TWO

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Brimming with ideas about his new position, Churchill returned to London from the Lympne estate after his talk with Lloyd George. Home was 2 Sussex Square, an elegant early Victorian house close to Hyde Park with two mews houses at the rear, into which he and Clementine had moved less than a year before. By now they had four children: Diana aged eleven, Randolph nine, Sarah six, and two-year-old Marigold. Randolph had just been packed off to a boarding school in Surrey and was already showing signs of the ill-mannered turbulence that would make the father–son relationship one of ‘storm and sunshine’. Diana and Sarah were attending nearby Notting Hill High School, while Marigold was mostly in the care of a nanny. Their parents had given them animal nicknames. Diana was ‘the Gold-cream Kitten’, Randolph ‘the Rabbit’ or sometimes ‘the Chum Bolly’, Sarah ‘the Bumblebee’ and Marigold ‘the Duckadilly’; collectively they were known as ‘the Kittens’. Churchill loved playing both indoor and outdoor games with his children, giving them the close parental affection lacking in his own childhood. He particularly doted on Marigold and indulged her wildly, letting her scamper round the dining table when he and Clementine had guests for lunch. She was just beginning to talk. Soon she was singing her own special tune, the hit song of the year, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’.1

The move to Sussex Square ended a period of chronic domestic chaos caused by Churchill’s political misfortunes and his own innate restlessness. More than once the burden of finding a home for the growing family and its required retinue of servants and nannies had threatened to overwhelm him. He survived thanks only to the willing help of friends and relations. After his forced departure from Admiralty House, his aunt Cornelia was the first to come to his aid. She had long been an ardent supporter of his political ambitions and a treasured confidante. His father’s sister, she had married Ivor Guest, a wealthy steel magnate who enjoyed the title of Baron Wimborne. Now a widow, she owned a town house at 21 Arlington Street lying just behind the Ritz Hotel with magnificent views over Green Park. It was there that the Churchills had briefly moved during the summer of 1915, along with Goonie and her two children, Peregrine and Johnny. But the stifling domesticity and noise of it all soon became too much for Churchill, and he fled to live with his mother in her nearby Georgian house on Mayfair’s Brook Street. Later, Clementine and the children moved back to Goonie’s Cromwell Road house, and here he rejoined them after returning from his soldiering on the Western Front.

But by now the dreams of owning a more peaceful, rural, retreat had taken hold in his mind and he was actively seeking a place outside London. ‘I wish to find a place to end my days amid trees and upon grass of my own,’ he confessed. Shortly afterwards he found the haven he sought, one that also removed his children safely away from the increasing hazards of German bombing attacks on London. Lullenden was a Tudor-built mansion house set in some 70 acres in Surrey, and over the next two years he spent as many weekends there as he could. During the week he ‘camped’ in various government-owned houses or flats in Whitehall near his Ministry of Munitions office. One of Lullenden’s advantages was its large barn, where his boisterous young children and their cousins could be housed away from the main house, leaving him in peace and quiet for his writing. It also gave him the opportunity to try his hand at farming, although not very successfully.

By the end of the war, however, this rural idyll was proving far too expensive to run and he and Clementine began the search for a house in central London. Once again, family and friends volunteered to help. Sir John and Lady Frances Horner were long-time friends of Clementine, and their country home at Mells in Somerset frequently lent her peaceful respite from the strains of everyday family life. They also owned a town house on Lower Berkeley Street in Mayfair, and for a while they let the Churchills live there. Then Aunt Cornelia again stepped forward and they moved briefly to another house she owned in Mayfair, just off Hanover Square. Finding a permanent home in London suitable for the whole family proved tricky. After a plan to rent the house in Pimlico owned by Clementine’s sister Nellie unexpectedly fell through, he was forced to move quickly and rented a small house on Dean Trench Street in Westminster, within easy walking distance of Parliament. As it was too small to house the children as well, they were left at Lullenden with the nannies while their parents visited them at weekends.

This could only be a makeshift arrangement. Unlike her husband, Clementine worried obsessively about money and knew that they were badly over-extended. Reluctantly, the hard decision was made to place Lullenden on the market, which added extra urgency to their search for a permanent home. Then in July 1919 Churchill impetuously made an offer on a large early Victorian house overlooking Hyde Park but typically failed to have an initial survey done. The bad news quickly emerged. It required extensive and costly repairs and he tried to back out of the contract. An unpleasant legal wrangle followed, from which he was rescued by his long-time friend and benefactor Sir Ernest Cassel, who purchased the lease. Meanwhile, they kept searching for the right house. Finally, they spotted 2 Sussex Square.

But this was not the end of the domestic upheaval. The house required extensive improvements and the renovations would not be finished for months. Having finally sold Lullenden to the wife of an old friend of Churchill’s from South Africa days, Sir Ian Hamilton, who had also commanded the British land forces at Gallipoli, they temporarily moved in with yet another family member.

Freddie Guest was the third of Aunt Cornelia’s five sons and Churchill’s favourite cousin. Close in age – they were only six months apart – they had been polo-playing friends and political allies for years, and were to remain so until Freddie’s premature death from cancer aged only sixty-one. Like Churchill, he had quit the Conservatives over the issue of free trade and was a Liberal Member of Parliament; for a short while before the war he had even served as his cousin’s private secretary. Thanks to a distinguished military career in both the Boer and First World Wars, he was usually referred to as ‘Captain Guest’, although to Churchill he was always just ‘Freddie’. Genial and sociable, he was sometimes wrongly dismissed as no more than a lightweight, a snob, and a playboy. His real importance lay behind the scenes. During the war he had headed the National War Aims Committee whose goal was ‘to resist insidious influences of an unpatriotic character’, for which it received money from the Secret Service to disseminate anti-socialist and anti-pacifist propaganda.2

More significant now was Freddie Guest’s role as the Coalition Liberals’ Chief Whip, a fierce promoter of Lloyd George, and a cunning and ruthless backroom fixer. This made him a fund of useful knowledge for Churchill about internal Coalition politics, and a useful go-between when Winston and the prime minister were at odds. Guest was also in charge of raising money for Lloyd George’s political fund. This relied mostly on the selling of honours, a murky business that was to erupt the next year into a major scandal that would see him fiercely denounced as Lloyd George’s ‘evil genius’. Already, during this first week of 1921, the Conservatives were bitterly complaining that he was unscrupulously poaching on their own financial terrain. Freddie was also a keen aviator and like his cousin fought fiercely for the institutional independence of the Royal Air Force. When Churchill moved to the Colonial Office, Lloyd George rewarded Guest for his loyalty by appointing him Secretary of State for Air. This made him more useful to Churchill than ever.³

Freddie’s marriage was as fragile as Churchill’s was secure. His wife was Amy Grant, a fellow aviation enthusiast and the daughter of Henry Phipps Jr, a wealthy Pittsburgh iron master and business partner of Andrew Carnegie, the great American steel magnate and philanthropist. Templeton, their house in Roehampton, to which the Churchills moved while waiting to occupy Sussex Square, lay some six miles from central London and had its own tennis court. For Clementine, an avid player, this was a delight. It was not the first time the two couples had ‘bunked’ together. After their marriage in 1908 the Churchills had stayed with Freddie and Amy while their first London house was being renovated, and at Templeton they now had several children between them. It was with relief, however, that Clementine was finally able to move out. She disliked what she termed ‘the Guest tribe’, and sometimes found Amy infuriating – ‘Suffragetty, Christian Sciency, and Yankee Doodle,’ she complained to her husband. Once, while the Churchills had been staying as guests before the war, Amy became so furious that Freddie was staying up late playing cards with Winston that she locked him out of their bedroom and ignored the resounding blows on the door delivered on Freddie’s behalf by his cousin – who, in ‘family solidarity’, was demanding to be let in. By 1921 the Guests’ marriage was fraying visibly at the edges. Before the year was out, Freddie was openly talking about marrying another woman.4

Once installed in his new home Churchill immediately began dreaming up even more improvements. These included the conversion of the two mews houses into a library and a painting studio for himself. Typically, this cost more than anticipated. But armoured with his aristocratic sense of entitlement, he rarely let expense be a barrier to his lifestyle. Visits to his bank manager were frequent, and he relied heavily on loans secured against his shareholdings or guaranteed by dependable friends such as Freddie. When the war ended he had debts of £16,000 (more than £600,000 in today’s terms). His post as Secretary of State for War gave him an annual salary of £5,000. Yet this fell short by at least £300 per month of what he was spending, and he was running a substantial overdraft. The sale of Lullenden had somewhat eased his position. But the building works at Sussex Square quickly overran the budget. Simultaneously, his portfolio of shares was losing its value thanks to a general weakening in the stock market. The only thing keeping his bank manager happy was the promised contracts on The World Crisis. When he returned to London from his New Year’s stay at Lympne, the debts were relentlessly piling up.⁵

*

Back at the War Office, he launched on a frenzied bout of action readying himself to take over the Colonial Office the following month. As its Under-Secretary for two years before the war, he had been mostly concerned with Britain’s colonies in Africa. But the institutional responsibilities added since that time had vastly expanded to take in territories across the Middle East formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire but handed over to Britain as mandates by the League of Nations. At their core lay Palestine and Mesopotamia – the latter consisting of the old Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, the former an ill-defined area both to the east and west of the River Jordan. Victory over the Turks had ended with a million British and Indian Army troops in occupation of territory that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean shore to the Persian Gulf. To a government pledged to cutting the budget back to peacetime levels, the cost of maintaining them was unacceptable. During his two years at the War Office, Churchill had already forced through massive reductions in expenditure. But with drastic cutbacks in personnel, how was the peace to be maintained amongst simmering ethnic and religious conflicts and political rivalries? How were these territories to be governed?

His first priority was to set up the new Middle East Department he had agreed on with Lloyd George. He consulted with civil service mandarins in Whitehall, fired off telegrams to Baghdad, and kept the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, informed since Mesopotamia had been a Foreign Office responsibility. Above all, Churchill made sure that Lloyd George remained on board. The immediate administrative details apart, the outline of a longer-term political solution was already forming in his head. To help him, he sought out the views of someone with his own unique and first-hand experience of the Arab world.

*

On the morning of Saturday 8 January 1921 a slight, fair-headed thirty-three-year-old man with piercing blue eyes and untidily dressed was ushered into Churchill’s office by Edward Marsh, the civil servant who had served as his private secretary through his various ministerial posts since 1905. With his lispy voice, upturned eyebrows, and quizzical regard, many people found Marsh a cold and distant figure, a marked contrast to the hot-blooded Churchill. But the two of them fitted comfortably together, and the fastidious Marsh – always known affectionately as ‘Eddie’ – had even survived the gruelling challenges of accompanying Churchill in his pre-war tour of East Africa. With a double first-class degree in Classics from Cambridge, he possessed strong literary interests and was a ruthless proofreader for many distinguished writers. As an intimate friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, who had died of sepsis en route to Gallipoli in 1915 aged twenty-seven, he was also his literary executor. Later this year, Marsh would present to the British Museum the manuscript of Brooke’s most celebrated sonnet, ‘The Soldier’, with its moving opening lines:

If I should die, think only this of me

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

Brooke had died in the Aegean and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.6

‘Tactful and patient,’ one historian remarks, ‘Marsh translated the furious energy of his demanding superior with his own quiet and meticulous administrative skills.’ The two men enjoyed a good, joking relationship. Once, when Marsh drafted a skilful letter smoothing over a ruffled personal friendship for his signature, Churchill appended a few appreciative words. ‘You are a good little boy & I am vy [sic] fond of you. W.’ Clementine felt the same way. ‘I am so glad you will let me be your friend too,’ she told Marsh after first meeting him.⁷

The man he now showed into Churchill’s office was Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who was already being widely celebrated as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. After the failure at Gallipoli, British attention had turned towards subverting Turkey by promoting an Arab uprising. Lawrence, an Oxford-educated archaeologist-turned-wartime intelligence officer based in Cairo, had been sent to Jeddah to support a revolt already hatched by Hussain, the Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Hashemite family. In Hussain’s third son Faisal and his army of Bedouin warriors, the romantically inclined Lawrence found the ideal personification of the legendary ‘noble Arab’. During the last two years of the war he and Faisal spearheaded increasingly successful guerrilla raids. Their targets included the all-important Hejaz railway and supply line linking Medina to Damascus, and key centres on the fringes of the main British advance. In October 1918 General Allenby had marched triumphantly into the Syrian capital. During the Paris Peace Conference, frequently dressed in his flowing Arab robes, Lawrence passionately promoted Faisal’s claim to the Syrian throne. But he was thwarted by the French, who considered Syria their own special domain. Just months before Lawrence appeared in Churchill’s office, they had driven Faisal out of the country into exile. Ever since, Lawrence had been promoting the alternative idea of making him King of Iraq.8

The heroic image that clung to Lawrence was a complex mix of truth, rumour, and invention. Some of this was due to Lawrence himself. Most of it, however, was thanks to an enterprising American journalist and war correspondent named Lowell Thomas, who had met Lawrence in Jerusalem after its capture by the British. Dressed in full sheik’s costume including robe, headdress, and dagger, the barefoot Lawrence had instantly bewitched the youthful American. The mud and mechanized slaughter of the Western Front trenches offered nothing heroic. Keen to find a positive story about the war for Americans, Thomas forged instead a powerful and emotional story about the adventures in the desert of the man he described glowingly as Britain’s modern ‘Coeur de Lion’ – Richard I, or Richard the Lionheart – the king who had led the Third Crusade in Palestine to victory over the great warrior Saladin. Ironically, Lawrence had once himself compared Faisal to the same medieval English monarch.⁹

Using coloured slides and dramatic live film footage shot from the air, Thomas skilfully crafted a two-hour-long multi-media extravaganza accompanied by a symphony orchestra playing Arab-inflected music. Entitled With Allenby in Palestine, and presenting Lawrence as the liberator of the Arabs, the show opened in New York early in 1919 and in August transferred to London and the Royal Opera House, where the words and Lawrence in Arabia were quickly added to the title. On most evenings Thomas himself would stride onto the stage to introduce the spectacle. ‘This blue-eyed poet,’ he would tell the enraptured audience, referring to Lawrence, ‘succeeded in accomplishing what no caliph and no sultan had been able to do in over a thousand years. He wiped out centuries-old blood feuds and built up an army and drove the Turks from Holy Arabia.’ The show was a huge hit. Its originally scheduled two-week run was extended to six months and from the opera house it moved on to the Royal Albert Hall and after that to the Queen’s Hall. Some million or so people flocked to see it including Queen Mary, celebrity writers such as Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, and dozens of school groups. Allenby himself even turned up one night, to considerable fanfare. The show arrived in the British capital with the blessing of the English-Speaking Union, an organization dedicated to promoting a sense of a common Anglo-American destiny. At a luncheon it hosted in his honour Thomas said that from the moment he first met Lawrence he had known that he was a man destined to go down in history as ‘one of the most remarkable characters of modern times’. Both fascinated and appalled at the extravaganza, on several occasions Lawrence himself anonymously slipped in to view the show. Lloyd George also went to see it and echoed Thomas in declaring that Lawrence was one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times. In one of the British press’s most over-the-top reviews of Thomas’s show, the Daily Telegraph lauded it as a celebration of ‘British grit’ and ‘British resourcefulness’.

Churchill was predictably swept away by the spectacle. Seizing on its power as propaganda, he urged Thomas to prolong its life in London and even extend it to other British cities. ‘It would be of great public advantage,’ he told him, ‘that this impressive tribute from an impartial quarter to some of the most striking achievements of the British Army should be as widely known as possible.’10

By his own confession, he knew little about the Middle East. But, as always, he was determined to be on top of his brief. Seduced by the Lawrence legend, he turned to its hero as his principal advisor on Arab affairs. Reluctant at first, Lawrence was soon enthusiastically playing the part. Each man saw in the other something to admire. Both were brave, energetic, visionary, and enjoyed reputations as being brilliant but wayward. After Lawrence was killed many years later in 1935 while riding his motorbike, Churchill declared that he had possessed the ‘full measure of the versatility of genius’. Thanks to Lowell Thomas, he was also an American hero, and the New York Herald Tribune hailed him as ‘the most romantic figure that the world has brought forth in modern times’.11

*

Three days before Lawrence was ushered into his office, Churchill found a file in his in-tray. Classified ‘Most Secret’, it consisted of intercepts of Bolshevik telegrams, reports from British agents keeping an eye on the Reds’ activities around the world, the diplomatic communications of various countries including the United States, and some of the Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS) own evaluations of the Russian scene.

It was almost exactly twelve months since Admiral Kolchak, leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces, had been captured and murdered by the Communists. Since then, despite continued fighting in the Crimea, Lenin had consolidated his grip on Russia. Just months before, Lloyd George had welcomed the arrival in London of a Soviet delegation to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with Britain – the first time a representative of the new Bolshevik state had been received officially by the leader of any of the Great Powers. Lloyd George had no liking for Communism. But he was convinced that the best antidote to revolution was trade and European economic recovery, and for that the Russians had to be involved. Outwardly, the head of the Russian delegation, Leonid Krassin, was a reassuring figure. A veteran Bolshevik and former financier and supplier of weapons to the party, he resembled a solid member of the bourgeoisie. After meeting him at the Savoy Hotel in Berlin, one British special correspondent described him as ‘the best-dressed Communist in the world’, with his morning coat and trousers obviously hailing from Bond Street. ‘His linen is immaculate,’ he rhapsodized, ‘and a silk tie sets off a valuable tie pin. A gold ring and wrist watch hardly suggest Moscow.’ Such powerful visual impressions helped nourish the idea that Krassin was a moderate – and that there were others like him in Lenin’s entourage who could be wooed by the West. The location of the Bolshevik office in the British capital encouraged such a hope – New Bond Street, in the very heart of Mayfair.

But Lloyd George’s conciliatory approach to the Bolsheviks bitterly divided British opinion. Many Conservatives were strongly opposed to any dealings at all with a regime that openly espoused revolution, while the Left prayed for the survival of the new socialist state and vocally opposed any efforts to undermine it. The protests climaxed in the summer of 1920, when Soviet and Polish forces clashed outside the gates of Warsaw amidst fears of Western intervention to help the Poles. ‘Hands Off Russia’ became the watch cry on the Left.

Churchill led the vanguard of those determined to destroy Lenin’s regime. He saw nothing good in Krassin’s presence in London. To him, a Bolshevik was always a Bolshevik and he had a more clear-eyed view than many of his contemporaries of the tyranny that Lenin and Trotsky were imposing on the Russian people. It was also obvious that Krassin’s London office was far more than a trade office – it was a significant base for Bolshevik espionage, as he knew from the dozens of secret intercepts being produced by the British codebreakers.

Despite what they revealed, Lloyd George refused to expel Krassin, and the Cabinet voted to continue the trade talks. Churchill’s fury remained unabated, especially as he believed that the Russians would be paying for Western goods with gold and diamonds plundered from their owners – in effect, he protested, ‘the proceeds of piracy’. Across the Cabinet table, Lloyd George openly disagreed with him. ‘The Russians are prepared to pay in gold and you won’t buy,’ he scoffed, and went on to quip that after all Britain traded with cannibals in the Solomon Islands. Humiliated and close to resigning, Churchill sat out the meeting, white-faced and silent. That night he travelled to Oxford and told students at the Union that there would be no recovery in Europe while ‘these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannize over its great population’. The policy that he would always advocate, he said, would be the overthrow and destruction of that ‘criminal regime’.

It is easy to scoff at his overblown rhetoric on the topic, and many biographers have done so. But Churchill’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ reign of terror and its suppression of freedom and basic liberties has been amply vindicated by history. Moreover, his bloodthirsty language was no worse than that emanating from the Bolsheviks themselves. Indeed, even in Britain, the rhetoric attacking him from the Left was often toxic. At a huge ‘Hands Off Russia’ rally at the Royal Albert Hall that same month to commemorate the third anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Cecil Malone, a Communist Member of Parliament and decorated former army officer, proclaimed to wild cheers that the hanging of ‘a few Churchills and Curzons from the lampposts was a price worth paying for revolution’.12

*

As 1921 opened, any hope that Lenin could be brought down by the organized forces of the ‘White’ (anti-Bolshevik) armies was clearly in vain. Stubbornly, Churchill continued to believe that the Bolsheviks could be crushed by other means using secret service sources. Since the creation of both MI5 (the domestic security service) and MI6 (the foreign intelligence service, otherwise known as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS) under the pre-war Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, Churchill had been amongst their strongest supporters. As Home Secretary he had given MI5 the power to use general warrants to intercept the mail, and at the Admiralty he had thrown his weight behind the creation of Room 40, its top-secret unit for the breaking of German codes and ciphers, avidly reading the raw material it produced. Only a few months before, he had strongly resisted peacetime cutbacks to the budgets of the individual intelligence services. Better, he argued, would be to create a unified service to produce more effective results. ‘With the world in its present condition of extreme unrest and changing friendships and with our greatly reduced and weakened military forces,’ he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘it is more than ever vital to us to have good and timely information.’ He also strongly supported the creation of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the successor to Room 40 in breaking foreign codes and ciphers.¹³

Now, secret service reports from a wide variety of sources were regularly landing on his desk. Delivering them was his personal military secretary, the man who that morning had placed the file of intercepts in his in-tray. This was ‘Archie’ Sinclair, his battalion second-in-command from ‘Plug Street’ days. With his fine features, black hair, and dark complexion, Sinclair resembled ‘a Spanish grandee rather than the Highland Chieftain he really was’.14 Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he had joined the 2nd Life Guards in 1910 and two years later succeeded to his grandfather’s baronetcy as Viscount Thurso, along with some 100,000 acres of land in northern Scotland. ‘There were few more glamorous young men in society than Archie,’ writes one historian. ‘His good looks, charm, and romantic highland aura were spiced with a touch of daredevilry that led him to experiment with a primitive aircraft which he flew before breakfast.’¹⁵

Although Archie was sixteen years Churchill’s junior, they had much in common. Archie’s mother, like his, was the daughter of a wealthy New York businessman. Her death a few days after Archie’s birth, followed by that of his father when he was only five, meant that he too, although for different reasons, felt deprived of proper parental attention. Both Sinclair and Churchill were cavalry officers and relished the thrills of polo and flying. During the war Churchill shared some of his most intimate thoughts and feelings with the young officer whom he treated with close to paternal affection. In several letters addressing him variously as ‘Archie dear’ or ‘My Dear’, and signing off with ‘Best Love’, ‘Yours always’, and ‘Yours affectionately’, Churchill opened his heart to him about his despair at the fall-out from the Dardanelles disaster. In one, handwritten only two weeks after his removal from the Admiralty and marked ‘Very Private’, he confessed that the hour was ‘bitter’, that he was ‘profoundly unsettled’, and that he had no idea of what to do or which way to turn.¹⁶

In 1921 Sinclair was Churchill’s principal channel into British intelligence, one of a network of friends working with, or for, the SIS. This was thanks largely to Archie’s personal friendship with a fellow officer and Scot in his regiment who had worked on the intelligence staff at GHQ France, Stewart Menzies – the man eventually destined to become ‘C’, or head of SIS, and who was to serve as Churchill’s ‘spymaster’ during the Second World War. It was Sinclair who first introduced the two men. Cryptically, Menzies remarked that he found Churchill ‘an entertainment’. Archie acted as ‘cut-out’ with the intelligence services, served as gatekeeper against importuning White Russian supplicants, and provided a discreet and reliable conduit to the major players. All this, in Churchill’s own scribbled words on a secret file he kept in his papers, he described as ‘Archie’s work’.17

Two other vital links with British intelligence emerged at this time. The first was Major Desmond Morton, another Eton-educated young officer who was connected – like Sassoon and Sinclair – with GHQ in France. In fact, as ADC to Haig, Morton lived at its epicentre. Frequently tasked with escorting visitors to the front, he established lasting connections with a number of ministers and dignitaries. More importantly, he made significant contacts in the world of intelligence. Morton at age twenty-five was a year younger than Sinclair, and already a badly wounded holder of the Military Cross when he first met Churchill painting a canvas at Ploegsteert in 1916. Later he frequently escorted him round the front lines and they had lengthy talks about technical issues that concerned them both. ‘Together,’ Churchill recorded later, ‘we visited many parts of the line. During these sometimes dangerous excursions, and at [Haig’s] house, I formed a great regard and friendship for this gallant officer.’¹⁸ When the war ended Morton moved into SIS – and Churchill claimed to have arranged the transfer. True or not – firm evidence is lacking – by 1921 Morton was SIS’s expert on Soviet activities directed against Britain.¹⁹

Equalling Morton in importance as an intelligence source for now and in the future was Brigadier Edward Louis Spears, who had performed brilliantly during the war as British Liaison Officer with the French Deuxième Bureau (Secret Service) and War Office. He was now head of the British Military Mission in Paris, with the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre to his name. A fluent French speaker born in Paris, the twenty-nine-year-old Spears had conducted Churchill around the French front lines in 1915. In the younger man Churchill instantly spotted a similar spirit to his own: a man of courage, high intelligence, nonconformist views, and something of an outsider. Soon they were in regular correspondence. The next year, after Spears was seriously wounded for the fourth time, he sent him a passionate letter. ‘You are indeed a Paladin worthy to rank with the truest knights of the great days of romance,’ he wrote. ‘Thank God you are alive. Some good angel has guarded you amid such innumerable perils, & brought you safely thus far along this terrible and never-ending road.’20 It was no wonder that Spears was Churchill’s first (but rejected) choice as his battalion second-in-command on the Western Front, and that more than two years after the war Spears was still supplying him with intelligence about French affairs. So much so, indeed, that their personal link created a crisis with the British ambassador to France, Lord Derby. ‘Spiers [the original spelling of his surname] is a sort of political spy for [Churchill],’ he complained bitterly to Curzon.²¹ This forced Spears to leave Paris, but he remained a key link for Churchill with his anti-Bolshevik contacts.

The documents Sinclair placed in his tray this January morning confirmed all Churchill’s darkest fears about the Bolsheviks. Even as he was preparing to join Lloyd George for the New Year’s celebrations, he now learned, Krassin had sent a message to Moscow advising Lenin that signing the trade agreement would cut the feet from under hostile elements such as Churchill and thus free Moscow from ‘the English political and economic cabal’. Once an agreement was signed, argued Krassin, threats to break it by Moscow would provide the Bolsheviks with a powerful weapon. ‘We must boldly conclude an agreement and naturally be prepared for further struggle,’ he told Lenin, ‘since no treaties will save us from a struggle until communism is victorious in the West.’ On reading the file, Churchill’s response was short and blunt. ‘All these telegrams,’ he responded, ‘illustrate the perfidy and malice of these ruffians.’²²