finished to a select audience. I still ponder on the future and don't want to decide unless I am convinced. Today I went into Monte Carlo and bought a grisly book by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. It is all about concentration camps, but in good readable print, which matters to me. It is like taking refuge from melancholy in horror. It provides a background. I have read almost ¾ of Coningsby, but the print was faint and small. I am glad I did not have to live in that artificial society of dukes & would-be duchesses with their Tadpoles & Tapers.'
The 'grisly book' was Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque; Coningsby was one of the novels of his Conservative predecessor Disraeli, whose death in 1881 had been one of his first political memories.
Colville, who flew out to join Churchill on September 23, later recalled that the Prime Minister 'spent hours painting the rocks and pine trees'. Painting, Churchill wrote to Clementine on September 25, was 'a great distraction and a little perch for a tired bird'. On the following day, having looked again at the pre-war proofs of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, he wrote to Beaverbrook, 'On the whole I think I would rather have lived through our lot of troubles than any of the others, though I must place on record my regret that the human race ever learned to fly.'
Churchill advised Beaverbrook to be 'careful' about his opposition to a German Army. 'Although armies are no longer the instruments by which the fate of nations is decided,' he wrote, 'there is certainly going to be a German army and I hope it will be on our side and not against us. This need in no way prevent, but may on the contrary help, friendly relations with the bear.'
***
On September 30 Churchill flew back to England. Nine days later he travelled to Margate to make the speech, the reception of which would help him decide his political future. He spoke for fifty minutes, standing throughout, and without losing his place or his concentration. During his speech he reiterated his hopes of May 11 for a meeting at the summit with the Russians. He also told the assembled Conservatives that the NATO alliance existed 'not to play Russia against Germany or Germany against Russia, but to make them both feel they can live in safety with each other, in spite of their grievous problems and differences'. Britain's role was to use her growing influence with both 'to relieve them of any anxiety they may feel about each other'. Personally, he added, he welcomed Germany 'back among the great powers of the world'. The speech was a success. It was also, Jane Portal later recalled, a 'terrific ordeal'. Although news of his stroke had been kept secret, all sorts of rumours had circulated about his ill-health. 'Everyone,' Miss Portal added, 'was watching him for frailty. It was a triumphant achievement to have got through that.'
On October 16 Churchill learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was a fitting tribute to one whose first book had been published more than fifty years earlier, whose five-volume history of the First World War had become a classic, and whose six-volume history of the Second World War was now so nearly completed. Four days later he returned to the House of Commons, for the first time since his stroke, for Prime Minister's Questions. 'He seemed self-confident,' was Channon's comment, 'though a touch deaf in spite of his hearing-aid, but apparently more vigorous than before.' Channon doubted, however, 'whether he can carry on for long'.
There was now renewed pressure on Churchill to retire. Clementine wanted him to hand over to Eden, who was desperate to be summoned to take his place. But on November 3, when he made his first Parliamentary speech since his stroke, Churchill's vigour was such that it gave him confidence that he need not step down. Channon commented on the speech in his diary: 'Brilliant, full of cunning and charm, of wit and thrusts, he poured out his Macaulay-like phrases to a stilled and awed House. It was an Olympian spectacle. A supreme performance which we shall never see again from him or anyone else. In eighteen years in this honourable House I have never heard anything like it.'
Churchill left the Chamber and walked unaided to the smoking-room and then, Channon noted, 'flushed with pride, pleasure, and triumph, sat there for two hours sipping brandy and acknowledging compliments. He beamed like a school-boy.' Neither Channon nor any of those who crowded round the triumphant speaker realised that he was recovering from a stroke; one which had led most of those who knew of it, including his doctors, to conclude that he would never speak in the Commons again. 'That's the last bloody hurdle' were his words to Moran on returning to his room in the Commons, and he added, 'Now, Charles, we can think of Moscow.'
The first stage of any such journey to Moscow would have to be a preparatory meeting with the Americans and the French; within forty-eight hours of his Parliamentary triumph, Churchill once more invited Eisenhower to Bermuda. It was agreed that they would meet there for four days, beginning on December 4, together with the new French Prime Minister, Joseph Laniel. Churchill was determined to try to find a way to renew relations with Russia; at his suggestion, Colville and Soames had gone to the Soviet Embassy for a private talk on the possibilities of détente. But a telegram from the new British Ambassador in Moscow, William Hayter, boded ill for Churchill's hopes. The Soviets viewed co-existence, Hayter reported on November 24, as that 'of the snake and the rabbit'. The new Soviet leader, Malenkov, 'seems to have concluded that Stalin's methods were too rough. Other and more subtle methods of weakening the West are henceforth to be adopted.'
Churchill was not put off by this stark appraisal. On December 1, the day after his seventy-ninth birthday, he left London by air for Bermuda, a long and at times rough flight of seventeen hours. Lord Cherwell was with him as, Churchill had written to Eisenhower, 'I want to talk over with you our "collusion" on atomics etc.,' Churchill added: 'Indeed it might strengthen the impression, to which I gathered you were favourable, that our meeting was not simply an incident in the recent correspondence with the Soviets. He can always slip across to Washington after we have had a talk, if you thought it convenient for him to see more of your people.' The atomic aspect had been Cherwell's particular responsibility for more than ten years, since the very first years of the war.
***
On the day after his arrival in Bermuda, Churchill went to the airport to welcome the French Prime Minister, Laniel, and his Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault. On the following day he returned to the airport to greet Eisenhower and Dulles. During a private talk, Eisenhower told Churchill that if there were a deliberate breach of the Korean armistice by the Communists, the United States 'would expect to strike back with atomic weapons at military targets'. Churchill did not object, telling Eisenhower, as the minutes recorded, that he 'quite accepted this'. Then, Colville later recalled, he walked down to the beach, where he sat 'like King Canute defying the incoming tide (and getting his feet wet in consequence)'.
The first plenary session of the Bermuda Conference opened that afternoon. In discussing the Soviet Union, Bidault doubted that there was really a 'new look'. Churchill replied, 'Let us make sure that we do not too lightly dismiss this possibility'. He would not be 'in too much of a hurry to believe that nothing but evil emanates from this mighty branch of the human family, or that nothing but danger and peril could come out of this vast ocean of land in a single circle so little known and understood'. To Churchill's amazement, Eisenhower then proceeded to describe the new Russia as a tart; 'despite bath, perfume or lace, it was still the same old girl'. But perhaps they could pull her 'off the main street and put her on a back alley'. He did not want, said Eisenhower, 'to approach this problem on the basis that there had been any change in the Soviet policy of destroying the capitalist free world by all means, by force, by deceit or by lies. This was their long-term purpose. From their writings it was clear there had been no change since Lenin.'
Eisenhower asked Churchill to 'correct him' if he was wrong; he then adjourned the Conference. That evening, in discussion with Churchill and Eden, he again raised the question of future American action in Korea, if the truce was broken. Churchill, much encouraged by Eden, now 'strongly resisted' Eisenhower's suggestion that in the event of hostilities breaking out again America should use the atom bomb.
At a further meeting with Churchill on the following morning, Eisenhower proposed, as part of a speech he was to make at the United Nations, to refer to the 'obsolete Colonial mould' which was now being broken. After lunch that day, Churchill persuaded Eisenhower to remove from his speech what Colville called this 'obnoxious phrase'. More significantly, Churchill persuaded Eisenhower to replace the phrase about the United States being 'free to use the atomic bomb' by one about the United States 'reserving the right to use the atomic bomb'. The central theme of Eisenhower's proposal, the control of atomic energy by an international body, was very much acceptable to Churchill. It seemed a way back from the brink.
Much of the rest of the Conference was taken up discussing the European Defence Community, and by a series of appeals from Churchill to the French, urging them to accept a German military contingent as an integral part of the defence of Western Europe. When Bidault spoke with passion about the current Franco-German dispute over the Saar, on France's eastern border, Churchill, as the minutes of the meeting recorded, 'begged and implored his French friends not to let a few fields in the Saar valley come between the life and death of the flaming spirit of France and the break-up of the great structure on which so many hopes had been founded'. If Germany were left totally disarmed she would be 'at the mercy of Russia at any moment'.
The French were not to be convinced. Nor would the Americans agree to Churchill's request to participate with Britain in the policing of the Suez Canal Zone. As to the purpose of Churchill's visit, a common approach to Russia, with a view to a summit meeting, the Americans were adamant that nothing would come of it but a propaganda victory for the Soviets. When the Conference ended on December 8 Churchill was a disappointed man. He had travelled far, and mastered his illness, but his advocacy had failed.
Churchill left Bermuda by air on the evening of December 10. Eleven days later he explained to a former Labour Minister of Works, Richard Stokes: 'American anxiety about Russian rearmament must be borne in mind. We cannot get through without them.' He was upset, however, early in the New Year, to learn that the Americans were intending to give military aid to Pakistan, and to initiate some form of military collaboration between Pakistan and Turkey; this, he told the Cabinet on 7 January 1954, 'could do nothing for the moment to increase the military strength of the West, and it was bound to be regarded by the Soviet Government as a provocative gesture'.
***
On January 21 Churchill read in the newspapers of the death of his fellow-soldier of Omdurman days, Richard Molyneux. It was to help heal Molyneux's wound after the battle that Churchill had given some of his own skin for grafting. 'He will take my skin with him, a kind of advance guard, into the next world,' Churchill commented on reading of his friend's death. Churchill's own departure for the next world did not now seem as imminent as some had feared. After Archibald Sinclair had seen him at the Other Club on January 28, and again at No. 10 on the following morning, he wrote to Beaverbrook: 'Neither at night, nor in the middle of his morning's work, was there any trace of tiredness-still less of weakness or lethargy. He still radiates gaiety & power and his authority is unimpaired.'
In Cabinet on February 3 Churchill made his first intervention on a question which had begun to loom on the political horizon, the possibility of legislative restrictions on coloured immigration from the Commonwealth. The 'rapid improvement of communications', he said, was likely to lead 'to a continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country, and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people'. It might well be true, however, he told the Cabinet, that the problem had 'not yet assumed sufficient proportions to enable the Government to take adequate counter-measures'.
That February there were two calls in the Press for Churchill's resignation, one in the Daily Mirror and the other in Punch. There was also disappointment for Churchill that month when, at the long-awaited Four-Power meeting of Foreign Ministers, held in Berlin, the Russians proved obdurate and unyielding. But when he spoke in the Commons on February 25 he made it clear that he still hoped for détente. 'Patience and perseverance,' he said, 'must never be grudged when the peace of the world is at stake. Even if we had to go through a decade of cold-war bickerings punctuated by vain parleys, that would be preferable to the catalogue of unspeakable and also unimaginable horrors which is the alternative. We must not shrink from continuing to use every channel that is open or that we can open, any more than that we should relax those defensive measures indispensable for our own strength and safety.'
There was 'no contradiction', Churchill said, between the policy of building up the defence strength of the free world against 'potential armed Soviet aggression' and trying at the same time 'to create conditions under which Russia may dwell easily and peacefully side by side with us all'. His appeal ended: 'Peace is our aim, and strength is the only way of getting it. We need not be deterred by the taunt that we are trying to have it both ways at once. Indeed, it is only by having it both ways at once that we shall have a chance of getting anything of it at all.'
Churchill's stamina could still astound those who knew of his stroke. After a five-hour Cabinet meeting on March 4, Lord Moran asked him if he was tired. 'Not at all,' he said. 'Now I am going out to dinner with the American Ambassador.' Moran commented, 'This astonishing creature obeys no laws, recognises no rules.' A week later, however, when Churchill dined with Butler, he told his Chancellor of the Exchequer, 'I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.' The only political interest he had left, Churchill confided, was in 'high-level conversations with the Russians'.
Those who wanted Churchill to resign were becoming more vociferous, and more bitter. On March 22, in the privacy of his diary, Harry Crookshank called him 'gaga'. Four days later, however, Jane Portal, who saw him almost every day, described him to Lord Moran as 'quite perky'. He was also increasingly active in trying to win Eisenhower over to one more attempt at a high-level conference with Russia, and to promote greater East-West trade. But in answer to an appeal for an increase in trade with Russia, Eisenhower replied that he did not want the Russians to have the benefits of Western consumer goods.
Churchill did not slacken in his efforts to influence the President. With the explosion that month of an American hydrogen bomb, there were many who felt a sense of panic. Churchill still hoped, however, as he told Eisenhower on March 27, 'to promote an easement of relations with Soviet Russia and to encourage and aid any development of Russian life which leads to a wider enjoyment by the Russian masses of the consumer goods of which you speak, and modern popular amenities and diversions which play so large a part in British and American life'. In the climate of the Cold War, such sentiments were far-sighted. But with each telegram sent by Churchill to Eisenhower, Anthony Eden felt that his own authority as Foreign Secretary was being undermined. Tension between the two men grew almost to breaking-point. On March 31 Eden told one of his advisers, in exasperation, 'This simply cannot go on; he is gaga; he cannot finish his sentences.'
That day, the New York Times seemed to endorse Eden's judgement. 'For the first time since Parliament reconvened last autumn,' it wrote, 'Sir Winston appeared unsure of himself and tired. This was not the Churchill of two years ago and was only a shadow of the great figure of 1940.' Triumphantly, the Daily Mirror printed this comment on its back page with the headline, 'What America says about Churchill now.' A 'shadow' he may have been by comparison with 1940, but the New York Times was unaware of Churchill's continuing vigilance in world affairs. On the previous day he had written to his friend Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily Express: 'I think the Express took a very sensible line about not trying to forbid the United States to proceed with their hydrogen experiments. A breach with them might well be fatal to world peace and to our survival, for they could quite easily go on alone and we are far worse placed geographically.' Churchill added: 'I grieve that you continue to oppose so violently the rearmament, under proper limits, of Western Germany. It is going to happen anyway and it is better to have them on our side than against us.'
Frail though he was, Churchill was at that very moment preparing a speech on the hydrogen bomb, which he made in the Commons on April 5. Nothing could be more disastrous to the survival of Western Europe and the safety of Britain, he warned, 'than a great dispute between Britain and the United States'. He also spoke, as he had done almost a year earlier, on May 11, of the possibility of a summit meeting; one which would now have a different 'topic' as a result of Eisenhower's United Nations speech proposing a new consultative and co-operative machinery for the industrial atomic sphere.
Churchill told the Commons, 'If Russia, the British Commonwealth, and the United States were gathered round the table talking about the commercial application of atomic energy, and the diversion of some of their uranium stockpile, it would not seem odd if the question of the hydrogen bomb, which might blow all these pretty plans sky-high, cropped up, and what I have hoped for, namely a talk on supreme issues between the Heads of States and Governments concerned, might not seem so impossible as it has hitherto.' There were, he concluded, two main aims of British policy: 'One is to lose no opportunity of convincing the Soviet leaders and, if we can reach them, the Russian people, that the democracies of the West have no aggressive design on them. The other is to ensure that until that purpose has been achieved we have the strength necessary to deter any aggression by them and to ward it off if it should come.'
As Churchill spoke these words, his remarks were punctuated by cries of 'Resign!' from the Labour benches. So loud were the cries that at times they drowned his words. It was not the interruptions, however, but Churchill's lack of reaction to them, that caused the greatest comment. 'The virulence of the attack for once did not stimulate him to combat,' wrote the Parliamentary correspondent of The Times. 'It seemed to rob his voice of resonance and left him ploughing doggedly through this section of his speech.'
Churchill's performance on April 5 marked a turning point; it was 'the first time', one of his Private Secretaries, Anthony Montague Browne, later recalled, 'that I realised unmistakably how much his powers had waned. In days gone by he would have put aside his notes and devastated the opposition because he had the strongest case.' There was an 'overwhelming impression', Evelyn Shuckburgh noted in his diary, 'that the PM has made a real bloomer, and exposed his aged feebleness to the House'.
Despite the setback of April 5, Churchill, fearful of a world riven by nuclear conflict, expressed his concerns at the Royal Academy Banquet on April 28, and, two days later, at the Albert Hall. At Chequers on April 26 he had sought to impress on President Eisenhower's representative, Admiral Radford, who was hoping for a British commitment to participate in the war in Indo-China, 'the danger of war on the fringes, where the Russians were strong and could mobilise the enthusiasm of nationalist and oppressed peoples'. His policy was 'quite different', he told the Admiral; 'it was conversations at the centre'. Such conversations should lead neither to appeasement nor to an ultimatum, but should be 'calculated to bring home to the Russians the full implications of Western strength and to impress upon them the folly of war'.
On the day that Admiral Radford was at Chequers, the sixth and final volume of Churchill's war memoirs was published in London. In congratulating him, Brendan Bracken wrote, 'There never was such an animal as WSC.' But Churchill was now mentioning July as a possible date for his retirement; watching as Eden received daily press coverage for his work in Geneva at an international conference on Indo-China. 'He is going through a Valley of Decision, or rather of indecision, about the time when he should relinquish power,' Violet Bonham Carter wrote to a friend after a visit to Churchill at Chartwell, 'and I felt that he was in great agony of mind. I urged him, rightly or wrongly, to stay on. He said to me, "You know you and Beaverbrook are the only two people who really want me to stay."' Bracken was another who seemed to favour Churchill staying on, writing to Beaverbrook that month, 'Churchill alone has the capacity to hold on to excitable Uncle Sam's coat-tails.'
***
On May 27 Churchill was to address a Conservative Women's rally at the Albert Hall. 'I do not conceal from you that original composition is a greater toil than it used to be,' he wrote to Clementine two days earlier, 'while I dislike having my speeches made for me by others as much as I ever did.' For more than two days he worked on his speech, then spoke for forty minutes, telling the women that it was his belief 'that we may live to see-or you may-the awful secrets which science has wrung from nature serve mankind instead of destroying it, and put an end to the wars they were called forth to wage'.
Churchill was already planning to fly to Washington, to discuss with Eisenhower an Anglo-American exchange of information on the peaceful use of atomic energy. To that end, he would once more take Lord Cherwell with him. On being told of Churchill's plan, Eden took the opportunity, in a letter to him on June 7, to suggest to him that he should resign as Prime Minister as soon as he was back from the trip. 'My dear Anthony,' Churchill replied, 'I am not able to commit myself to what you suggest,' and he went on to explain, 'I am increasingly impressed by the crisis and tension which is developing in world affairs and I should be failing in my duty if I cast away my trust at such a juncture or failed to use the influence I possess in the causes we both have at heart.' He would not expect, however, to stay on 'beyond the autumn'.
Following Eden's letter, Churchill discussed his resignation with Macmillan, to whom he said he was thinking of going in the autumn. A few days later he received a typewritten letter from Macmillan, saying that in his view it would be better, if a new administration were to be formed that year, 'for Ministers to be installed in their new offices before and not after the summer holidays'. Churchill was not pleased. 'My dear Harold,' he replied on June 20, 'I received your letter yesterday morning. I do not think it ought to have been written except in your own hand. I was well aware of your views, Yours sincerely, Winston S. Churchill.'
Churchill was convinced that he could still influence the Americans to a policy of détente with Russia, on the basis of having first constructed what he described to Eisenhower in a message on June 21 as 'the world front against Communist aggression'. Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, and Tito's Yugoslavia, which in 1948 had broken with Moscow, could all be brought into that front. 'I seek as you know,' he added, 'to convince Russia that there is a thoroughly friendly and easy way out for her, in which all her hard-driven peoples may gain a broader, fuller, happier life.'
On the evening of June 24 Churchill, Eden and Cherwell left London by air for Washington. A year had passed since the stroke. The main purpose of the visit, Colville noted during the flight, was 'to convince the President that we must co-operate more fruitfully in the atomic and hydrogen sphere and that we, the Americans and British, must go and talk to the Russians in an effort to avert war, diminish the effects of the Cold War, and procure a ten years' period of "easement" during which we can divert our riches and our scientific knowledge to ends more fruitful than the production of catastrophic weapons.'
At Washington airport Churchill was met by Dulles, and by the Vice-President, Richard Nixon, then driven to the White House, which was to be his home for the duration of the talks. To his surprise, at their very first meeting that morning Eisenhower at last expressed agreement with the idea of a high-level meeting with the Russians. Churchill then proposed a 'reconnaissance in force' to Moscow, possibly by himself, 'to see if anything promising developed'. Eisenhower was prepared to see Churchill go alone to Moscow; he himself would not, however, go to a meeting 'anywhere under the present Soviet rule'. When Churchill suggested that a Churchill-Malenkov-Eisenhower meeting could take place in neutral Stockholm, or in London, Eisenhower agreed. As to Churchill's preliminary 'reconnaissance in force' to Moscow, he told Eisenhower, 'I swear to you that I will not compromise you in the slightest.'
Before Churchill had left for Washington, the Cabinet's Defence Policy Committee, of which he was Chairman, decided that Britain should produce its own hydrogen bomb. This decision was kept secret from the full Cabinet. On June 26, however, Churchill told Eisenhower that Britain would be manufacturing its own bomb, and would do so in Britain. The two men also discussed 'the dangers which now face the world as a result of the portability of the bomb'. A general moratorium on hydrogen-bomb experiments was thought, however, to be 'unwise', in the light of what the minutes of the discussion called 'the difficulties of detection', as well as the possibility of the concealment of any explosion.
At a public luncheon on June 26, Churchill addressed thirty leading Senators and Congressmen. Communism was a 'tyrant', he said, but 'meeting jaw to jaw is better than war'. This approach still did not commend itself to Dulles, who, at a private talk with Churchill on the following day, expressed his doubts about any initial meeting between Churchill and the Russians. According to Dulles' note of their conversation, 'I pointed out that if Mr Churchill should make an exploratory mission alone, it would not be looked upon well in this country, and also we might have to make it clear that Mr Churchill was in no sense speaking or acting for the United States. Sir Winston said he fully understood this. On the other hand, he would be going not in any sense as an intermediary between the United States and the Soviet Union, but representing the spirit and purpose of "our side". I urged that the matter be very carefully weighed before any positive decision was made.'
The Washington talks ended on June 29. In a final communiqué that morning, Churchill and Eisenhower announced their agreement that West Germany, which had now become the German Federal Republic, 'should take its place as an equal partner in the community of Western nations where it can make its proper contribution to the defence of the free world.' Thus came to fruition the idea Churchill had first put forward at Zurich eight years earlier. At lunch that day the question of Anglo-American nuclear co-operation was discussed; the conclusions of that discussion remain secret to this day. Churchill then flew from Washington to Ottawa, where he told the Canadian Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence of Britain's decision to manufacture a hydrogen bomb.
At midday on June 30, in Ottawa, Churchill broadcast to the Canadian people, before dining with the Canadian Prime Minister. From the dinner table he was driven to the airport for a flight to New York. Reaching New York after midnight, he was driven straight to the docks, where he boarded the Queen Elizabeth. At noon on the following morning he was bound for home. During the voyage he finally decided on what Colville called 'an expedition to Russia, where he would ask for freedom for Austria as an earnest of better relations'.
Eden, who was also on board, pressed Churchill to make a precise commitment to retirement. Churchill agreed to do so, telling Eden on the morning of July 2 that he would go to Moscow in early August, then hand over to Eden on September 21. Later that day Churchill dictated a telegram to Molotov, proposing a meeting between himself and the Soviet leaders, 'which might be the prelude to a wider reunion where much might be settled'. On being sent the text of this telegram, Eisenhower replied, 'You did not let any grass grow under your feet.'
Eden was angered that Churchill intended to despatch the telegram from on board ship, without consulting the Cabinet. 'After a great deal of talk,' Colville noted in his diary, 'Eden was sent for and eventually agreed to a compromise.' Churchill would send the telegram to the Cabinet as Eden wished, 'provided he could say that Eden agreed with it in principle (which of course he does not). Eden weakly gave in.' To Churchill's surprise and satisfaction, when R.A. Butler sent a message to the ship about the proposed telegram, he appeared 'generally satisfied about the main idea'. The telegram was then sent to Moscow. Other than Butler, however, no other Cabinet Minister had seen it.
On July 6 the Queen Elizabeth reached Southampton. On the following day Churchill told the Cabinet of the decision to manufacture a British hydrogen bomb. He had no doubt, he said, that the 'best hope of preserving world peace was to make it clear to potential aggressors that they had no hope of shielding themselves from a crushing retaliatory use of atomic power'. That evening Churchill received Molotov's reply to his ship-board telegram. It was entirely favourable to a meeting of the sort he had proposed; in Moscow between himself and Malenkov. All seemed set fair for Churchill's last great act of statesmanship. But when the Cabinet met on July 8, it was soon clear that many Ministers were totally opposed to Churchill's initiative, and deeply resented the fact that it had been taken without consulting them.
Lord Salisbury and Harry Crookshank both spoke against Churchill's telegram to Molotov. Butler then dealt Churchill's initiative a crushing blow. The draft telegram had reached him, he said, during the afternoon of Saturday July 3, when he was in Norfolk. It had been addressed to him personally. 'There was nothing in the telegram to suggest that the views of the Cabinet were being invited.' Indeed, even before he had been able to despatch his own comments, 'a further telegram had been received from the Prime Minister enquiring whether the message had been transmitted to Moscow.' This, Butler said, 'had confirmed his view that he had not been expected to invite the views of other Cabinet colleagues-and it would in any event have been very difficult for him to do so when Ministers were dispersed at the week-end.'
Butler's account shocked Churchill's Ministers. As the discussion continued, it was clear that the majority of them would not support a Moscow visit. Churchill looked for a way out, telling the Cabinet that he would consult first with Eisenhower. This was accepted. All would depend, he told Eisenhower, on whether 'the Cabinet decide to go forward with the project'. But he did not mean to give up his idea of a Three-Power meeting, telling Eisenhower, in a telegram on July 9: 'I do not intend to go to Moscow. We can only meet as equals, and though Stockholm which you mentioned to me before you took office, or Vienna, are both acceptable, Anthony has proposed what I think is the best, namely Berne.' Malenkov could come to Berne once the Geneva Conference was over, with Molotov coming from Geneva, 'and Anthony and I could have a few talks on the dead level'. There could then be a Three-or a Four-Power Conference in London in September.
'Of course,' Churchill admitted, 'all this may be moonshine. The Soviets may refuse any meeting place but Moscow. In that case all would be off for the present, or they will give nothing and merely seek, quite vainly, to split Anglo-American unity. I cherish hopes not illusions and after all I am "an expendable" and very ready to be one in so great a cause.'
In Cabinet, Eden intervened forcefully against Churchill's continuing initiative. The dangers of a meeting such as Churchill proposed, he told his colleagues on July 9, were the lack of any fixed agenda and the problem of 'the questions which the Russians were likely to raise'. As an alternative to the creation of a European Defence Community, Eden warned, 'they would probably suggest that a united Germany should be admitted to the NATO, and that NATO should thereafter be widened to include the Soviet Union'. As regards the project for 'a broader meeting', Eden warned, Britain must be prepared for the Russians to press the suggestion that this should be on a Five-Power basis, 'including Communist China'.
Although Churchill still refused to abandon his hopes of a meeting with Malenkov, the weight of Cabinet opinion was clearly against him. On July 16 Macmillan went to see Lady Churchill to tell her that the Cabinet was 'in danger of breaking up' on this issue. There was considerable anger in Cabinet at what several senior Ministers felt was the unconstitutional nature of Churchill's ship-board telegram to Molotov. When the Cabinet met on July 23 there was widespread agreement that Ministers ought to have been consulted in advance on a telegram of such importance. As to the substance of Churchill's proposal, Eden was outspoken, telling the Cabinet that day that he did not believe 'that any good would come from a bi-lateral meeting with the Russians at the present time'. He added, however, rather ambivalently, that in view of the fact that Churchill 'with all his long experience' felt so strongly that the attempt was worth making, he was 'ready to acquiesce-so long as the meeting was not held on Russian soil'.
The Cabinet decided to postpone their decision until their next meeting three days later. When they met on July 26 it was clear that the majority opinion was still against any Churchill-Malenkov meeting, wherever it might be held. Churchill therefore withdrew his proposal. But the new factor of the hydrogen bomb convinced him that some effort ought to be made to end the Cold War. When, on July 29, there was criticism in the Commons of the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, signed two days earlier in Cairo, whereby British troops were to withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone, Churchill begged MPs to see the matter in its wider perspective. 'How utterly out of all proportion to the Suez Canal and the position we held in Egypt,' he said, 'are the appalling developments and the appalling spectacle which imagination raises before us,' and he went on to explain: 'Merely to try to imagine in outline the first few weeks of a war under conditions about which we did not know when this Session commenced, and about which we had not been told-merely to portray that picture and submit it to the House would, I am sure, convince Hon. Gentlemen of the obsolescence of the base and of the sense of proportion which is vitally needed at the present time, not only in military dispositions but in all our attempts to establish human relationships between nation and nation.'
Churchill's appeal was effective. 'Before he sat down,' Moran wrote in his diary, 'he had restored to the House a sense of proportion, so that they were able to measure the importance of Suez against the incredible calamities of a war of annihilation.' But despite this Parliamentary success, during an intervention that lasted a mere four minutes, more and more Ministers now joined the private but determined move to secure his resignation. Had he not first spoken of June, then of July, then of September, as the month in which he would leave? Could he not fix a date now? Churchill was 'a marvel & mystery,' his daughter Mary wrote in her diary on July 29, 'and none of us really know what his intentions are-perhaps he doesn't himself!'
Churchill went down to Chartwell. To the consternation of his Cabinet, he now decided not to hand over to Eden in September. Eden asked if the change-over could at least be in October, so that he could go to the Party Conference that month as Prime Minister, or as imminent Prime Minister. But Churchill did not accept this. He wished, he said, to remain at the helm until the early months of 1955. 'I brood much about things,' he wrote to Clementine, who was on holiday in the South of France, on August 10, 'and all my moods are not equally gay.' He was particularly put out when it was announced that Attlee was to visit Moscow. 'There would have been an outburst of joy if I'd seen Malenkov,' he told Moran on August 12. 'Now Attlee has done it.' Churchill clung with tenacity to the hope of a Russian meeting. He set out his arguments, first to Butler and then to Macmillan, who noted them down in his diary on August 24, after a visit to Chartwell: 'He proposed to stay on as long as he could. He had a unique position. He could talk to anybody, on either side of the Iron Curtain, either by personal message or face to face. Having now fully recovered his health, he could not abandon his commission.' Churchill also told Macmillan that a 'fag-end' Government, such as Eden would have to lead if Churchill resigned before an election, 'could never succeed. Such brilliant figures as Lord Rosebery and Arthur Balfour had been swept aside, in spite of their talents and charm, after they had succeeded Gladstone and Salisbury.' Churchill added that, as Macmillan noted, 'he was PM and nothing could drive him out of his office, so long as he could form and control a Government and have the confidence of the House. This continual chatter in the lobbies and the Press about his resignation was intolerable. It arose, of course, from his illness last year. But he was now recovered. Naturally, like any man of nearly eighty, who had had two strokes, he might die at any moment. But he could not undertake to die at any particular moment! Meanwhile, he did not propose to resign.'
Churchill showed Macmillan the letter he was writing to Eden, explaining that he intended to remain Prime Minister until a General Election in November 1955. The letter gave him much anguish, particularly as Clementine was most reluctant to see him remain in office for another year, and more. 'Harold thought I ought to send it,' Churchill wrote to Clementine on the following day. 'It has gone. The responsibility is mine. But I hope you will give me your love.'
On August 27 Eden went to see Churchill. Their talk confirmed that Churchill did not intend to stand down for at least a year. 'You are young,' Churchill told him. 'It will all be yours before you are sixty. Why are you in such a hurry?' Two days later, Churchill announced in Cabinet that he would be staying on. He again looked forward to what he called, in a letter to Bernard Baruch, a 'Top Level' meeting with the Russians. 'You will, I am sure, be glad to hear that I am not thinking of retirement at the present time,' he told Baruch. 'I feel earnestly I still have something to contribute to the cause of "Peace through Strength". I am sure that I shall always get a fair hearing in my Mother's Land. I have seemed to gather vigour as this year has progressed and can do a long and thorough day's work especially if I get a good sleep in the middle of the day.' Churchill added, 'My mind is continually oppressed by the thermo-nuclear problem, though I still believe it is more likely to bring War to an end than mankind.'
On the last day of August Churchill was shocked to learn that the French Assembly had rejected the European Defence Community by 319 votes to 264. He at once wrote to the German Chancellor, Dr Konrad Adenauer, to ask him to agree not to press, in any future defence arrangement, for larger German forces than had been envisaged in the EDC plan. 'This would invest the new Germany with a moral dignity and respect,' he wrote, 'far more worth having than merely claiming the right to create as many divisions as she chose, or as anybody else, and plunging into an endless legalistic argument on the subject.' This advice came, Churchill explained, 'from one who after so many years of strife has few stronger wishes than to see the German nation take her true place in the worldwide family of free nations.'
In a letter to Eisenhower on September 18, Churchill told the President: 'I do hope and pray that you and I will still keep the German contribution as our No. 1 target, and also to get them on our side instead of on the other.'
***
At Chequers, Graham Sutherland was painting a portrait of Churchill, to be presented to him by both Houses of Parliament on his eightieth birthday. On September 1 Clementine wrote to Mary: 'Mr Graham Sutherland is a "Wow". He is really a most attractive man & one can hardly believe that the savage cruel designs that he exhibits, come from his brush.' Churchill had already given him three sittings, but no one had seen the beginnings of the portrait 'except Papa & he is much struck by the power of the drawing'. As the painting progressed, Sutherland made sure that it was covered up after each sitting. When he finished it, it was taken away, its final state seen neither by Churchill nor Clementine.
On October 9 Churchill spoke at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool. He had now been Leader of the Conservative Party for fourteen years, he pointed out. He made no reference to standing down. 'At any rate for the moment,' wrote the Observer, 'the rank and file seem content that he should go in his own time and how he pleases.' Unknown to the Observer, Macmillan had written to Churchill a week earlier, urging him to fix a date for his retirement, and to choose a date sufficiently long enough before the election to give Eden 'a fair run on his own' before polling day.
Immediately after his return from Blackpool, Churchill invited Macmillan to Chartwell. After their talk, Macmillan noted in his diary that Churchill would remain Prime Minister 'without any commitment written or verbal' as to the date of his resignation. Churchill also offered to appoint Macmillan Minister of Defence; Macmillan accepted. On October 26 Mary wrote in her diary: 'How fantastic it now seems that one actually thought & believed that Papa must retire! He is in full flight now-having reshuffled his government.'
Churchill allowed himself no respite. On November 9 he spoke at the Guildhall, on November 12 at Harrow School, on November 23 at Woodford, and on November 26 at Bristol University, where, Moran noted, the students 'had no feeling that he was an old man; on the contrary, he seemed to be one of themselves, and two thousand young voices shouted their joy and approval. The same puckish humour marked his approach to their seniors.' Among those at Bristol when Churchill spoke was a former British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Oliver Franks, who told Moran he had seen Churchill a few days earlier at Buckingham Palace, 'sitting on the sofa, apparently too weary to listen to anybody; his face was white and like a mask, his body had flopped, he seemed a very old man who had not long to live. But at Bristol he was pink, his expression was full of animation and his eyes twinkled.'
On November 30 Churchill was eighty; no Prime Minister since Gladstone had been in office at that age. No living Member of Parliament other than Churchill had first been elected in the reign of Queen Victoria. That morning, before a vast gathering in Westminster Hall, he was presented with the Sutherland portrait, which he described as 'a remarkable example of modern art. It certainly combines force with candour.' But he had not liked it; it seemed to combine a look of unredeemed ruthlessness with senility. After her husband's death, Clementine gave orders for it to be destroyed.
More acceptable that morning was Attlee's tribute, in which he praised Churchill's 'full share' in the Liberal social reforms before the First World War, and went on to describe the Dardanelles campaign of 1915 as 'the only imaginative strategic idea of the war'. Attlee added, 'I only wish that you had had full power to carry it to success.' In his reply, Churchill said: 'I am now nearing the end of my journey. I hope I still have some services to render,' and in answer to Eisenhower's congratulations he wrote, on December 7, of his one remaining aspiration, telling the President, 'I still hope we may reach a top level meeting with the new regime in Russia and that you and I may both be present.'
Did Churchill still have the stamina for such activities? In a note written three months later, Colville recalled: 'He was ageing month by month and was reluctant to read any papers except the newspapers or to give his mind to anything that he did not find diverting. More and more time was given to bezique and ever less to public business. The preparation of a Parliamentary question might consume a whole morning; facts would be demanded from the Government departments and not arouse any interest when they arrived (they would be marked "R" and left to moulder in his black box); it was becoming an effort even to sign letters and a positive condescension to read Foreign Office telegrams.' And yet, Colville added, 'on some days the old gleam would be there, wit and good humour would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or phrase'.
On December 21 Eden went to see Churchill at Downing Street to ask him to set a date for his resignation. Churchill spoke of 'the end of June or July' as a possible date, but would make no commitment. When a group of senior Cabinet Ministers came to see him on the following day, he told them, as Eden noted in his diary, 'that it was clear we wanted him out'. Nobody contradicted him. Nor did he any more wish to hang on against the obviously unanimous opinion that he must resign, not at some vague moment in the summer, but in time to give Eden a full run-up to the election. Early in 1955 he decided, without informing Eden or Macmillan, to go at the beginning of the Easter Recess; that year the House would rise on April 7. 'His only wish now,' Bracken told Beaverbrook on January 17, 'is to find a small villa in the South of France where he can spend the winter months in the years which remain to him.'
Churchill's decision to resign at the beginning of April remained a close secret. He had still not given up hope for a meeting with the Russians; on January 12 he had told the French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendès-France, that he had 'for some time felt a strong desire to establish a direct personal contact with the new leaders of the Soviet Government such as might lead to a fruitful Four-Power Conference'. There were other ideas which he looked forward to advancing, among them the possible admission of Israel into the Commonwealth. 'Israel is a force in the world,' he wrote to Eden on February 9, '& a link with the USA.' Nine days later, at a luncheon at Buckingham Palace, he raised the question of Israel as a member of the Commonwealth with Evelyn Shuckburgh, telling him: 'Do not put that out of your mind. It would be a wonderful thing. So many people want to leave us, it might be the turning of the tide.' Churchill also wanted to encourage Nehru 'to be able to do what no other human being could,' as he explained to the Indian Prime Minister on February 21, 'in giving India the lead, at least in the realm of thought, throughout Asia, with the freedom and dignity of the individual as the ideal rather than the Communist Party drill book'.
***
Exactly a month after Bracken told Beaverbrook that Churchill intended to resign that April, Macmillan, who had not been told, noted in his diary: 'I think now he has taken the final decision to go. He is resigned to it and has begun to plan a future and quite agreeable life for himself.' Macmillan had come to this conclusion after a Cabinet meeting at which Churchill had been in a 'very merry mood'. At one point during the discussion, the question had arisen of the future lay-out of Parliament Square, and of its possible redesign and enlargement. This, Churchill told his Ministers, would be 'a good subject for a politician in retreat'. It was the first time, Macmillan wrote, that Churchill had referred in Cabinet to a time when he might no longer be Prime Minister. When Macmillan went to Chartwell on February 26, Churchill told him he had in mind resigning on April 5. He also told his visitor that he wished to hear the next budget 'as PM'. As the budget would be introduced on March 28, this in no way conflicted with the resignation date.
Churchill had one more major speech to make. 'He dictated it all himself,' Jane Portal later recalled. Like one of his earliest speeches in Parliament, in 1901, it dealt with the dramatic change in the nature of war. In 1901 it had been the ominous prospect of the use of the whole industrial resources of a nation for war; in 1955 it was the hydrogen bomb, 'What ought we to do?' Churchill asked. 'Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people; they are going to die soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.'
The best defence would be 'bona fide disarmament all round'. But the 'long history and tradition of Russia makes it repugnant to the Soviet Government to accept any practical system of international inspection'. The Great Powers must devise 'a balanced and phased system of disarmament'. Until that could be reached, there was only 'one sane policy' for the free world, the policy of defence through deterrents. 'These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter.'
The hydrogen bomb, 'with its vast range of destruction and the even wider area of contamination, would be effective also against nations whose population, hitherto, has been so widely dispersed over large land areas as to make them feel that they were not in any danger at all.' This was 'well understood' by the leaders on both sides. That is why he had hoped 'for a long time' for a top-level conference 'where these matters could be put plainly and bluntly from one friendly visitor to the conference to another'. Then, Churchill believed, 'it may well be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage where safety will be the sturdy shield of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation'. There was still time and hope, he believed, 'if we combine patience and courage'. In his peroration, the last Churchill was to deliver in the House of Commons, he declared: 'The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.'
Churchill had spoken for three-quarters of an hour. His powers, commented the Sunday Times, 'as he has so brilliantly demonstrated, are still of the highest order'. What the newspaper did not know was that Churchill had finally decided to relinquish office. But on the second day of the debate, in answer to criticism that in the matter of the hydrogen bomb Britain had followed the dictation of the United States, Churchill astounded the House by making the first public reference to his stroke. 'I was prepared in every way to go over to see the President,' he said, recalling the early months of 1953. 'However, I was struck down by a very sudden illness which paralysed me completely, physically. That is why I had to put it off.'
Six days later, on March 8, during a lunch with Eden at Downing Street, Churchill confirmed that he would resign on April 5, in less than a month. Three days later he was shown a telegram from the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Roger Makins, reporting a suggestion by Eisenhower that he, Churchill and Adenauer could meet in Paris on May 8, the tenth anniversary of VE Day, to ratify the new defence agreement that was to replace the European Defence Community. Eisenhower had also said, according to the Ambassador, that while he was in Paris he might be prepared to 'lay plans for a meeting with the Soviets in a sustained effort to reduce tensions and the risk of war'.
Churchill did not at first take in the implication of what Eisenhower had proposed. On rereading the Washington telegram, and a somewhat disparaging Foreign Office comment that had been attached to it, he suddenly saw a chance to revive his hopes for a top-level meeting. But May 8 was a month and three days after he had intended to resign. Eisenhower's suggestion, he wrote to Eden on March 12, 'must be regarded as creating a new situation which will affect our personal plans and time-tables'. Churchill thought he saw a light at the end of his long tunnel towards a meeting at the summit. 'The magnitude of the Washington advance towards a top-level Meeting,' he told Eden, 'is the dominant fact now before us, and our reply must not underrate it, or fail to encourage its development.' The Cabinet must be shown the Washington telegram. Meanwhile, 'a cordial interim message should be sent for Makins to deliver'.
Eden was distressed that Churchill wished to take a new diplomatic initiative, let alone to remain at the helm for another month. But when Churchill returned from Chequers to London on the evening of March 13 he told Eden that his offer to go on April 5 was now withdrawn, overtaken by the prospect of a Paris meeting, followed by a London summit.
The Cabinet met at noon at No. 10 to discuss the Makins telegram. Eden was emphatic that it betokened no new development in relations with Russia. Churchill disagreed; he attached 'primary importance,' he said, 'to the President's willingness to come to Europe for the purpose of making plans for a Four-Power meeting with the Russians'. This, he said, was 'a new and significant initiative, and we should welcome it'.
The Cabinet now discussed the possibility that the Paris meeting would be held in May as proposed by Eisenhower, to be followed by a Four-Power meeting in June. Churchill then suggested that perhaps the June meeting, at which the Russians would be present, could be held in London. Was it the mention of June that suddenly made Eden see red? To the mystification of his colleagues, who knew nothing of the April 5 hand-over date, he then asked, slowly and deliberately, 'Does that mean, Prime Minister, that the arrangements you have made with me are at an end?'
Churchill was angered that Eden should raise the resignation issue in this way. He began to reply somewhat indistinctly about 'the national interest' and 'this has been my ambition', whereupon Eden broke in with the words, 'I have been Foreign Minister for ten years. I am not to be trusted?'
'It seems certain facts are not known to all of us,' interrupted Lord Salisbury, who knew nothing of the April 5 date, and who now insisted that the Cabinet be told what was going on between Churchill and Eden. But Churchill refused. 'I cannot assent to such a discussion,' he said. 'I know my duty and will perform it. If any member of the Cabinet dissents, his way is open.'
Ministers left Downing Street bewildered by what had happened. 'The poor Cabinet, most of whom knew nothing about the inner story, seemed puzzled and worried,' Churchill wrote to Clementine. 'Of course, as you know, only one thing has influenced me, and that is the possibility of arranging with Ike for a top level meeting in the near future with the Soviets. Otherwise I am very ready to hand over responsibility. I thought this Makins message offered a new chance, and that is why I am testing it.'
By an extraordinary irony, and coincidence, immediately after the Cabinet of March 14 Churchill had to put the finishing touches to a speech, in the Commons, in answer to a Labour Vote of Censure critical of the Government's efforts to secure world peace, and calling for a conference with the Soviet Union. The motion was moved by Attlee. 'I have tried very hard,' Churchill told the House-few statements could have been more true, and none more galling for Eden to listen to-'to set in motion this process of a conference at the top level and to bring about actual results.' Malenkov had now been replaced by Marshal Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. 'Although I do not pretend to measure what the recent changes in the Soviet oligarchy imply,' Churchill told the House, 'I do not feel that they should in any way discourage us from further endeavours.'
Attlee's Vote of Censure was defeated, and Churchill prepared to make those 'further endeavours' for the Paris meeting and the London summit. But within a few hours of his speech a message was brought to Downing Street from the American Embassy, with the news, as Churchill reported at once to Clementine, 'that Ike was not willing himself to participate in a meeting with Russia.' This was indeed so; on March 16 a telegram from Makins confirmed that neither Eisenhower nor Dulles was contemplating an 'early' Four-Power meeting with the Russians. The London summit was dead. For Churchill the news was a blow; for Eden it was a joy. The hand-over date of April 5 could be reinstated. 'PM seems rather low,' Macmillan wrote in his diary after lunching at No. 10 on March 17, and he added, 'It is now certain that the crisis of indecision is over.'
It was not quite over. On March 27 Churchill learned that Marshal Bulganin had spoken favourably about the prospect of Four-Power talks. Two days later, at an audience at Buckingham Palace, he told the Queen that he thought of putting off his resignation. 'He had asked her if she minded,' Colville noted on the following day, 'and she said no!' A few days later Queen Elizabeth's Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, wrote to Churchill to say that the Queen had 'fully understood' why, on March 29, 'there still seemed to be some uncertainty about the future'. It was an uncertainty that could not, and did not last long. During March 30 it became clear that whatever Bulganin had said, there was no real prospect of a top-level conference in the near future, especially given Eisenhower's hostile attitude to any such meeting. Churchill would resign on April 5 as planned.
At six-thirty on the evening of March 30 Churchill asked Eden and Butler to see him. 'Anthony and I were invited into the Cabinet room,' Butler later recalled. 'Winston made a slip by asking me to sit on his right, but then corrected himself and beckoned to Anthony. We gazed out over Horse Guards Parade. Then Winston said very shortly, "I am going and Anthony will succeed me. We can discuss details later." The ceremonial was over. We found ourselves in the passage, where Anthony and I shook hands.'
On the morning of March 31 Churchill asked Sir Michael Adeane to inform the Queen that he would resign in five days' time. 'Though she recognised your wisdom in taking the decision which you had,' Adeane replied, 'she felt the greatest personal regrets and that she would especially miss the weekly audiences which she has found so instructive and, if one can say so of State matters, so entertaining.'
A lifetime of politics was coming to an end; yet a newspaper strike made it certain that Churchill's resignation would receive little public coverage. On April 4 he and his wife gave a farewell dinner at No. 10 to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. At noon on the following day he held his last Cabinet meeting, wishing his colleagues 'all good fortune in the difficult, but hopeful, situation which they had to face'. He next saw the Ministers not in the Cabinet, telling them, 'Man is spirit', and leaving them with one piece of advice, 'Never be separated from the Americans.'
Churchill was then driven to Buckingham Palace, where he submitted his resignation to the Queen. 'She asked me whether I would recommend a successor,' he noted on his return to Downing Street, 'and I said I preferred to leave it to her. She said the case was not a difficult one and that she would summon Sir Anthony Eden. After some further conversation Her Majesty said she believed that I wished to continue in the Commons but that otherwise she would offer me a Dukedom. I said that I would like to go on in the Commons while I felt physically fit but that if I felt the work was too hard I would be very proud if she chose to reconsider her proposal.'
That afternoon, his last afternoon at Downing Street, Churchill gave a tea party for the staff at No. 10, about a hundred people; secretaries, telephonists, messengers and drivers. Then, cheered by his guests as he walked to the front door, he was driven to Chartwell.
Churchill had no intention of allowing retirement or old age to curb his love of adventure; a week after his resignation he was on his travels again, flying with Clementine to Sicily. As he boarded the plane, he was handed a letter from the Queen, written in her own hand. 'In thanking you for what you have done,' she wrote, 'I must confine myself to my own experience, to the comparatively short time-barely more than three years-during which I have been on the throne and you have been my First Minister. If I do not mention the years before and all their momentous events, in which you took a leading part, it is because you know already of the high value my father set on your achievements, and you are aware that he joined his people and the peoples of the whole free world in acknowledging a debt of deep and sincere thankfulness.'
The Queen's letter continued: 'During the more recent years you have had to face the Cold War and with it threats and dangers which are more awe-inspiring than any which you have had to contend with before, in war or peace. By your foresight and by your shaping of our destiny you have, if it were possible to do so, enhanced the admiration in which you are held, not only here but throughout much of the world and you know that you will take with you into retirement a deep fund of affectionate goodwill. For my part I know that in losing my constitutional adviser, I gain a wise counsellor to whom I shall not look in vain for help and support in the days which lie ahead. May there be many of them.'
***
For two weeks Churchill stayed at a hotel, the Villa Politi, in Syracuse. It was from there, on April 18, that he replied to the Queen, telling her that from her first days as Queen he had felt 'the impact of a new personality upon our unfolding history', and he went on to explain: 'Our Island no longer holds the same authority or power that it did in the days of Queen Victoria. A vast world towers up around it and after all our victories we could not claim the rank we hold were it not for the respect for our character and good sense and the general admiration not untinged by envy for our institutions and way of life. All this had already grown stronger and more solidly founded during the opening years of the present Reign, and I regard it as the most direct mark of God's favour we have ever received in my long life that the whole structure of our new formed Commonwealth has been linked and illuminated by a sparkling presence at its summit.'
Churchill ended his letter with a reflection on the 'historical atmosphere' of Syracuse: 'Our hotel rises out of the sinister quarries in which six thousand Athenian prisoners of war were toiled and starved to death in 413 BC, and I am trying to paint a picture of a cavern's mouth near the listening gallery whose echoes brought secrets to the ears of Dionysius. All this is agreeable to the mental and psychological processes of laying down direct responsibility for the guidance of great affairs and falling back upon the comforting reflection, "I have done my best".'
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