PEACEMAKER
Churchill came home from the Middle East to find Britain in crisis. The post-war slump was deepening, wages were falling, and unemployment had rocketed from some 600,000 at the start of the year to almost 2 million, prompting mass demonstrations by the unemployed. While he was contentedly painting with Lavery at Cap d’Ail, the coalminers had gone on strike against a hefty cut in wages. The transport workers and railway men promised to follow suit. In response the Cabinet declared a state of emergency and mobilized the armed forces. Reservists were called up, vehicles were requisitioned for emergency food distribution, and a special volunteer Defence Force was created. Although the threatened work stoppage was abandoned, the miners remained defiantly out and the reservists were not released until June. To alarmists, there was a distinct whiff of civil war in the spring air. ‘The strike news is bad. Everyone discusses revolution,’ noted Duff Cooper the day that Churchill finally arrived back in London.1
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Yet across the Irish Sea things were far worse. Since the partial imposition of martial law, violence on both sides had intensified and feelings polarized even further. Attacks by the IRA on the British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary were countered by ruthless official reprisals – the burning or blowing up of the houses of suspects along with their furniture and other possessions. These had a chilling effect on the civilian population and soon the IRA began to encounter silent but stubborn hostility to its campaign of attacks on British forces, even in areas of the south and south-west where nationalist sympathies ran deep. Those found guilty of murder in the courts continued to be executed. As victory for Sinn Fein proved elusive, paranoia amongst IRA units about spies and informers within the civilian population mounted. ‘Civilian spies were considered by us as the most dangerous of all,’ recalled one IRA intelligence officer from County Cork, the epicentre of its guerrilla campaign. Suspects received threatening letters, suffered economic boycotts, or were forced into exile. Women seen consorting with British soldiers had their hair forcibly cut. In the most serious cases, those deemed guilty were simply shot. By May, some seventy-three bodies had been discovered with placards attached announcing ‘Traitor. Shot by the IRA.’ County Cork saw the most killings – amounting to almost half of all those carried out in the whole of Ireland during the war of independence. One of them indirectly impinged on the Churchill family.2
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At 9.30 on the night of Thursday 31 March a man named Frederick Stenning heard a knock on the front door of his house in the village of Innishannon in County Cork, where he lived with his wife and three adult children. Two armed men stood on the doorstep. He tried to slam the door shut. When he couldn’t, he fled back down the hallway followed by the men. Drawing a revolver, he turned and opened fire on his pursuers, who shot him dead. The assassins belonged to the West Cork Brigade Flying Column of the IRA, which had identified him as an important informer for the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Protestant Stenning was a well-known loyalist and the father of a British soldier killed in the First World War. He had been spotted watching the local IRA unit preparing an ambush before cycling off to the RIC barracks in the town. The fifty-seven-year-old was also the sub-agent for Clare Sheridan’s father, Moreton Frewen, the owner of the nearby Innishannon House and proprietor of most of the houses and shops in the village, as well as the local fishing and shooting rights. Originally hired to create a fish hatchery by the entrepreneurial but unreliable Frewen, Stenning collected the rents and served as his gamekeeper and wood ranger. Frewen had once been the nationalist MP for Cork North-East but now lived in his English family home in Sussex.3
Things were to get much worse. Just a few weeks later the IRA launched a full-scale campaign of punitive counter-reprisals against the British by targeting ‘Big Houses’ belonging to the largely Protestant gentry. Again the heaviest hit area was County Cork, where a ‘devil’s competition’ of burnings erupted between the two sides. Here, in June, some eighteen grand mansions went up in flames along with their often priceless collections of furniture, paintings, and antiques.
After Stenning’s murder his widow and her children left Innishannon for England. But in the last week of June the IRA returned to the town, attacked the post office, and sabotaged its telephonic and telegraphic equipment – a classic guerrilla technique designed to paralyze army and police communications. In addition, they burned down the Stennings’ empty home along with four local ‘Big Houses’ along the River Bandon including the historic Coy Castle. Innishannon House, which was now occupied by a retired British officer, was burned that same day. ‘On Friday the miscreants put the torch to my pretty home,’ wrote Frewen to his Irish-American friend Bourke Cochran, Churchill’s one-time American mentor. Clare quickly learned of its fate from her father in a letter he sent her in New York. She had loved playing in its grounds as a child and remembered it well – ‘a mere square shooting lodge, comfortable but plain’.4
Churchill had stayed at Innishannon before the war. But there were other strong Irish links as well. His aunt Leonie spent much of her time across the Irish Sea, having married into the Anglo-Irish Leslie family of County Monaghan. As pre-war Home Secretary, Churchill had happily introduced her son Shane to John Redmond, the leader of the nationalist Irish parliamentary party for which he stood twice – unsuccessfully – as a Member of Parliament. During the war Shane sailed to the United States and linked up with Cochran, married the Irish-American’s sister-in-law, and worked with the British ambassador in Washington DC in a campaign to soften Irish-American hostility to Britain. Back in London, he provided Churchill with a useful conduit to Irish nationalist feeling, and it was after a discussion with him that Churchill warned Clare against simplistically equating the Irish with the Bolsheviks. ‘Don’t confuse [them],’ he told her, ‘The Irish all believe in God, uphold the family, and love their country.’ Clare admired and respected Shane and the two spent many happy hours together at Innishannon.5
Then there were the Laverys, who in 1921 were playing a major part in the Churchills’ social life. Both had strong feelings about Ireland, and although the socially ambitious and successful Sir John was careful what he said in public, his paintings often carried a powerful message. His massive 1916 canvas recording Sir Roger Casement’s unsuccessful appeal against his death sentence for high treason in seeking German help for the Irish rebels, showed the full machinery of the state directed towards the hapless Casement’s extinction. More recently, he had painted Terence MacSwiney’s coffin leaving Southwark Cathedral, a shaft of sunlight dramatically highlighting the green, white and orange Irish tricolour draped over the Republican martyr’s coffin. One day, when Churchill visited Lavery in his studio, the artist placed the painting on his easel without comment. ‘Well,’ said Churchill after gazing at it for a few moments, ‘what could we do?’ Lavery stayed silent and Churchill continued to study it. ‘He was a brave man! They are fine people,’ he said finally. ‘We cannot afford to lose them. We shall be shaking hands together in months.’6 These strong personal links with Ireland and the Irish made Churchill more receptive to Irish national feelings than many of his colleagues.7
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‘If you were their leader you would not be cowed by severity and certainly not by reprisals which fall like the rain from Heaven upon the Just and upon the Unjust.’ So wrote Clementine from the French Riviera about the rebels to her husband, urging him to adopt a more moderate line over Ireland.8 This was a typically blunt piece of advice from his liberally inclined and politically savvy wife. But it only reinforced the view he had already reached himself. Since December he had been urging a truce, and the escalating violence over the winter and spring only strengthened his conviction. Four weeks after the murder at Innishannon, and with the IRA’s scorched-earth campaign against Ireland’s Big Houses fully ablaze, he also argued that the planned elections for the two new Irish parliaments should go ahead, even if this almost certainly meant a landslide victory for Sinn Fein in the south. ‘How are you worse off if all returned are Sinn Fein?’ he asked his Cabinet colleagues in April. ‘The election would be a new situation which might lead to negotiations.’ With the elections finally fixed for a month ahead, he again argued strongly in Cabinet for a truce, on the plausible grounds that British forces were finally getting the upper hand and that continuing the war could only worsen Britain’s reputation around the world. ‘We are getting an odious reputation,’ he declared, ‘[and] poisoning our relations with the United States.’
1. A top-hatted Churchill strides forcefully ahead during the Anglo-Irish conference in Downing Street, October 1921. He had strong family connections with Ireland, was amongst the first to call for a truce during the war for independence, and played a principal role during the negotiations. The man at the very back on the right is his Special Branch bodyguard, Detective-Sergeant Walter Thompson, appointed because of assassination threats, and a constant presence at his side.
2. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star.’ Lady Randolph (‘Jennie’) Churchill, Winston’s beloved mother, was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street speculator. Her first husband and father to Winston, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at age forty-five, and she remarried twice. She had numerous lovers, was reckless with money, and died suddenly in June 1921 after tripping down stairs while staying with friends in Somerset. Her vast network of society contacts was invaluable in boosting Churchill’s early career.
3. In the bosom of his family: the young Winston (right) with his mother and younger brother, John (‘Jack’). By profession a stockbroker, Jack is largely absent from most Churchill biographies, but the two were close and he campaigned for Winston, advised him on finances, and sorted out their parents’ complicated estates. He and his wife ‘Goonie’ (Lady Gwendeline Bertie, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Abingdon) regularly lived and holidayed with Winston and Clementine along with their children.
4. Churchill (extreme left) heads the family procession at his mother’s funeral in July 1921 at St Martin’s church, Bladon, close to Blenheim Place, where she was buried alongside Lord Randolph. He is followed by his brother Jack and nephew Johnnie. Behind, other close members of the family include Clare Sheridan’s mother and brother, as well as Clementine and Goonie. Churchill himself was buried at Bladon in 1965, close to his parents and Jack who pre-deceased him.
5. Clementine with daughter Marigold (‘the Duckadilly’), whose favourite song was ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. Churchill took her to Chequers during his weekend stay there in February 1921. Her sudden death in August while on holiday in Kent caused her parents inconsolable grief. She was buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London, where they could easily visit her grave. All their other children are buried at Bladon, as is Clementine.
6. Winston and his only son Randolph, whose headmaster complained that he was ‘combative’, seen here together at about this time. The father–son relationship was to be one of ‘storm and sunshine’, and Randolph’s personal and professional lives as husband, politician, and journalist proved turbulent. He became his father’s official biographer and wrote the first two volumes of the eight-volume set that was eventually completed by Sir Martin Gilbert.
7. A casual Winston and Clementine enjoy a rare relaxing moment in the garden. Note the cigar, already a regular prop. With her cloche hat and drop-waist belt, Clementine has clearly embraced the brave new world of post-war fashion. Privately a sometimes severe critic of her husband, she was also the emotional anchor that moored him firmly to the home and family that provided the vital bedrock of his life and career.
8. Married to a wealthy American heiress, the genial and sociable Member of Parliament and decorated army officer Captain Frederick (‘Freddie’) Guest was Churchill’s favourite cousin, and remained close to him politically and personally throughout his life. A son of Lord Randolph’s sister Cornelia (Lady Wimborne), he was also the Coalition Liberals’ Chief Whip, a cunning backroom fixer, and successful raiser of finances for Lloyd George’s political fund. In April 1921 he was appointed by Lloyd George as Secretary of State for Air in succession to his cousin.
9. Another of Churchill’s close relatives, his ‘wild cousin’ Clare Sheridan, with whom he shared fond childhood memories of Ireland, was widowed during the First World War and left with two small children. Naïve and idealistic, she was also a serious sculptor who enraged him by heading for Moscow to sculpt Lenin, Trotsky, and other top Bolsheviks. On her return to London in 1921 she was briefly ‘exiled’ by the family to the United States, but she and Winston were eventually reconciled and she sculpted him as prime minister during the Second World War.
10. The charismatic Boris Savinkov, former anti-Tsarist revolutionary and political assassin on whom Churchill pinned his hopes of toppling Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A bon-viveur who mixed with poets and artists and had a string of mistresses, he once authored a play about Napoleon’s escape from Elba in which he himself played a major role. A mesmerised Churchill described him as ‘an unusual personality of veiled power in strong restraint’. In December 1921 he personally took Savinkov to meet with Lloyd George at Chequers.
11. The dashing and daredevil ‘Archie’ Sinclair, Churchill’s wartime comrade-in-arms, link with the secret intelligence service, and trusted handler of his confidential files on anti-Bolshevik affairs. Younger by some sixteen years, he too had an American mother, was a trained cavalry officer, and enjoyed flying and polo. Their intimate relationship resembled that of father and son, and during the aftermath of the Dardanelles disaster Churchill privately confessed to him that he was ‘profoundly unsettled’. During the Second World War Sinclair served as his Secretary of State for Air.
12. A typically acerbic David Low cartoon entitled ‘Winston’s Bag’ with the caption ‘He hunts lions and brings home decayed cats’. Wearing plus- fours, Churchill is shown big game hunting but with only small dead cats lying at his feet, labelled with episodes held against him such as ‘Russia’ and ‘Antwerp’. Like the accompanying Strube cartoon, it illustrates the negative reputation enjoyed by Churchill at the start of the decade.
13. A cartoon by Sidney Conrad Strube reflects the widespread contemporary view of Churchill as restless and ambitious. Captioned ‘A New Hat’, it mocks Churchill and his many career and political hats as journalist, painter, and Cabinet Minister, the latest being Colonial Secretary. His beaming ally and prime minister, David Lloyd George, rubs his hands in approval.
14. Churchill takes a front row seat at the Cairo Conference in March 1921. On the second row, left, stands ‘The Queen of the Desert’, the archaeologist and wartime intelligence officer Gertrude Bell. She spoke Arabic, it was said, ‘like a nightingale’. Note the two lion cubs also in attendance. The ever-faithful Sinclair stands at the very back, wearing a bow tie. The conference established important contours of the post-war Middle East settlement, especially the creation of Iraq. ‘It has been wonderful,’ declared Bell at its close, ‘Mr. Churchill was admirable.’
15. Churchill, escorted by Palestine High Commissioner and former Liberal Home Secretary Sir Herbert Samuel, greets Zionist youth during his visit to Jerusalem following the Cairo Conference. He was enthused by what he witnessed of the pioneering Jewish settlements and sympathized with the Zionist dream. But he found balancing Jewish and Arab interests increasingly frustrating.
16. Churchill on a camel in front of the Sphinx in March 1921. On his right Clementine; on his left Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’). With painting now his premier private passion, Churchill spent most afternoons during the Cairo Conference disappearing into the desert with his canvas and paints, while Clementine explored the principal tourist sites and went shopping with Bell in the bazaars of Cairo.
17. Churchill with T.E. Lawrence during his Middle East trip. Seduced by the romantic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ myth created by the enterprising American journalist Lowell Thomas, Churchill appointed him as his principal advisor on Arab affairs. Along with Gertrude Bell, Lawrence strongly supported the cause of the Hashemite Sheikh Faisal as King of the newly created Iraq. On Lawrence’s death in 1935, Churchill declared that he had possessed the ‘full measure of the versatility of genius’.
18. Abdullah of Transjordan, brother to Faisal of Iraq, shakes hands with Clementine on the steps of Government House in Jerusalem in March 1921. Churchill considered him ‘a very agreeable, intelligent, and civilized Arab prince’, and he was to rule over Transjordan until his assassination in 1951 by a Palestinian nationalist. While Clementine chose to visit some of the holy sites in the city, Churchill opted instead to go off once more with his canvas and paints.
19. Hazel, Lady Lavery unlocked Churchill’s artistic inhibitions and played hostess to Michael Collins, the thirty-three-year-old director of intelligence for the IRA, during the Anglo-Irish treaty talks. This strikingly beautiful American-born model, fashion innovator, and socialite was unreliably rumoured to have had an affair with Collins, and her portrait later featured on banknotes of the Irish Free State.
20. Michael Collins delivers a passionate speech in late 1921 or early 1922. During the Irish Treaty negotiations, he and Churchill accorded each other an important measure of respect. Sinn Fein was bitterly divided about the agreement, and Collins told a friend that in putting his signature to it he had signed his death warrant. Nine months later, during the civil war between pro- and anti-Treaty forces that followed, he was shot and killed by a Republican assassin.
21. Churchill in Dundee with Sir George Ritchie, his political guide and friend in the city, in September 1921 following severe riots. Famed for its jute industry, Dundee had been Churchill’s constituency since 1908 and was suffering from high unemployment and dismal poverty. Bodyguard Detective-Sergeant Walter Thompson can be spotted on the right staring at the camera.
22. The wealthy and well-connected aesthete and Member of Parliament Sir Philip Sassoon, a frequent and generous host to Churchill during 1921, seen here on the steps of his home at Lympne on the Channel coast in Kent. Previously private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western front, he was now Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary. The prime minister’s mistress, Frances Stevenson, quipped that he was as ‘amusing and clever as a cartload of monkeys’.
23. The ‘Big Three’ of the Coalition: Churchill seen here in 1921 with F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George. They were also the principal founders of The Other Club, a cross-party and exclusively male dining club founded before the First World War that in addition to politicians included artists, writers, entertainers, and members of the press. Its day-to-day running was largely left in the hands of Freddie Guest.
24. Churchill playing his beloved polo in 1921. He described it as ‘the prince [and sometimes emperor] of games’ and he rarely missed an opportunity to indulge in it. He also enjoyed the danger and thrill of flying, but reluctantly gave that up after a crash and many entreaties by Clementine to think of the future of his family. Churchill’s love of risk was also evident in his gambling and finances.
25. One of Britain’s most accomplished and celebrated portrait artists, the Belfast-born Sir John Lavery actively nurtured Churchill’s artistic ambitions and, along with the considerably younger Hazel, quietly supported the Irish nationalist cause. During 1921 he and Churchill painted together on the French Riviera, and in the catalogue for a show of Lavery’s landscapes in October Churchill highlighted the artist’s use of ‘brilliant and beautiful colour’. Here, Lavery captures Churchill at work with his canvas.
Yet it wasn’t just across the Atlantic and in the Dominions that British ‘frightfulness’ was generating hostility. It was in Britain itself. No one was a more avid daily reader of newspapers than Churchill, and he knew full well that the major Liberal and Labour papers had opposed the war from the start. But the country’s distinguished newspaper of record, The Times, had also now come out strongly against reprisals and the ‘reign of terror’ being inflicted on the Irish. ‘If only the people of England knew . . . Why do these things happen?’ it asked. ‘Why are the servants of the Crown charged with pillage and arson and what amounts to lynch law, and even with drunkenness and murder? How can the reign of terror be stopped?’ Even as Clementine was penning her own plea to her husband, in the House of Commons the Liberal leader Herbert Henry Asquith called for a truce to end ‘the ghastly state of affairs’ in Ireland. The Archbishop of Canterbury joined him in the Lords by denouncing the government’s policy as ‘morally unjust’. Sir John Simon, a former Liberal Home Secretary, also described the reprisals as ‘politically disastrous and morally wrong . . . exposing us to the scorn of the world’. Even some Conservatives began to voice doubts. If nothing else, the relentless violence in Ireland was now threatening the coherence of Lloyd George’s Coalition.
Churchill’s case for a truce was helped by the actions of Sir James Craig, the leader of the Irish Unionists, who now decided to meet secretly with Eamon de Valera to see what direct discussions between the two men could achieve. The answer was virtually nothing – except that the encounter raised the pertinent question: if Craig could meet with the Sinn Fein leader, why not Lloyd George?9 But when the issue of a truce again came to a vote in Cabinet, Churchill found himself once more in a minority against the prime minister. The violence and the burnings continued and spread to the British mainland. In mid-May several night-time attacks were launched against the homes of Royal Irish Constabulary men in London, Liverpool, and Scotland. The methods in each case were remarkably similar. Gangs of between three and sixteen men, all masked and carrying revolvers, broke into houses, soaked carpets, curtains, and furnishings with petrol or paraffin, and set them ablaze. No one was killed, but some of the occupants were shot and wounded. At one house, the ‘hands up’ order was met by a determined one-legged Royal Navy veteran who simply hurled a sewing machine at the raiders.10
As Churchill predicted, the elections later that month produced a landslide victory for Sinn Fein in the south and a healthy majority for the Unionists in the north. The next day an IRA company of 120 men seized control of the Customs House in Dublin, set it on fire, and destroyed most of the Irish Local Government Board records that underpinned the British civil administration of the country. It was a propaganda coup for Sinn Fein. Yet in the subsequent battle with the police six of the attackers were killed, and over the following weeks a significant surge of British troops along with major intelligence swoops inflicted heavy damage on the rebels. More worryingly for the IRA, internal discipline was beginning to fray. This lent force to Churchill’s argument for a truce. At a Cabinet meeting in the first week of June he confidently claimed that his old friend and head of the Royal Irish Constabulary, General Tudor, was clearly ‘getting to the root of the matter’. He was not wrong. The intensification of IRA actions represented a degree of desperation. While it was clear they could continue guerrilla warfare for quite a while, it was also obvious that they could never prevail.11
The conditions were ripe for a deal. Behind-the-scenes peace-feelers had never ceased. King George V had long expressed his dislike for the Black and Tans’ methods, and when he travelled to Belfast to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament he openly appealed for all Irishmen ‘to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill’. Two days later, Churchill strongly supported Lloyd George when he floated the idea of seizing the moment to send a letter to both de Valera and Craig inviting them to enter into negotiations. ‘I believe in striking while the iron is hot,’ he said. The next day, his uncle Moreton’s Irish home was torched – a clear sign that the campaign of official reprisals had simply encouraged the IRA to raise the stakes and intensified the deadly spiral of destruction.12
With the ruins of Innishannon still smouldering, an American delegation from the state of Virginia arrived in England to present statues of George Washington to St Paul’s Cathedral and to Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral home of the United States’ first President that had recently been purchased by public subscription to mark a century of peace between Britain and the United States. Churchill was the guest speaker at a London lunch hosted by the English-Speaking Union. He used the occasion to celebrate the growing closeness and common sense of purpose between Britain and America as witnessed so recently on the Western Front, but coupled it with a warning that a ‘grave impediment’ to its future was the troubled Ireland. Happily, he pointed out, an opportunity had now arisen to place Anglo-Irish relations on an honourable, free, and enduring foundation. ‘It would be foolish to anticipate what the course of events may be,’ he said. ‘No one can tell. Once more, unreason may dash away the cup.’ It was important, therefore, for the British people to appreciate that their relations with Ireland and the Irish involved far more than the United Kingdom, but had a global impact. Ireland, he hoped, would soon no longer provide ‘a source of peril and of reproach to the British Empire’.13
The momentum for peace was gathering force. Over the next few days, several Sinn Fein leaders were released from prison. When General Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, arrived in Britain for the Imperial Conference, he offered his services as an intermediary. Travelling to Dublin, he drew on his experience of fighting against the British in the Boer War to urge the Sinn Fein leaders to accept the olive branch being offered. Their response was grudging, but encouraging enough that when Smuts reported it to the Cabinet Churchill warmly welcomed the news. ‘I would go a long way to humour them,’ he declared.
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The week before the King’s speech in Belfast, Churchill addressed the House of Commons about his settlement for the Middle East. He had been preparing it for weeks, knowing full well that his performance could make or break his political future. One of his great skills as a speaker was to make complex issues comprehensible. But he only succeeded after laborious and lengthy preparation and practice. His speeches always went through several drafts, and he would frequently read them out loud to himself to gauge their rhythms and effect. Early in his parliamentary career he had once tried to speak to the Commons without notes, only to forget in mid-sentence what he was about to say and be forced to resume his seat to a shocked silence in the House. Traumatized, he rarely again tried to speak without carefully constructed notes.14
Complex events in the Middle East required a simplifying narrative for Members of Parliament. For one thing, there had been continuous unrest in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Only about 10 per cent of its population of just over 600,000 was Jewish, and of these only a small minority were recently arrived Zionists. So the mark they left on the physical and demographic landscape of Palestine was minor. But even this was too much for local Arab nationalists. They complained about an increasing proportion of Jews taking jobs in Palestine’s civil administration and feared a future in which Jews might predominate. With Zionist immigration picking up again after the end of the war, they also took aim at even historic Jewish communities long established in the Holy Land. The first week of May saw an outbreak of violence in Jaffa between Arabs and Jews with shops looted, several people killed, and troops brought in to restore calm. The violence spread to recent Jewish settlements, and the Royal Air Force dropped bombs to scare away the attackers. In a radical effort to calm Arab fears, Sir Herbert Samuel ordered a temporary halt to all Jewish immigration, and even refused to allow two boatloads of Russian Jews to land at Jaffa. As a result, other groups of Jews already embarked for Palestine were held up in Europe.
Samuel’s decision took Churchill by surprise. The Jews en route could hardly be left stranded in Vienna. But when the High Commissioner told him that Arab unrest had been prompted by the presence of some two hundred recently arrived Jewish Bolsheviks from Russia, Churchill threw his weight behind the decision and urged him ‘to purge the Jewish Colonies and newcomers of Communist elements and without delay have all those who are guilty of subversive agitation expelled from the country’. Samuel’s reference to ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ was guaranteed – and possibly deliberately designed – to spark Churchill off. In his many fiery rhetorical tirades against the Bolsheviks since Lenin’s seizure of power, Churchill had more than once equated Jews with Bolsheviks and dubbed the latter as ‘Semitic conspirators’ or as ‘Jew Commissars’. Bolsheviks apart, however, he saw Jews in a highly positive light. This made him a marked anomaly in being free of the the ingrained hostility to Jewry typical of the English upper class, and indeed of a number of his friends and social contacts. Duff Cooper, for example, had recently been forced to send a grovelling letter of apology to Philip Sassoon after denouncing him with an offensive anti-Semitic slur for not lending him and Diana his car after a party – despite the fact that thanks to his generosity the two had spent their honeymoon night at Lympne. ‘Bendor’, the Duke of Westminster, frequently a welcoming host to Churchill, was a deep-grained and unapologetic anti-Semite. ‘Sunny’ Marlborough, his cousin, was little better.15
As for Zionism, Churchill had long advocated a Jewish homeland on the grounds that it rectified an historical injury and was a positive and civilizing force. It also, he argued, provided an antidote to Bolshevism. What he had seen with his own eyes at Rishon-le-Zion left a profound and permanent mark on his ideas about Palestine. ‘You have changed desolate places to smiling orchards,’ he told its pioneer inhabitants, ‘and initiated progress instead of stagnation.’ When he briefed the Cabinet before his Commons speech he went out of his way to emphasize that the Zionist colonies had created ‘a standard of living far superior to that of the indigenous Arabs’. His pro-Zionism was a sincere and lifelong commitment, although it was always tempered by his pragmatic views about British interests and his own political priorities.16
This became dismayingly clear to his military advisor in the Middle East Department, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. A tall and imposing figure some four years younger than Churchill, and with a decorated career as a soldier and spy in Africa and the Middle East to his credit, he was an even greater myth-maker than Lawrence of Arabia. His real-life story was interesting enough. Yet he felt compelled to embellish it with dozens of tall tales, faked many of his diary entries, and indulged in some shameless fraud and theft. An enthusiastic ornithologist, he gifted his collection to London’s famed Natural History Museum, but years later it was discovered that he had stolen dozens of specimens from other museums, incorporated them into his own collection, and then claimed to have discovered them in new locations. He even took specimens from the Museum, re-labelled them, and presented them back to it.
Such practised deception seems also to have applied to many of the stories he told about himself. One of the most celebrated was the so-called ‘Haversack Ruse’, a deception plan during Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in which a haversack containing false battle plans to fool the Turks was planted and led to British victory at the Battle of Beersheba. In reality, Meinertzhagen probably neither planned nor executed the operation. But his claim to have done so guaranteed him a formidable reputation at the Paris Peace Conference, where he served as a military advisor to the British delegation. ‘He struck me as being one of the ablest and most successful brains I had met in any army,’ enthused Lloyd George. Lawrence of Arabia, who got to know Meinertzhagen well in Paris and recognized something of a kindred soul, described him in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom as ‘a silent laughing masterful man . . . who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain, which chose the best way to its purpose unhampered by doubt or habit.’17
Churchill was often drawn uncritically to charismatic men of action. So he was attracted to this wealthy and well-connected banker’s son who had once been dangled on the knees of the elderly Charles Darwin, and whose aunt was the formidable Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb. During the same week in January that Churchill recruited Lawrence as his advisor on Arab affairs, he and Freddie Guest met with Meinertzhagen at a London club and over lunch offered him the post of Military Advisor. By this time, the legendary Colonel’s pro-Zionist views and friendship with Chaim Weizmann had already produced clashes with his army superiors; he provided a much-needed balance to their strongly pro-Arab views. It took three months for the appointment to come through. When it did, Meinertzhagen was dismayed to discover what he viewed as Britain’s betrayal of its commitment in the Balfour Declaration.18 He also took strong exception to the decision by Sir Herbert Samuel to appoint the mild-mannered twenty-six-year-old Al Hajj Amin al-Hussayni, the scion of a distinguished Palestinian family, as the new Mufti (later Grand Mufti) of Jerusalem, a position of significant influence in the Muslim community. Only the year before, Hajj Amin had been convicted in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment for his part in stirring up anti-Jewish riots, and his family was well known for its hostility to Jews. But Samuel believed that Arab grievances had to be met and that Hajj Amin could be coaxed into enforcing a more peaceful line with the local Palestinian population.
To Meinertzhagen, the decision was ‘pure madness’. He predicted that nothing but trouble would come of it – and indeed the Grand Mufti was eventually to be expelled from Palestine and ended up broadcasting anti-Semitic tirades from Hitler’s wartime Berlin. But Churchill’s response was simply to shrug and say he could do nothing about it. His reply to another complaint was equally infuriating to his pro-Zionist advisor. Meinertzhagen had not attended the Cairo Conference and believed that the decision to separate Transjordan from Palestine was a betrayal of Britain’s pledge to the Jews. His fury led to a stormy meeting in Churchill’s office. ‘I went foaming at the mouth with anger and indignation,’ noted Meinertzhagen in his (far from reliable) diary. ‘I told him it was grossly unfair to the Jews, that it was yet another promise broken, [and] that the Balfour Declaration was being torn up by degrees . . .’ Churchill eventually calmed him down with some soothing comments.
But his policy on the issue remained unaffected. He was not a minister to be easily swayed by any of his advisors, however passionate or like-minded. It was already becoming dismally clear that in Palestine he and his successors would be tested to – and beyond – the limit in finding a path acceptable to both Arabs and Jews. Meinertzhagen neither forgot nor forgave. In 1964, at age eighty-five, he wrote scathingly that ‘Churchill, encouraged by Lawrence, gave the whole of Transjordan to that miserable Abdullah . . . [In 1921] I remonstrated. He put on that ridiculous bull dog expression but nothing could be done to remedy Churchill’s stupidity.’ He then added bitterly, ‘I do not share the general admiration for Churchill. No living man has done so much harm to this country as Churchill, yet he is venerated as a God.’19
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After the Jaffa riots and Samuel’s restrictions on immigration, a temporary calm descended on Palestine. After spending a weekend with Clementine at Philip Sassoon’s Trent Park home in company with the Curzons, Ettie Desborough, and others, on Tuesday 14 June Churchill returned to Westminster to paint a relatively bright picture of the Middle East to the House of Commons. Skilfully, he began by stressing that Mesopotamia and Palestine were obligations inherited from the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. Whatever the challenges, they could not be abandoned. ‘We cannot,’ he said, ‘leave the Jews in Palestine to be maltreated by the Arabs . . . nor can we leave the great and historic city of Baghdad and other cities and towns in Mesopotamia to be pillaged by the wild Bedouin of the desert.’ It was Britain’s duty to succeed, and the key to that was to reduce expenditures to within reasonable and practicable limits. This solemn overture was followed by a lengthy account of the impressive troop and budgetary reductions he had been able to force through, thanks largely to decisions at Cairo. Even as he spoke, he told the House, Faisal was on his way from Mecca to Baghdad, and although popular opinion would have to be taken into account, he was clearly the most suitable candidate for the throne.
Then Churchill turned to Palestine. Here, he admitted, the problem was ‘more acute’, and he made no effort to disguise the contentious issue of Jewish immigration and the Arab response. But he strongly defended the principles of the Balfour Declaration, again painted a glowing picture of what he had witnessed at Rishon-le-Zion, and reiterated his strong belief that Jewish immigration would benefit all the inhabitants of Palestine. In Transjordan, he said, the arrangements he had made personally with Abdullah in Jerusalem had all been successful. Finally, like the masterful orator he was, he concluded by returning to where he had begun – the collapse of Ottoman rule and the chaotic legacy this had left. ‘All [our] efforts will be frustrated and brought to naught,’ he pronounced, ‘unless we can combine them with a peaceful and lasting settlement with Turkey.’20
It was a tour de force. It presented him as the man who had brought order out of chaos, saved millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and established the foundations of a solid peace in the Middle East. Simultaneously, however, he distanced himself sufficiently far from events to ensure that any failures could plausibly be blamed on a situation that he had inherited, not created. More importantly, it offered him a get-out clause. Only a few days before, he and other Cabinet ministers had met at Chequers for a brainstorming session on the Middle East where Lloyd George had suggested offering both Palestine and Mesopotamia to the United States. Over lunch, Churchill had discussed this idea privately with Curzon. Afterwards, he told Lloyd George that he was ‘much taken’ with the idea and would like to announce it in his forthcoming speech. But Lloyd George dropped the idea almost as quickly as he had floated it, and that was the end of it. Clearly, Churchill did not consider either Palestine or Iraq as vital to Britain’s security, nor was he personally committed to the settlement he had overseen. Two weeks beforehand, he had unburdened himself over the issue during lunch with Thomas Marlowe, the editor of the Daily Mail. ‘So far as he is concerned they are inheritances,’ Marlowe noted. ‘He did not initiate any of the liabilities there . . . Mesopotamia and Palestine are twin babies in his care but he is not the father.’ Churchill also told Lloyd George privately that in Mesopotamia ‘We live on a precarious basis in this wild land filled with a proud and impecunious chief [sic] & extremely peppery well armed politicians.’21
More significant in the long term was the problem he turned to in his concluding words – Turkey. Here, the nationalist government of Kemal Ataturk was engaged in a bitter war with the Greeks and had yet to sign a peace treaty with the Allies. It was also the issue on which he was at constant loggerheads with the prime minister, a fervent supporter of the Greeks. The entire Middle East settlement, Churchill told the House, depended in the last resort on a peaceful and lasting settlement with Turkey, which, if it chose, could stir up Arab unrest throughout the region.
The speech proved a personal triumph. The Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain believed that it had changed the whole atmosphere of the House of Commons on the Middle East question. Curzon commented on its ‘brilliancy [sic] and success’. Even Lloyd George, the target of Churchill’s concluding comments, felt bound to congratulate him. ‘Your Mesopotamian performance was one of your very best. Hearty congratulations on its conspicuous success,’ he wrote. Predictably, Churchill’s old nemesis, the Daily Herald, poured scorn on what it scathingly denounced as his ‘oriental visions of squandermania’. But The Times applauded his speech as the most interesting of the parliamentary session. ‘He has lost none of his old skill,’ it commented. The veteran journalist Herbert Sidebotham, a long-time observer and commentator on his parliamentary performances, wrote that he had never known the House more interested in any speech, ‘or a speaker more easy and confident in his power’.
Yet the most fulsome praise came from a Conservative backbencher who had entered the House just three years previously. Neville Chamberlain shared the ambivalent view of Churchill held by many of his fellow MPs. ‘I never quite know whether most to admire his great gifts,’ he confessed privately, ‘or to be alarmed at his impulsiveness and hasty judgement.’ But after listening to his panoramic survey of the Middle East, the later architect of appeasement dethroned by Churchill as prime minister in 1940, lauded him with unstinting praise. ‘Winston’s speech on Mesopotamia was a brilliant performance,’ he told his sister. ‘He kept the House amused and interested for 90 minutes interspersing arguments and policy with anecdote and description and exercising great art in delivery.’ And, he added, ‘his speeches are worth ten of [Lloyd George’s] as he takes so much more trouble on them’.22