Thus interest grew on both sides, fomented by aunts and cousins, Lady this and Lady that, until, on August 7, the Duke of Marlborough invited Clementine to a small party at Blenheim. The same mail brought a note from Winston. He hoped she would come because “I want so much to show you that beautiful place & in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, & lots of things to talk about.” His mother would act as chaperon—there were royal chuckles when the King heard that—with F. E. and Margaret Smith the only other guests. The next day he wrote her again; he thought she would like Sunny, and would “fascinate him with those strange mysterious eyes of yours, whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn…. Till Monday then & may the Fates play fair.” Clementine could have had little doubt of what awaited her at the palace, and she felt, she later said, a “sudden access of shyness.” She was down to her last clean cotton frock. The other women would have maids, and she would have to stand for fear of crumpling her skirt. Nevertheless, she arrived at Blenheim outwardly poised on Monday, August 10. That evening the stage for his proposal was set. After breakfast in the morning they would walk in the rose garden.⁸⁷

In later years Churchill said that “at Blenheim I took two important decisions: to be born and to marry. I am happily content with the decision I took on both those occasions.”⁸⁸ He neglected to mention that Clementine had had something to say about the second, and that his dilatoriness had nearly lost her. Always an early riser, she was prompt at breakfast Tuesday. Winston wasn’t there. She waited for him. And waited. He was fast asleep. Mortified, she considered returning to London immediately, and no one who knew her doubts that she meant it. Luckily, Sunny intervened. The duke sent his cousin a sharp note and, in his role as host, asked her to join him in a buggy ride around the grounds. They returned a half hour later to find Churchill yawning at the horizon.

The walk was postponed until late afternoon. They were in the middle of it, and Winston was just about to clear his throat, when the skies opened and wrapped them in sheets of rain. Fortunately an ornamental little Greek temple overlooking the palace’s great lake offered refuge, and there, drenched and shivering, he asked her to marry him. She said yes, but swore him to secrecy until she had her mother’s consent. He couldn’t keep his word. The skies cleared, they strolled back to the palace, and the moment he saw his friends he broke into a run, waving his arms and shouting the news. That night in her bedroom Clementine wrote him a love letter, addressing it by drawing a heart with “Winston” lettered inside it—the first of the endearing missives they would exchange throughout the rest of their long life together. The next day he picked a bouquet of roses for her to take home and, to make amends for breaking his pledge, wrote his future mother-in-law asking her “consent & blessing.” He told her, “I am not rich nor powerfully established, but your daughter loves me & with that love I feel strong enough to assume this great & sacred responsibility; & I think I can make her happy & give her a station & career worthy of her beauty and her virtues.” He never mailed the letter—he was apt to do this—but Lady Blanche took him into her heart anyway. She wrote Wilfrid Blunt: “He is gentle and tender, affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm.” At the moment he was also busy; the wedding was scheduled for Saturday, September 12, less than three weeks after the formal announcement, and there was much to do. Congratulatory notes required answers (two were from Pamela Plowden and Muriel Wilson). He picked Linky Cecil as his best man, and asked Welldon to speak at the service. Presents had to be acknowledged. In the happy English tradition of political civility, gifts arrived from Balfour and the Chamberlains. The King sent a gold-headed walking stick; Sir Ernest Cassel, £500.⁸⁹

On the appointed Saturday the guests, including Sir Bindon Blood, Ian Hamilton, and Lloyd George, gathered in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Even here the groom could not elude controversy; Tailor and Cutter described his attire as “one of the greatest failures as a wedding garment we have ever seen, giving the wearer a sort of glorified coachman appearance.” Blunt wrote in his diary that Churchill had “gained in appearance since I saw him last, and has a powerful if ugly face. Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.” Appropriately, the reception was held in Lady St. Helier’s home. In his new post Churchill had defended the right of costermongers to trade in the street, and “Pearly Kings and Queens,” cockneys whose costumes were adorned with pearl buttons sewn in elaborate patterns, danced outside in Portland Place.⁹⁰

Winston later wrote that he and Clementine “lived happily ever afterwards.” It was, in fact, a great marriage, but few brides have had to adjust so quickly to their husband’s careers. She was given a glimpse of the future immediately after the wedding ceremony, when she found him with Lloyd George in the church vestry, earnestly talking politics. At Blenheim, where their honeymoon began, he revised the final text of his book on Africa, and in Venice, their last stop, he was toiling away at official papers and memoranda, belying his letter to his mother from there: “We have only loitered & loved—a good & serious occupation for which the histories furnish respectable precedents.” In Eichorn on the way back they stayed with an old friend of Winston’s, the Austrian Baron Tuty de Forest, who had been educated in England. Winston and the baron had a marvelous time shooting, but Clementine found the household stiff and the baroness dull. She was glad to be headed home, and was excited by the prospect of being presented to her husband’s constituents in Dundee. Her oddest experience on the wedding trip had been her first encounter with Winston’s underwear. She wore cheap chemises, but his underclothes, she whispered to a wide-eyed Violet Asquith when they returned and dined at Downing Street, were made of pale pink, very finely woven silk; they came from the Army and Navy Stores and “cost the eyes out of the head”—about eighty pounds a year, she calculated. When Violet “taxed him with this curious form of self-indulgence, he replied: ‘It is essential to my well-being. I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle which demands the finest covering.’ ” He invited her to examine the texture of the skin on his forearm. It was, he proudly told her, “a cuticle without a blemish, except for one small portion of my anatomy where I sacrificed a piece of my skin to accommodate a wounded brother officer on my way back from the Sudan campaign.”⁹¹

Like other lovers, they invented pet names for each other. Clementine was “Cat” or “Kat”; Winston was “Pug,” then “Amber Pug,” then “Pig.” Drawings of these animals decorated the margins of their letters to each other, and at dinner parties Winston would reach across the table, squeeze her hand, and murmur, “Dear Cat.” After a garden luncheon, Blunt entered in his diary: “He is aux plus petits soins with his wife, taking all possible care of her. They are a very happy married pair. Clementine was afraid of wasps, and one settled on her sleeve, and Winston gallantly took the wasp by the wings and thrust it into the ashes of the fire.” She became pregnant the month after the wedding. Not knowing the child’s sex, they created the name “Puppy Kitten,” then shortened it to simply “P.K.” The imminent arrival of the P.K. made a move from the little house on Bolton Street imperative, and early in 1909 Churchill took an eighteen-year lease, at £195 a year, on a house at 33 Eccleston Square, in Pimlico, between Victoria Station and the Thames. Clementine was economizing wherever possible; on April 27 she wrote Winston: “I had a long afternoon with Baxter & carpets. The green carpet is lovely & will do beautifully for the library. It looks like soft green moss… I tried hard to make the red stair carpet do for the dining room, but it is really too shabby.” A “green sickly looking carpet” from Bolton Street “does Puppy Kitten’s room.” One servant’s room could “be done for about £2.” She had “written to the people who are making the blue stair carpet to ask what it will cost to cover dining room entirely with the blue—(4/6 a yard).”⁹²

In May they moved in, and three months later Clementine gave birth to a girl, whom they christened Diana. Away watching army maneuvers that September, Winston wrote his “dear Kat,” begging her to “try to gather your strength. Don’t spend it as it comes. Let it accumulate…. My darling I so want your life to be a full & sweet one, I want it to be worthy of all the beauties of your nature. I am so much centered in my politics, that I often feel I must be a dull companion, to anyone who is not in the trade too. It gives me so much joy to make you happy—& often wish I were more various in my topics.” Diana was followed, less than two years later, by their son, Randolph, “the Chumbolly.” Winston wrote from Blenheim: “My precious pussy cat, I do trust & hope that you are being good & not sitting up or fussing yourself. The Chumbolly must do his duty and help you with your milk, you are to tell him so from me.” She replied, “I am very happy here, contemplating the beautiful Chumbolly who grows more darling & handsome every hour, & puts on weight with every meal; so that soon he will be a little round ball of fat. Just now I was kissing him, when catching sight of my nose he suddenly fastened upon it & began to suck it, no doubt thinking it was another part of my person!”⁹³

These notes are only partly attributable to his travels. She was a lark, he a nightingale; they tried having breakfast together two or three times, he later said, “but it didn’t work. Breakfast should be had in bed alone.” Since one was often bustling about while the other slept, they left hundreds of these missives for each other. All testify to a devotion that never flagged, though, like every other couple, they had their edgy moments. In the beginning his sudden and unexpected absences made her wonder if there were other women in his life. Her challenge does not survive, but we have his reply: “Dearest, it worries me vy much that you should seem to nurse such absolutely wild suspicions wh are so dishonouring to all the love & loyalty I bear you & will please god bear you while I breathe. They are unworthy of you & me. And they fill my mind with feelings of embarrassment to wh I have been a stranger since I was a schoolboy. I know that they originate in the fond love you have for me and therefore they make me feel tenderly towards you & anxious always to deserve that most precious possession of my life. But at the same time they depress me & vex me—& without reason. We do not live in a world of small intrigues but of serious & important affairs…. You ought to trust me for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you and my chief desire is to link myself to you week by week by bonds which shall ever become more intimate & profound. Beloved I kiss your memory—your sweetness & beauty have cast a glory upon my life. You will find me always your loving & devoted husband, W.”⁹⁴

He once said: “It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman; they remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils.” Clementine’s acquaintances forgot that at their peril. Her response to slights was swift and literally unanswerable, for she simply departed. Once, when they were playing bridge at Canford Manor, Ivor Guest, one of Winston’s cousins, lost his temper and threw his cards at her head. She rose from the table, went to bed, and in the morning, ignoring Guest’s profuse apologies, left for London with her dismayed husband in tow. Again, she was in the Green Room at Blenheim, replying to a letter from Lloyd George, when Sunny said: “Please, Clemmie, would you mind not writing to that horrible little man on Blenheim writing-paper?” She flew upstairs and packed. Sunny begged her to stay, but she was off on the next train from Woodstock. Winston, who hadn’t been with her, was tepid in his defense of her, and she resented that; she believed she had hoisted the Liberal banner against Tory spite. When she had calmed down she wrote him: “My sweet and Dear Pig, when I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed your life & troubled your spirit by my temper. Do not cease to love me. I could not do without it. If no one loves me, instead of being a Cat with teeth & Claws, but you will admit soft fur, I shall become like the prickly porcupine outside, & inside so raw & unhappy.” He replied that “I loved much to read the words of your dear letter,” and this was followed by a rare Churchillian admission of self-doubt: “At times, I think I cd conquer everything—& then again I know I am only a weak vain fool. But your love for me is the greatest glory & recognition that has or will ever befall me: & the attachment wh I feel towards you is not capable of being altered by the sort of things that happen in this world. I only wish I were more worthy of you, & more able to meet the inner needs of your soul.”⁹⁵

Clementine was as complex as her husband, but in many ways his antithesis: less gregarious, always reserved, often lonely in the midst of people, and far more critical of others. In those days she admired Lloyd George—many women did, and he exploited them; his promiscuity was so extraordinary that it had won him the sobriquet “Goat”—but she didn’t like Guest or F. E. Smith, who went on to be Lord Birkenhead, lord chancellor of England; or the young Canadian millionaire Max Aitken. It puzzled her that “F.E.,” as everyone called him, should be Winston’s best friend. His brilliance and dazzling wit were lost on her. She saw him as simply an archconservative Tory. Yet Winston and F.E. went on summer cruises together and founded the Other Club (the House of Commons being the Club), where bitter political rivals dined amicably in one another’s company and took up their weapons again afterward, the constitution providing that “nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.” Churchill later wrote of F.E. in Great Contemporaries: “Never did I separate from him without having learnt something, and enjoyed myself besides.” He and F.E. were also fellow officers in the QOOH, the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and took the field each spring in the regiment’s annual camp, held in Blenheim Park. He and Clementine would engage in bantering correspondence during these gentlemanly maneuvers. “We are going to bathe in the lake this evening,” he told her in a typical note. “No cats allowed! Your pug in clover, W.” And she would assure him that while he was gone, “your lazy Kat sits purring and lapping cream and stroking her kittens.”⁹⁶

Certainly Winston needed the exercise. In 1909 newspapers noted that his stoop had grown more pronounced, and that he was getting fat. Nevertheless, the QOOH outings made Clementine uneasy. She believed that F.E. kept her husband up late and encouraged him to play poker. Winston always stayed up late and always gambled, but her anxiety was understandable; he couldn’t afford the high stakes of his rich friends. At the time of his appointment, Asquith had written him that as president of the Board of Trade he would be “on the same level, as regards salary & status,” as a secretary of state. That would have brought in £5,000 a year, on which the family could have lived comfortably. As it turned out, he was paid only half that. The money he had invested with Cassel was gone; so were the royalties from his later books. Clementine had grown up learning to live on little money, but she became haunted by the need to make ends meet. Her husband was loving but inconsiderate. On very short notice he would send word that he was bringing friends home to dinner. If she asked what she was expected to feed them, his answer was always the same: “Let’s have Irish stew with lots of onions.” She waved handfuls of bills at him and he turned away shrugging, though once he suffered pangs of remorse. At their wedding his aunt Cornelia had given her a diamond necklace; later Winston had had rubies set around the diamonds. Beset by creditors, she impulsively sold it. When she told him, he rushed to the jeweler to buy it back, but he was too late; it was gone.⁹⁷

Being Winston Churchill’s wife was sometimes embarrassing and even dangerous. In November 1909 the Churchills, arriving at Bristol railway station, were leaving their car when a suffragette, Theresa Garnett, ran up and tried to lash his face with a whip. He grabbed her wrists and she tugged him toward the tracks and the path of a moving train. At the last moment Clementine grabbed his coat and pulled both of them back to safety. A few months later he faced another whip, this one in the hands of a suffragette’s male relative who cried: “Take that, you dirty cur!” Winston took evasive action instead. He warned his wife against opening “suspicious parcels arriving by post without precautions…. These harpies are quite capable of trying to burn us out.” By 1912 he would be a supporter of their cause, but as long as their assaults on public men continued, he refused to commit himself in Parliament. Clementine’s feelings were mixed. She said publicly that she was “ardently in favour of votes for women,” and privately she believed feminism needed champions willing to break the law. On the other hand, she certainly didn’t want Winston maimed or killed. No such ambiguity troubled her on other issues, however. As his advocacy of Liberal reforms grew more passionate, Tory homes were closed to the Churchills, and some die-hard acquaintances would cross the street rather than greet her. She gloried in their animosity, for in these years, when Winston’s radicalism crested, his most enthusiastic supporter was Clementine Churchill.⁹⁸

Even before he left the Colonial Office, Winston had become a thunderer on the left. He had urged the South Africans to adopt a program of unemployment compensation, and in a letter from Africa on December 22, 1907, he had proposed parliamentary bills establishing minimum wages, insurance against sickness, and old-age pensions in England. Back in London he gave Charles Masterman, himself a reformer, the impression that he was “full of the poor whom he has just discovered. He thinks he is called by Providence—to do something for them. ‘Why have I always been kept safe within a hair’s breadth,’ he asked, ‘except to do something like this?’ ” Writing in the Nation of March 7, he recommended that men without jobs be “treated as if they were hospital patients” and that the economy be managed through a “network of state intervention and regulation”; he saw “little glory,” he had said, “in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.” In Glasgow he had delivered a historic speech, declaring that “the fortunes and interests of Liberalism and Labour are inseparably interwoven. They rise by the same forces, they face the same enemies, they are affected by the same dangers.” The state, he said, must “concern itself with the care of the sick and the aged, and, above all, of the children.” The government should get “the railways of this country in our hands” and become “the reserve employer of labour,” establishing public-works projects to “spread a net over the abyss.”⁹⁹

All this was breathtaking in 1908. Beatrice Webb revised her early judgment of him; she wrote: “He is brilliantly able—more than a phrase-monger, I think.” But the upper classes, Churchill’s relatives and the people he had lived among all his life, were flabbergasted. This was the man who, as a Sandhurst cadet, had approved of churchgoing for workmen on the ground that “nothing can give them a good time here, but it makes them more contented to think that they will get one hereafter.” At heart he was a traditionalist who loved the Shakespearean “tide of pomp/That beats upon the high shore of this world.” Except by reading, or strolling through the Manchester slum with Eddie Marsh, he knew nothing of real poverty. Clementine’s small economies were hardly comparable to the destitution of jobless Britons. The Churchills always had servants. Winston never packed a bag; it was simpler to ring a bell. It never occurred to him to travel third-class. Eddie Marsh wrote that until he married, Winston had never even heard of such things as “lodgings.” He once told Violet Asquith: “I have always had to earn every penny I possessed, but there has never been a day in my life when I could not order a bottle of champagne for myself and offer another to a friend.”¹⁰⁰

Why, then, had he chosen to become a tribune of the oppressed? Doubtless his resentment of the Tory hierarchy was one reason; as he saw it, they had ruined his father, driven Winston himself out of their party, and treated him viciously since he had crossed the House floor. He was an intuitive rebel. But being humane, he was also genuinely appalled by the plight of the downtrodden as he discovered it through reading and in talks with the Webbs, Shaw, and Wells. Another explanation is political. The Liberals, though apparently invincible, felt menaced by the burgeoning Labour party, which threatened to steal their thunder and their strong radical wing. An increase in Lib-Lab strength was the result. Asquith made their triumphs possible, though he himself was no ideologue. Silver-haired, with a small, thin-lipped, stubborn-looking mouth and a thick Yorkshire accent which had survived the City of London School and Balliol College at Oxford, he had displayed little political imagination in the past, but he grasped his party’s need for movement to the left, shrewdly sensing the necessity for some official response, however limited, to the outcry over the public and private exposés of working-class destitution. One of his first acts had been to provide free meals and free medical attention for schoolchildren. Winston’s combative spirit was stirred when these mild measures provoked violent Tory protests. “Party animosity,” Lord Campion wrote nearly a half-century later, “reached a degree of virulence which is hardly conceivable in the present generation.”¹⁰¹ Finally, all these motives for the liberation of Churchill from patrician dogma were immeasurably strengthened by the charisma and leadership of his colleague Lloyd George, his senior by eleven years.

Churchill and David Lloyd George, Budget Day, 1910

Churchill at the Board of Trade, Lloyd George at the Exchequer—this was the team which really drove the Asquith government in its first surge of reform. It was an unlikely alliance. The younger man, born to a ducal family, weaned on privilege, had been boosted to fame by influential relatives and friends, including England’s present King, and had, for all his brushes with death on battlefields, led a sheltered life. Lloyd George had been a penniless Welsh boy, raised by a widowed mother, articled to a solicitor at sixteen, and introduced to the practice of law by defending poachers in local courts. One wore a top hat in town, the other, except on extraordinary occasions, a crumpled fedora. Yet each was an impulsive political genius, fired by idealism, joined to the other by common goals. “Both,” wrote Elie Halévy, “were opposed to a policy of heavy expenditure on the Army and the Navy, both advocates of a policy of social reform which, they maintained, the Liberal Party must pursue with unprecedented daring, if the Labour Party were not to grow strong on its left. They came forward as the two leaders of the radical group of pacifists and advanced social reformers as opposed to the three Imperialists, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane.”¹⁰²

If it is difficult to accept Churchill as a grandfather of the welfare state, it is even harder to picture him fighting plans to arm England against saber-rattling Germans. Nevertheless, that was his position in the summer of 1908. In this he was once more his father’s son, a co-conspirator with Lloyd George against military estimates. Reginald McKenna, first lord of the Admiralty, wanted to lay keels for six dreadnoughts; Sir John Fisher, the first sea lord, wrote: “Six in the estimates w/o any doubt is an irreducible minimum—no qualifying statement.” Lloyd George, who regarded the navy as a toy for the rich—and called the War Office the “Ministry of Slaughter”—thought four of the ships was enough. Winston agreed with him. Speaking to miners in south Wales on August 14, he ridiculed the notion of war with the kaiser. “I think it is greatly to be deprecated,” he said, “that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense.” There was nothing to fight about, he added, “although there may be snapping and snarling in London clubs.”¹⁰³

“What are Winston’s reasons for acting as he does in this matter?” Lord Knollys later wrote Lord Esher. “Of course it cannot be from conviction or principle. The very idea of his having either is enough to make one laugh.” That is a fair sample of the kind of judgments Tories passed on Churchill then. Neither peer could see the obvious: money spent on warships couldn’t go into social programs. The militants in the cabinet wanted six keels, but Asquith complained to his wife: “Winston and Ll. G. by their combined machinations have got the bulk of the Liberal press in the same camp… there are moments when I am disposed summarily to cashier them both.” He couldn’t; his back-benchers wouldn’t have stood for it; of 377 Liberal MPs, over 200 had joined the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism—the “LLAAMs,” or “Lambs.” The issue was in doubt when Lloyd George sent Winston word “that the Admiralty have had very serious news from their Naval attaché in Germany since our last Cabinet Committee & that McK is now convinced we may have to lay down 8 Dreadnoughts next year!!!” The news leaked to the press; in music halls jingoes sang a new ditty: “We want eight and we won’t wait.” They had to wait, but they got them. The two radical ministers accepted an Asquith compromise: four keels were to be laid now, and another four later if the German naval program made it absolutely necessary. Berlin obliged. “In the end,” Churchill therefore wrote later, “a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four and we finally compromised on eight.” He added that “although the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I were right in the narrow sense, we were absolutely wrong in relation to the deep tides of destiny.”¹⁰⁴

Despite this channeling of money into armaments, Churchill passed most of his program through the House. A maximum workday was established for miners. Sweated labor was attacked by establishing trade boards which fixed minimum wages. In each city he set up a labor exchange where employment would be sought for the jobless, trade-union leaders could meet, and all visitors would be provided with “facilities for washing, mending, and non-alcoholic refreshments.”¹⁰⁵ He also drafted an unemployment-insurance bill. At the same time, Lloyd George, as chancellor, was introducing a measure providing for old-age pensions and an expanded National Health Insurance Act—his slogan was “nine-pence for fourpence,” the difference between the two figures being the contributions from employers and the government. The latter bill didn’t become law until 1911, because the House of Lords balked at it. The solution which broke the legislative impasse, and which was designed by Lloyd George and Churchill, altered the historical balance between the two Houses of Parliament.

At that time the Lords, the “upper house,” could veto bills passed by the Commons, the “lower house,” though since 1660 money matters, by custom, had been left to the commoners. Until now there had been few confrontations between the two because members of both houses had come from the same background, and within a fairly narrow range they shared the same political convictions, regardless of party. But Asquith’s Liberals were introducing new concepts of government. The burning question, said Balfour, was whether the Conservatives “should still control, whether in power or whether in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” The upper house, AJB pointed out, still had a heavy Tory majority. They could block or mutilate social legislation. He urged them to do it, and they did. An education bill was so maimed by the Lords that Asquith had to drop it. A voting bill was rejected outright. A land-reform program met the same fate, and so did a liquor-licensing bill. This last was a favorite of Winston’s. Among the radical causes he had embraced—this from Churchill!—was temperance. Lucy Masterman was with him on November 26, 1908, when word arrived that the Lords had killed the measure. She wrote in her diary: “Churchill was perfectly furious at the rejection… stabbed at his bread, would hardly speak: murmured perorations about ‘the heart of every Band of Hope in this country sinking within them.’ He went on: ‘We shall send them up a budget in June as shall terrify them, they have started a class war, they had better be careful.’ ”¹⁰⁶

Actually, the “People’s Budget” of 1909 came in April. Its essence was a revolutionary concept. Until now, with the exception of progressive death duties the taxing power had been used solely to raise revenues for the government. Now it would also redistribute the wealth. Churchill and Lloyd George drafted the budget together. On Tuesday, April 27, Winston wrote Clementine: “Tomorrow—Sweated Trades! Thursday—the deluge [the budget]!!! Thus the world wags—good, bad, & indifferent intermingled or alternating, & only my sweet Pussy cat remains a constant darling.” The next day he reported that his minimum-wage bill had been “beautifully received & will be passed without division,” but: “Tomorrow is the day of wrath! I feel this budget will kill or cure. Either we shall secure ample funds for great reforms next year, or the Lords will force a Dissolution in September.” Clementine, replying from Blenheim, noted that “Sunny is much preoccupied about the Budget.” She predicted: “It will make politics vy bitter for a long time.” She was right, but it is an astonishing fact that scarcely anyone realized the budget’s implications when the chancellor introduced it in the House. He began by stating his intention to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness” and went on for more than four hours while “Churchill,” according to Virginia Cowles, “watched him like an anxious nannie.” As a performance, Violet Asquith wrote, “it was a flop. I went to the House of Commons, agog to hear it, and I failed to sit it out…. It was read so badly that to some he gave the impression that he did not himself understand it.” Even the press missed its implications; the following day The Times, the trumpet of the Conservative establishment, dismissed it as “unadventurous.”¹⁰⁷

It was hardly that. Taxes were raised on everything: whiskey, gasoline, pub licenses. But the stinger, cloaked in elaborate periphrases, provided that the rich, for the first time, be singled out for special treatment. Death duties were up, the aristocracy’s great estates were assessed whether their land was used or not, capital gains were taxed if the land was sold, and everyone who received over £3,000 a year was subject to a supertax. Only some 11,500 Englishmen had that much, but they were the people who ran the country, including members in the House of Lords. The aristocracy was enraged—Winston and Sunny were estranged—and they decided that if Liberals could break precedents, so could they. Against the advice of wiser Tories, the peers vetoed the People’s Budget. This created a constitutional crisis. Winston’s dander was up; he relished the fight ahead. As early as June 1907 he had described the Lords as “one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, absentee. Has the House of Lords ever been right?” he had asked. “I defy the Party opposite to produce a single instance of a settled controversy in which the House of Lords was right.”¹⁰⁸ Until now their blunders had been borne. But never before had they usurped the lower house’s power of the purse. He meant to right this wrong by taking the issue to the country, and he meant to pour it on.

So did Lloyd George, who went for the dukes, the leaders of the peerage. The economy was flourishing under the Liberal administration, he said; “only one stock has gone down badly; there has been a great slump in dukes. A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.” A nobleman’s elder son, he said, was merely “the first of the litter.” Since that definition fitted Sunny, Winston was expected to curb Lloyd George’s invective. Instead, he matched it. In a speech which the Daily Express headed HIS OWN RECORD FOR ABUSE OUTDONE, he pictured “the small fry of the Tory party” falling back on their dukes, from whom nothing could be expected but childish behavior. “These unfortunate individuals,” he said, “who ought to lead quiet, delicate, sheltered lives, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, have been dragged into the football scrimmage, and they have got rather roughly mauled in the process…. Do not let us be too hard on them. It is poor sport—almost like teasing goldfish. These ornamental creatures blunder on every hook they see, and there is no sport whatever in trying to catch them. It would be barbarous to leave them gasping upon the bank of public ridicule upon which they have landed themselves. Let us put them back gently, tenderly in their fountains; and if a few bright gold scales have been rubbed off in what the Prime Minister calls the variegated handling they have received they will soon get over it. They have got plenty more.”¹⁰⁹

Lloyd George was forgiven because of his background, Churchill condemned because of his. Cartoons depicted him denouncing the aristocracy and then retiring to Blenheim for the weekend. A Manchester Tory said that what was “neither excusable nor permissible is the lack of common decency shown by vulgar abuse of the dukes on the part of a man who is the grandson of one duke, the nephew of another, and the cousin of a third; who belongs to a family which has produced nine dukes; who figures in Debrett ^* as boasting a dozen titled relatives; and who owes every advantage he possesses over those whom he contemptuously calls ‘the small fry of public life’ to his aristocratic connections.” In the great country houses during that summer of 1909 venomous gossips agreed that the Churchill family, for all its power and glory, had never produced a gentleman; the first Duke of Marlborough had been a rogue, Lord Randolph a knave; Sunny’s duchess had left him because he was a cad—actually, Consuelo had left him for a lover—and now Winston had revealed himself as “utterly contemptible.” For a traditionalist like Churchill, with his great pride in his family, this was bitter medicine. Once he hesitated. He wrote Clementine that he was working on a speech “and am gradually getting some material together but of doubtful merit. I cannot make up my mind whether to be provocative or conciliatory and am halting between the two.” She stiffened his spine. Again and again, in these stormy years, she warned him not to be seduced by those Tories like F.E. who, even when public abuse was thickest, dined and drank with him. One morning she wrote him: “My dear Darling Amber Pug—Do not let the glamour and elegance & refinement & the return of old associations blind you. The charming people you are meeting today—they do not represent Toryism, they are just the cream on the top. Below, they are ignorant, vulgar, prejudiced. They can’t bear the idea of the lower classes being independent & free. They want them to sweat for them when they are well & to accept flannel & skilly [cheap clothes and thin soup] as a dole if they fall ill, & to touch their caps & drop curtsies when the great people go by—Goodbye my Darling. I love you very much. Your Radical Bristling”—here she drew an indignant cat.¹¹⁰

Probably he would have rejected propitiation anyway. Once committed to battle, he was almost incapable of restraint. Asquith complained that Winston’s letters to him were all “begotten by froth out of foam.” Asquith’s wife, Margot, wrote Churchill: “Believe me cheap scores, henroost phrases & all oratorical want of dignity is out of date.” He was unrepentant and untamed. “The House of Lords,” he told his audiences, was “not a national institution but a party dodge”; the peers had been “tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition which preceded dissolution.” All they could do, “if they go mad,” was “to put a stone on the track and throw the train of state off the line and that is what we are told they are going to do.” He was ready for bloodshed, if it came to that: “If the struggle comes, it will be between a representative assembly and a miserable minority of titled persons who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, their class interests and in their own interests.” Then, savagely, to a huge crowd in Inverness: “Just as they clutched greedily at the last sour, unpalatable dregs of the bottle before it was torn away from them at the last election, so now when they see a possible chance of obtaining power and place, they kick over the whole table in an ugly wish to jam their noses in the trough.”¹¹¹

The King, dismayed, directed his secretary, Lord Knollys, to write The Times deploring Churchill’s diatribes. This was unconstitutional; flagrantly so. Winston wrote Clementine that Edward “must really have gone mad. The Royal Prerogative is always exercised on the advice of ministers, and ministers and not the Crown are responsible—and criticism of all debatable acts of policy should be directed to ministers…. This looks to me like a rather remarkable Royal intervention and shows the bitterness which is felt in those circles. I shall take no notice of it. It will defeat itself.” He sent Asquith a memo: “The time has come for the total abolition of the House of Lords.” But the prime minister wasn’t prepared to do that. Indeed, he felt that under these extraordinary circumstances, he could no longer claim the Liberal victory of 1906 as a mandate. In January 1910 he called for a general election; the party slogan would be “The People versus the Peers.” Churchill was the most popular campaigner in the election, but the results were disappointing. The Conservatives picked up 116 seats, reducing the Liberal majority to 2. The Annual Register called the verdict “obscure and indecisive.” Nevertheless, with the support of Labour MPs and Irish Nationalists, the Asquith government still held the field. Then, on May 6, 1910, Edward VII suddenly died. There was just enough time for Queen Alexandra to send a brougham to fetch Mrs. Keppel so she could be at the bedside of her royal lover when he breathed his last.¹¹²

Margot Asquith dined at Jennie’s home that evening. Winston was there, and at the end of the dinner he rose and said: “Let us drink to the health of the new King.” Lord Crewe added: “Rather to the memory of the old.” Jennie, her face puffy from weeping, gave Crewe a grateful look. She and Edward’s other mistresses knew now that their long social reign had ended. Some hoped that the younger generation would pick up their torch. Alice Keppel told Clementine that if she really wanted to advance Winston’s career, she would take a wealthy, influential lover. Mrs. Keppel even offered to act as procuress and, when Clementine declined, called her “positively selfish.” But other faded beauties realized that this was, in the words of the song they had adored, After the Ball. They stood forlornly, sobbing among a quarter-million other grievers as the gun carriage bearing Edward’s coffin passed them on the Mall, between St. James’s Park on one side and the stately buildings, including St. James’s Palace, on the other, Big Ben tonguing with muffled clapper, the cortege led by the new King, George V, flanked by his uncle the Duke of Connaught and, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British field marshal, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to whom, said The Times, “belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,” because “even when relations are most strained [he] has never lost his popularity amongst us.” Later Edward’s mistresses paid him their own tribute. Jennie, Alice, Lillie Langtry, and the others celebrated that year’s Ascot as Black Ascot, standing in their old box wearing black feathers and ribbons on enormous black hats—wrinkled, graying women in their late fifties, but still slender, still pert, still flirtatious, and, in Jennie’s case—her marriage to Cornwallis-West was headed for the divorce court—still available.¹¹³

Winston’s mother was not invited to the new King’s coronation, but her daughter-in-law was. George sent Clementine a ticket to the Royal Box in Westminster Abbey, and when he learned that she was indisposed, he made special arrangements for her to arrive just before the crown was set on his head and then be whisked away. Her husband was another matter. Churchill tactlessly insisted that the King name a new battleship the Cromwell, which George flatly refused to do. Worse, when the King told him that he felt Asquith was “not quite a gentleman,” Winston repeated it to Asquith.¹¹⁴ The big issue facing the new monarch, however, was the unresolved People’s Budget. The Liberals urged him to appoint enough new peers to swing the House of Lords’ vote their way. He hesitated, and the country prepared to go to the polls again. Andrew Bonar Law, who would succeed Balfour as the Conservative leader, tried to exploit Churchill’s gambling instincts by proposing that he and Winston run for the same constituency in Manchester, with the understanding that the loser would stay out of the next Parliament. Winston declined to abandon his safe seat, preferring to spend his time and energy campaigning for other Liberal candidates. He was a political celebrity now. Crowds gathered wherever he spoke, eager to hear his biting wit and pitiless philippics.

The second election confirmed the close results of the first. Still the Lords refused to budge. Winston wrote Clementine: “Things are tending to a pretty sharp crisis. What are you to do with men whose obstinacy & pride have blinded them to their interests and to every counsel of reason? It would not be surprising if we actually have to create 500. We shall not boggle about it when it comes to the pinch.” Three weeks later he wrote her: “If anything goes wrong we make 350 Peers at once.” It proved unnecessary. Lloyd George had derided the upper house as “Mr. Balfour’s poodle,” and on this issue it was; they would take their cue from him. Asquith wrote Balfour, telling him the King would pack the Lords with new peers. The diehards—originally a regimental nick-name, the word entered the language at this time—were finished. Balfour resigned his post as party leader, signifying defeat, and in the sweltering summer of 1911 the upper house passed a parliamentary reform act, emasculating their powers, by the thin margin of 131 to 114. The Liberals, however, had paid a price. During the campaign Austen Chamberlain had predicted that Asquith’s government, if kept in office, would “establish Home Rule in Ireland.” Churchill later wrote of Austen: “He always played the game, and he always lost.” But this time he was right. To win the backing of the Irish MPs in the “People versus the Peers” struggle, the Liberals had agreed to introduce a new Home Rule bill, thus reviving that old and bitter quarrel.¹¹⁵

Winston and Jennie, 1912

Winston’s parliamentary skills and his services to the party entitled him to a promotion—a long step toward the prime ministership which, it was generally agreed, would be his before long. Even the Tories believed it; Balfour told him: “Winston, I believe your hour has come.” Churchill never waited for recognition. When the polls closed on the first of these two elections, he wrote Asquith that “Ministers should occupy positions in the Government which correspond to some extent with their influence in the country.” He wanted, he said, “to go either to the Admiralty (assuming that place to become vacant) or to the Home Office.” He was advised that “the First Lord could not be changed… without being slighted. But if you cared for the HO, no doubt it would be at your disposal.” He cared for it, and on February 14, 1910, he was appointed home secretary. He was thirty-five. Only one home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, had been younger.¹¹⁶

Churchill’s salary now reached the promised £5,000, and he was working hard for it. His responsibilities included the welfare of seven million factory workers and a million miners, national security, England’s police force, immigration, and law and order. Every evening when the House was in session he had to write a longhand report on its proceedings for the King. He was answerable for conservation, the censorship of stage plays, regulations governing automobile mudguards, the licensing of Italian organ-grinders—everything, in short, which directly involved the people living in the United Kingdom. His view of the office was liberal and humanitarian. He said: “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.”¹¹⁷ Bills drafted by him limited the hours of shop assistants and introduced safety measures in the mines. Most important, at the outset, were his role in guiding Lloyd George’s National Health Insurance Act through the House and his penal reforms.

On his appointment he told Violet Asquith that he was less interested in his policemen than in their quarries. Memories of his POW imprisonment in Pretoria were still vivid. Prisoners, he said, must have entertainment, “plenty of books, that’s what I missed most,” and anything else which would relieve their feelings of confinement, “except of course the chance of breaking bounds and getting out of the damned place—I suppose I mustn’t give them that!” She said she would prefer hanging to a life sentence; he vehemently disagreed: “Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.” He soon found that the duty he liked least was signing execution warrants; after visiting him, Blunt noted in his diary that it had “become a nightmare to him to have to exercise his power of life and death in the case of condemned criminals, on an average of one case a fortnight.” One death warrant which did not trouble him was that of Dr. H. H. Crippen, who had left his wife’s dismembered remains in the cellar of his London home and boarded a transatlantic steamer with his mistress, only to be intercepted on the other side by Canadian Mounties—the first fugitive to be caught by a wireless alert. Crippen was hanged at first light in Pentonville Prison on October 18, 1910. Churchill celebrated with a champagne breakfast.¹¹⁸

His predecessor, in handing over the seals of office, had told him: “As regards prisons, it won’t be a bad thing to give a harassed department some rest.” Winston gave it no rest. Beginning a series of visits to penitentiaries, he abolished floggings and introduced libraries and lecture programs. Of Britain’s 184,000 prisoners, he found, a third had been committed for drunkenness and more than half for failure to pay fines. Imprisonment for debt, theoretically abolished, was still common: “We are confronted annually with an ever increasing number of committals to prison and hence of failures to recover debt. A vicious system of credit, based on no real security, is increasingly involving working class families in domestic disputes, extravagance, embarrassment and ultimate disgrace, and is sapping thrift and honesty.” Here again he could identify with the men in cells; he, too, knew the burden of debt. He instituted a “time-to-pay” program for debtors and replaced the jailing of drunkards with fines. The number of debtors behind bars dropped from 95,686 to 5,264; of drunks, from 62,822 to 1,670. At the same time, he moved to deprive suffragettes of their martyrdom. They were, he said, “political prisoners.” As such they were neither searched nor forbidden to bathe; they could wear their own clothing, receive food and parcels from outside, and talk to one another. His explanation for this leniency was that “prison rules which are suitable to criminals jailed for dishonesty or cruelty or other crimes implying moral turpitude should not be applied inflexibly to those whose general character is good and whose offences, however reprehensible, do not involve personal dishonour.”¹¹⁹

He had been impressed and influenced by John Galsworthy’s Justice. Galsworthy now wrote The Times: “These changes are one and all inspired by imagination, without which reform is deadly, and by common sense, without which it is dangerous.” But a penal official warned that England should not “ignore the poorer classes outside the prison walls while we do so much for the worst classes of our population,” and the Tories were delighted when one case of clemency backfired. On a prison visit, accompanied by Lloyd George, Winston met the “Dartmoor Shepherd.” This unfortunate man had been in and out of prison since 1870. Once he had been sentenced to ten years for stealing a watch and chain; another time to five years for stealing £1 6s. 6d.; and, most recently, to three years for taking two shillings from a church box. He had never been guilty of violence. At Dartmoor he tended the penitentiary’s flock of sheep. Winston described him in a minute as a man who “enjoyed a melancholy celebrity for the prodigious sentences he had endured, for his good behaviour and docility in prison, and for his unusual gift of calling individual sheep by name.” On the stump Lloyd George contrasted him with the peers, “plunderers of the poor.” Churchill ordered him released. It was a mistake. The man was a recidivist. He promptly left the job the warden had found for him and, three months later, was arrested while breaking into a house. Winston reported to the King that the incident had received its “mead of merriment” in the House. The Tories formally moved a reduction of £500 in his salary, and, Churchill wrote in another report to the King, “as the Irish members were away, half the Labour members absent, ministers at the gala and holiday moods in the air, this flagitious proposal was rejected only by a majority of 32.”¹²⁰

Why weren’t all the Liberals and their allies there to save him from this humiliation? The answer lies in the letter’s date: June 27, 1911. By then MPs on the left had begun to qualify their admiration of Churchill. Actually, it had never been wholehearted. His colleagues in the Liberal hierarchy had always had reservations about him. Asquith complained that he “thinks with his mouth”; his wife wrote in her diary, “Winston has a noisy mind”; Lloyd George compared him to “a chauffeur who apparently is perfectly sane and drives with great skill for months, then suddenly takes you over a precipice.” Almeric Fitzroy thought that “his defect is that he sees everything through the magnifying-glass of his self-confidence.” Another Liberal leader came closer to the deepest source of their misgivings when he told A. G. Gardiner: “Don’t forget that the aristocrat is still there—submerged but latent.” Charles Masterman put it bluntly a few years later: “He desired in England a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to an industrious, bien pensant, and grateful working class.” There was an undefined feeling that his social legislation smacked of paternalism and had been a gesture de haut en bas; that, in Margot Asquith’s words, he had merely learned “the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George’s native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference.’ ” In point of fact there was a difference. Beatrice Webb remarked upon Winston’s “capacity for quick appreciation and rapid execution of new ideas, whilst hardly comprehending the philosophy beneath them.” But in time he did comprehend the philosophy of the extremists. And when he understood it, he recoiled. He put his trust in social evolution, not upheaval. England’s class distinctions suited him. He saw no need to efface them, or even blur them. Only when reactionaries refused to budge, as in the struggle with the Lords, would he endorse sweeping action. Rejected by Tories because he had betrayed his class, he was distrusted by radical reformers because his conversion had been incomplete. He couldn’t win.¹²¹

He was likeliest to lose in the Home Office. The first duty of the home secretary was maintenance of order, and beginning in the year he took over the ministry, organized workingmen suddenly turned to violent tactics. In the beginning the prospect of labor strife didn’t daunt him. Three weeks after taking over the Board of Trade he had settled a shipbuilding lockout on the Tyne to the satisfaction of both parties. But in the two years since then battle lines had been drawn between capital and labor, and as a moderate he occupied no-man’s-land. In union chapels his ritualistic denunciations of socialism were resented—though, curiously, Lloyd George’s, just as vehement, were not—and his attempts to be evenhanded failed. He compared irresponsible workmen to irresponsible peers and succeeded only in irking the new King, who felt he had insulted the aristocracy. Replying to the sovereign, Winston said that the home secretary had received “with deep regret the expression of YM’s Displeasure wh has reached him through the PM… with regard to the particular phrase wh has caused YM’s displeasure, wh Mr Churchill understands is ‘It should be remembered that there are idlers at both ends of the social scale.’ Mr Churchill cannot understand why this shd be thought Socialistic in character…. To say this is not to attack the wealthy classes, most of whom as Mr Churchill knows well have done their duty in many ways: but only to point to those particular persons whose idle and frivolous conduct and lack of public spirit brings a reproach to the meritorious class to wh they belong.” George was unmollified. And the left, judging Winston by his acts, found him wanting.¹²²

In the first week of November, 1910, over 25,000 coal miners walked out at Rhondda, in south Wales. Riots followed; several mines were flooded, and the disorders culminated in the battle of Glamorgan Valley, after which the miners smashed shop fronts in the town of Tonypandy. The local chief constable, unable to cope, asked for troops. Aware that sending soldiers against strikers was bad politics, Churchill kept the number of troops to a minimum of four hundred, sent three hundred London policemen, and made sure that the commanding officer was reponsible to him. Afterward the officer said: “It was entirely due to Mr Churchill’s foresight in sending a strong force of Metropolitan Police, directly he was made aware of the state of affairs in the valleys, that bloodshed was avoided.”¹²³ Strikers charged the bobbies, but the policemen swung rolled-up mackintoshes and beat them off. Elsewhere, however, two miners were killed, and when a unit of soldiers was stoned, they fixed bayonets and prodded the strikers into retreating.

In light of the fact that the wrecked stores in Tonypandy were looted during what The Times called “an orgy of naked anarchy,” the use of force does not seem excessive. The troops had been sent in response to an appeal from the Glamorgan law-enforcement official, and Churchill had had no part in that decision. But the fact that they had been called out, and had unsheathed bayonets, infuriated union leaders. Churchill firmly told them that the soldiers now in position would remain there until he judged that troops were “no longer necessary.” They then blamed the two deaths on him. He called this “a cruel lie,” which it was. Keir Hardie, maddened beyond reason, declared that the Liberals “will give you Insurance Bills, they will give you all sorts of soothing syrups to keep you quiet, but in the end your Liberal Party, just like your Tory Party, is the Party of the rich and exists to protect the rich when Labour and Capital come into conflict.”¹²⁴

The Conservatives turned this inside out. If troops had been sent in earlier, they said in the House, there would have been no looting and no property damage. An appeal from Winston, urging the strikers to renounce violence, was ridiculed by The Times as showing “a somewhat maudlin tone…. Mr Churchill hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen, which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place, but its place is not in the face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction.” The Daily Express was even harsher: “Nothing was ever more contemptible in childish and vicious folly than Mr Churchill’s message to the miners…. It is the last word in a policy of shameful neglect and poltroonery which may cost the country dear.” To the King, Winston reported: “The insensate action of the rioters in wrecking shops in the town of Tonypandy, against which they had not the slightest cause for animosity, was not foreseen by anyone on the spot, and would not have been prevented by the presence of soldiers at the colliery itself.” Nevertheless, the two myths endured. Tories thought he had acted spinelessly. Labor believed he had overreacted, and for more than forty years he would be heckled by workingmen who were convinced that he had led a bloody massacre of miners at Tonypandy.¹²⁵

Less than two months later he was in his bathtub—it is extraordinary how many crises found him bathing—when he was summoned to the telephone, “dripping wet and shrouded in a towel,” as he later recalled, to be told that members of a gang of Latvian anarchists had been trapped at 100 Sidney Street in Whitechapel. This was welcome news, exciting and important. Churchill wanted these men badly. They were not only criminals; the Liberal government was responsible for their presence in England. The city’s East End, inhabited by nearly two million poor Londoners, had always seethed with crime. But since the abortive Russian uprising of 1905 and the Liberals’ refusal to restrict immigration, Whitechapel, Stepney, Shadwell, and Bethnal Green had also become asylums for political refugees from the czar’s Okhrana, or secret police. Joseph Stalin had briefly lived in Whitechapel in June 1907, sharing a tiny room with Maxim Litvinov. In their homeland these anarchists—today they would be called urban guerrillas—had supported their causes by robberies, and they continued to do so here, treating bobbies as they treated the Okhrana. Among them was a band of Letts led by Peter Piaktow, alias “Peter the Painter,” so christened because when not ambushing bank messengers or holding up shopkeepers at pistol point, he worked as a house painter. The men trapped in the Sidney Street house were part of this gang. Heavily armed, they had already murdered three policemen; Winston and Clementine had attended the funerals in St. Paul’s ten days earlier. Now the bobbies holding them at bay wanted the assistance of troops; hence the phone call to the home secretary. “Use whatever force is necessary,” he said, promising that a detachment of Scots Guards from the Tower would be there within the hour. Then, dressing and donning his top hat and astrakhan-collared coat, he hurried by cab to the Home Office in search of more information. There was none there, so at noon he decided to take an official car to the scene because “I thought it my duty to see what was going on myself…. I must, however, admit that convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check.”¹²⁶

In Whitechapel he found high drama. Spectators and men in uniform were crouching behind buildings on both sides of the street while the killers and their besiegers blazed away at one another—the anarchists in their hideout firing Mausers; the Scots Guards, Lee-Enfields; and the sixty policemen, obsolete Morris-tube rifles. A Daily Chronicle reporter perched on the roof of the Rising Sun pub estimated that in the past hour and a half several thousand bullets had been exchanged without result. Churchill realized that he had made a mistake in coming: “It was not for me to interfere with those who were in charge on the spot. Yet… my position of authority, far above them all, attracted inevitably to itself direct responsibility. I saw now that I should have done much better to have remained quietly in my office. On the other hand, it was impossible to get into one’s car and drive away while matters stood in such great uncertainty, and, moreover, were extremely interesting.” Crossing the street for a better view, he sheltered in a warehouse doorway. Senior officers believed the house should be stormed, and he agreed; his “instincts,” he later wrote, “turned at once to a direct advance up the staircase behind a steel plate or shield, and a search was made in the foundries of the neighborhood for one of suitable size.” None was found, but the idea had lodged in his mind. In Sidney Street his concept of the tank was born.¹²⁷

At one o’clock thin wisps of bluish smoke curled upward from a garret window of the embattled hideout, and within a half hour it was burning fiercely. The London fire brigade clattered up. Firemen and policemen argued. The bobbies refused to let the men with hoses approach the building; the firemen insisted that extinguishing the flames was their duty. At this point Churchill intervened. “I thought it better to let the house burn down,” he explained afterward, “than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.” So it blazed for an hour. “Then at last,” reported the Daily News, “Mr Churchill stepped to the middle of the street and waved his arms… firemen appeared and regardless of possible bullets poured water on the burning house… and policemen led by Mr Churchill rushed forward to the door.” Inside they found nothing but charred bodies.¹²⁸

All this was recorded by cameramen. Eddie Marsh, dropping into the Palace Theatre, saw flickering newsreels, captioned “Mr Churchill directing the operations,” and heard them greeted by boos, hisses, shouts of “ ’E let the bastards in the country!” and “Shoot ’im!” More embarrassing, Balfour rose in the House to ask caustically: “We are concerned to observe photographs in the illustrated newspapers of the Home Secretary in the danger zone. I understand what the photographer was doing, but why the Home Secretary?” The Conservative press agreed that it was absurd. Churchill noted that “The Times blamed me for stopping the soldiers going to Tonypandy and now blames me for sending them to Sidney Street. Their doctrine is now apparent, that soldiers should always be sent to put down British miners in trade disputes but never to apprehend alien murderers engaged in crime. This is on a par with Tory thought in other directions.” It was not only Tory thought, however. Liberals were equally troubled; his recent conduct seemed inconsistent with their serene slogan: “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” A. G. Gardiner wrote in the Daily News: “He is always unconsciously playing a part—an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator. He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle—triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed in thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain…. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in this fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot, with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. Hence that portentous gravity that sits on his youthful shoulders so oddly, those impressive postures and tremendous silences, the body flung wearily in the chair, the head resting gloomily in the hand, the abstracted look.” Thus, Gardiner accounted for his “tendency to exaggerate a situation” and dispatch “the military hither and thither as though Armageddon was upon us.” Other Liberals believed that he had shown he lacked a sense of proportion, using “a steamhammer to crack a nut.” Charles Masterman, returning from holiday, demanded: “What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?” Churchill, lapsing into his lisp, replied: “Now, Charlie. Don’t be croth. It was such fun.”¹²⁹

The “Siege of Sidney Street,” as the press called it, was followed by the hottest summer on record, and, with it, a wave of industrial unrest. The disturbances began in June, when dockers walked out in Southampton, and swiftly spread to other ports. Then transport workers struck to show that they sided with the longshoremen. Churchill observed that “a new force has arisen in trades unionism, whereby the power of the old leaders has proved quite ineffective, and the sympathetic strike on a wide scale is prominent. Shipping, coal, railways, dockers etc etc are all uniting and breaking out at once.” The head constable in Liverpool reported to the Home Office that rioters had built barricades of dustbins and wire entanglements in side streets, lured policemen there, and stoned them from windows and housetops. The King wired Churchill: “Accounts from Liverpool show that situation there more like revolution than a strike…. Strongly deprecate half-hearted employment of troops: they should not be called on except as a last resource but if called on they should be given a free hand & the mob should be made to fear them.”¹³⁰

The immediate threat was famine. On August 9 the London meat and fruit markets shut down; they had nothing left to sell. Then, a week later, the railwaymen gave notice of a national strike. The railway companies had refused to recognize their union as a bargaining agent. Food shortages were imminent in the great quadrilateral of British industrialism, from Liverpool and Manchester in the west to Hull and Grimsby in the east, from Newcastle down to Birmingham and Coventry. Asquith offered the trainmen an inquiry by a royal commission. When they turned it down on the ground that such a commission would take too long, he reportedly said: “Then your blood be on your own head.” That night every member of the union received a wire from its leadership: “Your liberty is at stake, all railwaymen must strike at once.” Churchill told the House that “no blockade by a foreign enemy” could be so perilous. If unchecked it would lead, he said, “to the starvation of great numbers of the poorer people.”¹³¹

Violence erupted in Llanelly when rioters stormed a train and two were shot. The lord mayor of Liverpool telegraphed Churchill, asking him to requisition a warship and bluejackets to man the Mersey River ferries. H.M.S. Antrim was dispatched. But the larger issue was the railroad strike. Until August 17 the home secretary, though goaded by Tories and his sovereign, clung to the same position he had held at Tonypandy. Law enforcement was the responsibility of policemen, who were encouraged to enroll special constables. This attitude was not unappreciated; Ben Tillet, the leader of the London longshoremen, called Winston’s influence moderating and responsible. In his “History of the London Transport Workers’ Strike,” a leaflet published by the transport workers’ union in 1911, Tillet wrote that before the crisis he had thought of Winston as a “ferocious man of blood and iron,” but when they met in the lobby of the House he found him “as amiable as the gentlest shepherd on earth,” a man who “in quite convincing manner assured us he heartily agreed with all our views.” Tillet added: “If patience and courtesy, if anxious effort and sincerity count for respect, then Winston Churchill is entitled as a man to gratitude…. We found an urbane young Cabinet Minister apparently fully alive to the duties and responsibilities of his office.”

Unfortunately, Churchill’s approach had produced no results. He was in a dilemma. Liberal politicians, including every member of the cabinet except the chancellor of the Exchequer, shied away from the use of force, and soldiers could not be legally used in any domestic dispute without specific requests from local authorities. On August 19 Winston decided to break this precedent. He alerted fifty thousand troops and announced: “The Army Regulation which requires a requisition for troops from a civil authority is suspended.” Asquith remained silent. Lloyd George acted; he persuaded the railroad employers to recognize the union, and the men went back to work. Churchill believed his own order had cut the knot because it proved “that any Government must exert itself to prevent… catastrophe, and because it was certain that in taking such action they would be supported by the good sense and resolution of the whole mass of the people.” King George concurred; he wired him: “Feel convinced that prompt measures taken by you prevented loss of life in different parts of the country.”¹³²

Nonetheless, he had set a questionable example. In addition, he had again offended the left, whose powerful ally he had been at the Board of Trade. Masterman charged Churchill with “whiff-of-grapeshot” tactics, even with a “longing for blood.” Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald called the mobilization “diabolical” and went on: “This is not a mediaeval state, and it is not Russia. It is not even Germany…. If the Home Secretary had just a little bit more knowledge of how to handle masses of men in these critical times, if he had a somewhat better instinct of what civil liberty does mean… we should have had much less difficulty during the last four or five days in facing and finally settling the problem.” One observer concluded that Churchill’s “reputation with organized labour suffered a severe blow.” Even the Manchester Guardian, until now Winston’s warmest admirer in the press, was outraged when, despite the absence of any request from the lord mayor, troops appeared and occupied Manchester’s railroad stations.¹³³

The speed with which Churchill’s reforms were forgotten is puzzling. It is almost as though the radicals had felt uncomfortable with him in their midst. Henceforth he would be regarded as a conservative. He had always felt ties to the past, and there is an inevitable connection between a public man’s performance and the psychic baggage which is his unshakable companion. But the politicians of the left had pushed him rightward, just as the Tories had pushed him in the opposite direction seven years earlier. His own view was evocative of Robert E. Lee’s: “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another.” Essentially Churchill was unaltered. It was England which had shifted direction. The awakening of the working class, which he himself had stirred, had altered the political climate. In Victoria’s reign, or even during her son’s early years on the throne, workmen would never have conspired to bring the country to its knees over a union issue. But neither would a chancellor have imposed a supertax on the rich, nor a party have humiliated the peers. Social stability was wobbly, and civility diminished. The easy cordiality which had marked the rivalry between Joe Chamberlain and young Winston would soon be a rarity. Enemies were implacable. Friendships became exhausted, reservoirs of goodwill drained, public men used up. The disturbances of 1910–1911 had damaged Churchill’s credibility in the Home Office, and Asquith decided to shake up his cabinet. The rift within the Liberal-Labour coalition over the use of force in industrial disputes was one reason. The other lay in Europe. The kaiser, so welcome at Edward’s funeral, had been behaving outrageously. Germany was now regarded as a menace to the long European peace.

Churchill had met the kaiser on September 8, 1906, when he was still undersecretary at the Colonial Office. He had sought an invitation to the German army’s military maneuvers that year in Silesia, and as a member of Britain’s ruling class he was welcome. Count von der Schulenberg, military attaché at the emperor’s London embassy, informed him that an officer would meet his train in Breslau; he would stay at the Hofmarschallamt as the personal guest of Seine Majestät. Winston didn’t speak a word of German—“I’ll never learn the beastly language,” he growled, “until the Kaiser marches on London”—but like most upper-class Britons of the time, he assumed that every civilized man knew English.¹³⁴ His chief problem was finding an appropriate uniform. Von der Schulenberg had specified levee dress for a state dinner, and he hadn’t any. He thought he could borrow the leopard skin and plume of the Oxfordshire Hussars from his brother, but Jack had turned the skin into a hearthrug six years earlier. Finally Sunny rooted around in Blenheim’s attic and found his.

Winston witnessed the kaiser’s “entry into the city of Breslau at the beginning of the manoeuvres. He rode his magnificent horse at the head of a squadron of cuirassiers, wearing their white uniform and eagle-crested helmet… surrounded by Kings and Princes while his legions defiled before him in what seemed to be an endless procession.” On September 14 Churchill wrote Elgin from Vienna: “I had about 20 minutes talk with H.I.M. at the Parade dinner. He was vy friendly & is certainly a most fascinating personality.” They had bantered over a recent issue. Rebellious natives in German Southwest Africa had recently fled into the Cape Colony; German police had crossed the frontier in hot pursuit, and the kaiser, Churchill told Elgin, “was pleased to be sarcastic about ‘his design of flying across the deserts to seize Cape Town’ wh he suggested we attributed to him; & he said that if a native rising took place all over S.A. ‘those people (in Cape Town) would be vy glad of my troops.’ He enlarged on the fighting qualities of the Hereros, & I said in reply that in Natal on the contrary our chief difficulty had not been to kill the rebellious natives, but to prevent our Colonists (who so thoroughly understood native war) from killing too many of them.” Still, Winston had been impressed by the “massive simplicity & force” of the Prussian military machine. He told his aunt Leonie: “I am very thankful there is a sea between that army and England.”¹³⁵

Wilhelm remembered him, and was aware of the Churchills’ prestige in England. Over a year later, in December 1907, Jennie wrote Winston that the kaiser, meeting Leonie at a Clarence House luncheon, “asked a great deal after me & said he remembered me in Berlin with R[andolph]. He also spoke of you.” In the summer of 1909, with his reputation growing, Churchill was asked to return to Germany for another visit. He wrote his mother: “The German Emperor has invited me to the Manoeuvres as his guest, and I am to be at Wurzburg, in Franconia, on the 14th of September.” He wrote Clementine that the kaiser, who appeared “vy sallow—but otherwise looks quite well,” was “vy friendly—‘My dear Winston’ & so on.” His imperial host warned him “to guard against ‘disagreements on party politics’ & chaffed about ‘Socialists’ in a good-humoured way.” Winston was treated as an exalted guest: “I have a vy nice horse from the Emperor’s stables, & am able to ride about wherever I choose with a suitable retinue. As I am supposed to be an ‘Excellency’ I get a vy good place.”¹³⁶

Churchill and Kaiser Wilhelm at German maneuvers in 1909

He was troubled by the Teutonic character: “These people are so amazingly routinière that anything at least [sic] out of the ordinary—anything they have not considered officially and for months—upsets them dreadfully…. With us there are so many shades. Here it is all black & white (the Prussian colours). I think another 50 years will see a wiser & gentler world. But we shall not be spectators of it. Only the P.K. will glitter in a happier scene.” This time he was even more awed by the kaiser’s martial juggernaut. He described it as “a terrible engine. It marches sometimes 35 miles in a day. It is in number as the sands of the sea—& with all the modern conveniences…. How easily men could make things better than they are—if they only all tried together! Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations—I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” He treasured his family all the more: “Sweet cat—I kiss your vision as it rises before my mind. Your dear heart throbs often in my own. God bless you darling & keep you safe & sound. Kiss the P.K. for me all over. With fondest love—W.”¹³⁷

Back in England he once more persuaded himself that war between the two empires was unthinkable; it would be too ghastly; no sane authority could countenance it. He counseled the new King to take a conciliatory line, writing him on May 13, 1911, “Mr Churchill thinks that Your Majesty’s references on Tuesday next to the German Emperor will be very warmly welcomed by the Peace party in the country, & will do a lot of good to public sentiment here & in Germany.”¹³⁸ Then, less than seven weeks later, came Churchill’s greatest volte-face, transforming him from a dove into a hawk. It was triggered that July by the incident at Agadir, an obscure port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

The Germans had been late entrants in the race for colonies, and by the time they reached Africa all the prizes were gone. After the Tangier incident in 1905, Germany and France had agreed that neither would annex Morocco, but unrest there spread into French Algeria, and French troops, in another hot pursuit, crossed over onto Moroccan soil. The kaiser, on the advice of his aggressive foreign minister, decided to make an issue of it. He dispatched a gunboat, the Panther, to Agadir. Wilhelm expected the French to grab Morocco, which they did, and had no intention of contesting it; his goal was acquisition of a bargaining chip which would win him concessions in the Congo. He got them, but the arrival of the Panther on July 1, 1911, was destined to set off a murderous chain reaction. While Paris and Berlin were haggling, the Italians took advantage of the diversion by invading Tripoli. Tripoli was part of the Turks’ Ottoman Empire. Discontented nationalities in the Balkans decided that if Italy could take on the Turks, so could they. The immediate results were the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, followed by the rise of Serbia, Austria-Hungary’s fear of a strong Serbia, and Russia’s alliance with the Serbs, a consequence of the czar’s determination to preserve his credibility in the Balkans. Russia’s growing military presence in the region threatened Austria-Hungary and Germany, Austria-Hungary’s powerful ally. The kaiser liked his cousin in Saint Petersburg, but he believed that if he ever allowed him time to mobilize and arm Russia’s countless millions, they would be unbeatable. Therefore he began to contemplate pre-emptive war. Meanwhile, all the great European powers, engaging in a deadly quadrille, rearmed at a furious pace.

These sequelae were unrevealed to the Britons of 1911. No man, not even the wisest statesman, can see across the horizon, and in the barbarous 1980s the appearance of a small warship in an African harbor does not seem provocative. But it was then. Diplomacy was different in the years before 1914. A studied insult, even an unanswered note, could make governments tremble. The display of naked force—the Panther—had been shocking. It simply was not done. By doing it, the Germans changed a lot of minds, among them that of Lloyd George. Obviously, George told Churchill, Berlin believed that London would never intervene, whatever the kaiser did. He said, “People think that because I was pro-Boer I am anti-war in general, and that I should faint at the mention of a cannon.” He meant to correct that impression at once, and he did, in the chancellor’s annual address to the City bankers at the Mansion House. He said: “If a situation were forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.” The German ambassador, who had described George as a pacifist, was recalled in disgrace.¹³⁹

Churchill was also reappraising his position. His opposition to the Admiralty’s dreadnought program had been based upon his faith in Germany’s good intentions. Now, in an undated memorandum on Home Office stationery, he set down his thoughts. “Germany’s action at Agadir,” he wrote, “has put her in the wrong & forced us to consider her claims in the light of her policy & methods.” He believed that England must give France diplomatic support. “If no settlement is reached between F. & G. & deadlock results we must secure Brit interests independently…. If Germany makes war on France in the course of the discussion or deadlock (unless F. has meanwhile after full warning from us taken unjustifiable ground) we shd join with France. Germany should be told this now.” Asquith appointed him to the cabinet’s Committee of Imperial Defence, formed in 1904. There Sir Edward Grey revealed his 1906 pledge to defend France. On August 30 Winston wrote Grey that if “decisive action” became necessary, Britain should join France and Russia in “a triple alliance,” guarantee Belgium’s frontiers, “aid Belgium to defend Antwerp,” and plan “a blockade of the Rhine.”¹⁴⁰

Beginning that summer of 1911, after the disappointments of Tonypandy, the siege of Sidney Street, and the railroad strike, preparation for war was never far from Churchill’s thoughts. “Once I got drawn in,” he later wrote, “it dominated all other interests in my mind.”¹⁴¹ He was horrified when, at a Downing Street garden party, the commissioner of police informed him that the Home Office was responsible for guarding the magazines in which all England’s reserves of naval cordite were stored. Rushing from the party to the War Office, he persuaded the duty officer to post sentries at the depots until he could organize parties of constables. In mid-August he sought peace in the country. He was sitting on a hilltop, overlooking green fields, when he realized that lines from Housman’s Shropshire Lad were running through his head:

On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the distant drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder,

Soldiers marching, all to die.

On August 23 he submitted a prescient memorandum to the Imperial Defence Committee. Assuming that Britain, France, and Russia were attacked by Germany and Austria-Hungary, he predicted that on the twentieth day of the war the kaiser’s armies in France would break through the Meuse defense line. The French would then fall back on Paris. By the fortieth day, however, Germany would “be extended at full strain both internally and on her war fronts,” and with each passing hour this pressure would become “more severe and ultimately overwhelming” unless they could force an immediate decision. Denying them that would require “heavy and hard sacrifices from France.” Whether France could make them would depend on British military support, “and this must be known beforehand.” He proposed a contingency plan under which Britain would send 107,000 troops across the Channel at the outbreak of war, with another 100,000 men from India reaching Marseilles by the all-important fortieth day. General Henry Wilson told the committee that Winston’s prediction was “ridiculous and fantastic—a silly memorandum.” But three years later the Germans lost the battle of the Marne on the war’s forty-second day.¹⁴²

Churchill at British army maneuvers, September 1913

By September 1911 Churchill had tired of the Liberals’ growing polarization between left and right, the internal struggle in which he was being ground up, and was again pondering the Victorian policy of Splendid Isolation. He had cherished it as part of his political legacy. But now he studied a Foreign Office paper written in 1907 by Eyre Crowe. Crowe had held that England must preserve Europe’s balance of power by forging an alliance with the second-strongest nation on the Continent. Brooding over this thesis, Winston was struck by the thought that although earlier generations of Englishmen had never put it on paper, they had in fact always pursued it. This grand strategy, he believed, had been the key to the Elizabethans’ rout of the Spaniards, Marlborough’s defeat of Louis XIV, and Wellington’s triumph over Napoleon. Following the same line of reasoning, he concluded that England must now embrace France, even hold joint maneuvers with France. As a candidate three years earlier, he had told audiences in Manchester and Dundee that the German threat was a figment of Tory imagination. After Agadir he became the cabinet’s most ardent advocate of intervention.

Another prime minister might have resented his home secretary’s active interest in military issues. Asquith didn’t. Indeed, he had good reason to encourage it. Churchill, one of his ablest ministers, was no longer comfortable or suitable in the Home Office, and the Royal Navy needed a forceful hand at the tiller. As first lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna was far too easygoing; he had been unable to overcome the resistance of his first sea lord—the equivalent of the U.S. chief of naval operations—to the formation of a naval war staff. Asquith pondered having them switch jobs. Apart from Churchill, the only other strong candidate for the Admiralty was the secretary for war, Lord Haldane, who had just completed a brilliant reorganization of the army. In September 1911 the prime minister invited both men and their wives to be his guests at Archerfield, his Scottish estate on the East Lothian coast. The Churchills would arrive late, because Winston had to visit Balmoral first. It was customary for each senior minister to spend a few days there with the King each year. Clementine passed those days with her grandmother in Airlie Castle—wives were not received at Balmoral on such occasions—and on September 25 she wrote: “I hope you are happy my sweet Pug and that you are being properly petted, & that you will secure a huge stag. I am very happy here—Granny is become much kinder with age…. She sends her love & is looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday for luncheon which is at 1.30 to the second by Greenwich time. Afterwards we fly away to Archerfield in the new motor.” The automobile, a £610 red Napier, had been delivered to Churchill at Balmoral. He drove over to pick Clementine up, and before they left the castle he told her he was afraid Asquith would pick Haldane. She opened her grandmother’s Bible to the one hundred seventh Psalm. “I know it’s all right about the Admiralty,” she said, and read: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”¹⁴³

She was right. Asquith had already made his decision. Churchill would run the navy. Asquith wrote Haldane: “The main and, in the longer run, the deciding factor with me has been the absolute necessity for keeping the First Lord in the Commons.” Clementine was absent at the great moment. After a round of golf with Asquith, Winston approached Violet, who was just finishing tea, and asked her to join him for a walk. In his face, she wrote, she saw “a radiance like the sun.” Did he want tea? she asked. He shook his head. They had hardly left the house when he blurted out: “I don’t want tea, I don’t want anything—anything in the world. Your father has just offered me the Admiralty.” He looked sea-ward, and in the fading light of evening watched the silhouettes of two battleships steaming slowly out of the Firth of Forth. It was a full moment for him. He said: “Look at the people I’ve had to deal with so far. Judges and convicts! This is a big thing—the biggest thing that has ever come my way—the chance I should have chosen before all others. I shall pour into it everything I’ve got!” Just as Clementine had opened a Bible in Airlie Castle, so, that night at Archerfield, did he. He found himself reading from the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself…. Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee.”¹⁴⁴

The next day he and Clementine rode to London in the Napier, and in the morning he and McKenna changed guard. McKenna came over to the Home Office and Churchill introduced him to everyone there; then they crossed to the Admiralty, where Winston met his new board, senior officers, and departmental heads. That afternoon he convened a board meeting. The secretary read the letters patent confirming the new first lord’s appointment. Thereupon Churchill, in the words of the order-in-council, became “responsible to Crown and Parliament for all the business of the Admiralty.” In 1923 he would write: “I was to endeavour to discharge this responsibility for the four most memorable years of my life.”¹⁴⁵

His new office was accompanied by many perquisites, in all of which he reveled. There has always been a certain panache to England’s service ministries, and because the Admiralty is the senior service, the navy, in an old expression, “always travels first class.” Among other things, the first lord decides who launches ships. Seven weeks after his appointment Clementine christened the battleship Centurion at Devonport, and shortly thereafter Jennie baptized its sister ship, the Benbow. The first lord had at his disposal a luxurious steam yacht, the Enchantress. In Churchill’s words, this vessel became “largely my office, almost my home.” His time aboard was mostly work time; he visited every important ship and every dockyard, shipyard, and naval establishment in the British Isles and the Mediterranean. But for Clementine it was mostly fun. There was one memorable cruise up the coast of Scotland, on which her sister Nellie and her sister-in-law Goonie accompanied them. Another took them to Venice, where the crew caught a huge turtle; the cook asked, “Which evening would madam prefer turtle soup?” and was dismayed when his mistress, as fond of pets as her husband, ordered the tortoise returned to the sea. On a third voyage, they anchored in Cardigan Bay and visited the Lloyd Georges in Criccieth, their Welsh home. Because Clementine knew that Winston hated meals at which nothing of importance was accomplished, most guests were men who could be useful to the Admiralty, and she scored a real coup by suggesting they entertain Kitchener, now a field marshal and agent-general in Egypt. “By all means ask K to lunch,” Winston said. “Let us just be à trois. I have some things to talk to him about.” So the long feud finally ended.¹⁴⁶

These were golden days for Clementine. Motherhood had brought her a new tranquillity, and she had learned to suppress her objections to some of her in-laws. Winston wrote that they had received an invitation from Lady Wimborne, and asked her to accept: “I have a great regard for her—& we have not too many friends. If however you don’t want to go—I will go alone. Don’t come with all your hackles up & your fur brushed the wrong way—you naughty.” She replied: “I will write tomorrow to Aunt Cornelia—I would like to go, & I will be very good I promise you, especially if you stroke my silky tail.” She didn’t even demur when seated next to Asquith at meals, though the prime minister was a notorious peerer down Pennsylvania Avenue. Now in her late twenties, Clementine attracted many a lustful eye. After a day at Broadstairs with the Churchills, an artist friend wrote: “Winston went off to dig castles in the sands and the rest of us bathed. It was a broiling day and the water was heavenly. Clemmie came forth like the reincarnation of Venus re-entering the sea. Her form is most beautiful. I had no idea she had such a splendid body.”¹⁴⁷

Yet she was jealous of Violet Asquith, feeling, according to her daughter Mary, “an understandable reserve toward this well-ensconced friend of Winston’s.” And soon Violet would be practically living next door. In addition to his yacht, the first lord was provided with a magnificent eighteenth-century residence, Admiralty House, with a superb view of St. James’s Park. Winston wrote Clementine: “I am sure you will take to it when you get there. I am afraid it all means vy hard work for you—Poor lamb.” Sir Edward Grey wanted to sublet their Eccleston Square house, but she fought the move, pleading economy. Because the government was providing them with a home, Churchill’s salary was cut by £500, and Admiralty House meant increasing their servants from five to eleven or twelve. Confronted with this argument, he was, as always, vulnerable. In one helpless note he agreed with her that “money seems to flow away.” A few days later he cheerfully wrote that he was “preparing a scheme which will enable us to clear off our debts & bills & start on a ready money basis. We shall have to pull in our horns.” He couldn’t do it, though. That same week she was off to visit France, and he wrote: “If you have anything left out of the £40, spend it on some little thing you like in Paris.” Finally, after she had reduced the staff to nine by sealing off the first floor of Admiralty House, the move was made. Violet rejoiced. Winston, she wrote, had now become “our nearest neighbor. Only the width of the Horse Guards Parade separated the Admiralty from the garden door of No. 10 and it was often crossed hot-foot. It was a joy to see him buoyantly engaged in his new context, tasting complete fulfillment. I remember telling him that even his brooding had assumed a different quality. He travailed almost with serenity. ‘That is because I can now lay eggs instead of scratching around in the dust and clucking. It is a far more satisfactory occupation. I am at present in process of laying a great number of eggs—good eggs, every one of them.’ ”¹⁴⁸

He spent long days in his new nest. Eddie Marsh wrote a friend: “Winston stays until at least 8 every day…. Even Sundays are no longer my own, as I have spent 3 out of the last 4 on the Enchantress. We have made a new commandment. ‘The seventh day is the Sabbath of the First Lord, and on it thou shalt do all manner of work.’ ” Officers at the Admiralty were on duty twenty-four hours a day, alert for a surprise attack. In Churchill’s office hung a large chart of the North Sea with flag pins marking the position of every German warship; he studied it each morning on first entering the room “to inculcate in myself and those working with me a sense of ever-present danger.” The Pall Mall Gazette described him as “quite” a naval enthusiast, and after he had visited a submarine the Daily Express reported: “He had a yarn with nearly all the lower deck men of the ship’s company, asking why, wherefore, and how everything was done. All the sailors ‘go the bundle’ on him, because he makes no fuss and takes them by surprise. He is here, there, and everywhere.” Everything about the Admiralty excited him, from the twin stone dolphins guarding the building’s entrance to the furniture within, each piece of which was adorned with golden dolphins dating from Nelson’s time. His delights, like Antony’s, were “dolphin-like.”¹⁴⁹

Like Antony he was also accustomed to infusing his public roles with high drama. But this time it was appropriate. What had been absurd at the Colonial Office—depicting a dubious African chief as a martyr—became sublime at the Admiralty. It is arguable that the first lord’s burden was greater than the prime minister’s. He was answerable for England’s safety. Only the fleet could protect the island from invasion, move British troops to the Continent, bring regiments home from India, replace them with territorials, and prevent what an Admiralty paper called Britain’s likeliest peril: “the interruption of our trade and destruction of merchant shipping.” Two-thirds of England’s food was imported. The British merchant vessels which fetched it still accounted for over half the world’s seaborne trade. Enemy sea raiders, unless held at bay, could sink every one of them. Afterward Churchill wrote of the Royal Navy that its ships “were all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century, all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended on them. Open the sea-cocks and let them sink beneath the surface… and in a few minutes—half an hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole Empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly out of control, and falling a prey to others; and Europe after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.”¹⁵⁰

He had no doubts about the identity of England’s enemy. His mission, he said at the outset, was to put the fleet into “a state of instant and constant readiness for war in case we are attacked by Germany.” Looking back, he wondered how he could ever have been gulled by Berlin’s protestations of peaceful intent. In 1900, when he had been first elected to Parliament, the kaiser already presided over the most powerful army in Europe. That year Seine Majestät had proclaimed: “In order to protect German trade and commerce under existing conditions, only one thing will suffice, namely, Germany must possess a battle fleet of such strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power’s own supremacy doubtful.” Nautically, only one nation could be this “most powerful adversary.” Since 1889 Britain had been committed to what was called the “two-power naval standard,” meaning that England’s navy must be as great as any two other navies combined. Its supremacy posed no threat to the Second Reich. England had nothing to gain on the Continent. But sea power was its lifeline, and throughout the Edwardian years the kaiser’s shipbuilding program had put it at increasing hazard. In a note to Grey on January 31, 1912, four months after taking over as first lord, Churchill wrote that while “at present… several of the German Dreadnts are vy often the wrong side of the Kiel Canal wh they can’t pass & therefore must make a long detour,” that consolation was only temporary: “The deepening of the Canal by 1915 will extinguish this safety signal.” Then he submitted a formal memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence: “The whole character of the German fleet shows that it was designed for aggressive and offensive action of the largest possible character in the North Sea or the North Atlantic…. The structure of the German battleships shows clearly that they are intended for attack and for fleet action. They are not a cruiser fleet designed to protect colonies and commerce all over the world. They have been preparing for years, and continue to prepare… for a great trial of strength.”¹⁵¹

To end this insanity, Haldane visited Berlin early in 1912. He seemed the right man to send; a barrister with a passion for German philosophy, he was known at the War Office as “Schopenhauer among the generals.” But the first lord was better informed about the Reich’s new naval program, due to be introduced in May. The kaiser, in the naive assumption that their friendship transcended geopolitics, had sent him a copy via Sir Ernest Cassel. On February 7, with Haldane still on the Wilhelmstrasse, the Churchills were in Victoria Station, waiting for a train, when Winston picked up the late edition of an evening newspaper and read the German emperor’s speech opening the Reichstag. One sentence struck him: “It is my constant duty and care to maintain and strengthen on land and water the power of defence of the German people, which has no lack of young men fit to bear arms.” Two days later, after comparing this with the kaiser’s May plan, Churchill spoke out in Glasgow. “This island,” he said, “has never been, and never will be, lacking in trained and hardy mariners bred from their boyhood up in the service of the sea…. We will face the future as our ancestors would have faced it, without disquiet, without arrogance, but in stolid and inflexible determination.” He could not understand the kaiser’s motives: “The British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury.”¹⁵²

Had he understood their beastly language, he would have used another word. The German press translated it as Luxus, which has other implications; it denotes extravagance, or sumptuousness. In the Reich, as Churchill later wrote, it became “an expression passed angrily from lip to lip.” In London the Tories were critical; even the Daily News, which had been one of his most ardent supporters, commented: “It is difficult to reconcile Lord Haldane’s mission with Mr Churchill’s speech at Glasgow…. Lord Haldane is on a mission to cultivate good feeling between the Governments and peoples of England and Germany…. Mr Churchill will pass and be forgotten. What we trust will remain and work is Lord Haldane’s mission and determination to come to an understanding with Germany which doubtless it represents.” The kaiser, told of Winston’s statement, realized that he had miscalculated. Feeling betrayed by a former guest and protégé, he demanded an apology. None was forthcoming. Asquith said that although his first lord’s choice of language had perhaps been unfortunate, he had nevertheless made “a plain statement of an obvious truth.” And Haldane, upon his return from Berlin, told the cabinet that, “so far from being a hindrance” in his negotiations, “the Glasgow speech had been the greatest possible help.”¹⁵³

Regrettably, he added bleakly, it had not been enough to crown his efforts with success. He had talked to the emperor, to Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg, and to Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Their price for accepting Britannia’s rule of the waves had been exorbitant—an English pledge of neutrality in the event of war between Germany and France. Haldane had concluded that once “the war party got into the saddle” in Berlin, they would push “not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia but for the domination of the world.” None of them seemed to realize that the English were as sensitive on the naval issue as the French on Alsace-Lorraine. They vigorously supported the German Navy League, whose hundred thousand members, corps of paid lecturers (paid by Krupp, shipbuilders to Seine Majestät), and magazine Die Flotte were flooding the Reich with chauvinistic literature and posters with such slogans as “England the Foe!” “Perfidious Albion!” “The Coming War!” “The British Peril!” “England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” Apparently Bernard Shaw was right; the Germans were a people with contempt for common sense.¹⁵⁴

Or perhaps their problem was their critical adoration of authority. Haldane was convinced that the root of it was the kaiser, der hohe Herr. It was he who had told them: “Germany’s future is on the water.” Apparently someone had given him a book by an American, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History. Reading it, he had become convinced that his empire could never be truly great until it had mastered the seas. In addition, der hohe Herr had become paranoid. That was the explanation for his mischief-making and saber rattling. He believed his enemies were encircling the Reich and saw a powerful German fleet as a cleaver to cut through that investment. His navy, he predicted, “will bring the English to their senses through sheer fright,” after which they would “submit to the inevitable, and we shall become the best friends in the world.”¹⁵⁵

Winston sat stone-faced through Haldane’s report and, at the end, gloomily commented that the secretary for war had confirmed his worst suspicions. The German shipbuilding program scheduled to start in May, he pointed out to the cabinet, represented an “extraordinary increase in the striking force, in ships of all classes,” providing Tirpitz with five fresh battle squadrons, each attended by flotillas of destroyers and submarines, each “extremely formidable.”¹⁵⁶

Meeting this challenge—keeping England afloat—was Churchill’s responsibility, but first he had to make peace within the Admiralty, a task he compared to “burrowing about in an illimitable rabbit-warren.” The relationship between civilian administrators and naval officers could hardly have been worse. The first called the second “boneheads”; the second referred to the first as “frocks” and shared the conviction of Douglas Haig, now a lieutenant general, that the word politician was “synonymous with crooked dealing and wrong values.” Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the first sea lord, had been McKenna’s undoing. Wilson was, among other things, the chief obstacle to the creation of a naval war staff. He thought it would undermine his authority. The admiral was nearly twice Churchill’s age, but Winston was unintimidated. Believing that Wilson dwelt “too much in the past” and was “not sufficiently receptive of new ideas,” the new first lord decided to fire the old first sea lord. He didn’t know whom to appoint in his place, so he sent for Lord Fisher.¹⁵⁷

Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher—“Jacky” Fisher to England’s adoring masses—had retired to Lake Lucerne with a peerage four years earlier. He was a legend, “the greatest sailor since Nelson,” and he was immensely old. In 1854, when he had joined the navy as a midshipman, British men-of-war still carried sails. He had been a captain, commanding a battleship, when Winston was born. His great period had been between 1904 and 1910, when, as first sea lord, he had scrapped ships which he said could “neither fight nor run,” conceived the dreadnoughts, introduced submarines and 13.5-inch guns, revised the naval educational system, and built 161 warships, including 22 battleships of over 16,000 tons. Quick-tempered, emotional, with burning black eyes and a curiously Mongoloid face, he liked to portray himself as “ruthless, relentless, and remorseless.” The description was accurate. Officers who had questioned his policies had been ruined professionally; he had branded them traitors and declared that “their wives should be widows, their children fatherless, and their homes a dunghill.” Nevertheless, he was indisputably a genius. If Germany and England went to war, the navy Tirpitz would fight would be Fisher’s creation.¹⁵⁸

Churchill had met him in 1907, when both were visiting Biarritz. They had begun corresponding that April, and Fisher’s first letter, inspired by a sugar strike in the British West Indies, provides a fair sample of his style: “St Lucia quite splendid! Dog eat dog! You are using niggers to fight niggers! For God’s sake don’t send British Bluejackets inland amongst sugar canes on this job or we shall have to set up a War Office inside the Admiralty & goodness knows one War Office is enough! I enclose a very secret paper. Don’t let anyone see it. The best thing ever written in the English language bar the Bible & Robertson’s Sermons & letters from a Competition Wallah. Kindly return the print with your improvements in the margin—study it closely.”¹⁵⁹ The enclosure has not survived. It could have been anything. The admiral was given to superlatives and overstatements; his letters were peppered with exclamation marks and words underscored two or three times. A prudent minister would have shunned him, but Winston was never that; he believed that his own vision, married to Fisher’s experience, would make a brilliant union.

In the beginning he was right. The admiral came hopping home in response to Churchill’s summons, and they talked for three days. Winston found him “a veritable volcano of knowledge and inspiration; and as soon as he learnt what my main purpose was, he passed into a state of vehement eruption…. Once he began, he could hardly stop. I plied him with questions, and he poured out ideas.” Fisher, for his part, was so excited that he ran a fever. His chief recommendations were to arm Britain’s battleships with fifteen-inch guns, increase their speed, convert the entire navy from coal to oil, and shake up the senior officers: “The argument for a War Staff is that you may have a d—d fool as First Sea Lord, and so you put him in commission, as it were.” Churchill adopted all these proposals, though his attempt to put the war staff under himself failed when Haldane persuaded the cabinet that a sailor, not a politician, should head it. The fuel conversion was a difficult step. Having made it, he took another, inducing the House to invest £2,000,000, later increased to £5,000,000, in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, thus assuring adequate reserves in the event of war.¹⁶⁰

Handling the admirals was easier, but more delicate. The war staff was established in January 1912 and Wilson was relieved of his post. Winston had considered bringing Fisher back as first sea lord, then rejected the idea because another retired admiral, Lord Charles Beresford, the old salt’s sworn enemy, had become powerful in Parliament. At Fisher’s suggestion he settled on Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman. As second sea lord—Bridgeman’s prospective successor—he chose Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, a relative of the royal family. It was not a foresighted move. Prince Louis was a naturalized British subject and proud of it; when one of Tirpitz’s officers had reproached him at Kiel for serving under the Union Jack, he had stiffened and replied: “Sir, when I joined the Royal Navy in 1868, the German Empire did not exist.” Still, he spoke with a heavy German accent, and the time was coming when that would be enough to discredit him. Winston appointed one friend, David Beatty of his Sudan days, to be rear admiral and his personal naval secretary. His key decision was naming Admiral Sir John Jellicoe as second in command of the Home Fleet and thus heir to England’s most crucial seagoing command. Jellicoe was Fisher’s candidate for Nelsonhood. The old admiral wrote Churchill: “He has all the Nelsonic attributes. He writes me of new designs. His one, one, one cry is SPEED! Do lay that to heart! Do remember the receipt for jugged hare in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book! First catch your hare!” After leaving London he wrote a friend: “I’ll tell you… the whole secret of the changes! To get Jellicoe Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet prior to October 21, 1914—which is the date of the Battle of Armageddon.” That was vintage Fisher. One moment he sounded demented and the next he came uncannily close to guessing the date of the approaching war.¹⁶¹