ELEVEN

‘WHERE ARE WE GOING IN EUROPE?’

Ireland was burning, the miners were striking, and the dole queues lengthening. But the annual rituals of Ascot, Wimbledon, and Test Match cricket against Australia were played out as usual. With the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, the ‘great silence’ of collective grief was finally ending. Churchill had already experienced the Riviera’s return to its usual pleasure-seeking routine. Now it was London’s turn to embrace renewal. Nothing better symbolized this celebration than the first Anglo-American Polo Test Match to take place since before the war. Held at Hurlingham Park, the ‘spiritual home’ of polo in Fulham in south-west London, it was another symbol of the intensifying sense of transatlantic friendship so firmly embraced by Churchill in his address to the English-Speaking Union. The captain of the American team was an Oxford Blue.

On a Saturday afternoon shortly after his Commons speech on the Middle East, he and Clementine joined hundreds of enthusiastic spectators including a generous sprinkling of dukes, duchesses and other ranks of the nobility to enjoy the first of the two matches. It was also a grand royal occasion. The first of the Windsors to arrive was the Prince of Wales, followed shortly afterwards by Queen Alexandra, his grandmother and widow of King Edward VII, as well as several of the royal princesses. Then at three o’clock, in blazing sunshine and greeted by the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards, the King and Queen arrived in their luxurious open carriage drawn by two bay horses. The King wore a silk hat and dark frock coat, while the Queen was dressed in a gown of hyacinth blue satin covered by a heavily beaded black and silver cloak and sporting a double necklace of pearls. Joining them in the Royal Box were the Duke of York – the future King George VI – and the Duke of Connaught, the elderly third son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who as a young army officer based in Montreal had helped repel a Fenian raid from across the border with Vermont. Making it clear that such hostile episodes were firmly interred in the past, that Anglo-American friendship was now the name of the game, and that the Canadian-American border was friendly and open, the American ambassador and his wife sat comfortably next to royalty in the Royal Box.1

Accompanying the Churchills were Philip Sassoon as well as the ubiquitous Freddie Guest, who regularly helped organize the annual Commons versus Lords polo match. Since his Sandhurst days, horses had engaged some of Churchill’s deepest passions. He had emptied his pockets hiring horses from nearby livery stables for point-to-point races and steeplechases. Gazetted at age twenty to the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment, he had spent hours in the riding school and stables. He loved the glittering jingle of the cavalry squadron manoeuvring at the trot. Famously, he had taken part in the 400-horse cavalry charge of British troops at the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898 and seen more than twenty of his comrades killed.

‘Never, never, give up’ was one of life’s lessons he had learned on the barracks square. ‘Many a time,’ he writes in My Early Life, ‘did I pick myself up shaken and sore from the riding school tan [track] . . . and with what appearance of dignity I could command, while twenty recruits grinned furtively but delightedly to see their Officer suffering the same misfortunes which it was their lot so frequently to undergo’.² It is hard here not see a metaphor for his entire political career – and perhaps it consciously was, as he wrote these words well after his misfortune and recovery from the Dardanelles.

Risk and danger were his aphrodisiacs. Only the year before, when he was not busy painting, he had spent hours breathlessly chasing wild boar on horseback through the vast estate in south-west France belonging to his friend Bendor. But it was polo that really captivated him. Since leaving the army he had been a regular player, including at Hurlingham. In India, so he recalled with self-mocking irony, this was the only serious purpose of being a subaltern. On arrival at Bangalore, he and his fellow junior officers had purchased ponies to form a regimental team; a mere six weeks later it broke records by winning one of India’s most prestigious tournaments. In his memoir he describes a typical day under the blistering sun at the garrison. On parade at six in the morning, an hour and a half practising manoeuvres, then breakfast, cleaning out the stables, and long before eleven the officers retire to their bungalows to sleep until emerging at five o’clock as the shadows began to lengthen. ‘Now,’ he writes, ‘the station begins to live again. It is the hour of Polo. It is the hour for which we have been living all day long.’ But his own playing days were almost over; he was to enjoy his last match six years later at age fifty-two. Yet his youthful passion remained alive and well. To share it, for the second match against the Americans he brought along his friends General Smuts, Hazel Lavery, and Lady Diana Cooper. England lost both matches. But the game was the thing. ‘Polo,’ he later pronounced, ‘is the prince of games.’

After the first match at Hurlingham there was tea on the lawn. But the Churchills couldn’t linger over the cucumber sandwiches. That evening, they drove into Kent to spend the weekend with Winston’s wartime friend, Edward Spears.3

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By now, the acerbic Spears had made a sufficient number of enemies in high places to have been forced to resign his position in Paris and settle in England. But Churchill still considered him a first-rate source of intelligence about Russian and Bolshevik affairs and remained convinced that Lenin could still be toppled. Just as he had arrived in Cairo, the Bolsheviks had gathered for their Tenth Party Congress in Moscow. It should have been a cause of celebration. Instead, the economy was stricken by famine, strikes, and peasant revolts. 25 million people were close to starvation. Well over a million – possibly two – had fled abroad. In the region of Tambov 300 miles south-east of Moscow, a 70,000-strong peasant army was in open rebellion. In Petrograd, workers went on strike and demanded free elections and the end of Bolshevik dictatorship. Eddie Marsh, who was taking care of ‘Archie’s work’ during his absence in Cairo, cabled Churchill with even more dramatic news. Sailors at the huge Russian naval base on the fortress island of Kronstadt that guarded the entrance to Petrograd had once formed the shock troops of the Revolution. But now they had joined the strikers, burned their Party membership cards, and denounced the ‘Communist usurpers’ and the Cheka. Lenin ordered Trotsky to crush the revolt. After twenty-four hours of bloody fighting, Red Army troops captured the fortress at the cost of nearly 10,000 men. Many of the rebels escaped across the ice to Finland. But some 15,000 were captured, to face either immediate execution or a lifetime in the prison camps now multiplying across the Soviet utopia.4

To Churchill, this justified all his fierce loathing for Lenin’s regime and confirmed his long-aired predictions about the tyrannical path the Bolsheviks would inevitably take. But it also gave him some hope that dissent might still be ignited against the Reds. So he was making sure to keep in touch with the plotting of anti-Soviet forces. Here, the role of Spears was crucial. From Paris, Boris Savinkov was pushing grandiose plans to open up Poland, the Ukraine, and Rumania to Western capital. Spears was ambitious, keen to enter the world of business, and eager to make a fortune. So he had strenuously cultivated his links with Savinkov and was collaborating in a number of his schemes. Churchill was also in touch with another shadowy player in the anti-Soviet game: Sidney Reilly, the legendary and unpredictable ‘Ace of Spies’, who had only just escaped with his life after spying for the SIS in Moscow. Since then he had been travelling constantly between Moscow and Paris reporting on the plans of Savinkov and other White Russian activists, as well as campaigning for more positive action against the Bolshevik regime, which he denounced as ‘the worst form of autocratic tyranny in history’. After meeting him in Paris, Churchill recognized a kindred soul and they had kept in regular touch by letter or phone, using Archie Sinclair as a go-between. Both Spears and Reilly were valuable as links to Savinkov’s plans for an anti-Bolshevik uprising, and each was in touch with Sir Mansfield Cumming, the SIS boss.5

The Spears were renting Ightham Mote, a half-timbered fourteenth-century moated manor house hidden deep in the Kentish countryside. Spears’ wife was the American novelist Mary (‘May’) Borden, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and a former lover of the avant-garde artist and poet, Percy Wyndham Lewis. Quick-witted and intelligent, and with large and expressive grey-green eyes, she was a divorcee and former suffragette who had spent time in a police cell after smashing windows during a demonstration in Parliament Square. Clementine disliked many of her husband’s male friends, and at first Spears found her difficult. But the ice was broken by a hearty game of tennis and the hosts’ customary charm and hospitality. For Churchill, who was godfather to the Spears’ young son, there was the typical pleasure of painting. The canvas he produced shows the ancient lattice-windowed house with its shimmering reflections in the surrounding water.

Spears also knew Churchill well enough to have invited a guest for Sunday lunch as lively conversational foil. The local clergyman proved well up to the challenge as Churchill peppered him good-naturedly with questions such as ‘Should the clergy be patriotic?’ and by provocative declarations like ‘Jesus Christ would not have taken sides in this war.’ When he tired of the verbal sparring, Mary Borden, who was herself a lively and accomplished conversationalist, fascinated him with stories about her mobile field hospital in wartime France. All in all, the weekend was a success in cementing further the personal bond linking Churchill to the leading conspirators against Lenin’s regime.⁶

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The weekend with Spears may well have stimulated a more domestic project. Churchill was still yearning for his own home in the country, and he and Clementine had been searching for properties ever since his Garron Towers inheritance came through. Shortly after visiting Ightham Mote, he went to view ‘Peelings’, a seventeenth-century house with an adjoining estate on the East Sussex coast owned by the Duke of Devonshire. But Clementine worried about her husband’s grandiose visions of running a farm as well as a large family home. Why risk their new-found fortune on a venture where they had no experience? she asked in exasperation. What with his political career, painting for leisure, and polo for excitement and danger, what need did he have for more? She, too, longed for a country house. But she wanted it to be a rest and a joy, not a fresh preoccupation. ‘I want to lie in the sun & blink & wake up now & then to eat a mouse caught by someone else & drink a little cream & doze off again,’ wrote ‘the Cat’.7

In fact, she was already doing plenty of dozing and eating, enjoying the lazy days of early summer. With the older children still at school, she and Goonie were guests of the Horners at ‘Menabilly’, a large old house on the Cornish coast that her friends had rented for the summer. Neglected but endowed with lush sub-tropical gardens and a huge kitchen garden with buttressed walls, its lethargic atmosphere entranced her as a place that time seemed to have forgotten. A decade later it was to be fictionalized by the novelist Daphne du Maurier as ‘Manderley,’ the home of the villainous Maxim de Winter and his sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in her best-selling novel, Rebecca.

Clementine’s appeal to her husband may have had some effect. Within days ‘Peelings’ was forgotten and he was enthusing about another property he had just seen. This one was in Kent; perhaps he had been drawn to the attractions of the county by his stay with Spears. It was called Chartwell Manor and lay about twenty-five miles south-east of London. It enjoyed commanding views over the Weald of Kent and on its southern side featured a small lake fed by a natural spring – the Chart Well. By this time Clementine had left Cornwall to join a tennis party at nearby ‘Fairlawne’, another country house owned by an old friend and future Member of Parliament, Victor Cazalet. At Winston’s urging, she went over to view Chartwell herself. She was enthusiastic. ‘I can think of nothing but that heavenly tree-crowned Hill – It is like a view from an aeroplane being up there,’ she told him. ‘I do hope we shall get it – If we do I feel we shall live there a great deal & be very, very, happy.’ This would be especially so if they could immediately build a new wing for Jack, Goonie, and their children. However, on second thoughts and after a further viewing she turned against it as requiring extensive modernizations and additions beyond their financial means. But her husband had set his heart on it. A year later, without consulting her, he bought it.8

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Busy though the domestic scene was, politically the summer was even more demanding. The Imperial Conference opened in London on Monday 20 June and lasted six weeks until early August. The word ‘conference’ is misleading. In reality it consisted of a series of closed meetings at 10 Downing Street between Lloyd George and British ministers and officials on the one hand, and the Dominion prime ministers on the other: William (‘Billy’) Hughes of Australia; Arthur Meighen of Canada; William Massey of New Zealand; Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa; and, representing India in a somewhat anomalous position, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, a member of the Council of State of India. Interspersed were several meetings of the Imperial Defence Committee for a discussion of major strategic issues.

As Colonial Secretary, Churchill might have been expected to act as major domo. But Lloyd George was determined to set the course for Britain’s place in the post-war world himself and chaired all the sessions. Churchill added this to his growing list of grievances against his old rival. Lloyd George, he complained to the Daily Mail’s editor Thomas Marlowe over lunch one day, was stealing the limelight. He was, so Marlowe told his newspaper’s owner Lord Northcliffe afterwards, ‘very sore’ about it.⁹ Once again, it was painfully evident which of the ‘terrible twins’ was the senior partner. To the man who had donated Chequers to the nation and was now First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Lee of Fareham had plenty of time to observe the two rivals duelling verbally at Cabinet meetings. ‘L.G.’s domination of the Cabinet is complete and wonderful,’ he told his wife. ‘Winston, who talks a great deal, and usually in a stimulating and interesting way, is the only Minister who even tries to measure swords with him.’ But, he added, ‘if it comes to a serious contest L. G. never has any difficulty downing him in argument’.¹⁰

Churchill’s feelings were understandable. The Colonial Office with its global reach sounded very grand. By drawing Mesopotamia and Palestine into its orbit he had put it firmly in the headlines. But the Dominions essentially now ran themselves, and looking after British colonies in Africa, the West Indies, South-East Asia and the Far East was mostly run-of-the-mill business and tediously mundane: currency problems in East Africa, postage rates in the Crown colonies, citrus fruit production in Jamaica, and so on. He happily delegated most of these issues to his subordinates.

One episode, however, brought him credit from an unexpected source, and has been curiously neglected by previous biographers. One of the first parliamentary questions he faced as Colonial Secretary was about child slavery in Hong Kong. Mui-tsai – the Cantonese for ‘little sister’ – were young Chinese girls sold by the poor, who could not afford to keep them, as bonded domestic servants to wealthier families. It was a long-established cultural practice also to be found in Malaya and Singapore. But it had been roundly denounced as child slavery by Western missionaries and organizations such as the Anti-Slavery Society, and frequently came accompanied by lurid allegations of sexual abuse and prostitution. As a result, the Mui-tsai system had come under hostile press and parliamentary scrutiny as ‘a disgrace and scandal under the British flag’.

Churchill’s predecessor Lord Milner had done little about it, thanks largely to resistance from the Governor of Hong Kong and Colonial Office officials who argued that it was an essentially philanthropic cultural tradition that helped the poor provide for their children. At first, Churchill was inclined not to cause trouble in the colony by pressing the issue. But when public criticism intensified and publicly defending child slavery became an embarrassment, he abruptly changed tack and told his officials that he was not prepared to go on defending it. When the Governor protested that abolishing the system would cause ructions in the island colony, he instantly snapped back. ‘I do not care a rap what the local consequences are,’ he wrote. ‘You had better make it clear that [freedom for the Mui-tsai] must be real.’ Later he followed this up with a telegram curtly instructing the Governor to issue a proclamation declaring that the system would no longer be recognized in the colony. His decision made him friends in unfamiliar places. The Manchester Guardian, a frequent critic, applauded his decisive action as ‘handsome and sensible’, and congratulated him for having ‘cut through all sophisticated official defences by which this piece of humanity has been resisted so long by the bureaucrats’. The issue had by now also become something of a feminist cause, and Lady Gladstone of the Anti-Slavery Society, the doyenne of humanitarian lobbyists with numerous friends in high places, declared that Churchill’s name ‘would go down to history for this in glory’.11

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Nonetheless, he regarded such incursions into distant Imperial affairs as inferior to most Foreign Office business and continued to speak his mind on its activities whenever the mood took him. This was much to the annoyance of Curzon. Already this year, the Foreign Secretary had complained that Churchill seemed to be behaving like some sort of ‘Asiatic Secretary’. The sinner was happy to compound the offence. A week before the Imperial Conference opened, he travelled to Manchester, the heartland of Britain’s cotton manufacturing industry, where he had held his first seat as a Liberal in the Commons. Here, at a luncheon for the city’s Chamber of Commerce, he painted a vivid panorama of the post-war world coloured by the extremes of violence and peace, prosperity and poverty, despair and hope. Ireland was teetering on the brink. International trade held the key to prosperity but was stalled by mountains of debt and unrealistic demands on Germany for reparations that it couldn’t pay. As for Russia, under Lenin it was a case study in folly. ‘Probably seven or eight million have lost their lives, and many more have had their lives ruined in order to teach Monsieur Lenin the rudiments of political economy,’ he mocked. Things would only get worse for Russians. But at least other nations would be saved by her example. The lesson, he assured his audience, was written in glaring letters – ‘the utter failure of this Socialistic and Communistic theory, and the ruins which it brings to those subjected to its cruel yoke’.¹²

But it was potential failure closer to home a mere twenty miles across the English Channel that truly worried him most. ‘Where are we going in Europe?’ he demanded. ‘Has the Great War brought us the assurance of a lasting peace? Can we be quite sure that our children will not be exposed to a repetition of the horrors through which we have, with difficulty, lived?’ Talk of peace was all very well, he went on, but it was no good trusting in ‘a paper League of Nations’. Peace had to have the backing of the Great Powers. The only real way to prevent another terrible war was to establish a solid settlement between Britain, France, and Germany. His audience hardly needed to be reminded that since the Peace Conference there had been endless disputes about German reparation payments, and that in March Allied troops had marched into the Ruhr cities of Dusseldorf and Duisburg over defaults on payments.

Recent headlines had also shone an alarming spotlight on violence in Upper Silesia, a significant region of Germany awarded to Poland by the Paris peacemakers. Its loss was dire for the Germans as it produced a quarter of the country’s coal and was rich in iron and steel mills; at least a third of its population was German-speaking. After powerful protests, the Allied victors decided to hold a plebiscite allowing inhabitants to decide of which nation they wished to be citizens. In the months leading up to it violent Polish resistance broke out, especially after former German residents were granted the vote and began flooding back to the region in their tens of thousands. In March, four battalions of British troops had been rushed in to restore order amidst widespread intimidation, assaults, and raids from across the Polish border. In the ballot, the Germans obtained a large majority, but much of the coal-producing area opted for Poland. How precisely to divide the region in light of the results provoked yet more violence. By the time Churchill was speaking to his Manchester audience, the Upper Silesia question had flared into a broader argument pitting Germany on one side and Poland and France on the other. As well, fighting between German and Polish paramilitary forces had seriously escalated. The dispute seemed to be threatening peace in Europe itself. ‘If the Treaty [of Versailles] can be reduced to waste in one quarter,’ thundered The Times, ‘it will soon become pulp in others.’ Anglo-French relations in particular seemed threatened. Just days before Churchill spoke, British troops had once again been in action. A sergeant from the Black Watch who was shot ‘by unknown outlaws’ was buried with full military honours. ‘Allies Floundering in Silesia’ warned The Times.13

Combined with Anglo-French disputes over Syria and the Middle East, traditional anti-French feeling was mounting in Britain. But this was dangerous, argued Churchill. People had to be fair to France, and understand the anxieties its people felt about the ex-enemy nation of some 70 million just across its border compared to their own more modest 40 million. ‘We must,’ he declared, ‘understand their point of view.’ In pursuing post-war reconstruction, it was for Britain to help navigate the rancour between these two European nations. ‘Let that be the part of Britain,’ he exhorted, ‘to mitigate the dangerous poisons still rife in Europe, and to consolidate the world upon the basis of the victory which our lads have won.’¹⁴

He may well have concluded on his customary upbeat and patriotic note – this, after all, was a speech delivered to natural-born Liberal businessmen in a county that had sent tens of thousands of ‘lads’ off to war. But his reference to ‘dangerous poisons still rife in Europe’ offered a necessary and timely caution about radical nationalist trends across the English Channel. His words proved remarkably prescient. ‘You may be sure,’ he warned his listeners, ‘that deep in the heart of Germany, certainly in their universities and in those powerful forces dethroned by the war, there must be lurking ideas dangerous to the peace of Europe.’ Criticisms that Churchill lacked judgement were then, as they remain today, commonplace. Yet he also possessed a much rarer and more valuable quality: that of insight. As history was to show, German universities did indeed nurture strongly nationalist sentiments, and some of them capitulated easily to the Nazis and their ideology. Meanwhile, ‘dethroned’ by the war, elements within the German armed forces and elsewhere were busily doing their best to destroy the Weimar Republic. Only weeks after Churchill’s Manchester speech, an embittered ex-corporal from Austria named Adolf Hitler, who had also fought on the Western Front, was elected as sole leader – ‘Fuhrer’ – of the radically nationalist and anti-Semitic party in Munich known as the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP – the Nazis.¹⁵

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Lloyd George formally opened the Imperial Conference in 10 Downing Street at noon on Monday 20 June. Evoking the unity that the Empire had displayed during the Peace Conference, he stressed the need to uphold the treaties they had all signed and pronounced friendship with the United States ‘a cardinal principle’ for the future – especially if agreement could be reached on naval armaments. ‘We cannot forget,’ he said, evoking his most bullish patriotic sentiments, ‘that the very life of the United Kingdom, as also of Australia and New Zealand, indeed the whole Empire, has been built up on sea power – and that sea power is necessarily the basis for the whole Empire’s existence.’ His final remarks acknowledged changes in the nature of the Empire created by the war. Four blood-soaked years had fuelled growing demands for independence from what was still frequently described in the white Dominions as ‘the Mother Country’. If Australian and New Zealand boys could die in their thousands at Gallipoli, and Canadians at Vimy Ridge, then it was clear that any future commitments to fight should be the result of decisions made in Canberra, Wellington, or Ottawa, not in London. At Paris, each Dominion had been granted its own delegation. Lloyd George acknowledged the new reality. ‘There was a time when Downing Street controlled the Empire,’ he declared. ‘Today the Empire is in charge of Downing Street.’ This was inflated rhetoric. Forging a new constitutional relationship between the Dominions and London that would balance their growing sense of autonomy while maintaining the integrity of the British Empire proved too complex and controversial to deal with, and the issue was shelved until a later conference.

But for now, the warm glow of victory and wartime comradeship smoothed the path of co-operation, helped by the common British heritage shared by those sitting around the Downing Street table. Billy Hughes, the Australian prime minister, a dozen years older than Churchill, had been born in Pimlico, less than a mile away from Downing Street; New Zealand’s William Massey came from Londonderry; and while Arthur Meighen of Canada had been born in Ontario, his paternal grandfather had come from the same Ulster city as Massey; while his mother, who had travelled with him from Canada, was visiting her family relatives in Scotland and Ireland. Meighen was the youngest of the Dominion prime ministers at the conference, a ‘debutante among a tribe of dowagers’.16

Churchill was one of the only four British Cabinet members sitting round the Downing Street table to hear Lloyd George’s opening remarks. The next day he formally delivered his own tour d’horizon by reporting on the Crown Colonies and other territories administered by the Colonial Office. It was a subject he had already covered the week before in a speech that pre-empted much of what Lloyd George had just said. At a dinner in the House of Commons given by the Empire Development Parliamentary Committee to welcome the delegates, he promised they could look forward to the British Empire’s future as ‘a super-unit’, one that would deal with ‘our cousins and brothers in the United States on terms of amity and equal friendship’. That was the dream, he suggested, one that would secure the peace and safety of ‘all who spoke the English tongue’. The route was through increasing inter-Imperial trade and improving and extending communications by air and sea. Not least, he told them, ‘we must spread our valiant manhood over the British Empire, we must spread our soldiers and citizens as numerously as possible in the great Dominions of the Crown and in that way facilitate the steady growth of inter-Imperial sentiment and common interest’. His comments on India came almost as an after-thought. ‘Not yet a Dominion,’ he acknowledged, it was heading in that direction thanks to the reforms being introduced by the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu; eventually, Churchill promised, it would join the others as a powerful partner.¹⁷