EIGHT

THE SMILING ORCHARDS

Churchill and his party left Cairo by train shortly before midnight on Wednesday 23 March, headed for Jerusalem. At the last minute Archie Sinclair decided he was still too ill to travel, so Maxwell Coote continued to stand in for him and shared a sleeper compartment with T. E. Lawrence. Gertrude Bell was making her own way back to Baghdad. Her elderly father, who had accompanied her to Cairo, joined the Churchill group to travel back home. Coote thought him a cheery old man with a keen sense of humour.

The young air force officer by now was feeling relaxed around his ward. At first he had been apprehensive. But after two weeks together he had got used to Churchill’s demanding habits and developed skills to manage him. They were badly needed at dawn the next day when the train had to cross the Suez Canal. There was no fixed bridge. So the carriages were uncoupled two at a time from the train and shunted onto a ferry that took them to the other side, where they were attached to an onward waiting train. Coote was all too aware that Churchill was a notoriously late riser and constitutionally incapable of arriving anywhere on time. Because of this, the train was late in leaving and there was now a serious risk they would miss the connection to Palestine. So before departing Cairo, Coote arranged that breakfast would not be served until they were safely across the Canal and installed in the carriage that would take them on to the Holy City. The stratagem worked brilliantly. Churchill sat himself down with three minutes to spare and was soon tucking contentedly into his food.

The train’s only restaurant car was used by other, carefully vetted, travellers. One was the society hostess Mrs ‘Ronnie’ Greville, widow of the Honourable Ronald Greville, a horse-racing chum of ‘Bertie’ (King Edward VII), and a Tory MP for whom Churchill had once campaigned. The illegitimate daughter of the Scottish millionaire brewer William McEwan and a ferocious gossip, she was also a notorious social climber and friend of Queen Mary. As a couple the Grevilles had been privately mocked as ‘the Grovels’, and it was once said of Mrs Greville that she had to be ‘fed royalty like sea lions fish’. Maxwell Coote, observing her at work in the restaurant car, decided that she was definitely a ‘tuft hunter’ – meaning a snob – who liked to sprinkle her conversation with remarks such as ‘the nicest king I have ever met’. Also sharing the carriage was the Baroness de la Grange, a Frenchwoman who had made her château a centre of hospitality for the British Army during the war. Both Allenby and Jack Churchill had been visitors there and the press had dubbed her the ‘Mother of the British Army’. Lawrence, however, was convinced that she was working as a French spy. He disliked the French for having expelled Faisal from Syria and was determined, as were Churchill and Lloyd George, to keep their current negotiations and plotting with Faisal about the throne of Mesopotamia secret from their allies in Paris for as long as possible.

One of the more distinguished of the passengers, however, was not to be seen mingling with this pseudo-house party on the train as it chugged eastwards through the Sinai. He and his small party remained in their own special carriage. It was only after lunch, when the train crossed the border and stopped at Gaza, that he linked up with Churchill.1

*

Sir Herbert Samuel was the British High Commissioner for Palestine. Four years older than Churchill, he had also been a radical member of the reforming pre-war Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, and had served as a wartime Home Secretary. He was the first British minister to promote the idea of a Jewish state and enjoyed the reputation of being a resourceful and resilient administrator. He had arrived in Cairo shortly before midnight on the night of Allenby’s grand ball and Churchill had immediately quit the dance floor to confer with him. Samuel’s appearance marked a new and more contentious phase of the discussions.2

Palestine was a League of Nations mandate under British control. By the terms of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, Britain had also pledged it as the site of ‘a Jewish National Home’ – provided that this did not impinge on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities there. Fleeing pogroms and discrimination in Europe, Jews had begun arriving in large numbers since the 1880s and violence between them and Arabs had been increasing. Churchill was sympathetic to Zionist aspirations, but not uncritically so. Samuel was one of the few Jews in the top reaches of British politics. Churchill hoped that he would be able to play tough with the most vociferous Zionists.

One of the other issues to be discussed was that of Transjordan – the territory east of the River Jordan that was technically part of Palestine but mostly desert and almost exclusively Arab. In preparation for Cairo, Churchill’s advisors had concluded that Transjordan should be separated from the rest of Palestine and set up as an Arab state. The Balfour Declaration promise was to be confined to the lands west of the Jordan. Lawrence strongly supported this view, and Churchill accepted it. Transjordan, they both agreed, should be an Arab state with Abdullah as its most likely monarch.

When Churchill officially announced this on the sixth day of the conference, Samuel had been dismayed. But he was outmanoeuvred and outnumbered. Abdullah had already set himself up in Transjordan, Britain’s ‘Sharifian’ policy was in play, and he could not be removed without bringing down the entire edifice of indirect British rule in the Middle East so carefully constructed over the previous five days. As a sop to Samuel, however, both Churchill and Lawrence promised that everything would be done to ensure that Abdullah stamped down on any anti-Zionist agitation. The next day at the conference Samuel also lost out over the maintenance of law and order in Palestine, an increasingly troublesome issue. He wanted a Jewish military force rather than a simple gendarmerie to defend Jewish settlements. This time Churchill was on his side. But both were thwarted by the local military authorities, who opposed any separate Jewish army.

*

The main purpose of the visit to Jerusalem was to meet with Abdullah and get him firmly committed to the British grand plan. When the train stopped in Gaza, Churchill and Samuel were met by a police guard of honour and driven into the town. It had been badly shelled during the war and many of its buildings lay in ruins. The population consisted of some 15,000 Arabs and fewer than a hundred Jews. As they toured the streets, the two were greeted by enthusiastic crowds shouting in Arabic, ‘Cheers for the Minister’, and also cheers for Great Britain. But as neither understood the language they remained happily unaware that mingled with these greetings were cries of ‘Down with the Jews’ and ‘Cut their throats’. Lawrence, who understood perfectly, remained silent. If the British nurtured any illusions that settling differences between the Arabs and the Jews was going to be easy, this made it abundantly clear that Arab hostility ran deep.

Churchill arrived in Jerusalem after dark. There was a full moon, and on the drive up the Mount of Olives to Government House he caught glimpses of the distant Dead Sea shining in the moonlight. The next day was Good Friday and Maxwell Coote escorted Clementine to St George’s Anglican Cathedral for the midday service. Dedicated barely twenty years before as the focal point of worship for Anglican Christians in the Holy Land, the Victorian Gothic edifice had been shut down during the war and its adjacent Bishop’s Residence used as the home and headquarters of the notoriously brutal commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army. Jemal Pasha had terrorized the city by ruthlessly deporting or hanging opponents he suspected of treachery or nationalist leanings. It was here, too, that the surrender of the city had been signed in December 1917. The Anglican Bishop, the Harrow-educated Rt Reverend Rennie MacInnes, was well known as a supporter of the Palestinian Arabs – especially Christians – against the Zionists, whose demands he denounced in a pastoral letter that year as ‘unjust and intolerable’.3 Afterwards Clementine visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built in the fourth century to enclose both the site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb where his body was laid. From this most holy of Christian sites she proceeded to the Temple Mount to see the massive Western (or ‘Wailing’) Wall, a remnant of Herod the Great’s Second Jewish Temple and the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray. She followed this by visiting the gleaming white marble of the Islamic shrine of the Dome of the Rock, one of the world’s most potent symbols of Islamic power.

Churchill decided against joining this whistle-stop tour of the holy highlights of Jerusalem. Instead, he opted to pursue his own very personal source of spiritual solace. Setting up his easel in the gardens of Government House, he spent the afternoon happily painting a view over the Jordan Valley. Maxwell Coote liked the result, but thought that the oils failed to capture the soft and subtle colouring of the Palestinian landscape. The political landscape, however, was far from serene. That same day in Haifa demonstrators massed to protest against continuing Jewish immigration and police shot and killed two Arabs, a woman and a thirteen-year-old boy. In the anti-Jewish riots which followed, ten Jews and five policemen were wounded. Over the next few days Churchill would have plenty to ponder on as he tried to capture the troubled topography of the Holy Land.4

That night, true to form, he kept the Samuels waiting for dinner. Their official residence on the Mount of Olives was based in a vast church-hospital complex originally named after Augusta Viktoria, the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II who had visited Jerusalem some twenty years before, nursing dreams of establishing a German empire in the East. Built to resemble a Hohenzollern Castle, it was notoriously cold and uncomfortable – an ‘icebox’ thought Coote. This perhaps suited Samuel, an austere and buttoned-up figure once described ‘as free from passion as an oyster’. But after the heat of Cairo and the luxurious comforts of the Semiramis Hotel, the Churchills suffered. Feeling distinctly chilled when she went to bed, Clementine lit the oil stove. Within minutes it was belching out thick black smoke and soot rapidly covered the bedcovers. Churchill managed to clear enough of it off for them to clamber between the sheets. But it was a wretched night and when Clementine’s maid arrived in the morning she described the Colonial Secretary and his wife as looking like a couple of ‘coal heavers’.5

Yet the couple were nothing if not hardy and game. After breakfast Clementine went off to play tennis and Churchill attended a memorial service at the British Military Cemetery nearby on the Mount of Olives. In an emotional debate in the House of Commons barely twelve months before, he had supported the recommendation of the War Graves Commission which favoured the burial of fallen soldiers close to the foreign fields where they had died rather than the repatriation of their bodies home. Now, as he stood alongside Bishop MacInnes, he gazed over the graves of some 2,500 soldiers of the British Empire killed during the Palestine Campaign. As always on such occasions, he was deeply moved and fluent in his words that set the scene in historic perspective and gave meaning to the lives of the dead. ‘These veteran soldiers lie here where rests the dust of the Khalifs and Crusaders and the Maccabees,’ he said. ‘Peace to their ashes, honour to their memory and may we not fail to complete the work which they have begun.’⁶

The next day was Easter Sunday, the holiest in the Christian calendar. After attending morning service at the Cathedral – which Coote ap-plauded as nice and ‘thoroughly English’ – Churchill was taken in hand by Sir Ronald Storrs, the civilian governor of the city. Something of an artistic connoisseur who favoured white suits and flamboyant buttonholes, he was a Cambridge-educated classicist and long-time friend of Lawrence with whom he had worked in the Arab Bureau in Cairo. The forty-year-old Storrs was intimately familiar with British policy towards the Arabs and especially Abdullah, and since arriving three years before in the wake of the British Army had thoroughly explored Palestine. Now, he was bent on putting a British stamp on Jerusalem. Determined to preserve and enhance its historic buildings and antiquities, and to prevent it from becoming ‘an inferior Manchester or Baltimore’, he had recently founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society. Funded by Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike along with many international banks and millionaires such as Mrs Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan Junior, its subscription list also included Sir Basil Zaharoff, the most notorious arms dealer of the day – and an important British intelligence asset. Storrs had visited him in his villa outside Paris during the Peace Conference to find him lying in the garden with one foot swathed for classic gout and an electric bell-push in a cedar tree for communicating with his secretary. After Storrs showed him his plans for Jerusalem, Zaharoff pushed the bell and immediately wrote out a generous cheque – ‘the millionaire of my dreams,’ recalled Storrs.7 Amongst the Society’s first acts were the restoration of the Dome of the Rock, the founding of a Chess Club and a School of Music for both sexes, and a Dramatic Society, whose first performance was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁸

Storrs had briefly met Churchill in Paris two years previously and now showed him the sites of old Jerusalem that he had missed the day before, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount. Afterwards, he drove both the Churchills six miles south to Bethlehem. The Emperor Constantine had built the Church of the Nativity over the cave where Jesus Christ was believed to have been born and the town was a major site of pilgrimage for Christians around the world. Storrs knew it well. He had visited the town on his first Christmas Eve in Palestine to attend midnight mass and afterwards descended the steep stone steps into the Crypt of the Manger. Its walls and ceilings were hung with heavy satin brocade and Storrs had watched entranced as a baby doll on a little gold bed was lowered reverently into the recessed niche of the Manger. Despite the dozens of holy fakes being hawked on the streets, he found the town and its church to be of ‘surpassing merit’. So he was able to give his guests a thorough and genuinely enthusiastic guided tour through the church.⁹

Churchill, however, seems to have been more moved by the fact that although he had taken along his easel and equipment, the weather was too cloudy and dull for him to make use of his brushes. Storrs singled out this obsession in his memoirs. After applauding how briskly and efficiently Churchill dealt with business, he noted that after appreciating the beauty of the Temple Mount by moonlight, the Colonial Secretary had seemed ‘thereafter to grudge every moment spent away from his easel’.¹⁰

*

Painting notwithstanding, the main order of the day was Churchill’s first face-to-face meeting with Abdullah. The day before, Lawrence had driven across the Jordan to the ancient trading city of Al-Salt high in the hills between Jerusalem and Amman to brief Abdullah on what he could expect Churchill to say. At dinner that night they both dined with Yusuf al-Sukhar, a wealthy Christian merchant, and in the morning were driven in a British military car to Jerusalem via Jericho. Arriving at Government House in the afternoon, Abdullah was ceremoniously greeted with flags, a Guard of Honour, and a band, and afterwards took tea with the Samuels.

That night there was a large dinner in the grand hall. Here Churchill finally met Abdullah. Short and thickly-built with dark brown eyes and a heavy beard, the thirty-nine-year-old emir exuded intelligence, energy, and charm. A devout Muslim who had spent most of his youth in Istanbul, he possessed a good sense of humour and, an avid chess player, he was astute and ambitious. In moving from Mecca to Transjordan his eyes had been set on Damascus rather than Amman, and Churchill knew it. For the sake of Britain’s wider relations with France, he had to make it clear to Abdullah that Transjordan should not become a base for attacks on the French. Over dinner he promptly raised the issue by mentioning a recent attack by desert tribesmen on a French border patrol and said that the British government was blaming it on Abdullah’s influence. ‘But luckily,’ he laughed, ‘I have two broad shoulders to carry the Government’s protest for you.’ This made it easier for Abdullah, too, to distance himself from the dispute by pleading ignorance but, he added, he couldn’t prevent people from defending their own country. He then made a gesture of friendship. The dinner over, he took some snuff from a golden box enamelled green with the rays of the setting sun in red and offered it to Churchill. Seeing that the snuff was French, he took some, and then sneezed violently. They both took this as a great joke, laughed, and amiably set nine thirty the next morning for their first meeting. Churchill described Abdullah as ‘a very agreeable, intelligent, and civilized Arab prince’.11

*

Over the next three days he had three separate meetings with him, interspersed with several events designed to signal to all communities in Palestine that their future was assured under the new British mandate. From the start Churchill made it clear that the Balfour Declaration would stand and that there could be no question of having an Arab ruler for both Palestine and Transjordan – an idea that Abdullah initially tried floating but that he instantly squashed. Instead, Abdullah would continue to govern in Transjordan with the support of a British political agent and a handful of military officers to assist his local levies. In addition, he would receive a subsidy of £5,000 a month. Aware of Abdullah’s wider ambitions and to make it all more palatable, Churchill hinted that perhaps, in the not too distant future, he might eventually end up being installed by the French in Damascus. But, he quickly added, this was not something that the British could guarantee.12

What he could promise, however, was a neighbouring military and air force presence to bolster Abdullah’s position and impress his opponents. To make the point, he took Abdullah to witness a grand military review at the barracks at Jaffa where they viewed a march past featuring units of the Indian mule corps and cavalry, infantry from the South Lancashire regiment, and light cars and armoured cars. As they stood together on the podium while the National Anthem played, Bristol fighters from No. 14 squadron swooped overhead. This was military theatre to warm his heart and he was delighted. For Abdullah, a realist, it showed where power lay. Transjordan was at least a stepping stone to something larger, or so he hoped. So he accepted the deal and promised he would stamp down on Syrian exiles in his country who were stirring up cross-border trouble with the French. For this, he was to pay a heavy price. It made him enemies amongst Arab nationalists who had pinned their wider hopes of Arab liberation on his shoulders, and it alienated his Palestinian allies by accepting that Britain was bound by the Balfour Declaration, even though Churchill promised that it would not apply to Transjordan itself. In the longer run too, there was to be yet a further price. Abdullah remained confined for a lifetime in Amman, a town of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, ruling over a territory of no more than 300,000 people – a ‘falcon trapped in a canary cage’, as one observer cruelly noted. Churchill was well aware of the risks Abdullah was taking. ‘I hope he won’t get his throat cut by his own followers,’ he told Curzon. Thirty years later the fears were to come true. On 20 July 1951, three years after the creation of Israel, Abdullah was assassinated by a young Palestinian on the steps of the Al-Aqsa mosque as he entered for Friday evening prayers.13

Britain also paid a penalty in Churchill’s attempts to find a middle way between competing visions of the future. Throughout his talks in Jerusalem he received petitions from both Jews and Arabs about the future of Palestine. Following his second meeting with Abdullah at Government House, on Easter Monday, the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs presented him with a lengthy protest against Zionist activity and bluntly demanded he rescind the Balfour Declaration, put an end to Jewish immigration, and create a government elected by those in Palestine who had been there before the war. The protest was also rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes that could have been lifted verbatim from the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Churchill dealt with the protesters briskly, refused their demands, and urged the Arabs instead to work creatively with the Jews to create a prosperous Palestine.¹⁴

Then it was the turn of the Jewish National Council to present him with its own lengthy statement, which stressed its acceptance of Arab rights, the hope of reaching an understanding with them, and the immense progress already made by the immigrants in trade, industry, and agriculture. In response, he expressed his strong support for the Zionist dream but asked that the pioneers should be ‘picked men, worthy in every way of the greatness of the idea and of the cause for which they are striving’ – a thinly disguised warning against socialists and revolutionaries. That same night he was a guest at a reception given in his honour by the leading Zionists in the city, and the next day he visited the still uncompleted Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Here he was greeted by a guard of honour of the Palestine Police and presented with a scroll of the Law by the Chief Rabbi. ‘Personally, my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism,’ he declared. But he repeated yet again that Britain’s promise included assurances to the non-Jewish inhabitants that they would not suffer as a result. If the Zionists worked for all Palestinians, he declared, the country would ‘turn into a Paradise and will become . . . a land flowing with milk and honey’. Then he was handed a tree to plant. But it broke off from its root as he tried to place it in the hole. No one had thought to provide a spare. He looked annoyed and Samuel was embarrassed. Finally, a small palm tree was substituted. But, as one disgruntled observer remarked, it would not even grow there. It was an ill omen for the smooth implantation of a new society.

That same afternoon Samuel threw a huge reception in Government House for representatives of all religions in Palestine, taking care to personally greet them all. Lawrence was also present and introduced the wide-eyed young Maxwell Coote to two Christian sheiks from Al-Salt dressed in the full finery of their traditional robes. Alongside patriarchs of the Abyssinian Christian Church and other grandees it was all, in the young officer’s words, ‘far more interesting than any European or Egyptian show could be’.15 More useful, however, was a frank discussion Churchill was able to have with a French diplomat named Robert de Caix, a veteran advocate of France’s hereditary rights to Syria and Palestine as the original land of the Crusades and now Chief Secretary to General Henri Gouraud, the commander of French forces in Syria. Bluntly, Churchill charged him with being ‘extremely hostile’ to Britain, and complained that the French were causing great difficulties for Britain in the Middle East. De Caix’s denial, along with his strongly expressed fears that Transjordan could become a staging ground for anti-French action, was equally robust. But after Churchill explained that a ‘keystone’ of the deal with Abdullah was the prevention of such acts, and de Caix on his side outlined what the French were doing to soothe nationalist sentiment, both men calmed down and Churchill felt satisfied. ‘He seemed an honest man,’ he reported to the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, ‘and on the whole I got on with him.’¹⁶

*

Meantime, events in London were never far from his mind. There was still no news about whom Lloyd George would appoint as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This may explain why Coote became involved in some urgent reshuffling of Churchill’s travel plans, although it may simply have reflected his ward’s habitual impetuosity. Already by the time Churchill arrived in Jerusalem he had changed his initial plans to sail home from Alexandria on the Italian liner the Esperia and instead booked berths for a later sailing on the French ship the Lotus. But on the day of Abdullah’s arrival in Jerusalem he reverted to his original plan. Barely had Coote fired off telegrams to take care of this than Churchill announced yet another change of schedule, this time asking his young aide-de-camp to book a special train back to Alexandria that would leave in the evening rather than on the morning of his last day in Palestine, thus giving him an extra few hours to pack in more visits. This seemed settled. But the next day, from Cairo, Archie Sinclair sent a telegram saying that a 50 per cent penalty charge would have to be paid for cancellation of the Lotus reservations. At this Churchill flew into a fury and dictated an enraged reply. He then wondered whether they should after all cancel the arrangements for the special train, which by now had been painstakingly arranged. The issue was left hanging until just before dinner, when Coote was summoned yet again. This time he found Churchill wallowing in the bath. The conversation was somewhat intermittent while he submerged himself fully under the water on at least four occasions. But in the end it was agreed that he would stick with the ‘special’ night train after all and board the Esperia the next day.

Coote took all this with amazing good humour. He was neither the first nor the last of those who worked for Churchill to find him both infuriating and endearing. ‘Winston is a wonderful man truly, to work with,’ he noted, ‘he always changes his plans literally every day and would drive one demented, I think, in time if one had the job of always fixing up his arrangements, but I like him for it and he can never receive “No” as an answer to anything he would like.’ Churchill in turn had taken a shine to Coote, jokingly calling him ‘Coûte que Coûte’ (‘Cost what may’) and always asking him if he was happy and having a good time. ‘I have grown quite fond of him on this trip,’ noted Coote on their final day together, ‘although I never expected I should during my first few days with him.’17

*

Churchill’s last day in Jerusalem was Wednesday 30 March. It was a packed schedule that began with an unprecedented early morning rise at 5.30 to drive to Jericho for breakfast with the local Arab Governor. Back in Jerusalem by ten o’clock, he visited a Muslim school with Samuel before witnessing a fly past at the Royal Air Force base at Ramleh – both a boost to the local squadron and a re-affirmation of his faith in British air power as an economical peacekeeper in the Middle East.

Afterwards, he visited three of the most impressive new Jewish settlements in Palestine. The first was Tel-Aviv, where he was met by its mayor Meir Dizengoff who, like thousands of others, was an immigrant from the Russian Empire. As Churchill proudly explained, Tel-Aviv was only twelve years old and had been ‘conquered by us on sand dunes’. The next stop was the small pioneer settlement of Bir Yaakov, which was wholly settled by Russian Jews. ‘Were they Bolsheviks?’ enquired Churchill. ‘Certainly not’ came the reply, they believed in hard work and self-help. Duly impressed, he went on to his last stop: the small community of Rishon-le-Zion (First in Zion). Founded forty years before, again mostly by Jews from Russia, and sponsored by Baron Edmund de Rothschild, it had a population of some 2,000 inhabitants housed in modern red-roofed houses set amidst verdant vineyards and flourishing orange groves created by assiduous cultivation and irrigation. Churchill was especially impressed by the youth and vigour of its workers, both men and women, and lauded how the Jews had not just made their own land flourish but raised the standards around it. ‘I am talking of what I saw with my own eyes,’ he told the House of Commons later. ‘All around the Jewish colony, the Arab houses were tiled instead of being built with mud, so that the culture from this centre has spread out into the surrounding district.’ For Zionists, this was a sure sign that in Churchill they had a friend. For Palestinian Arabs, however, while his emphatic support for the Balfour Declaration persuaded some to abandon their opposition to it, to others it merely hardened their determination to resist it.18

*

Churchill’s train left Ludd station that evening bound for Alexandria. He was exhausted but cheerful, enjoyed his dinner, and stayed up talking for quite a while. He was up early next morning and watched intently in his bedroom slippers as the coach was ferried across the Suez Canal. Then, thanks to plentiful hot water from the engine, he enjoyed a hot bath, as did a grateful Clementine. In Alexandria he was reunited with Archie Sinclair, who was now recovered from his typhoid fever, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, with Royal Air Force planes circling overhead, he embarked on the Esperia bound for Genoa. The next morning it was announced in London that Lloyd George had appointed Sir Robert Horne as his new Chancellor of the Exchequer.¹⁹