‘I WILL TAKE WHAT COMES’
The fallout from the Cairo Conference kept Churchill busy over the summer and he rapidly descended into gloom about the prospect of reconciling Jews and Arabs. ‘I do not think things are going to get better, but rather worse,’ he told the Cabinet.1 He had a head-on collision with Chaim Weizmann, who insisted that the Balfour Declaration presumed an ultimate Jewish majority in Palestine, and later in the summer at a meeting with a Palestinian delegation of Muslim and Christian Arabs in London he encountered a different brick wall – their demand that the Balfour Declaration be repealed and a point-blank refusal to talk directly with the Zionists. Even before the delegation arrived, he confessed to the Cabinet that the situation in Palestine was causing him ‘perplexity and anxiety. The whole country is in ferment,’ he lamented, ‘both Arabs and Jews are arming, ready to spring at each other’s throats.’2
He could barely conceal his exasperation with the Palestinian demands. Shortly after the end of the Imperial Conference he met privately with Shibley al-Jamal, the delegation’s head, but made no headway. A week later, he spent the morning receiving the entire delegation. As he had already explained to Shibley al-Jamal, he had no power to change the Balfour Declaration, nor could he agree to an elected assembly for Palestine, which would inevitably place the Jews in a permanent minority and certainly impose a ban on any future immigration. He used blunt talk about the Palestinians’ refusal to compromise. ‘Do you really want to go back to Palestine empty-handed?’ he asked, and appealed to them – ‘without any great hope’, he admitted – to be more flexible. That was all he could do. The Palestinians remained obdurate. The Cabinet, not surprisingly, had no solution either for Palestine. All that his equally exasperated ally Birkenhead could offer was the idea that the mandate should be offered to the United States.3
Things were looking brighter in Iraq, however, where Churchill’s driving concern remained cost-cutting. To Sir Percy Cox, his consistent message was the need for economies. It was essential that Faisal and a stable Iraqi government be installed in Baghdad as soon as possible – and that the Royal Air Force officially become the primary keeper of order in the desert. As the Imperial Conference was winding up in early August, Churchill laid out his plans to the Cabinet. Thanks to Cox’s heroic (not to say Machiavellian) efforts in buying support for the British choice for the throne across the country, Faisal was gaining acceptance as the country’s first monarch. This meant that Britain could look forward to an independent native state casting ‘hardly any burden’ on the Empire. The country would be run by ‘the same cheap, makeshift machinery which the Colonial Office have successfully employed . . . in East and West Africa,’ he promised. There would be no Imperial troops stationed at great expense outside Baghdad, and instead the RAF would keep order. Iraq, he told them, was a ‘vexatious country’, and spending any more on it would be a misapplication of resources. As he insisted personally to Lloyd George, the Colonial Office should be given full control over War Office expenditures in the country. This was agreed, and two weeks later he happily announced that Faisal had finally been chosen by the people as their ruler after a referendum that produced a literally incredible 96 per cent approval for the Hashemite King.4
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‘The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire,’ Churchill had impressed upon the House of Commons in 1919, and at Cairo he made clear that this new arm of war would play the major role in policing Iraq. By then even the army had come to admit their rival’s value in quelling disorder across the new country’s sprawling terrain. While he was enthusiastic about what air power could do, he also remained cautious. The sudden appearance of airplanes dropping bombs from the sky could have an enormous deterrent effect. But with British troops becoming thinner and thinner on the ground, such actions might increasingly be seen as a bluff, and hence perhaps dangerously discounted. Air power should be used with circumspection, he cautioned Sir Percy Cox after one such episode in July on the Lower Euphrates. With that proviso, he assured the High Commissioner, he was a great believer in its legitimate use.
What did he consider legitimate? Quelling disturbances and enforcing order met the test, but supporting measures such as the collection of taxes did not. That same month, he was shocked to learn that Royal Air Force planes had fired on women and children taking refuge in a lake. ‘By doing such things we put ourselves on the lower level,’ he berated Sir Hugh Trenchard. ‘Combatants are fair game and sometimes non-combatants get injured through their proximity to fighting troops, but this seems to be quite a different matter.’ He was surprised, he told the Chief of the Air Staff, that the officers responsible had not been court-martialled. Yet his reprimand appears to have had no effect on the ground. A year later, the same RAF officer whose report had so shocked him wrote with gusto about a hundred bombs having been dropped on a village that formed ‘a hotbed of malcontents’, after which it had been burnt to the ground by troops.5
Razing a village full of ‘malcontents’ was a brutal but not unusual aspect of colonial policing. Far more controversial is Churchill’s alleged use of poison gas against Iraqi rebels. The charge has been widely accepted by many of his critics. Yet it is far from accurate, largely because of Churchill’s own confused use of the term ‘poison gas’ when he was actually referring to non-lethal tear gas and not the far more deadly chlorine or phosgene gas. ‘It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell,’ he had declared as Secretary of State for War and Air, ‘and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.’ This was not the view of the Cabinet, however, which held that Britain should only use gas in warfare in retaliation against its first use by others. Besides, the League of Nations was actively discussing the idea of banning chemical weapons altogether. For Britain to use any sort of gas with talks under way would cause serious political and diplomatic complications.
However, the next year during a rebellion across Iraq, Sir Aylmer Haldane appealed for the use of gas to be considered – both from the air and by ground troops. Trenchard’s view was that gas dropped in bombs from the air was probably far less effective than regular high-explosive bombs. But Churchill authorized Haldane to use whatever gas shells he had; and when it was discovered that there were none available in Iraq, he gave him permission to acquire 5,000 rounds of sixty-pound SK chemical (tear gas) shells from stocks in Egypt. Now, just days before Faisal was officially enthroned as Iraq’s new monarch, Haldane told Churchill that he was ‘arranging to do some bombing by moonlight’. Then he added: ‘I wish that we could have authority to use gas bombs, but the air ministry are [sic] awaiting for the Cabinet’s decision in the matter. I am allowed to use them from my guns – but where the guns can go they cannot use gas shells with advantage – but in the hilly country of the Kurds gas would be far more effective than in the hot plains where the gas is very volatile.’ From this it is clear that gas bombing from the air was not being carried out, because it was unauthorized. Nor was shelling using tear gas being deployed, even though permitted, because of the terrain. This appears to have remained the case for at least the rest of 1921.6 Despite her support for Trenchard at Cairo, Gertrude Bell realized the limits of what bombing could achieve. Shortly before Christmas she told her father that ‘between ourselves, aeroplanes are no good in mountainous country. You can’t so much as see a Kurdish mountain village from the air; its’ [sic] flat mud roofs look like a part of the hillside. And even if you do locate it you can’t do much harm. The people take refuge under any convenient rock and your bombs are comparatively innocuous. Oh for peace.’7
As for tear-gas bombs dropped by air, Cox discussed their use with King Faisal in November that year and gained the Iraqi monarch’s consent – ‘provided they were not lethal or permanently injurious to health’. Buoyed up by this, shortly after Christmas Churchill agreed to the supply of such bombs to the air force in Iraq. No sooner had he done this, however, than he revoked the order. Ironically, this was thanks to a decision by the disarmament conference in Washington whose meeting he had so warmly supported. Article 5 of its Disarmament Treaty prohibited the use of ‘asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases’. Faced with a major political embarrassment if his decision became public, he lost no time in beating a retreat and the order was quickly countermanded. Similar instructions were sent to the army.
In short, Churchill would gladly have approved using tear gas in Iraq if circumstances had permitted. But thanks to a combination of practical, legal, and political obstacles, he never did. Otherwise, his enthusiasm for policing by air remained undimmed for so long as he remained Colonial Secretary. Subsequently the Royal Air Force suppressed several Kurdish insurrections, ensured that Faisal’s writ ran effectively across his kingdom, and also kept Abdullah on the throne of neighbouring Transjordan.8
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No one this summer could accuse Churchill of not doing his best to follow the Cabinet’s determination to pare military expenditure to the bone. Ironically, his relentless search for cuts contrasted sharply with his never-ending personal desire to spend more. Using his Garron Towers estate inheritance, he increased Clementine’s household allowance by a third. He also visited his bank manager to discuss arranging a new consolidated loan of £30,000. Then, the day after the ‘game of notes’ with Curzon round the Cabinet table, he met with Sir Reginald Cox, the senior partner of Cox and Co., to discuss his financial affairs. As soon as Parliament rose for the summer recess, he promised, he would produce a detailed blueprint of his plans. He was true to his word. Early in August, after providing a list of his outstanding loans and an overdraft totalling £35,000, he asked whether they could be consolidated into a single loan to be paid off slowly over eleven years. At this, however, the bank baulked. Instead, it agreed to a small overdraft and a loan of £30,000, to be reduced ‘substantially’ in the following year. Meanwhile, Churchill pressed on with his search for a grand country home. Clementine’s confession of her desire to lie in the sun and ‘eat a mouse caught by someone else’ came the day after he attended the meeting at Chequers where the Cabinet accepted President Harding’s proposal for the Washington Conference.9
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Other items on the personal front also kept him happily busy. His painting was going well and drawing compliments from friends. During the British-American polo match at Hurlingham, Lady Jean Hamilton had visited his studio to look over the paintings he had brought back from his Middle East journey as well as others he had painted that year, and to his delight she purchased one. ‘I am steadily improving,’ he enthused to Charles Montag in Paris, and invited the Swiss painter over to London so that together they could explore the Tate Gallery where there were many ‘fine pictures’ to be examined. Montag was unable to come, but instead arranged for a Paris bookseller to have a package of books sent to him via the British Embassy in Paris. One was a volume on the doctrines of Confucius. The others were lengthy studies on the art of Corot, Renoir, and Cézanne, and he valiantly began to struggle through them in French.10 ‘Painting is the joy of my life,’ he told Lord Riddell over lunch one day as the Imperial Conference was nearing its end. Meanwhile, the Strand magazine visited his studio and chose the eighteen paintings it planned to use as illustrations for his article on ‘Painting as a Pastime’. Most were landscapes painted at the homes of friends with whom he spent weekends, such as Lympne and Breccles. But the selection also included a handful from that year’s visits to the Riviera as well as one of the pyramids outside Cairo. Two more were also carefully packed to go with him to Dundee, where he was due to visit his constituency in the autumn.
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Nor was he neglecting his other great passion. Vindicating his record at the Admiralty was central to his political comeback and long-term political ambition. The week before lunching with Riddell, he sent off yet another draft chapter of The World Crisis for comments to Admiral Thomas Jackson, a pre-war head of naval intelligence who had served as his Director of Operations at the Admiralty including planning for the Dardanelles. The chapter covered his account of the Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands fought early in the war against the German Navy in the south Atlantic. In addition to having Jackson check, correct, and amplify his account, Churchill asked for any suggestions or criticism he might have from the naval point of view. ‘I am most anxious . . . to do justice to the Navy and to the Sea Lords on the Boards of Admiralty with whom I was associated,’ he stressed. Yet he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he intended to place himself at the centre of the story. ‘I feel fully justified in showing the part which I played personally,’ he told him.11
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On the domestic front, plans for the summer holidays were well advanced. During the first half of August all four of the children would be sent off to the seaside resort of Broadstairs in Kent in the care of Rose, their young French nursery governess. Once Parliament recessed in mid-month, their parents would travel up to Scotland to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster at Lochmore Lodge on their vast estate in county Sutherland. The children would join them there. In the meantime, with Winston still taking care of Middle Eastern and Imperial matters, Clementine would go on her own to stay with the Westminsters at their English home at Eaton Hall near Chester, for a tennis tournament. When she left, she would join the children on the train taking them north where the family would be reunited for a holiday amidst the moors and glens of Scotland.
He had a few special summer treats planned for himself as well. The same day that he informed the Cabinet of Faisal’s forthcoming coronation, he celebrated the receipt of his first advance for The World Crisis by purchasing one of the most expensive cars of its day, a Rolls-Royce ‘Silver Ghost’ Cabriolet (Convertible), so-called because of the ghost-like quiet of its engine. It cost him £2,595. In homage to his ducal heritage, he ordered it to be painted in Marlborough blue. It was to remain at the coachbuilders until he returned from his visit to Scotland at the end of September. Meanwhile, he grandly hired another ‘Silver Ghost’ to use over the weekend.12
There was just one small cloud on the horizon. ‘Winston v anxious about his sick child,’ noted H. A. L. Fisher, the President of the Board of Education, after the Cabinet meeting. Childhood diseases were still a cause for concern in these pre-antibiotic days, and especially so in the immediate shadow of the great influenza pandemic. Only the previous month, while Clementine was staying with Goonie at Menabilly, Sarah had fallen ill and Churchill was profoundly anxious until the family doctor telephoned with the good news that it was ‘only’ measles. He was vastly relieved to hear it, and she soon recovered. The only inconvenience was that he had to cancel a dinner he had planned for the Prince of Wales – the heir to the throne had never had the highly contagious disease and didn’t want to risk his approaching holiday.13
This time it was Marigold who was sick. Along with her brother and two sisters, she had been in Kent since the beginning of the month. From the start she had suffered from a slight cold and a cough. The local doctor did what he could. But by mid-August her throat had become seriously sore. Alerted by the landlady at Broadstairs, Clementine rushed down from Eaton Hall and the other three children travelled to Scotland as planned accompanied by Bessie, her maid. Marigold was now gravely ill, with septicaemia. A specialist was called in, but could do nothing. Two days after voicing his anxieties to Fisher, Churchill told Curzon that Marigold was a little improved but that he and Clementine were still dreadfully anxious about her. That evening, Monday 22 August, Clementine was sitting by Marigold’s bedside. ‘Sing me Bubbles,’ she said suddenly and her mother bravely began singing her favourite song. But she had not gone far when Marigold whispered, ‘Not tonight . . . finish it tomorrow.’ On the following evening she died, with both of her parents at her side. She was just two years and nine months old.
The day should have been one of celebration for Churchill. Early that same morning on the banks of the river Tigris Gertrude Bell, wearing her CBE star and three war ribbons, had watched proudly as Sir Percy Cox announced that Faisal had been elected King of Iraq and there followed a twenty-one-gun salute and a playing of ‘God Save the King’.14 Instead, it was one of intense private sorrow. Clementine, so Winston later recalled, ‘gave a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain’. Three days later, Marigold was buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London, close enough to their London home for her parents to make regular visits to the grave; subsequently, it was marked by a headstone carved by the renowned artist Eric Gill. Press photographers were present at the burial but at Churchill’s request none of the pictures were used. That evening, ‘stupefied by grief’, he and Clementine took the sleeper train north to join the other children at Lochmore Lodge. ‘My mother never got over Marigold’s death,’ recalled her youngest daughter, Mary, ‘and her very existence was a forbidden subject in the family.’15 For Churchill, Marigold’s death appears to have been so closely associated with his purchase of the Rolls-Royce that he couldn’t bear to use it. Shortly after returning from Scotland, he sold it to his ever supportive Aunt Cornelia.
Marigold’s death generated widespread sympathy. From New York, Bernard Baruch wrote a heartfelt letter of sympathy and Gertrude Bell sent her own special condolences to Clementine from Baghdad; only five months before, they had been happily exploring the bazaars of Cairo together. ‘What a cruel year this has been for you,’ wrote Venetia Stanley, ‘and this last blow seems the most cruel and wanton of all. That divine perfect little creature!’ John and Hazel Lavery were in Edinburgh when they received the news. ‘Dearest Winston and Clementine,’ read their telegram, ‘we are so deeply grieved for you our tenderest love and sympathy.’ From Taplow, Ettie Desborough addressed a letter to Winston. ‘The baby of the family always seems in a way the focus point,’ she wrote, ‘& Marigold was such a wonderful, darling & beautiful little child – everything that was bright seemed to lie open before her, the little Duckadilly . . . My deepest heart is with you,’ she added, ‘no one, no one, knows what the pain of losing a darling child is but those who have borne it.’ Ettie knew of what she wrote. Two of her three sons had been killed on the Western Front.16
His political colleagues added their voices, and Lloyd George took the opportunity to mend relations between them; he himself had lost his favourite young daughter some fourteen years previously, a death that finally killed off his own religious faith. Following his mother’s death, this was the second family loss that Churchill suffered that summer. ‘You were saying the other day how closely death had pressed home to you this year,’ wrote Lord Grey of Fallodon, ‘and now it has come again in a particularly poignant form.’ Sir Abe Bailey expressed a similar sentiment. ‘My dear Winston,’ he wrote, ‘You seem to be getting quite your share of trouble and family losses & might well say “How much more.” ’
The answer came soon enough. Thomas Walden had been butler to Lord Randolph and stayed with the family, served loyally and bravely as Churchill’s valet in South Africa, and shared his Boer War dangers. Shane Leslie knew him well. ‘Strong and faithful,’ he recalled, ‘he valeted Randolph and Winston whose dress was often almost ragged until he reached the period of uniform.’ Walden died in early August and both Winston and Jack attended his funeral, and paid its expenses. A quarter of a century before, he had also stood by the freshly dug grave of his childhood nanny, Mrs Everest, ‘my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived,’ he later wrote in My Early Life. Now another important link with his childhood was severed. ‘What a wonderful and terrible year this has been for you. Full of political triumph and material good fortune but crossed with too much sadness,’ wrote Archie Sinclair from his family seat at Thurso Castle in Caithness.17
For two weeks the Churchill family stayed together as guests of the Westminsters at Lochmore Lodge. No record exists of what they did, what they said, or how they coped. Afterwards, Clementine left for London with the children to prepare them for school while Churchill went to stay with the Duke of Sutherland at Dunrobin Castle, as he had arranged the month before over a dinner at Philip Sassoon’s. A vast baronial mansion north of Inverness designed by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, the castle had served as a naval hospital during the war and after a disastrous fire in 1915 had recently undergone considerable refurbishment at the hands of another renowned architect, Sir Robert Lorimer. It also enjoyed its own private railway station and ran its own carriages as well as a special locomotive equipped with an upholstered seat high up at the back of the driver’s cab for special guests such as crowned heads of state and members of Royalty. This year they included the Prince of Wales and his brother, the Duke of York – the future King George VI. They were met by the duke at Inverness station and escorted in his private train to the castle. There were some thirty or so guests during Churchill’s stay. Mrs Dudley Ward, as well as her husband, was amongst them.
By this time – as The Times put it – ‘everybody who is anybody will now be found north of the Tweed’.18 King George V and Queen Mary were firmly ensconced at Balmoral. Grouse shooting had begun as always on 12 August (‘the Glorious Twelfth’) and Highland lodges and grand houses were packed with shooting parties. Other members of the Royal Family also headed north, many of them solemnly attending the unveiling of war memorials now being completed in towns and villages across Scotland. Soon, the Highland Games were also under way at Ballater.
But Churchill was in no mood for heavy socializing. Besides, he found the company at Dunrobin, many of them there for tennis, to be ‘extremely young’ – a sure sign that he himself was now feeling distinctly middle-aged. Instead, he preferred to wander off by himself with his brushes and easel and paint. On one cool but brilliant afternoon, under a cloudless sky, he went out and painted what he described to Clementine as ‘a beautiful river in the afternoon light with crimson and golden hills in the background’. He was so refreshed by the outing that he declined an invitation the next day from the duke to join a grouse-shooting party and instead went off again with his canvas. When rain kept him indoors he spent time reading Amelia, a domestic novel by Henry Fielding describing the hardships of a newly married young couple in London. ‘It’s saltly [sic] written’, he told Clementine.
There were other distractions, too. One morning a Royal Navy destroyer dropped anchor in a nearby bay and gave him the chance to go over it with an expert eye. He knew his ships and noted immediately that it was far larger than any destroyer from his own time at the Admiralty, almost as large as a cruiser. ‘I expect they have gone too far in the direction of size for a vessel which has no armour and now becomes such a very easy target,’ he mused critically. He also spent time corresponding with his brother about his personal finances. They were due money from their grandfather Leonard Jerome’s settlement on their mother. But getting their hands on it proved difficult and they had to hire an American lawyer. ‘I should be glad to get it ferried safely across the Atlantic and invested here,’ he told Clementine. ‘There are so many splendid things going cheaply now.’ In the end it provided him with some more useful income.19
Most of his time, however, he spent on mapping out the speech he planned for his approaching visit to Dundee. It would give a tour d’horizon of the major issues facing the government: unemployment, Ireland, and the forthcoming Washington Conference. ‘I intend to make a very careful and thoughtful speech,’ he wrote.
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Introspection was not one of Churchill’s most obvious qualities. But spending these long summer days in the Highlands after Marigold’s death gave him ample time to ponder life’s tragedies and its unpredictable brevity. Close by, there were other reminders, too. The duke’s brother, Alastair, who had been awarded the Military Cross while fighting with a machine-gun regiment, had died of malaria just four months previously aged thirty-one, and lay buried next to his father in a grave by the sea. This raised more ghosts from the past. He penned a note to Clementine:
It’s another splendid day: & I am off to the river to catch pictures – much better fun than salmon. Many tender thoughts my darling one of you & yr [sic] sweet kittens. Alas I keep on feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly. I expect you will all have made a pilgrimage yesterday. ’Tis twenty years since I first used to come here [when] Geordie [the Duke of Sutherland] & Alastair were little boys . . . Another twenty years will bring me to the end of my allotted span even if I have so long . . . I will take what comes.20
He had to. Two days later Sir Ernest Cassel died suddenly of a heart attack at his Park Lane home in London. Not only had he often helped Churchill financially, he was also a treasured link to the past and to his father. Only a few months before, Winston and Clementine had been his personal guests on the Riviera. The loss struck Churchill deeply. ‘He was very fond of me and believed in me at all times – especially bad times,’ he told Edwina Ashley, Cassel’s granddaughter, the future Lady Mountbatten. ‘The last talk we had – about six weeks ago – he told me that he hoped he wd [sic] live to see me at the head of affairs . . . I have lost a good friend whose like I shall never seen again. This year has been vy [sic] grievous to me.’21 Clementine shared his grief. ‘I have been through so much lately that I thought I had little feeling left, but I wept for our dear old friend, he was a feature in our lives and he cared deeply for you.’ Four days later, they both attended the Requiem Mass for Cassel held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, which concluded with the playing of Chopin’s Funeral March. Afterwards, Cassel was interred, like Marigold, at Kensal Green cemetery.22
At age forty-six, Churchill had suffered several heavy personal losses. They had not unnerved him, or made him any less ambitious, but they had made him more reflective and aware of his mortality. No longer was he simply ‘the bold, bad man’ of the year before. He was now a more vulnerable figure, an everyman who had suffered personal tragedies, and with whom ordinary people could identify.