Churchill Page 6

  He was aware from his Indian service of the variety of Islam and the ferocious force of its fundamentalist elements. He was fond of saying, “The British Empire is the world’s greatest Moslem power,” with 80 million in India, which was then undivided, alone. In his two Indian campaigns, and in the Sudan in 1899, he had been fighting fundamentalists. So, essentially, had been Britain in the Persian Gulf since the early nineteenth century. The strongest fundamentalist force in the Arab world was the Wahhabi sect, a confederation of tribes ruled by the Saud family. Britain built up a series of Gulf peoples—in Muscat and Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain—whose moderate views and trading interests made them natural allies—to pen the Saudis in and prevent their piratical dhows from raiding communications with India. Britain also made friends with the Hashemite family, hereditary sharifs of Mecca by direct descent from the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

  When Churchill took over, first as head of the army and air force, and from early 1921 the Colonial Office, the idea was to make the Hashemites the pivot of British policy. This was frustrated by the ferocity of the Saudis who, the moment Turkish power collapsed, overran most of the Arabian peninsula, slaughtering their opponents and setting up a kingdom which included the majority of the Gulf coast, already recognized as the world’s largest oil reserves. Churchill would have liked to reverse this decision, but war-weary Britain had no relish for another campaign in the East, and the lesson of the recent failure to reverse history in Russia was too painful, even for him. What he did was to concoct with General Trenchard, head of the air force—which Churchill formed into a separate body—methods of using bombers to control large areas of sparsely populated territory. Churchill’s backing for the new RAF was enthusiastic and provident, and by the time he moved to the Colonial Office it was easily the largest air force in the world. He also encouraged the expansion of the British air construction industry which, between the wars, was exceptionally fertile and dynamic, and was to save the country, under his leadership, in 1940.

  He now remodeled the Colonial Office to found a new and powerful Middle East department, which in the spring of 1921 organized a high-level conference in Cairo to refashion the area in light of the Saudi triumph. This was one of the highlights of Churchill’s career, and it gave him a taste for summit conferences he never lost. It was highly productive. Two new kingdoms were created, Iraq and Transjordan, for the two leading Hashemite princes, Emir Faisal, sharif of Mecca, and Emir Abdullah. The role of the RAF was confirmed and a vast new base in Habbaniya in northern Iraq, still in use by the West, was created. This settlement lasted half a century and would have endured longer but for an unfortunate intervention by the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil. While Britain was using Anglo-Persian and Anglo-Dutch Shell to develop the fields in Persia, Iraq, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf, Standard formed an alliance with the Saudis to develop fields on their territory, which proved the richest of all. American policy almost inevitably backed Standard, and so the Saudis. Thus the Wahhabi fundamentalists became a great power in the Middle East, immune from attack because of U.S. support and provided with colossal sums of oil royalties with which to undermine the moderates everywhere and the Hashemites in particular.

  Churchill was painfully aware of the shadows this cast over the future, but there was little he could do about it at the time. What he could, and did, do was to ensure the continuation of the Jewish experiment in making a National Home in Palestine. To reinforce worldwide Jewish support for the Allies, Britain had issued in 1917 a promise known as the “Balfour Declaration” (he was foreign secretary at the time), under which the government promised “its best endeavours” to help the Jews found their new home there “without prejudice to the existing inhabitants.” The declaration, of course, did not exactly envisage the creation of Israel, and it was internally a contradiction. But it had the enthusiastic support of Churchill. His time as a Manchester MP had put him in close touch with a thriving Jewish community. He was always pro-Jewish and became (and remained) pro-Zionist as soon as it became a practical scheme. At Cairo and later he was able to defeat attempts to renege on the declaration and wind up the Jewish National Home in response to Arab pressure. On the contrary, he gave it every support in his power, and when in 1922 the House of Commons showed signs of turning against the whole idea, he made one of his greatest speeches, which swung MPs round into giving the Jews their chance. Without Churchill it is very likely Israel would never have come into existence. It is not given to many men to found, or help preserve, one new state: his score was three.

  Churchill was meanwhile playing a key role in the latest phase of the Irish problem. He had been at the front, happily, when the Easter Rebellion broke out in Dublin in 1916 and was not involved in the subsequent hangings. By the end of the war, the Irish Republican Army, under the leadership of Michael Collins, the handsome killer-charmer known as “the Big Fellah,” had reduced much of Ireland to anarchy. Lloyd George’s first instinct was to pacify it by force, bringing in a special army of ex-soldiers whose uniforms made them known as the Black and Tans, and whose tendency to match the atrocities perpetrated by the rebels with similar reprisals made them hated. The net result was that there was no longer any possibility of coercing Ulster into accepting Home Rule, i.e., inclusion in a Dublin Parliament. The problem was: could the rest of Ireland be persuaded to accept a settlement which left the six counties (of Ulster) under British rule? By 1921 Lloyd George was determined to negotiate a settlement along these lines, and he called in to help him Churchill and his lord chancellor, Birkenhead (as F. E. Smith had become). These three men, plus Collins, eventually reached one. Churchill again proved himself, in negotiation, a moderate by nature, infinitely fertile in imaginative compromises, much helped by Birkenhead’s legal genius, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty must be counted another of his positive achievements, albeit shared with the other three in the quadrumvirate. This treaty led to the establishment of the Irish Free State, under which southern Ireland had the right to govern itself but retained allegiance to the Crown and remained part of the empire, Ulster could opt out, and British forces committed to leaving southern Ireland. It did not prevent a brief and bloody civil war in the south, when Eamon De Valera led the extreme nationalists, and Collins (who had told Churchill, “We would never have done anything without you”) was murdered. But the treaty did include a provision, on which Churchill insisted, to allow the British navy to maintain antisubmarine bases on the west coast (“the Treaty ports”), and it lasted, in most respects, for half a century, until the next Irish explosion came.

  Meanwhile Lloyd George, who had enjoyed heady personal power for over three years, engaged in his own Churchill-type adventure on the Turkish coast, where he tried to come to the rescue of Greek communities against the newly invigorated Turkish state under Kemal Atatürk. LG loved small, fierce nations, among whom he numbered Greece, and he wanted to commit British forces to preserve these Greek pockets. Churchill, for once, was in favor of withdrawal from what he saw was an untenable position. LG broke with him over this issue—their relations had already been strained by the Irish crisis and the Honours scandal, for which LG was responsible and when Churchill gave him no sympathy. In what became known as the Chanak crisis, LG was forced to back down, and that effectively ended his coalition government. The Tories had long been restive under a regime in which they provided most of the votes in Parliament and Lloyd George and his cronies had most of the jobs. On October 19, 1922, at a meeting of the Carlton Club, Stanley Baldwin, a newcomer to high politics, made a persuasive speech in which he accused LG of splitting the Liberal Party and threatening to split the Tories, too. The Tories voted to withdraw from the coalition, LG resigned, Bonar Law formed a Tory government, and a general election followed in November. During the campaign Churchill was in great pain (the photos show it) and was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation: “In the twinkling of an eye, I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an
appendix.”

  Thus, seven years after the Dardanelles disaster, Churchill was again sent to the bottom. Or rather, it was like a game of snakes and ladders, and he had now gone right down a snake and had to face the task of wearily climbing the ladder again, for the third time in his life. It was not so easy now he was nearing fifty. For one reason or another the orthodox Liberals, under the battered but revengeful Asquithians, the Lloyd George Liberals, Labourites, and the Tories all hated and distrusted him. He now had a long record. Seen in retrospect, in the twenty-first century, it seems a record of astonishing variety, most of it admirable. Seen in 1922, it appeared alarming. Nothing daunted Churchill, determined to get back into the Commons. Without that, nothing was possible. With it, and his astonishing powers of persuasion and sheer oratory, everything was possible. Dundee was hopeless: he had come in fourth in 1922. So in December 1923 he stood for Leicester West, as a Liberal free trader, but was well beaten by Labour. He stood again in March 1924, in Westminster (Abbey) at a by-election. This was the famous independent-minded seat where in the late eighteenth century Charles James Fox had triumphed against all the might of the Crown, with the help of the kisses of Whig duchesses. Churchill had no duchesses, for Consuelo, the rich American lady who had married his cousin, the 9th Duke of Marlborough and who was fond of “Cousin Winston,” had been cast off and had married a Frenchman. But he had a new admirer: Brendan Bracken, a mysterious Canadian, who had come from nowhere (many thought, quite wrongly, that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son) and was busy becoming a millionaire and a power in city journalism, eventually owning the Financial Times. He became Churchill’s closest and most faithful aide, and thanks to his efforts the seat was nearly won. But a Tory got in by forty-three votes, and all was to do again.

  But one of Churchill’s strengths, both as a man and a statesman, was that politics never occupied his whole attention and energies. He had an astonishing range of activities to provide him with relief, exercise, thrills, fun, and, not least, money. By the end of October 1923, he had embarked on his enormous record of the First World War, The World Crisis, which appeared in multiple volumes between 1923 and 1927. The serialization had begun in the Times in February. Together with its Aftermath (1929), it is his best large-scale book, much of it written with a kind of incandescent excitement, verging at times on poetry, rage, and even genius. It vindicated his wartime career, so far as possible, and provided a brilliantly lit guide through the dark and horrific war. It made a great deal of money over the years and more than three quarters of a century later is still in print, and read. Its success opened before Churchill an endless vista of publishers’ contracts all over the earth, for anything he cared to produce.

  It also justified a new venture: a country house. Hitherto he had borrowed and let several. But he wanted one he could fashion as his own. In 1922 an inheritance of a small estate from an old dowager duchess of Marlborough gave him a chance. He sold the estate and invested the proceeds in buying Chartwell, a house of Elizabethan origin, plus three hundred acres, at Westerham in Kent. It was only twenty-five miles from Parliament and had a magnificent view. He called in Philip Tilden, the fashionable art deco-style architect (the mode of the twenties), who had worked for his friend Philip Sas soon and redone Lloyd George’s country house at Churt, to modernize it. But much of the planning and design was Churchill’s own work. It had never been a beautiful house, and is not one now (apart from the view). But it is distinctive, personal, and fascinating, an extension of the man himself in brick and mortar, beams and decorations. It has big windows, which Churchill liked: “Light is life,” he said. It is equipped for a writer and revolves round the library and study. But it also has an art deco dining room, which saw countless bottles of champagne uncorked, and a dazzling succession of lunches and dinners, conjuring up the age of Lady Colefax and Emerald Cunard, the great hostesses. The real personality of Chartwell, however, lies in the surrounding grounds and buildings, which were entirely of his design and often literally of his creation. As the plaque there states, he built most of the cottage and a large proportion of the kitchen garden wall, having learned to lay bricks in a rough-and-ready manner. He applied for membership in the brick-layers’ trade union but was eventually turned down, after much argument—trade union prejudice and Tonypandy playing a part. He excavated mountains of earth in order to create three connected lakes. He had a mechanical digger for this task, of which he became very fond. He treated it like his own prehistoric monster and referred to it as “he.” He also laid down railway tracks to speed the operations, first eighteen inches wide, later twenty inches—three in all—and used various devices to insulate the lake bottoms and keep the water in. His youngest child, Mary Soames, later recalled, “My childhood was beset by leaking lakes.” He populated the lakes with black swans which sang to one another (unlike the silent white swans), danced minuets, and performed other tricks. There were also cows, pigs, and fowl, sheep and goats, budgerigars and a parrot. He took particular trouble stocking the ponds with freshwater fish, goldfish and exotics, and his greatest pleasure was to feed them and encourage guests to do so. As in India, he collected live butterflies and had a specially designed hut to house them. The little estate thus became a wonderland of creatures and activities, the delight of countless guests, and the source of provender at Hyde Park Gate, a place of constant entertainment. Every Monday, a carful of flowers left Chartwell for the London drawing room, and on Thursday there was another carful of fruit and vegetables for the kitchen.

  The Churchill family always lived well. There was a succession of first-class cooks. The cellars were ample. He nearly always drank champagne at mealtimes (as was normal among the richer politicians of his generation). His favorite was Pol Roger. Toward the end of his life he said the 1928 vintage, of which he bought a great quantity, was the best ever bottled. Madame Roger became a friend of his and named a special cru after him. In turn, when he formed a racehorse stable, he named a horse after the brand. He had a special room for his cigars, of which the Romeo y Julieta was his chosen Havana. But it is important to realize that, though he was almost invariably seen and photographed with a cigar in his hand, his consumption was not large—never more than twelve a day. He did not inhale. His cigars were constantly going out and being relit rather than smoked. He never used a lighter, always very large, specially made matches, of which he once gave me a specimen. He loved the procedure of cigar smoking more than the smoking itself—one reason he never had any smoke-produced trouble with his lungs. As Beaverbrook said, “He smoked matches and ate cigars.” As for his consumption of hard liquor, he never gulped but sipped, slowly and at long intervals. Once aboard the yacht of Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping millionaire, he was sitting in the main saloon with his host and Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), his personal science adviser, when he suddenly said, “If all the whisky and brandy I have drunk in my life was added up, it would fill this state-room to overflowing.” Lindemann: “I don’t think so.” Onassis: “Let us measure the dimensions of this room and see.” Churchill told the professor to get out his slide rule and gave him details of his daily intake of spirits over his lifetime. Lindemann got to work and came up with the answer: the saloon would be filled up to the height of five inches. Churchill was plainly very disappointed.

  However, if Churchill lived well, he never had much cash in hand or saw his investments rise to a point when he could feel secure for life, or even for the next year. Chartwell cost £5,000 but he had spent £20,000 on it by the end of the 1920s. His finances roller-skated, and on three occasions he feared he would have to sell the house. Eventually, after the Second World War, the Daily Telegraph proprietor bought it and endowed it for the National Trust, to be kept in perpetuity as a memorial to Churchill and his day. It was agreed he could live there for the rest of his life at a nominal rent of £300 a year. It was, and is, handsomely kept up and has become one of the choicest attractions for visitors to Britain from all over the wo
rld.

  All this was in the future. At the time, Chartwell and all it offered in terms of work and enjoyment blunted the sense of loss his exclusion from high politics inflicted, until the wheel of fortune should turn again. And turn it did! It became clear that his only political future was with the Tories. But how to get back among them? So long as Bonar Law lived, there was no chance. He hated Churchill because of Ulster, distrusted him because of the Dardanelles, and found him an infuriating cabinet colleague. Churchill had a pernicious habit, which did him infinite harm, of overrunning the boundaries between the various government departments and speaking in cabinet—without being invited by the prime minister—on issues which were not his direct concern. Nothing makes a cabinet minister more unpopular, and his interventions were controversial and lengthy. He reduced Curzon to rage and even tears, and caused Bonar Law to lose his temper in cabinet, the only time he did so. He recognized Churchill’s abilities but said, “I would rather see them displayed as my opponent than as my colleague.” However, in 1923 Bonar Law became mortally ill and resigned, saying he was too sick to advise George V about a successor. The job of adviser went to Balfour. He rejected the favored candidate, Curzon, who would certainly never have offered a top job to Churchill, in favor of Stanley Baldwin. In the meantime, Churchill had been worming his way back into Conservatism. He was helped by Birkenhead and by his father’s old friend in Liverpool, Alderman Salvidge. They arranged for Churchill to make a big speech in that city in May 1924. In those days, Churchill often took several whiffs of pure oxygen to “lift” him before a bout of oratory, and he traveled up with two canisters. The speech was a tremendous public success and in it he withdrew his old opposition to duties and in effect dropped his free trade views. This public recantation was humbling to make but it achieved its purpose. In September he was adopted as a “Constitutionalist” candidate in the Epping division of Essex, and at the general election in October he was returned with a massive majority of 9,763. It was now the easiest of moves to ask for the Conservative whip and get it, thus making himself eligible for office. It opened up a new era in his life. For the rest of it, he was now seen as a Tory on the great chessboard of Westminster, and had the ideal seat to keep him there.