SIXTEEN

THE COMFORT OF FRIENDS

Back in London after the summer break, the Churchills sought to find comfort for their summer griefs by resuming their busy social life as normal. Friends were only too ready to help, and early in October Ettie Desborough invited them again to Taplow. It was exactly a year since she had been at Cassis enjoying their company in the warmth of Provence. ‘Clemmie is so delicious to be with, so easy & happy,’ she had noted. ‘Winston’s spirits and joie-de-vivre & the fun-per-minute that he puts into life are quite indescribable – and his absorption in his pictures (really very good) keeps him utterly happy from 7a.m. till bed-time.’ The mood was more sombre now, and he spent most of his time painting quietly in the company of John Lavery.1 A week later, with Clementine incapacitated by an ingrowing toenail, he bundled Diana and Sarah into a car along with his painting gear and thanks to an invitation from Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton drove down to Lullenden. It was blazing hot. Southern England was suffering a record heatwave and temperatures in central London were the highest in more than eighty years. He spent hours outdoors painting a picture of Lullenden’s barn and the contrasting effects of light and shade that he had learned on the Riviera. He also took along his painting of the Spears’ house at Ightham Moat that Lady Hamilton had bought for £50, and together they chose a spot to hang it in the dining room. Now, she was no longer sure that she liked it and wished instead that she had bought one of Cap Ferrat, but he assured her that he thought it one of his best. Meanwhile, his daughters eagerly explored the house they knew so well and pronounced their approval for the additions made by their hosts. Left unspoken between them all was any mention of Marigold. But when Churchill’s eye lit upon the Hamiltons’ recently adopted daughter, Lady Jean thought she detected a shadow flit briefly across his face.2

Another weekend took them again to Breccles to stay with Edwin and Venetia Montagu. The Saturday was Guy Fawkes Night, perfect weather with russet brown leaves on the trees and a hint of frost in the air. They arrived late and missed the fireworks display, but as usual his appearance rapidly lit things up and sparked a fiery discussion about politics. Duff Cooper was also there with his wife Diana. ‘We drank a lot and argued heatedly,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Winston doesn’t get drunk but takes a great deal.’³

Hazel and John Lavery continued to be close friends of the Churchills. They had spent part of the summer playing golf and painting in North Berwick on the Firth of Forth. Hazel was a painter in her own right and since returning to London the couple had been adding a second studio to their Cromwell Road house. In October the Alpine Gallery in the West End opened a show of Sir John’s landscapes from his Riviera trip as well as some of Hazel’s portraits, including one of Clementine, one of Philip Sassoon’s sister Lady Rocksavage, and another of herself taking an early morning cup of tea in her bed. The private viewing was a glittering event that stretched over two days and attracted the cream of London society. There was also a handsomely produced catalogue with a foreword by Churchill. As a companion and eyewitness, he was well able to capture the spirit of his teacher’s plein-air technique. ‘No painter has coped so successfully with the difficulties of this method,’ he wrote in praise of Lavery’s use of the ‘pellucid and pleasurable’ light of the Riviera. ‘His practicability made it child’s play to transport easel and extensive canvas to the chosen scene to stabilize them against sudden gusts of wind, to protect them from the caprice of rain. In consequence,’ he added, ‘there is a freshness and a natural glow about these pictures which gives them unusual charm.’ The experience, as well as the skill, was also obviously his own.

But the actual words were not. They had been crafted by Eddie Marsh. Besides his literary pursuits, Churchill’s private secretary was a distinguished art connoisseur and patron of the arts. Thanks to a family inheritance he had been buying paintings by young and upcoming English artists such as Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, and the brothers John and Paul Nash, and by now was the owner of one of the most valuable collections of modern works in private hands. That the unmarried Eddie was gay and part of a large homosexual community in London was little secret, although with male homosexuality still illegal in Britain the fact was left discreetly unspoken. It certainly bothered Clementine and Winston not at all, and spoke well for the latter’s tolerance when it came to the private lives of his friends.4

As he scanned Marsh’s draft, he removed some of the more arcane art-historical references and added a sentence or two of his own. One, revealing of his own approach to the canvas, highlighted Lavery’s use of ‘brilliant and beautiful colour’. The foreword prompted some gentle mockery in the press. ‘Mr. Winston Churchill, as the world knows, paints pictures,’ The Times reminded its readers, and regretted that some of his own were not in the show. ‘Did he not paint the Pyramids some months ago,’ it enquired ironically, ‘at a time when he might otherwise have been painting a portrait of himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer?’ – a pointed reminder, as if he needed it, of the issue that still rankled deeply. Yet he can only have been pleased to have such a spotlight shone on his efforts as an art critic. Shortly afterwards, the New English Art Club invited him to submit one or two of his paintings for a forthcoming exhibition, either under his own name or a nom de brosse (artist’s pseudonym). The Club had been founded some thirty years previously by artists who had fallen under the spell of Impressionism, as he so obviously had himself.

If close friends such as the Laverys, Desboroughs, and Montagus provided much-needed comfort, so too did his broader network of friends. Like most men of his class, generation, and profession, he already belonged to a club, indeed to many, that catered to the capital’s elite: The Turf, The Bath, the Royal Automobile, the National Liberal, and the Athenaeum all counted him as a member. But before the war he had also created one of his own crafted to his individual taste. Along with Lloyd George, F. E. and others, he had established The Other Club, a dining group that met at the Savoy Hotel on the Strand for dinner at 8.15 prompt every other Thursday while Parliament was sitting. This was now a fixed date in his social calendar. With its regular meetings and familiar faces, it provided a reassuring reminder that in the face of his personal grief the world still revolved on its familiar axis.

The Other Club’s members were restricted to fifty in number divided equally between parliamentarians from both major parties and a selection of men (all members were male) from the worlds of the arts, literature, entertainment, and the press. He could regularly count on seeing such friendly faces at the table as those of Lord (George) Riddell and Jim Garvin from the world of journalism, as well as fellow politicians of different colours such as the fiery-tempered Irish peer Lord Winterton – frequently a political thorn in his side on Irish questions – and the MP Dudley Ward. Eddie Marsh and Archie Sinclair were also members. One of its earliest recruits was Anthony Hope, the author and staunch Liberal whose 1894 best-selling novel of Ruritanian derring-do, The Prisoner of Zenda, had inspired his own single venture into fiction with his novel Savrola, a Byronic romance in which the hero is a barely disguised portrait of himself, at least as he had liked to imagine it in his mid-twenties. Hope was a keen attendee, liked Churchill, and believed his exploits at Antwerp had been ‘really splendid’. The club has been described as ‘the most enduring monument to the F. E.-Winston friendship’, a description that does a slight injustice to the significant inaugural role played by Lloyd George, but is broadly true. Churchill along with Birkenhead was clearly the animating force, and by 1921 the club’s day-to-day running was largely in the hands of his cousin Freddie.5

Churchill also kept his pen busy this autumn by working assiduously on The World Crisis. In early November he sent the first three chapters of Volume One to his publisher Thornton Butterworth, requesting they be set up in galley proofs and estimated that the final text would be 100,000 words long, plus thirty or forty pages of appendices. He liked to have galley proofs in front of him so he could work on improving his text and send them out for comments and critiques to friends and experts. It was an expensive way to work, as each new set of proofs had to be set and reset, but it was one that he always followed.6

*

Parliament resumed sitting in mid-October. As the autumn nights drew in, his social calendar included dinners alongside Philip Sassoon at Eresby House with the Earl and Countess of Ancaster, and at the Laverys with Duff and Diana Cooper. Towards the end of November he and Clementine were also guests at a dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel hosted by Lord and Lady Beaverbrook.

The owner of the Daily Express and Sunday Express had met him before the war when he was simply Max Aitken, a newly arrived business tycoon from Canada, and had been dazzled by his brilliance. Given a peerage by Lloyd George for his wartime services – but still known as Max by his friends – the millionaire press lord knew the value of the carefully chosen gift. Over the summer he had sent Churchill the latest volume of the Dictionary of National Biography, an essential item for any writer’s library. ‘Believe me, dear Max,’ he responded, ‘I value much more the spirit of regard of which it is a token. I think our friendship is not only very pleasant, but fruitful both in council and in action . . . I never forget,’ he added with genuine feeling, ‘the encouragement and help you gave me in 1916 [over Gallipoli] when I had such distracting political and personal issues to cope with.’

Other familiar faces greeted him around the table. Beaverbrook liked to entertain and preferred a round table to a long one to encourage conversation and also did away with the dismal English custom of dismissing females from the table after meals. Birkenhead was there with his wife, and so were Edwin and Venetia Montagu, as well as the ubiquitous Philip Sassoon. A much younger couple in their late twenties were also present. The Honourable Richard Norton was the son and heir to the fifth Lord Grantley. A captain in the Scots Guards with a penchant for fast cars, he had been wounded during the war and ahead of him beckoned a career in merchant banking and film production. His wife Jean was the daughter of a Scottish baronet and Brigadier-General and as a society beauty she was part of the Prince of Wales’ glamorous social set. Prince Louis Mountbatten was godfather to their one-year-old daughter. Beaverbrook was an unashamed philanderer and shortly afterwards took Norton’s wife as his mistress and she became his constant companion at social events until her death in 1945. Towards the extra-marital affairs of his close friends Churchill was as open-minded as he was to homosexuality. Here he differed from Clementine, who strongly disapproved of adultery. She already disliked Beaverbrook and Birkenhead – both Conservatives – for the political influence she feared they had on her husband. Their sexual misdemeanours only made matters worse. Once, when she learned that Winston had invited Beaverbrook for a lunch party, she wrote him a sharp letter of admonition. ‘Please do not allow any very low conversation before the Children. I don’t necessarily mean “improper”, but Lord B does manage to defile any subject he touches, & I hope the relationship between him & Mrs. Norton will not be apparent to Randolph and Diana’s inquisitive marmoset-like eyes and ears.’ It was no wonder that, more than once, she begged her husband to lock up or burn her letters.7

Beaverbrook had added some spice to the evening by inviting a sprinkling of celebrities. From his wide and diverse circle of friends, he had picked the novelist and playwright Arnold Bennett, one of the highest-paid literary journalists in England, as well as a fellow member of The Other Club. A devotee of the Riviera and its grand hotels, the fifty-four-year-old Bennett had spent the previous summer sailing round the Mediterranean in his private yacht with its crew of eight. Thanks to Beaverbrook’s post as Lloyd George’s wartime Minister of Information, he had been appointed Director of Propaganda to France and become a close friend to the press magnate. Bennett’s talk that night might have lacked sparkle. Just hours before, his wife had told him she wanted a separation. As he had been expecting this for some time, however, Beaverbrook’s champagne might have given him cause to celebrate rather than drown his sorrows.

But the undoubted main celebrity of the evening was a youthful star of the silver screen. Beaverbrook controlled Britain’s largest chain of cinemas, and it was a fellow Canadian who joined Churchill and others round the table. Aged twenty-nine, the Toronto-born and newly minted American citizen Mary Pickford was the undisputed queen of the silent film, her Hollywood contracts worth millions. In her latest film, Little Lord Fauntleroy, she had masterfully played the role of both mother and son. She was slim, petite, and undoubtedly pretty. Across the Atlantic she was dubbed ‘America’s Sweetheart’ and ‘the Girl with the Curls’. Her husband, seated beside her, matched that fame. Their marriage the year before had been the first movie-star celebrity wedding. In London for the honeymoon, they had been mobbed by enthusiastic crowds and only the quick-witted response of her husband hoisting her onto his shoulders as they stepped from their Rolls-Royce had saved her from serious injury by their fans. But that was a role natural to Douglas Fairbanks. His appearance in The Mask of Zorro had already marked him out as a pioneer of the Hollywood swashbuckler role. Along with Charlie Chaplin, both Pickford and Fairbanks had toured the United States during the war promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds to wild success.

What kind of performance this Hollywood royalty couple put on for Churchill is unclear. But the evening surely piqued further his powerful fascination with the world of the moving image, one already made evident in his 1898 description of the Battle of Omdurman as flickering before his eyes ‘exactly like a cinematographic film’. When the press magnate William Randolph Hearst later gave him a tour of Hollywood studios, he pronounced it ‘a strange and amazing world . . . It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre magnified a thousandfold.’ Soon after that, he tried writing a screenplay of his own entitled The Reign of George V, which he described to his film producer friend Alexander Korda as ‘an imperial film embodying the sentiments, anxieties and achievements of the British people all over the world’. Unlike many of his more conventionally minded political colleagues, he eagerly grasped the propaganda power of film, and especially so after the arrival of the talkies. ‘With the pregnant word, illustrated by the compelling picture,’ he told Korda, ‘it will be possible to bring home to a vast audience the basic truths about many questions of public importance.’ He saw films as essentially celluloid versions of great public speeches.8

His friendship with Max, which was to last a lifetime, always blew hot and cold. Yet at the very end of his life Beaverbrook had generous and revealing words to say about Churchill: ‘[He] is essentially a man without rancour. He has been accused of being bad-tempered. It isn’t true. He could get very emotional, but after bitterly criticizing you he had a habit of touching you, of putting his hand on your hand . . . as if to say his real feelings for you were not changed. A wonderful display of humanity.’⁹

*

There was little to comfort him, however, in his ministerial duties dealing with regular Colonial Office affairs. Shortly after returning from Dundee, he spoke grandly at the inaugural dinner of the Gold Coast Service Club at the Connaught Rooms in London about the vast potential of British colonies around the world. ‘Here,’ he pronounced, ‘are assets in which you could sink two hundred million pounds in the next ten years with the certainty of getting back every penny you invested.’ Yet there lay the insuperable problem – who would take the risk? Already this year he had protested to Lloyd George that the Treasury was starving his Colonial Office budget. But he was certainly not ready to have a row in Cabinet over the issue, especially given his own cost-cutting policies in Iraq. Once again, it was a matter of ‘Imperialism-lite’.

Over Africa he gave obligatory ministerial attention to Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. Just the year before, Kenya had become a separate colony with its own governor, and controversy swirled around the part that immigrant Indians should be permitted to play in its affairs. Some 30,000 Indian indentured labourers had worked (and 2,500 had died) to build the Uganda Railway that crossed over 600 miles of Kenyan territory from the sea to Lake Victoria and the Ugandan border. After its completion many chose to settle with their families and by 1921 their demands for greater participation in the colonial legislature could no longer be ignored. Racial tensions were also rising.

He knew Kenya at first hand. As Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies over a decade before he had made an official visit there in company with Eddie Marsh. Disembarking from their ship at Mombasa, he had taken the Uganda Railway into the interior. ‘One of the most romantic and wonderful railways in the world,’ he had described it with youthful imperial fervour, ‘a sure, swift road along which the white man and all that he brings with him for good or ill, may penetrate into the heart of Africa . . . one slender thread of scientific civilization, order, authority, and arrangement, drawn across the primeval chaos of the world’. Nairobi, the colony’s capital, was at the time little more than an overgrown assembly depot for the railway with a population of about 500 Europeans, 3,000 Indians, and 10,000 Africans. His stay there was long enough for him to grasp the toxic racial and other complexities that now faced him as Colonial Secretary. ‘There are already in miniature,’ he wrote, ‘all the elements of keen political and racial discord, all the materials for hot and acrimonious debate. The white man versus the black; the Indian versus both; the settler as against the planter; the town contrasted with the country . . . all these different points of view, naturally arising, honestly adopted, tenaciously held, and not yet reconciled into any harmonious general conception, confront the visitor in perplexing display. Nor will he be wise,’ he concluded, ‘to choose his part with any hurry.’10

He was no more inclined now than before to hasten to judgement about Kenya’s affairs. While he urged greater partnership between the white colonists and Indians, including a ban on residential segregation in urban areas and the creation of a common electoral role that included both Indians and Europeans, he was unwilling to cause a confrontation. He even described the Indians as ‘mainly of a very low class of coolie’, and insisted that the reservation of the Kenyan Highlands for white settlers was ‘an agreed fact’ that could not be changed. This prompted a bitter row with his more liberal-minded friend Edwin Montagu. ‘How angry you make me,’ complained the Secretary of State for India. Still, as in other cases, political disagreement failed to dent a personal friendship and a bare three weeks later he was enjoying his Guy Fawkes evening at Montagu’s home.¹¹

Elsewhere in Africa, Jan Smuts was dreaming of absorbing Southern Rhodesia into the Union of South Africa. But the settlers demanded autonomy and in September Churchill agreed to a referendum, although he personally preferred the Smuts option. Here, too, he was not prepared to raise the ire of local whites and kept officially neutral. In the event, union was rejected and Southern Rhodesia became an independent Crown Colony. In both cases he pursued an essentially ‘hands-off’ policy that revealed once more the essentially pragmatic nature of his imperial commitment. In any case, in his own mind Colonial Office affairs remained distinctly second rank to those of the Foreign Office. In speaking to the Overseas Bankers’ Association at Claridge’s Hotel in late November, he made his standard encomium on the potential of the British Empire. Yet his simultaneous and powerful call for reconciliation between Germany and France made clear that his urgent concern was Europe and relations between Britain’s neighbours across the Channel. That same month, Curzon complained yet again about Churchill’s meddling in Foreign Office affairs but he would hear none of it. ‘There is absolutely no comparison between the issues in Foreign affairs and . . . those which arise in ordinary departments,’ he wrote in an acerbic minute to the Foreign Secretary. ‘I have never known Foreign Affairs treated as if they were merely a departmental matter.’ On second thoughts he decided not to send it. But his feelings never changed. He remained the same Winston Churchill who before the war had prompted Earl Grey of Fallodon, the Foreign Secretary, to remark wearily that ‘Winston, very soon, will become incapable from sheer activity of mind of being anything in Cabinet but Prime Minister.’12

*

Nor did the Middle East offer much comfort. November saw the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which sparked violence in Jerusalem between Arabs and Jews and caused several deaths. Since his frustrating encounter in August with the Arab delegates in London, he had struggled to chart a path forward that would placate both sides. He also remained heavily committed to cutting the costs of maintaining the British garrison in Palestine, just as he was doing in Iraq. One idea he floated was to transfer the Black and Tans from Ireland as soon as they could be spared. In mid-November he repeated his familiar mantra to the head of his Middle East Department: ‘Do please realize that everything else that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense.’13

In wrestling to find a middle ground, he angered both Zionists and Arabs. He pleased the former by approving an ambitious hydro-electric scheme for Palestine known as the Rutenberg Plan after the Ukrainian Jewish immigrant entrepreneur promoting it, but he simultaneously angered Chaim Weizmann by refusing to endorse the claim that Palestine would become ‘as Jewish as England is English’. Once again, he tried to persuade Arabs and Jews to sort out their own differences, and arranged a joint conference that he would chair at the Colonial Office on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 November. But the day before, at a lunch given by the Arab delegation, Lord Sydenham of Combe, a former Governor of Bombay, delivered a fiery anti-Zionist speech and Churchill promptly cancelled the meeting using the excuse that he was unwell. He then delegated two subsequent meetings with Weizmann at the Colonial Office to senior officials. Richard Meinertzhagen was scathing. ‘Winston is prepared to relegate Zionism to the same policy of drift which has characterized the policy of the Government since the Armistice,’ he fulminated in his diary.¹⁴ This was typically intemperate, and inaccurate. Churchill was struggling with currents of history that no single person could halt or divert, and he was tiring of dealing with opponents who appeared unwilling to compromise.

*

In addition to his private tragedies, there remained public griefs and memories of war to assuage. As Chairman of the English-Speaking Union, he soon had a front-row seat in Westminster Abbey at a ceremony that was rich in symbolism. Preparations for the Washington Conference were well advanced and the British delegation was readying to cross the Atlantic. Watched by large crowds that had been assembling for hours, shortly before eleven o’clock on the morning of Monday 17 October General John (‘Black Jack’) Pershing, the man who had commanded American troops on the Western Front, stepped out of his carriage in front of the Abbey. A band struck up ‘The Stars and Stripes’. By the door stood the Dean of Westminster, Lloyd George, and the Duke of Connaught representing the King. Inside, American soldiers and sailors in their khaki and blue lined the nave. Near its west end, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was surrounded with wreaths. A Union Jack lay at its foot. The band of the Scots Guard began to play a selection of classical and modern music. The packed congregation watched as a succession of dignitaries filed into the Abbey.

Churchill was one of the first to arrive. He walked slowly the length of the nave and took his seat. The choir and the clergy in their scarlet cassocks assembled around the Tomb. Pershing, along with the American ambassador, Lloyd George, and other government ministers including Freddie Guest as Secretary of State for Air and Lord Lee of Fareham, the donor to the nation of the American-funded Chequers, joined them.

The American ambassador spoke first. By Act of Congress, he announced, President Harding had been authorized to bestow the Medal of Honour, the highest military award that could be granted by the government of the United States, upon Britain’s Unknown Warrior. It was not just a military tribute, he declared, it was also a message of fraternity from the American people to the people of the United Kingdom. He was followed by Pershing. In a crisp and clear voice, the general lauded the soldier in his tomb as the latest in the long line of men and women already lying within the Abbey who had given their lives and service to Great Britain. ‘His was ever the courage of right,’ he declared, ‘the confidence of justice.’ After solemnly laying the medal with its long ribbon of watered blue silk on the tomb’s grey stone, he stepped one pace back and gave a salute. The Dean also spoke a few words. ‘Saxon and Norman, Plantagenet and Tudor’ also lay in the Abbey, he reminded the congregation, and were part of the Anglo-American heritage. Then came the turn of Lloyd George to thank the American people for their gesture. ‘The Empire to its remotest corners will not miss the deep significance of this deed,’ he pronounced. ‘We feel we are taking part in no idle pageant . . . the homage laid today on this grave will remain as an emblem of a common sacrifice for a common purpose. It will be a reminder, not only for this generation but generations to come, that the fundamental aim of these two democracies are the same. These two mighty peoples,’ concluded the man who had so recently dominated the Paris Peace Conference, ‘who were comrades in the Great War have resolved to remain comrades to guarantee a great peace.’

Churchill then joined in The Lord’s Prayer, and the choir sang the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. From the far end of the Abbey the ‘Last Post’ sounded its melancholy notes. The ceremony closed with the singing, to the same tune, of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘My Country ’tis of Thee’ – the British and American National Anthems. Many of the congregation joined in. General Pershing and the Duke of Connaught shared an Order of Service, and the King later sent a telegram to President Harding announcing that he would confer Britain’s equivalent military medal, the Victoria Cross, on America’s Unknown Warrior, who was to be ceremoniously interred at Arlington National Cemetery on the approaching Armistice Day.15

Churchill placed great store on ceremony and political theatre. Music and ritual moved him deeply. He had an instinctive feel for the potency of symbolism as a lubricant of power. Twenty years later he was to draw on his experience of this October day as he master-minded a ceremony of his own in the cause of Anglo-American relations. In August 1941 he braved the U-boat infested North Atlantic for his first face-to-face meeting as prime minister with President Franklin D. Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland. Their summit climaxed with a Sunday morning service on the deck of the British battleship, which he had carefully rehearsed beforehand. Seated side by side in the centre of a hollow square, and with ranks of British and American sailors on each side and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes draped together on the pulpit, he and Roosevelt sang together the hymns they had selected. ‘If nothing else had happened here,’ pronounced the American President, ‘the joint service would have cemented us.’¹⁶

*

The Westminster Abbey service was not the last of the year’s events to bring back memories of the scars of war. Shortly afterwards, he was the guest at the annual dinner of the Tanks Corps to celebrate the Battle of Cambrai fought on the Western Front four years before, when British tanks had accomplished a significant breakthrough at relatively little cost in lives. He had strongly pushed for their use. Soon, in The World Crisis, he would be accusing ‘without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost’. Instead, more and better use of tanks and other mechanized weapons should have been used. ‘If only the Generals,’ he lamented, ‘had not been content to fight machine gun bullets with breasts of gallant men, and think that was waging war.’ His pen was at work not just to vindicate his own wartime years. He was also setting out his stall as an expert on tactics and strategy for the future.17

*

The day of remembrance for the war dead, 11 November, was another ritual that never failed to stir his emotions, and this year witnessed the first official wearing of red poppies to recall the fields of Flanders. That evening he was due to chair the Armistice Day dinner of the English-Speaking Union, where it would officially welcome the new American ambassador to London. But only a few minutes beforehand he was urgently summoned by Lloyd George to a Cabinet meeting about Ireland and his speech was given instead by Freddie Guest. ‘The one and only thing that mattered today was the fervent co-operation between the great English races,’ his cousin told an audience that included the Canadian High Commissioner as well as the senior members of the United States’ embassy. ‘As long as they were united they need not fear any foes . . . If they were divided, the road lay open to mischief and intrigue, through which they alone would not suffer, but the whole world.’¹⁸

Churchill’s Anglo-American enthusiasms were heartfelt and sincere. He liked Americans, was excited by the energy and dynamism he had encountered personally in the United States, and he believed that the country represented the essential spirit of the twentieth century. The fact that his mother and maternal aunts were all American was important in his life. But the Churchill family was to have an American future, as well as a past. It was more than fitting that it was Freddie Guest who spoke for him to the English-Speaking Union. For Freddie was not just married to an American: all his children were American citizens, having been born in the United States. In 1921 his second son Raymond was just fourteen years old. Twenty years later he was to head the naval section of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services – the forerunner of the CIA – in London. Shortly after that, he was elected a senator for Virginia and was subsequently appointed the US ambassador to Ireland – the very country whose future Churchill was helping determine when Raymond’s father Freddie stepped into his shoes for this Armistice Day dinner. If the British and Americans are often described metaphorically as cousins, in Churchill’s case it was literally true.

*

In the United States, the press continued to keep an eye on the progress of Jennie Jerome’s elder son. Shortly after Armistice Day the New York World reported on the final state of Lady Randolph’s marriage settlement to the benefit of both him and his brother. In the eyes of the Washington Post, this carried more than financial gain for Churchill. Under the headline, ‘Churchill Made Independent’, a columnist noted that combined with his earlier inheritance that year, his income now freed him from reliance on his official salary. This was noteworthy for one simple reason. ‘Private means,’ it declared, ‘are well-nigh indispensable to public life in Britain.’ It seemed self-evident across the Atlantic by the end of 1921 that Churchill could now find his own pathway through the dark thickets of British politics. Clearly, he was someone to keep an eye on.19