FLEETING SHADOWS
The year had begun with music-hall songs at Lympne. But when Churchill motored down to Chequers the week before Christmas it was to find Lloyd George surrounded by Free Church ministers and a choir solemnly singing Welsh hymns. This was no surprise. Yet for the man accompanying him to the prime minister’s English country-house retreat, it was a startling and novel experience.1
Boris Savinkov had erupted back into Churchill’s life a few days earlier, a reminder that while the Middle East and Ireland had dominated most of his year the future of Russia under the Bolsheviks still ranked high on his personal if not official agenda. The chain-smoking anti-Bolshevik conspirator had spent most of the year in Warsaw plotting guerrilla uprisings in Russia. Known as the ‘Greens’ to distinguish them from the Reds and the Whites, they blew up trains, assassinated Bolsheviks, and ambushed Red Army patrols. Russia was still in chaos after the Civil War, mired in famine and misery which Churchill sensed could yet stoke the overthrow of Lenin. Still captivated by Savinkov’s charisma, he compared the Greens positively to Sinn Fein and described them as waging ‘a sort of Robin Hood warfare’. Thanks to pressure from Moscow, Savinkov had been expelled from Warsaw in September and had eventually taken refuge in Paris.
Meanwhile Churchill had met privately in London with Sidney Reilly to discuss Savinkov’s schemes. While SIS had now severed its official links with the ‘Ace of Spies’, Desmond Morton had kept in touch with him. ‘There is no doubt that Reilly is a political intriguer of no mean class,’ he told a colleague, ‘. . . he is at the moment Boris Savinkoff’s right-hand man. In fact, some people might almost say he is Boris Savinkoff.’ In a lengthy report written for Churchill, Reilly described the guerrilla leader as ‘a man of courage, commanding personality, resolution, optimism, [and] shrewd and patient’, and rated as high the chances of a general uprising that would produce a more moderate government in Moscow. Early in November, Edward Spears, now one of Reilly’s business partners, met privately with Archie Sinclair to discuss his plans.2
Savinkov liked to dramatize and yearned to play the great leader. By this time he had convinced himself that Lenin’s New Economic Policy meant that the Bolsheviks were desperate to widen their basis of support. Perhaps, as Reilly had suggested, they might make concessions to opponents of the regime – possibly with a place in the leadership for Savinkov himself. With this in mind, Reilly planned to meet in London with Leonid Krassin, with whom he had briefly worked during the Social Revolutionary terrorist campaign against the Tsar and who was one of the few top Bolsheviks that he respected.
But there was a problem. The Foreign Office was firmly opposed to Savinkov’s visit. Since the signing of the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty that spring, it was standing firm on a policy of non-interference in Soviet affairs while it pondered the longer-term issue of establishing formal diplomatic relations with Moscow. Savinkov with his guerrilla forces was a disruptive factor in these calculations. Besides, as the senior Foreign Office official Sir Eyre Crowe noted scathingly, Savinkov was ‘most unreliable and crooked’. So he was refused a visa.
Churchill, however, was setting great store on meeting him in person. The journalist Herbert Sidebotham astutely described Churchill at this time as ‘not so much a member of the Government as an independent principality’. He might also have added that he often took an almost schoolboyish delight in playing cloak and dagger. ‘In the high ranges of Secret Service work,’ Churchill once wrote, ‘the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama.’ Not for the first time he ignored the Foreign Office, pulled his personal intelligence strings, and was able to get Savinkov a visa issued by the Passport Control Office in Paris.3
Once in London, Savinkov stayed at Reilly’s flat and met privately with Krassin over dinner at a private home. Ever the conspirator, he never revealed his host’s name but the most likely candidate was Edward Spears. What was agreed remains uncertain. Savinkov subsequently claimed that an eager Krassin had offered him a post in the Soviet government and that he agreed to take it, but only on three conditions: the abolition of the Cheka; the recognition of individual property rights; and free elections. Hardly was the meeting over than Churchill sent Archie Sinclair to discover what had happened and breakfast was arranged for the next morning. When Savinkov arrived at Sinclair’s home it was to find Churchill already seated at the table, hungry for the details. After listening carefully to his account of the meeting with Krassin, he said that the conditions would be quite acceptable to the British government but expressed his doubt that the Bolsheviks would ever agree. The next day, this time over tea at Sussex Square, Savinkov also met Birkenhead who agreed that any recognition of the Soviets had to be wholly conditional on their acceptance of Savinkov’s three points.4
These discreet private meetings over, Lloyd George had to be brought into the picture, so Churchill and Savinkov motored down together to see him at Chequers and found him with his Welsh choir. For a while they listened politely before the Russian put his case to him. Any official dealings with Moscow, he pleaded, should be on the stringent political conditions agreed by him, Birkenhead, and Churchill.
Lloyd George had his own plans in mind for Russia and believed that the quickest route to post-war recovery was through the rapid economic and political reintegration of Russia into Europe. ‘The way to help Russia and Europe and Britain is by trade,’ he flatly declared. He was now planning a major European conference for the spring to which the Bolsheviks would be invited. But for this he needed support from France, and he had invited its prime minister, Aristide Briand, for talks in London the next day. Privately, Lloyd George dismissed Churchill’s favourite Russian as a ‘seductive nihilist’. But the views that Savinkov expressed at Chequers, at least as the prime minister presented them, proved tactically highly convenient in persuading a deeply reluctant Briand to enter into talks with Moscow. Many counter-revolutionaries predicted that Bolshevism was on the verge of collapse, Lloyd George said. But those who ‘waited for dead men’s shoes were apt to find themselves down at heel’, and none of them were men of action who could be relied on. By contrast, he told Briand, at Chequers Savinkov had revealed himself as the only one of any strength. ‘The rest were sheep,’ he pronounced, whereas Savinkov ‘had blown up half a dozen governments and killed a Prime Minister. He was a man of action and great determination, which was plain from his personal appearance.’ This made it all the more significant that he had now urged the Allies to talk to Lenin and Trotsky on the grounds that they had become ‘anti-revolutionary and were fighting their own extremist wing’. It was even Savinkov’s view that it would be possible to put an end to the Bolsheviks. ‘If Lenin and Trotsky knew that they had Western Europe behind them,’ Savinkov had told him, ‘they would defy the extremists.’
As he explained them to Briand, Lloyd George’s interpretation of Savinkov’s views accorded conveniently with his own, which even included seeing Krassin ‘as a kind of Sir Eric Geddes, a businessman not a politician’. This was consistent with what he also told Savinkov at Chequers: that people had been predicting the collapse of Bolshevism for years but that revolutions, like diseases, ran their course. The Bolsheviks would either grow more responsible or fall out amongst themselves, as in the French Revolution, and thus open the way for more moderate leaders. Lloyd George’s arguments for talking with the Bolsheviks clearly had some effect on Briand, and they agreed to meet for further talks in Cannes early in the New Year.
Only after the Chequers meeting did Churchill bother to inform Curzon about the Russian’s visit. In a ‘Secret and Personal’ letter he wrote to the Foreign Secretary on Christmas Eve, he told him that he had ‘been informed in great secrecy’ that Krassin had approached Savinkov and they had met in London. This was disingenuous to say the least. Not only did he omit his own role in events, but by presenting Krassin as the instigator he suggested that Moscow was more eager for talks than in reality it was. Churchill’s main goal was to ensure that in any official discussions about aid to Russia, or even the diplomatic recognition to which he remained firmly opposed, the hardest possible bargain should be struck. Aid without the strings as being demanded by Savinkov would be both wrong and foolish. ‘Yet that is what I am afraid we may be led into doing if we slide helplessly into a reconstruction policy for Russia without making a good bargain for its unfortunate people,’ he told the Foreign Secretary. ‘If I may repeat a homely simile I have used before . . . “we want to nourish the dog and not the tapeworm that is killing the dog”.’ Somewhat cheekily, he added a PS: ‘I presume you know of Savinkoff’s lunch at Chequers & how well he got on with the P.M?’
Nothing of this episode endeared Churchill to the Foreign Office. It merely reinforced their view that he was something of a troublesome maverick. ‘[He] has notoriously relied on the advice concerning Russia of persons having no authority, and no direct connections with the centre of Russian affairs,’ wrote an irritated Sir Eyre Crowe, ‘I fear this is happening once again with Savinkov.’ Nothing in the future was to change Churchill’s preference for seeking out his own sources of intelligence to weigh against those of professional experts. As for both Savinkov and Reilly, shortly afterwards they were separately lured back to Moscow by a bogus anti-Bolshevik Front run by the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB, and were soon conveniently dead.5 Later, when his secret dealings with them became an inconvenient memory, he and Desmond Morton ensured that references to them were largely excised from his papers; Reilly’s name does not even appear in the relevant volume of the official biography. Alongside the fugitive references to Clare Sheridan, Churchill’s private contacts with the anti-Bolsheviks have left only ghostly traces in the record, remnants of what had once been a consuming passion that was already losing its heat.6
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In the meantime, thanks to his hard-working staff, he dealt with the myriad of other small requests that land routinely on ministers’ desks. Would he, pleaded Vera Weizmann, be the patron of a fund-raising concert for the London-based Women’s International Zionist Organiza-tion at which many well-known artists had already promised to appear? Reminding him that since the Balfour Declaration, ‘the gates of the country have been thrown open to those Jews who wish to return to their ancient homeland’, she went on to explain that ‘Most of the immigrants are economically ruined, having come from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. Our organisation makes it a duty to look after the welfare of these women and children on their arrival in Palestine.’ Their specific aim was to build a reception hostel for which they had already purchased the land. On behalf of his boss, Eddie Marsh replied – a bit too hurriedly, as he addressed Vera as ‘Sir’ – that Churchill would gladly act as patron for the concert ‘on the understanding that it is purely honorary’.7 There also came a request for money from the Rector of Ardelinis Church in Carnlough, County Antrim, reminding him that Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest from whom he had inherited Garron Towers had always been a benefactor of the Parish. Aware of his new duties as the local squire, he instructed his bankers to make sure that £10 for the Parochial Sustentation Fund and a further £2 for the Sunday School Prize Fund be sent. As a reminder of the fast-approaching Christmas holidays he also wrote an open appeal to shoppers urging them to do their gift-buying as early as possible and pointing out that the Early Closing Association, of which he was President, had successfully lobbied the government to make Tuesday 27 December an additional Bank Holiday. He ended by pressing the railway companies to lay on extra trains with cheap fares for the ‘millions of toilers’ so that they might purchase their presents early, thus ensuring that ‘there will be a good prospect of a happy Christmas for every one to bring this anxious and strenuous year to a satisfactory close’.8
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It certainly closed well for him politically. After the signing of the Irish agreement both Houses of Parliament had to approve it. Two days of heated debate took place. In the Lords, Curzon and Birkenhead defended it against bitter attacks by Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists. In the Commons, with Sir John Lavery sitting in the gallery sketching the historic scene below, Churchill followed Lloyd George in putting the government’s case. By this time de Valera had come out strongly against the treaty, as had a vocal minority on the Tory back benches. Churchill set out to demolish their objections and above all to reassure the mass of traditionally pro-Ulster Unionist MPs of the treaty’s merits. He lavishly flattered Ulster’s supporters and especially Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s prime minister, for their continued allegiance to the Crown, their willingness to seek peace, and for not blocking developments in the south. ‘Our debt to Ulster is great,’ he said. So far as the Irish Free State was concerned, he stressed its similarity to other independent Dominions that gave allegiance to the Crown and offered no threat to Britain. He admitted that the treaty was a compromise but that it was no surrender by an enfeebled Britain – a nation that, after all, had just emerged victorious from the war. On the contrary, it was ‘a manifestation of British genius’ that would echo throughout the Empire by removing a bitter grievance. ‘Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come?’ he asked. ‘It is a small, poor, sparsely populated island, lapped about by British sea power, accessible on every side, without iron or coal. How is it that she sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness?’ Here he resorted to words he had used during his speech to the Canada Club. ‘Ireland is not a daughter state. She is a parent nation . . . They are intermingled with the whole life of the Empire, and have interests in every part of the Empire wherever the English language is spoken, especially in those new countries with whom we have to look forward to the greatest friendship . . . and where the Irish canker has been at work.’ In Canada, the Toronto Globe had already expressed the same point. ‘It looks as though the vile spirit which has infected Anglo-Irish relations for centuries will be exorcised at last,’ it declared, while the Montreal Star rejoiced that the news of peace in Ireland ‘will warm more hearts and set more pulses beating than even the splendid forward step taken toward world peace at Washington’.9
Churchill continued. Did complaints against the treaty justify once again laying Ireland ‘waste to the scourge of war?’ he asked rhetorically. Clearly it was high time that the main body of Irish and British opinion asserted its determination to put a stop to ‘these fanatical quarrels’. Cartoonists relished portraying Churchill as a warmonger. But the tone he now struck was that of a committed, even militant, peacemaker and defender of the common people. After referring to Carson’s attacks on Curzon and de Valera’s on Collins, he went on to say:
Are we not getting a little tired of all this? These absolutely sincere, consistent, unswerving gentlemen, faithful in all circumstances to their implacable quarrels, seek to mount their respective national war horses, in person or by proxy, and to drive at full tilt at one another, shattering and splintering down the lists, to the indescribable misery of the common people, and to the utter confusion of our Imperial affairs.
The next day, in a speech to the English-Speaking Union, he widened his focus to bring the United States once more into the picture. By now the Washington Conference had already oiled significant points of friction in Anglo-American naval relations. Yet Ireland remained. ‘Who shall say,’ he asked, ‘how much we have suffered in our relations with the United States by the unceasing hostility of the Irish Americans, men who have emigrated from their country, carrying hatred of this island and its institutions all over the world?’ He could not foretell the future, he told his audience in Westminster’s Central Hall. ‘But this I will say. If the hopes . . . which we are entitled to hold of a satisfactory adjustment of the relations of this country with Ireland, of a union of hearts between the people of Great Britain and Ireland, if those fructify . . . then you will embark in the United States upon an era in which the work of the English-Speaking Union will find none of the obstacles which in the past have confronted the efforts to bring into closer harmony the political, social, and moral action of these two great communities.’10
Plaudits poured in for his speech. Austen Chamberlain told the King that the case for the treaty could not have been better put and had had ‘a profound effect on the House’. The Education Secretary H. A. L. Fisher wrote in his diary that ‘Winston makes one of his finest speeches in defence of the settlement’. For Freddie Guest, it was the best speech he had ever heard his cousin make. ‘Simplicity of style & fervor of advocacy won a genuine reception from all quarters,’ he told him. ‘Splendid, bless you.’ For The Sunday Times, too, he had excelled himself. The speech was ‘one of the best things he has done in this Parliament . . . Towards the end . . . Mr. Churchill attained a real eloquence, and it was noticeable that he reduced the malcontents to almost complete silence.’ For Hazel Lavery, listening intently from the gallery, it was ‘very long but excellent’.11
He had brilliantly made his case as a peacemaker for Ireland. A week later Lloyd George put him in charge of a special Cabinet Committee to arrange details of the handover of power in Dublin. With typical speed and energy, he took on the task by immediately pronouncing that British troops would be withdrawn from the Irish Free State as quickly as possible. ‘Ostentatious preparations to quit should be made everywhere,’ he instructed, and on the three consecutive days before Christmas he chaired his committee to work out the details. ‘I am full of hope and confidence about Ireland,’ he told the Prince of Wales. ‘I believe we are going to reap a rich reward all over the world and at home.’12
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Churchill spent Christmas Day with the family at home, and early the next morning left London by train with Lloyd George and Freddie Guest bound for Cannes and the prime minister’s meeting with Aristide Briand. The plan was for Clementine to join him later for a short Riviera break together. He was still working assiduously on The World Crisis and had recently consulted Foreign Office officials about the diplomatic manoeuvrings leading up to the outbreak of the war. As they rattled their way south through France, Lloyd George read two of the chapters and made some helpful suggestions. ‘I cannot help getting vy [sic] interested in the book,’ Churchill wrote to Clementine. ‘It is a gt [sic] chance to put my whole case in an agreeable form to an attentive audience.’ And, he added, the money would make them very comfortable.13
In Cannes he stayed with Adele, Lady Essex, working every morning and evening on the book and painting in the afternoons. In six days he wrote some 20,000 words. The more he wrote, the more he felt that he needed to do. The first volume was almost complete with just some ‘polishing’ left. When he sent it to the publisher, he would receive a hefty cheque. He also lifted weights every day to strengthen the elbow he had damaged during a polo accident to get it fit for action again. Predictably, he also succumbed to a temptation that rarely left him. The casino at Monte Carlo was only a short drive away, and he made several visits to gamble at its tables. ‘It excites me so much to play – foolish moth,’ he confessed to Clementine, pleading guiltily that he had earned many times what he had lost by the work he had done on his book.14
This was good news for the family finances. But back home Clementine was wandering through what she termed ‘a miserable valley’. Hardly had he stepped out of the door than one after the other the children and two of the maids started falling ill with the flu – fortunately not such a virulent or fatal strain as three years before. Bessie the maid was the first to succumb, followed quickly by Randolph. On the family doctor’s advice, Sarah and Diana were sent to stay with a relative but almost immediately Diana too fell ill and was returned to be nursed at home. Soon the nursery floor resembled a miniature hospital. Clementine called in professional nurses. But one of them proved unsuitable and only after a frantic search was she replaced. By the end of the day Clementine felt like a ‘squashed fly’, and the doctor ordered her to bed and prescribed a sleeping pill which she thankfully washed down with a glass of champagne. Twelve hours later, after a heavy night’s sleep, she wrote a lengthy letter to Winston with a detailed timetable of events. ‘Now what do you think of that?’ she asked. ‘In a small way it is like the beginning of the Great War.’
When she sent a telegram two days later reporting that everyone was on the mend, he replied that her letter was ‘Napoleonic’ and suggested that once she was recovered she should come out to the Riviera while he, back in London, would ‘mount guard in yr [sic] place over the kittens’. Meanwhile, he told her, he was sitting in his bed at night, ‘writing, dictating and sifting paper like the Editor of a ha’penny paper’. In his mind, he added, he could imagine her at the same time about to have dinner with a glass of champagne to keep up her spirits. Then, far beyond that, ‘in an outer circle of darkness ranges the wide colonial Empire and the Emerald Isle’. In ten days it would all be on top of him again. He also passed on a piece of family news. Cousin Freddie, who had by now separated from his wife Amy, was pursuing a young woman staying on the Riviera and had even mentioned marriage. ‘I replied sepulchrally,’ Churchill wrote, ‘that she was young enough to be his daughter, & that ten years would carry us both to the brink of the sixties.’15
His acute awareness of the passing of the years was also heightened by the recent death of yet another of his old acquaintances. As the Irish talks came to their climax in early December, Sir George Ritchie died at the home of his son near London. He had been taken ill in Dundee and travelled to London to consult a specialist, but collapsed with a fatal brain haemorrhage before he could keep the appointment. He was seventy-two. Churchill’s sense of loss was sincere and profound. ‘His kindness to me was boundless and unceasing,’ he wrote in a tribute, ‘he has been one of the best friends I have ever had and one of the most able and far-seeing counsellors.’ Ritchie’s wife had died earlier in the year, and he had unburdened his sorrows to Churchill in Dundee. ‘He was sustained and to some extent comforted by an absolute conviction of re-union in a happier world,’ he added, ‘and . . . spoke to me in the accents of one for whom death [was] simply a gateway beyond which all he had loved most on earth were awaiting in a serener form of existence.’ He himself had no such faith in an afterlife. What mattered was what one achieved in this life – and he was increasingly conscious of the relentless march of time.16
From his room at Lady Essex’s home he could see the Cap d’Ail Hotel, where he had stayed with his mother just ten months before. After dining on New Year’s Eve in Monte Carlo, the next morning he indulged in more melancholy reflections about the year that had passed. ‘What changes in a year!’ he lamented to Clementine. ‘What gaps! What a sense of fleeting shadows! But your sweet love & comradeship is a light that burns the stronger as our brief years pass.’17