Of these years Churchill would later write: “I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight.” Even today one senses the Churchillian presence at Chartwell, in the vast study, by the dining room’s round table, in the solid brick walls, the seat by the fishpond where he liked to meditate, and the studio in which his stunning paintings stand row on row, awaiting eventual public display. Perhaps, as Mary says, his painting, writing, and manual labor “were sovereign antidotes to the depressive element in his nature.” If so, never was depression so thoroughly routed by activity and wit. One can almost hear the merry rumble of his voice when, introduced to a young man on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, Winston said: “Napoleon took Toulon before his twenty-fifth birthday,” and, whipping out the gold watch, cried: “Quick, quick! You have just time to take Toulon before you are twenty-five—go and take Toulon!”¹⁷⁷

In fantasy one envisages long-ago summer afternoons here, with young voices calling scores from the tennis court, the middle-aged basking by the pool, and couples discussing imperial issues over tea and strawberries in the loggia. But if those who knew the Churchills could choose one moment of the year to relive, it would be Christmas. For them, in a nostalgic chamber of the mind, it will always be that magical eve when the entire family has gathered here, including Jack and Goonie and their young, with Randolph home from Eton, the girls rehearsing an amateur theatrical, Clementine helping the servants build a snowman, and Churchill upstairs writing one of his extraordinary love letters to her. (“The most precious thing in my life is yr love for me. I reproach myself for many shortcomings. You are a rock & I depend on you & rest on you.”) Presents, hidden all week in an out-of-bounds closet, the “Genii’s cupboard,” are about to appear. Fires crackle; the house is hung with holly, ivy, laurel, and yew; the Christ child gazes down lovingly from a large Della Robbia plaque. Now the double doors between the library and the drawing room are flung open and the Christmas tree is revealed in all its splendor, a hundred white wax candles gleaming, the scent of pine and wax like a breath of rapture, and Churchill, the benign sovereign in this absolutely English castle, leads the way across the threshold toward his annual festival of joy “with my happy family around me,” as he would later write, “at peace within my habitation.”¹⁷⁸

The prickly marriage of convenience between Asquith’s Liberals and Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government lasted less than a year. In the suit for divorce, bolshevism was named as correspondent. MacDonald had recognized Lenin’s regime, lent it money, and dropped charges against a Communist editor who had incited mutiny among British troops. Asquith thereupon withdrew his support, and Labour lost a vote of confidence, 364 to 198. The campaign which followed became known as the “Red Letter Election” because a few days before the polling the Foreign Office published a letter allegedly written by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Third International, calling on British socialists to organize an armed rebellion. Labour bitterly renounced it as a fake. Churchill shed crocodile tears. Many Labour MPs, he said, were politicians “of high reputation” who “stood by their country in the war” but whose position now was “pathetic. They have been unable to keep their feet upon the slippery slopes on which they have tried to stand.” Down they slid, the way greased by the Red Letter; in October 1924 the Conservatives won 419 seats, Labour 151, and the fading Liberals a mere 40.¹⁷⁹

Churchill in the garden at Chartwell

Among the triumphant candidates was Churchill, who became the member for Epping, a seat he was to hold for the rest of his public life, although in 1945 the constituency boundary was changed and it became the Woodford constituency. He was once more a supporter of Tory policies. In May, accompanied by Clementine, he had entrained to Liverpool and, for the first time in twenty years, addressed a Conservative party rally. Afterward he introduced his wife to their hosts. She was somewhat subdued, and he said: “She’s a Liberal, and always has been. It’s all very strange for her. But to me, of course, it’s just like coming home.” Presently the party’s chief parliamentary whip sent him congratulations “upon your brilliant speech.” He had spoken to a public meeting in Epping, coming down hard on MacDonald’s friendly overtures to Russia, “unquestionably one of the worst and meanest tyrannies in the history of the world.” Nominally he was a “Constitutionalist,” but the local Conservatives had adopted him as their nominee, and he won by nearly ten thousand, polling almost 60 percent of the votes cast, whereupon he accepted the Tory label. The Sunday Times reported that in Trafalgar Square “the great cheer of the day was reserved for Mr Winston Churchill’s victory at Epping.” T. E. Lawrence wrote him, “This isn’t congratulations, it’s just the hiss of excess delight rushing out,” and Ivor Guest, now Lord Wimborne, wrote: “I hope to goodness the Tories have the good sense to offer you high office. It will be reassuring to think of a progressive mind among their counsels, as a majority such as theirs is hardly conducive to a programme of social reforms.” But Churchill doubted there would be a ministry for him: “I think it very likely that I shall not be invited to join the Government, as owing to the size of its majority it will probably be composed only of impeccable conservatives.”¹⁸⁰

He was wrong. Baldwin, a shrewder politician than Churchill, very much wanted him in the cabinet. Despite the size of his party’s majority, he was afraid that Churchill and Lloyd George might form a center party and persuade Birkenhead to back them in the Lords, thus pitting the prime minister against Parliament’s three most eloquent speakers. Therefore he decided to separate Winston and George. Opportunity unexpectedly presented itself when Austen Chamberlain’s half brother Neville, who had only recently entered politics at the age of forty-nine but shared old Joe’s political legacy, declined the chancellorship of the Exchequer. Tory indifference to tariff reform had soured him; he preferred the Ministry of Health. Actually, it was Neville who suggested that Winston run the Treasury. Baldwin replied that the party would “howl.” Neville said that the howl would be louder if Churchill were returned to the Admiralty. Upon reflection the prime minister agreed; summoning the Epping turncoat he asked him if he would serve as “Chancellor.” Winston asked: “Of the Duchy?” “No,” said Baldwin, “of the Exchequer.” Churchill later wrote that he had been tempted to ask: “Will the bloody duck swim?” Instead, he replied: “This fulfills my ambition. I still have my father’s robes as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid office.” He also pledged his loyalty to Baldwin and said: “You have done more for me than Lloyd George ever did.”¹⁸¹

When Winston told Clementine, he wrote afterward, he had “the greatest difficulty in convincing my wife that I was not merely teasing her.” Convinced, she made him vow he would keep it from the press, letting the announcement come from No. 10. That was asking too much, however—it was like his pledge to keep their engagement a secret. That evening Winston dined at Beaverbrook’s home with Freddie Guest and Birkenhead, who had been appointed secretary of state for India. They all asked Churchill: “Are you in?” He said he was, but when pressed to name the ministry, he said: “I am sorry, but I would prefer not to disclose that just now.” He was obviously bursting to tell them, and they were indignant that he wouldn’t, but he didn’t want Beaverbrook to turn it into headlines. Finally he cried: “I am Chancellor of the Exchequer!” The phone rang; another source confirmed him; Beaverbrook decided to break the story. Birkenhead thought Winston had behaved badly by not sharing the tidings at once. According to Beaverbrook: “Suddenly a kind of flash of intuition came to me and I made a wild but shrewd guess. ‘I don’t believe Churchill is really to blame. He promised somebody he wouldn’t tell me before he came—yes—he promised his wife.’ Churchill said, ‘You are right. She drove me to the door of your house.’ ”¹⁸²

The howl Baldwin had predicted followed. The Morning Post sourly observed that “the idea of scrapping the Conservative Party in order to make a home for lost Liberals and returning prodigals does not appear to us to promise success.” The Times agreed. At the Admiralty Sir William Bridgeman, the new first lord, wrote his wife: “I am afraid that turbulent pushing busybody Winston is going to split the party. I can’t understand how anybody can want him or put any faith in a man who changes sides, just when he thinks it is to his own personal advantage to do so.” Austen Chamberlain, unaware of Neville’s role, wrote his wife: “Beloved: S. B. is mad!… I feel that this particular appointment will be a great shock to the party.” Sir John Simon told an amused audience: “There is a new piece of jazz music now being played which has been called ‘the Winston Constitution.’ You take a step forward, two steps backward, a side step to the right, and then reverse. You can see that the piece is well named.” His faithful old Liberal ally, the Guardian, commented mournfully: “Mr Churchill for the second time has—shall we say?—quitted the sinking ship and for the second time the reward of this fine instinct has been not safety only but high promotion.”¹⁸³

The Exchequer was the highest gift a prime minister could bestow. Keeping the Sussex Square house was no longer an issue; it was sold, and the family moved into No. 11 Downing Street, sharing the garden behind it with the Baldwins at No. 10. Gladstone’s famous red dispatch case was entrusted to Winston. Lord Randolph’s Exchequer robes, put away in tissue paper and camphor by Winston’s mother on Christmas Day, 1886, were aired and donned by him for his first official function, the “Pricking [selection] of the Sheriffs” on November 13, 1924. Afterward he lunched with Reginald McKenna, who wrote Beaverbrook: “He tells me he means to master the intricacies of finance and I think he will succeed, though he will find it more difficult than he imagines.” Actually, he appears to have had no concept of the challenge. Lord Boothby recalls that Churchill “soon discovered that the Treasury was not congenial to him, and that he was basically uninterested in the problems of high finance.” After a meeting with Treasury officials, economists, and bankers, Winston told Boothby: “I wish they were admirals or generals. I speak their language, and can beat them. But after a while these fellows start talking Persian. And then I am sunk.” As an MP, Boothby became Winston’s parliamentary private secretary. After it had become clear that Churchill was having difficulties in his new office, Boothby asked P. J. Grigg, a senior civil servant at the Exchequer, why that should be. Grigg replied: “There is only one man who has ever made the Treasury do what it didn’t want to do. That was Lloyd George. There will never be another.”¹⁸⁴

Certainly Winston wasn’t one. Late in life he remarked: “Everyone said I was the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever was, and now I am inclined to agree with them.” But that was going too far. To be sure, he had no economic convictions apart from his blind faith in Free Trade, and it was disconcerting to hear the seigneur of British finance say loftily: “The higher mind has no need to concern itself with the meticulous regimentation of figures.” He was far from being the worst chancellor, however, or even one of the worst; unlike his father, he knew what “those damned dots” meant, and he had a vision, a revival of the social strategy he and Lloyd George had conceived in the first decade of the century. Welfare legislation was very much on his mind. He envied Neville Chamberlain at the Ministry of Health, telling him: “You are in the van. You can raise a monument. You can leave a name in history.” Drafting his first budget at Chartwell, he wrote Clementine: “I have been working all day (Sunday) at pensions & am vy tired.” In a Treasury minute two days later he wrote: “It is when misfortune comes upon the household, when prolonged unemployment, or old age, or sickness, or the death of the breadwinner comes upon this household, that you see how narrow was the margin on which it was apparently living so prosperously, and in a few months the result of the thrift of years may be swept away, and the house broken up.” Addressing a skeptical audience—the British Bankers’ Association—he said that economic aid for “every class and every section… is our aim: the appeasement of class bitterness, the promotion of a spirit of cooperation, the stabilisation of our national life, the building of the financial and social plans upon a three or four years’ basis instead of a few months’ basis, an earnest effort to give the country some period of recuperation after the vicissitudes to which it has been subjected.”^*185

It was Churchill’s misfortune, and Britain’s, that he came to the Treasury with the right ideas at the wrong time. The country’s economists were torn between, on the one hand, those who regarded the classical law of supply and demand as an article of absolute faith and, on the other hand, the followers, still few in numbers, of John Maynard Keynes’s concept of a managed economy. A heavy parliamentary majority believed that the budget must be balanced, whatever the cost. Given the plight of the Treasury in the mid-1920s, this was wildly unrealistic. England’s great prewar assets were gone, spent, like the blood of its youth, in the trenches and no-man’s-land across the Channel. After the brief boom in the years immediately following the Armistice, management’s prewar troubles with organized labor returned, redoubled by a huge hard core of jobless men, refugees from giant industries—coal, cotton, shipbuilding, and steel and iron—which had once thrived on exports and could no longer find markets abroad. The miners’ union, exasperated with the coalfields’ shortsighted, reactionary, incompetent proprietors, turned to the government. An official inquiry recommended nationalization of the mines, but nothing was done. In 1921 a mine lockout was followed by competition from the revived German coal industry, which led to wage cuts in the British coalfields. Unrest was growing there.

Another of Winston’s unwelcome legacies was the servicing of England’s war debt to America. Great Britain owed the United States the preposterous sum of $4,933,701,642. Interest on this exceeded £35,000,000 a year. Again and again Churchill explained to England’s former ally, now its creditor, that Britain couldn’t repay the principal until France had paid Britain its war debt. Sometimes he thought he was succeeding. On January 10, 1925, he wrote Clementine: “I have had tremendous battles with the Yanks, & have beaten them down inch by inch to a reasonable figure. In the end we are fighting over tripe like £100,000!” But agreement after agreement collapsed, President Coolidge saying inanely: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” A Chartwell guest noted in his diary: “Winston talked very freely about the U.S.A. He thinks they are arrogant, fundamentally hostile to us, and that they want to dominate world politics.”¹⁸⁶

In the House of Commons annual calendar, Budget Day belongs to the chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill’s first such occasion was April 28, 1925. A large crowd awaited him outside No. 11 as he emerged smiling, the dispatch case in his hand. “Let me take the box, sir,” said Detective Thompson, and Winston recoiled in horror, saying: “No, no! There’s but one person to guard this box and it’s me!” The spectators tagged along as he proceeded down Parliament Street and into the crowded House, where Clementine, Diana, and Randolph were seated in the Strangers’ Gallery. His two-and-a-half-hour speech was lucid and witty; at one point he produced a pint of whiskey, poured some in a glass, and said: “It is imperative that I should fortify the revenue and I shall now, with the permission of the Commons, proceed to do so.” Everyone cheered as he sipped except Lady Astor, who had urged Britain to follow America’s example and adopt Prohibition. Bowing to her, he noted that she was “noble” but added: “I do not think we are likely to learn much from the liquor legislation of the United States.”¹⁸⁷

Like all budgets, this one required careful scrutiny, and those who studied it line by line realized that in many ways it was an abrupt departure from the traditional Tory approach to ways and means. Churchill believed that the key to fiscal health was productivity, that the leisure class was “but the glittering scum on the deep river of production.” He wanted to lower taxes on the poor and raise them on unearned income: “The process of the creation of new wealth is beneficial to the whole community. The process of squatting on old wealth though valuable is a far less lively agent.” At the same time, the Treasury must assume responsibility for the victims of industrial distress. His proposals included a reduction in the pensionable age from seventy to sixty-five, immediate payment of benefits to over 200,000 widows and 350,000 orphans, and abolition of what he called “restrictions, inquisitions and means tests” for welfare applicants—“it would be nobody’s business what they had or how they employed their time.” He believed that “by giving a far greater measure of security to the mass of wage-earners, their wives and children, it may promote contentment and stability, and make our Island more truly a home for all these people.” Funds would be set aside to provide health insurance for thirty million Britons; it was here, he argued, that “the State, with its long and stable finance, can march in and fill the immense gap.” A special sense of urgency, he felt, should spur the government’s obligation to help those rendered helpless by circumstances over which they had had no control, adding passionately: “It is the stragglers, the exhausted, the weak, the wounded, the veterans, the widows and orphans to whom the ambulances of State aid should be directed.”¹⁸⁸

Winston had stolen Neville Chamberlain’s thunder, and Chamberlain resented it. The chancellor’s mandate did not include the needy. But rustling was an old Churchillian habit, and few Tories would object if he could find the funds and balance the budget without raising taxes. He could and did. He had searched the files and minds of the Treasury’s senior civil servants, and had reached two momentous decisions. The first was a return to the gold standard, of which more presently; the second, a £10,000,000 cut in the service estimates, with the Admiralty as the heavy loser. Only the RAF had emerged unshorn. His reasons were various. One, perhaps, was a tribute to his father’s failed crusade. But others were stronger. If he were to win pensions, health insurance, and help for the helpless, he had to wield his scalpel somewhere, and the public mood would support drastic reductions in expensive armaments. Clementine spoke for millions of Britons when she wrote urging him to “stand up to the Admiralty…. don’t be fascinated or flattered or cajoled by Beatty.” Now that the kaiser’s fleet lay on the bottom of the Firth of Forth, Winston reasoned, Britain was secure at sea. The only foreign fleets of any size were those of the United States, which was hardly likely to declare war on England, even over debts, and Japan, whose military establishment, despite its successes against the Bolsheviks, was considered laughable. Churchill assumed that the Germans would keep their word and refrain from building another fleet to challenge British sea power, though later he described this supposition as “the acme of gullibility.”¹⁸⁹

The Royal Navy felt betrayed. Here was a former first lord, whose memory was still cherished in wardrooms, “committed,” as Admiral Sir William James puts it, “to fight the Admiralty inch by inch for every penny of their estimates.” His chief adversary, the first sea lord, was David Beatty, a Churchill friend since Omdurman. Winston argued that battleships had been obsolescent for some time and were now obsolete. They had been torpedoed at the Yalu River in 1894, at Port Arthur in 1904, and, repeatedly, in the Great War; the American air power evangelist Billy Mitchell had just proved that they could be sunk by Martin MB-2 twin-engined bombers. At the height of the controversy Beatty wrote his wife: “Yesterday I was vigorously engaged with Winston and I think on the whole got the better of him. I must say, although I had to say some pretty strong things, he never bears any malice and was good-humoured through the engagement.” Later he joined those who thought Winston had lost his sense of proportion, writing her heatedly: “That extraordinary fellow Winston has gone mad. Economically mad, and no sacrifice is too great to achieve what in his shortsightedness is the panacea for all evils—to take 1 S off the Income Tax. Nobody outside a lunatic asylum expects a shilling off the Income Tax this Budget…. As we at the Admiralty are the principal Spending Department, he attacks us with virulence.” And again: “I have to tackle Winston and had 2½ hours with him this evening. It takes a good deal out of me when dealing with a man of his calibre with a very quick brain. A false step, remark, or even gesture is immediately fastened upon, so I have to keep my wits about me. We of course arrived at nothing…. We are working up a case for the Prime Minister to adjudicate on the differences which exist between us.”¹⁹⁰

Baldwin, with his great skill at compromise, restored some of the Admiralty estimates, but Churchill won in the long run; during each of his five years as chancellor, every service except the RAF saw its appropriations dwindle. Even so, the public temper was such that he was frequently attacked as a military spendthrift; the Economist faulted him on the ground that 3 percent of the national income was being allocated to defense, compared with 2 percent in the later years of Victoria’s reign. Perhaps any other chancellor would have done the same. But one expects more from Churchill, and the saddest page in this record is his repeated insistence that the ten-year rule adopted in August 1919 be extended from year to year.^* He convinced the Committee of Imperial Defence that it was sound policy, though there was one demurrer. The minutes of the committee’s two hundred thirty-sixth meeting record that: “LORD BALFOUR was of the opinion that nobody could say that from any one moment war was an impossibility for the next ten years and that we could not rest in a state of unpreparedness on such an assumption by anybody. To suggest that we could be 9½ years away from preparedness would be a most dangerous suggestion.”¹⁹¹

Churchill was to oppose rearmament as late as 1929, when B. H. Liddell Hart wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “every important foreign Power has made startling, indeed ominous, increases of expenditure on its army…. Our Government, which has to keep watch for storm signals, would be false to its duty to this nation if it reduced our slender military strength more drastically until other nations imitate the lead which we have so repeatedly given.” In one instance Churchill was false to himself. He had inveighed against MacDonald for suggesting that the naval base at Singapore be abandoned. Now he argued that Singapore, like Iraq, could be defended by the RAF. He objected to “measuring our naval strength” against a “fancied” threat from Dai Nippon, commenting that the Admiralty was “unduly stressing the Japanese danger.” Indeed, he had been in No. 11 less than a month when he asked the Foreign Office to declare that war with Nippon would be impossible for the next twenty years. Austen Chamberlain hesitated, but the decision was made. Early in 1924 the Admiralty recommended the establishment of a submarine base at Hong Kong and the installation “as fast as possible” of new naval guns at Singapore. “For what?” asked Winston, who only a few months earlier had been Singapore’s staunchest champion. “A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.” He was convinced that “war with Japan is not a possibility any reasonable government need take into account.” Beatty thought otherwise. Later, with an eye on history, Winston claimed that he had been at a disadvantage because Beatty had not told him of secret telegrams bearing evidence of Japan’s aggressive designs. Still, one feels that this was not Churchill’s finest hour.¹⁹²

The most sensational moment in Churchill’s first budget was his dramatic disclosure that Britain, which had left the gold standard during the war, was back on it. The Times reported that this announcement was greeted with “tremendous cheers.” After the applause had died down he said: “No responsible authority has advocated any other policy. It has always been a matter of course that we should return to it.” This was simply untrue. Beaverbrook had been against it; on the evening of Budget Day he wrote Bracken: “My opinion of Winston has not altered. I knew from the beginning that he would give in to the bankers on the Gold Standard, which, I think, is the biggest sin in this budget.” Half a century later Boothby, looking back on a long public life, said of the return to gold that “with the exception of the unilateral guarantee to Poland without Russian support, this was the most fatal step taken by the country.”¹⁹³

Beaverbrook and Boothby were among the few Jeremiahs on the issue then; others, and they were almost the only others, were Winston’s old colleague Reginald McKenna, a former chancellor; John Maynard Keynes; and Vincent Vickers, who protested the move by resigning from the board of the Bank of England. Churchill has been blamed for it, and rightly so, because as chancellor he made the decision. The step was not taken lightly, however, or without learned advice. Responsibility was collective and bipartisan. In 1918 the step had been recommended by a standing committee of experts appointed by Lloyd George; a majority of Conservatives, Liberals, and Labourites had then endorsed it. Churchill regarded that endorsement as binding. According to Grigg, the new chancellor invited gold’s advocates and adversaries to dinner. Sir Otto Niemeyer of the Bank of England stated the case for gold; McKenna and Keynes argued against it. Winston thought some of the points made by McKenna and Keynes were valid. “But,” he added, staying off gold “isn’t entirely an economic matter; it [would be] a political decision, for it involves proclaiming that we cannot, for the time being at any rate, complete the undertaking which we all acclaimed was necessary in 1918, and introducing legislation accordingly.”¹⁹⁴

The roster of men who supported it on economic grounds alone was formidable; they included Austen Chamberlain, another ex-chancellor; Montague Norman, the governor of the Bank of England; and Labour’s Philip Snowden, Churchill’s immediate predecessor at No. 11, who had intended to put Britain back on gold himself had he remained chancellor. After yielding his seals of office Snowden had eloquently set forth the case for gold in the Observer. One Labour MP, Hugh Dalton, a Keynes disciple, challenged Winston’s decision: “We on these benches will hold the Chancellor of the Exchequer strictly to account, and strictly responsible, if, as we fear, there should be a further aggravation of unemployment and of the present trade depression as a result of his action, and should it work out that men who are employed lose their jobs as a result of this deflation. Should that be so we will explain who is to blame.” But Dalton was almost alone in his own party. Labour’s leaders didn’t even put the issue to a vote. Indeed, years passed before they grasped what had happened. In 1946 Ernest Bevin told the House that Churchill had acted impulsively and “like a bolt from the blue we were suddenly met with the complete upset of the wage structure in this country.” Bevin neglected to mention that in 1929, four years after Winston had brought England back to the prewar parity of gold, Ramsay MacDonald became Labour’s prime minister for the second time while vowing to “save the pound”—to keep the British economy belted in its twenty-four-karat straitjacket.¹⁹⁵

Why did they do it, and what did it mean? British financiers, in the Treasury and in the City, were convinced that England’s future prosperity could be assured only if London were reestablished as the financial center of the globe. This, they held, would be impossible until “the pound can look the dollar in the face.” Churchill told the House: “We have entered a period on both sides of the Atlantic when political and economic stability seems to be more assured than it has for some years. If this opportunity were missed, it might not recur soon, and the whole finance of the country would be clouded over for an indefinite period by the fact of uncertainty. ‘Now is the appointed time.’ ” Niemeyer asked doubters: “How are we, a great exporting and importing country, to live with an exchange fluctuating with gold, when the United States of America, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, the Dominions… and Japan have a stable gold exchange?”¹⁹⁶ To bankers, reestablishing the credit of the pound was worth any risk. In reality, any precious metal or even a flourishing economy can serve as well as gold, and many do today. The Niemeyers, Normans, and Snowdens were living in the past, when Britannia ruled the waves and the pound was regarded with respect and awe in all the world’s money markets. They assumed that the restoration of the pound’s parity with the American dollar would reestablish Britain’s prewar prosperity. None seemed to realize that England had squandered its wealth between Sarajevo and Versailles, or that the country’s shrunken export trade could no longer provide the surplus needed to reestablish London’s fiscal ascendancy over the rest of the world.

Keynes now emerged. In the Nation, the Evening Standard, and finally in a pamphlet, “The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill,” he went for Winston’s jugular, declaring that the chancellor had acted “partly, perhaps, because he has no instinctive judgment to prevent him from making mistakes; partly, because, lacking this instinctive judgment, he was defeated by the clamorous voice of conventional finance; and most of all, because he was gravely misled by the experts.” The return to gold, Keynes said, “shackled” and “enslaved” the country. “The whole object is to link rigidly the City and Wall Street,” and this alarmed him because America, with its rapidly expanding economy, “lives in a vast and unceasing crescendo. Wide fluctuations, which spell unemployment and misery for us, are swamped for them in the general upward movement.” The United States could afford “temporary maladjustments” because its productivity was growing “by several per cent per annum.” Once, when Victoria reigned, that had been true of Britain. “This, however, is not our state now. Our rate of progress is slow at best,” and flaws which could have been dismissed in the nineteenth century “are now fatal. The slump of 1921 was even more violent in the United States than here, but by the end of 1922 recovery was practically complete. We still, in 1925, drag on with a million unemployed.”¹⁹⁷

The effect of going back to gold, said Beaverbrook, was “making yet more difficult the selling of British goods abroad and so aggravating unemployment at home.” Events soon proved Keynes and Beaverbrook right. English goods which had been priced at eighteen shillings in foreign markets now cost twenty—a full pound. This handicapped all British exporters; some became hopelessly crippled. The owners of British collieries could not compete with German and American coal if they charged higher rates. Their only alternative was to cut their miners’ wages. That was ominous. Coal mining, Britain’s basic industry, was also the most highly organized and politicized; Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour party, had been a Scottish miner. The miners’ union protested the drop in pay. The Trade Union Congress, or TUC, the English equivalent of America’s AFL-CIO, promised to back the miners all the way, and Labour MPs declared their solidarity with them. In July 1925, two days before the cuts were to go into effect, Baldwin temporized. The Treasury, he said, would subsidize the mine owners while a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel investigated the situation. The prime minister bought nine months of labor peace, but the cost—first estimated at £10,000,000 but ultimately £23,000,000—was exorbitant. Churchill had agreed to the stopgap, but he protested, with the rest of the cabinet, when the prime minister proposed to extend it. Keynes was in the thick of things. He asked: “Why should coal miners suffer a lower standard of life than other classes of labour? They may be lazy, good-for-nothing fellows who do not work so hard or so long as they ought to. But is there any evidence that they are more lazy or more good-for-nothing than other people?” They were, he said, “victims of the economic juggernaut,” pawns being sacrificed to bridge the gap, required by the return to gold, between $4.40 and $4.86. “The plight of coal miners,” he concluded, “is the first—but not, unless we are very lucky, the last—of the Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill.”¹⁹⁸

Winston retorted angrily: “I have never heard of any argument more strange and so ill-founded, as that the Gold Standard is responsible for the condition of affairs in the coal industry. The Gold Standard is no more responsible than is the Gulf Stream.”¹⁹⁹ But evidence to the contrary was accumulating; week by week the tension in the mines grew. On March 1, 1926, the Samuel Report was released. It was a thoughtful, practical document, the result of profound research, and its conclusions were an indictment of the coal owners. Over the years, Samuel and his colleagues found, the proprietors had reaped enormous profits while bleeding the industry, refusing to replace obsolete equipment. As a consequence, theirs had become a losing business. Unless the government continued its subsidy, or nationalized the collieries, the miners would have to accept lower wages now. Later, after modern equipment had been installed, their pay would rise. No one could tell when that would be. The report gave the owners and the union six weeks to reach an agreement.

At this point the prime minister should have taken a strong stand. That is what leaders are for. The owners, with their accumulated wealth, could have been pressed to a settlement. But Baldwin had recently compromised himself, declaring publicly: “All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages in order to help put industry on its feet.” So he temporized again. The commission’s findings, he said, were disappointing, but if both parties could live with them, the government would not object. This encouraged extremists on each side; they shredded the report with technical arguments and then rejected it outright. Up to this point, Churchill’s sympathies had been with the miners. Labour didn’t appreciate that; when the coal subsidy forced him to cut health and unemployment insurance appropriations, there were cries of “Robber!” from the Opposition benches, to which he replied that for one who had frequently been called a “murderer,” this was “a sort of promotion.” Unknown to them, he had sent young Harold Macmillan to Newcastle, asking him to report on the situation there, and on April 10 Macmillan—who felt it “a great honour to be taken into your confidence”—wrote describing “the appalling conditions in this area.” He thought that “the patience and the endurance of the workers as a whole is really remarkable. Certainly adversity brings out greater virtues than prosperity in all classes, but peculiarly so among the working people.” Churchill was optimistic; he felt certain that a way to reward these virtues would be found. After all, those on both sides were Englishmen. Speaking to the Belfast Chamber of Commerce he said that he did not share the opinion, so widespread abroad, particularly in the United States, “that Britain is down and out, that the foundations of our commerce and industrial greatness have been sapped; that the stamina of our people is impaired; that the workmen are lazy; that our employers are indolent; that our Empire is falling to pieces. I have never been able to take that view.” He assured his audience that the justifiable grievances of “our much-abused coal miners” would be peacefully resolved.²⁰⁰

They weren’t. Strife was now inevitable, and before it ended the conflict would cost over £800,000,000. The crisis began on May Day, 1926. That Saturday morning miners who had assembled for the day’s first seven-hour shift were notified that their future pay envelopes would be thinner. They protested and the owners locked them out. At noon the TUC General Council, meeting in London, unanimously agreed that unless wage levels were restored at once, a nationwide general strike would begin Monday at one minute before midnight. The general strike is labor’s ultimate weapon. If prolonged, it can destroy society. English legal scholars then and since have agreed that to call one, or even threaten one, is a violation of the British constitution. The prospect made the entire country tremble. Yet grave as the situation was, the TUC decision was followed by forty-eight hours of chaos more appropriate in a Marx Brothers film than in the British establishment. The General Council, after alerting affiliates to its decision, sent the prime minister a letter, formally setting the deadline and offering to negotiate. Baldwin asked for two weeks’ grace, “confident that a settlement can be reached on the basis of the Samuel Report.” Since that implied a temporary acceptance of the wage cut, and since the miners had developed the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day,” the TUC replied that its membership must be consulted. It was then discovered that the miners had left London and gone home. Telegrams were dispatched recalling them, but it was late Sunday before a TUC delegation was ready to approach the government. That evening the union men called at No. 10. Nobody was home. The cabinet was meeting next door in Churchill’s house. After a long, confused delay, while the delegates waited on the pavement, Baldwin emerged with Birkenhead and said: “Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that our efforts for peace are unavailing. Something has happened at the Daily Mail and the Cabinet has empowered me to hand you this letter.” They shook hands and he said: “Goodbye; this is the end.” Gathering under a Downing Street lamp, they opened the envelope and learned that compositors at Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, members of the National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants, had refused to set type for a vehemently antilabor editorial titled “For King and Country.” Printers at the Express and other papers had indicated that they were prepared to do the same.²⁰¹

It has become part of Labour myth that Churchill exploited this incident to force a showdown with the unions. Ernest Bevin repeated the accusation again and again; the cabinet was within “five minutes” of reaching terms for a settlement, he said, when Winston learned what was happening at the Daily Mail, “dashed up to Downing Street, ordered a meeting of the Cabinet, rushed Baldwin off his feet… and in a few minutes the ultimatum was given to us.” Stories that Churchill was hostile toward organized labor had, of course, been in circulation since Tonypandy in 1909. The misunderstanding had grown, in part, because of his diatribes on socialism, which, under Labour’s banner, had become the political voice of the working class. But he himself drew a distinction. “When all is said and done,” he wrote, “there are very few well-informed persons in Great Britain, and not many employers of labour on a large scale, who would not sooner have to deal with the British trade unions as we know them, than with the wide vagaries of communist-agitated and totally disorganized discontent.” As he had written James Lane of the bricklayers: “I take a high view of the dignity both of craftsmanship and manual labour.” Bevin’s account is absurd anyhow. Since the cabinet had gathered in Churchill’s Downing Street home, he would hardly have “dashed up Downing Street” to reach it. The conference had already begun when Baldwin and his ministers learned of the Mail wildcatters. And the news came, not from Winston, but by telephone.²⁰²

After the Mail bombshell, Churchill was among the most vehement ministers—the others were Amery, Neville Chamberlain, and “Jix” Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary—in vowing not to capitulate. But there were no dissenters. The vote to break off talks was unanimous. Baldwin later told the House that the cabinet interpreted the phone call as a sign that “the first overt move in the General Strike was being actually made, by trying to suppress the press. We felt that in those circumstances the whole situation was changed.” One wonders why. It would have been easy to learn the truth by placing a few more calls. The fact was that the printers’ action had been impulsive and in no way reflected a larger strategy. The TUC leaders had been unaware of it and disowned it the moment they read Baldwin’s letter. The attempt to intimidate a free press outraged as many Labour MPs as Tories; more, perhaps, because some Tory back-benchers had been praying for a casus belli. Nevertheless, at 1:00 A.M. Monday reporters in Downing Street were given a brief announcement that negotiations had been discontinued. A few hours later a TUC delegation arrived at No. 10, bearing a written repudiation of the Mail printers. Ramsay MacDonald told the House “they found the door locked and the whole place in darkness.”²⁰³ That was inexcusable, but so was the TUC’s action Saturday in raising the specter of a general strike—for which the unions were completely unprepared—and the cloudy understanding between the miners and the TUC. The miners had authorized the unions’ national leadership to negotiate for them, but not to bargain. Thus, though sporadic attempts to resume talks continued through Monday, the TUC’s inability to compromise without the miners’ sanction hardened the cabinet’s position. And as the evening wore on Churchill, facing the imminent rupture of British order, grew increasingly defiant. He would be the most visible leader on one side; Bevin, on the other.

Bevin at that time was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, a merger of twenty-two unions, and at 11:59 P.M., as commander in chief of the general strike, he pushed the button. Six million Britons were thereby committed to walking off the job. Iron and steel foundries closed down. Bus drivers abandoned their buses. Newspapers ceased publication. No trains moved, no trucks; the tubes were silent. Building-trade workers, dockworkers, workers in the chemical industry, stayed home. Gas, sanitary, health, and food services deemed “essential” were supposed to be spared, but many gas and electricity works came to a standstill. The government was not unprepared, however. In 1920 Churchill had devised a plan against just such a contingency. The country was divided into nine areas, each with a central controller and staff. Troops would be dispatched to convoy vehicles carrying food and fuel. The police were fully mobilized; Hyde Park became a military post; the Welsh Guards were billeted on the Victoria Embankment. Joynson-Hicks appealed for volunteers, and thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen of the upper and middle classes drove trucks, trams, taxis, and even locomotives. Some members of the House of Lords served as railway porters. It was a peculiarly British emergency; there was little or no violence, and in many places volunteers, strikers, and policemen mingled with civility and even gaiety. Churchill, however, was not among the skylarkers. He felt grim. The miners’ strike had been legitimate, even admirable, he said, “but that is an entirely different thing from the concerted, deliberate organized menace of a General Strike in order to compel Parliament to do something which otherwise it would not do.” He wanted to intimidate the strikers with a show of force; at his suggestion, territorials were encouraged to enlist as civil constabulary reserves, and only after a long argument did his colleagues persuade him that the recruits should wear, not military uniforms, but mufti with armbands, and their weapons be limited to truncheons. Some ministers worried about costs. Churchill rumbled: “The Exchequer will pay! If we start arguing about petty details, we’ll have a tired-out police force, a dissipated army and bloody revolution.” He was embattled, and wondered why the country didn’t share his mood. He said: “One of the great difficulties of the situation is that large numbers of working people feel quite detached from the conflict; and they are waiting, as if they were spectators at a football match, to see whether the Government or the Trade Union is the stronger.” His provocative comments, friends warned him, were deepening labor’s resentment of him. He replied that he rejoiced in their hostility: “People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and to defy clamour are not fit to be Ministers in times of stress.”²⁰⁴

That would have ruled out the prime minister. “Baldwin,” in the words of one British historian, now “adopted a policy of masterly inactivity.” Churchill’s delight in battle puzzled him; essentially gentle, he himself shrank from discord almost as a matter of principle. Yet he snorted when told that Beaverbrook had remarked: “Churchill is the real power in the Government.” He knew this to be quite untrue. Beyond casting his vote, Winston had played no role in the severance of negotiations after the Mail episode. Later, Baldwin had excluded him from the select cabinet council which met daily to discuss supervising strikebreaking tactics. But Winston kept trying to intervene, and his combative stance loomed ever larger in the public view. Baldwin didn’t want to offend him—Churchill was now next in line for the prime ministership, and his militancy was winning grudging converts among some Tory diehards—but he did want him out of his hair. Then a solution presented itself. H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post approached John Davidson, a senior civil servant. If his premises were protected, he said, he would put his presses at the disposal of the government. The Tories could have their own newspaper. In a week, he predicted, he could build a circulation as high as 400,000 copies. Sir Samuel Hoare, told of the offer, proposed publishing a government paper to be called the British Gazette. The prime minister agreed but did not want Gwynne as its director. Instead, he appointed Churchill editor in chief. It was, Baldwin later said, “the cleverest thing I ever did.”²⁰⁵

He may have been right. In his long career Baldwin did few clever things, and this decision prevented the chancellor from playing a major role in determining the outcome of the strike. Winston himself savored a delicious irony. For twenty years Gwynne had been his most savage press critic, and now the Morning Post’s perennial target would be running the Post’s shop. He announced that the paper would be written, edited, and published by volunteers. Printers were a problem. On instructions from their union, Gwynne’s compositors stayed out. Beaverbrook said he could send a printer’s foreman at once. Given time, he could find other willing hands among his idle Daily Express employees, and the Daily Mail thought some of their men might pitch in. Winston wouldn’t wait. Beric Holt, who had agreed to serve as one of the Gazette’s editorial assistants, recalls joining a small procession of men who, in the early hours of Tuesday, May 4, “filed up the narrow back stairs of the Morning Post building just off the Strand.” In the composing room Sydney Long, night superintendent of the Daily Express, was already sitting at a Linotype machine, setting copy. Irish Guards and bobbies restrained an angry crowd of strikers on the street below. Churchill, in shirt sleeves, was peering down at large enamel mugs on the floor. He asked their purpose. Holt, who had been there before, replied: “Beer, sir.” “Have they got enough?” asked Winston. A man answered: “Oh yes, sir, plenty.” “Nonsense!” boomed Churchill, producing a pound note. “There is no such thing! Send out for some more.”²⁰⁶

The presses ran all night, and by 6:00 A.M. they had printed 232,000 copies, all of which were sold within an hour. The entire issue had been set single-handedly by Long. The lead article, unsigned but written by Churchill, set the tone: “This great nation, on the whole the strongest community which civilisation can show, is for the moment reduced in this respect to the level of African natives dependent only on the rumours which are carried from place to place. In a few days if this were allowed to continue, rumours would poison the air, raise panics and disorders, inflame fears and passions together, and carry us all to the depths which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate.” On the second day the circulation rose to 507,000. A week later, on the last day of the general strike, it soared to 2,209,000. The cabinet had been under the impression that the Gazette’s contents would be limited to public notices, official statements, and indispensable information. Winston had assured British newspaper publishers: “I do not contemplate violent partisanship, but fair, strong encouragement to the great mass of loyal people.” No one who knew him believed that—Beaverbrook had burst into laughter when told of it—for he was incapable of impartiality. When push came to shove, as it now had in England, he believed that the standards of traditional journalism were anemic. “The field of battle,” he now wrote grandly, “is no longer transport but news.” Then: “The State cannot be impartial between itself and that section of subjects with whom it is contending.” And, most memorably, when reproached in the House for his ringing editorial denunciations of the strike: “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”²⁰⁷

That was defensible. The paper’s pretense of objectivity in its news columns was not. Under the heading FALSE NEWS appeared the notice: “Many false rumours are current. Believe nothing until you see it in an authoritative journal like the British Gazette.” Yet readers of the Gazette were led to believe that the country was in the grip, not of an industrial dispute, but of incipient revolution. The strike was described as “a direct challenge to ordered government.” Strikers were “the enemy.” A specious claim from a French paper that Bolsheviks were behind the TUC was reprinted in full. Gazette accounts of House debates were outrageously distorted, one Labour MP being described as “a wild Socialist, passionate and shouting.” An MP’s conviction that a settlement was at hand was denied by an unidentified “Cabinet Minister.” Heavy coverage was given to Sir John Simon’s irresponsible statement that each TUC leader could be successfully sued to “the utmost farthing of his personal possessions.” At a time when the walkout had virtually paralyzed Britain a headline reported that the strike was NOT SO COMPLETE AS HOPED BY ITS PROMOTERS. All Englishmen were “calm and confident” that it would fail—the six million strikers, apparently, were no longer regarded as English. Strikebreakers were reassured: “No man who does his duty loyally to the country in the present crisis will be left unprotected by the State from subsequent reprisals”—a pledge, involving forces of the Crown, to which the King took strong exception. Patriotic poetry appeared frequently: Kipling, and, in three issues, Tennyson’s “Soul of England.” While Baldwin’s speeches and statements were bland, offensive to no one, the Gazette repeatedly blared that until the TUC surrendered unconditionally, “there can be no question of compromise of any kind.”²⁰⁸

The Gazette’s belligerence troubled many of Churchill’s old friends and allies. Lloyd George disapproved of the strike, but, as he told the House, “I know a great many of the people responsible. They are as little revolutionaries as any men in this House. They have fought the rebellious ones in their own Party.” He accused Winston of sabotaging a TUC attempt to reach an agreement and called his paper “a first-class indiscretion, clothed in the tawdry garb of third-rate journalism.” Churchill replied: “It is not the duty of the British Gazette to publish a lot of defeatist trash.” Gwynne, of course, was sharply critical. Thomas Jones noted in his diary that the Morning Post editor “has sent several messages begging that Winston should be kept away from that office where the ‘British Gazette’ is being printed. He butts in at the busiest hours and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious.” But the heaviest protests naturally came from the strike leaders. They countered with a paper of their own, the British Worker. Winston was its chief target; the idea of calling an industrial dispute a revolutionary movement, the Worker declared, “was mainly Mr Churchill’s. It is a melodramatic ‘stunt’ on Sydney [sic] Street lines…. The nation has kept its head in spite of the alarming tricks played upon it. Mr Churchill has failed again, and everybody knows… that ‘revolution’ exists nowhere save in Mr Churchill’s heated and disorderly imagination.” The following day the Worker observed that “day by day in the Cabinet’s newspaper, Mr Churchill, acting as its super-editor, publishes articles by prominent men. These are suspiciously like one another…. The reference to the Strike being directed by a ‘relatively small body of extremists’ again betrays Mr Churchill’s hand. It is mere violent, headlong, foolish propaganda—foolish because no sensible person will believe it.” They only wished that were true. Winston’s articles were believed; his flaming prose was being read in millions of upper- and middle-class homes, which was why the unions, too, had turned to journalism. They failed. Their editorials were dense and dull. Their greatest circulation was 713,000 for a single edition. In desperation, one firebrand slipped into the Post building and threw a steel bar into a press. Holt recalls: “Suddenly there was a horrible shattering jar. Power was turned off.” Workers at the Hoe Company, makers of the machine, refused to repair it. Churchill called the Chatham Dockyard, and Royal Navy ratings arrived in an impressive convoy, departed, and returned with mended parts wrapped in a Union Jack. Winston then issued each member of the staff a mauve pass. Nobody could enter the building without one.²⁰⁹

Not all Gazette critics lay outside the Establishment. The British Broadcasting Company was struggling to keep its news reports impartial, but Winston, according to John Reith, then its managing director, tried to treat the BBC as “an offshoot of the British Gazette.” Reith appealed to Davidson, Joynson-Hicks, and Baldwin, and when Churchill asked the cabinet to let him run the BBC he was turned down. Reith did permit him to address the radio audience, however, and Beatrice Webb, perhaps the first to appreciate his mastery of this medium, described the talk as “a vividly rhetorical representation of his own case…. Except that his voice is harsh, he is a first rate broadcaster.” He vexed London’s press lords that week, though not over a matter of principle. As the Gazette’s popularity rocketed, he began commandeering all the newsprint in London. Dawson remonstrated, then Rothermere, and finally Beaverbrook wrote him that the two hundred tons of paper at the Daily Express would be needed the moment the strike ended. Impossible, Winston replied: “We are expecting to publish over three millions tonight, and we shall probably have to requisition every scrap of newsprint which is available and suitable.” They met. Beaverbrook liked to tell friends that Winston had two moods, “Winston Up” and “Winston Down.” Down, facing defeat, he was magnificent, but “in a position of uncontrolled power and authority,” as he was at this point, he could be frightening. Of the newsprint confrontation Beaverbrook later recalled: “If any other man living had used such outrageous language to me as he did on that occasion I should never have forgiven him. Churchill on top of the wave has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made.”²¹⁰

This “terrible scene,” as Beaverbrook thereafter called it, turned out to be unnecessary. Early the following morning—Wednesday, May 12, the ninth day of the crisis—the unions capitulated. Their treasury was empty, the government’s attrition policy was working, and public opinion, fired by the Gazette, was hostile. Arthur Pugh, the TUC chairman, called at No. 10 to surrender. Accompanying him was the TUC’s general secretary, who wrote in his diary that evening: “While we were talking, Churchill, Baldwin, and Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland [minister of labor] were pacing rapidly up and down the garden, talking animatedly. There was no sign of jubilation amongst them, and Pugh muttered to me: ‘I saw Churchill a few minutes ago, and he said, “Thank God it’s over, Mr Pugh.” ’ ” That afternoon Winston announced that the next issue of the Gazette would be the last. Its final headline was unfortunate. It gloated: SURRENDER RECEIVED BY PREMIER IN DOWNING STREET. In an envoi Churchill told his readers: “The British Gazette may have had a short life, but it has fulfilled the purpose of living. It becomes a memory; but it remains a monument.” That evening he took a large party to see Adele and Fred Astaire in Lady Be Good, then playing at the old Empire Theatre. As he entered, the audience rose and gave him a standing ovation.²¹¹

Labor’s intellectuals now singled him out for attack. Kingsley Martin, a young leftist writer, studied the columns of the Gazette, noted its incendiary style, found certain striking omissions—Churchill had suppressed an appeal from the church which had blamed both sides—and concluded that Winston had been “discredited.” The New Statesman, then as now a journal of eccentric opinion, perpetrated a fraud. On the night of May 10, it reported, Churchill had led a “war party” of ministers who threatened to resign at once unless talks with the union leaders were broken off. The Churchill faction, it continued, had been “in favour of war at all costs.” This piece of outright fiction declared: “Mr Churchill was the villain of the piece. He is reported to have remarked that he thought ‘a little blood-letting’ would be all to the good.” Winston considered pressing charges of criminal libel against the editors. Sir Douglas Hogg, the government’s attorney general, advised against it. He would certainly win, Hogg said, but in court the defendants could discuss cabinet deliberations “in detail,” which would offend Baldwin Tories. Winston reluctantly let the matter drop, though it was already clear to him that run-of-the-mill Conservatives viewed him with little more favor than the Labourites. Dawson of the Times, in a widely read account of the strike, concluded that “Winston seems to have been the only minister who rather lost his head. He was excitable, provocative, and a great trial to his colleagues. They tried to divert his energies at an early stage to the editing of the British Gazette, an official propagandist organ, in which he became a similar trial to us.”²¹²

Curiously, one journalist who commended Churchill’s editorial performance was the irascible Gwynne. He wrote him: “May I lay at your feet my tribute of admiration at your wonderful energy and your marvellous powers of seeing things through?” In time Winston recalled his Gazette experience with nostalgia. On June 10, 1927, he wrote Gwynne: “I shall always look back to that extraordinary ten days. They form one of the most vivid experiences of my somewhat variegated life, and were utterly different from every other episode. I am glad to think they have left behind them a better understanding between us.” He even exploited the episode in one of his quick turns of parliamentary wit. In a tense debate he faced the Opposition and said solemnly: “I have no wish to make threats or use language which would disturb the House and cause bad blood. But this I must say: make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you loose upon us again a General Strike, we will loose upon you”—angry shouts were on Labour lips—“another British Gazette.” The expected storm, Baldwin wrote the King, “gave way to an outburst of unrestrained laughter in which the House was convulsed.”²¹³

In a long public life clouded with misunderstandings, none was more tragic than the inexpiable enmity between Churchill and Labour. He had been a progressive home secretary; he was a humane chancellor. His record on liberal issues in many ways resembles that of Bismarck, another farsighted conservative. It was far more impressive than that of, say, Ramsay MacDonald, who waffled again and again when in power. But Winston’s visceral reaction against socialism—he was always mistaking pink for red—led him into one rhetorical excess after another. It was Churchillian bombast which had touched off the Labourites’ antagonism toward him. They took him at his word, despite the fact that his word, however prickly, was often conspicuously at odds with his deeds. The Dawsons of the Conservative party distrusted him for an altogether different reason. When the strikers had unsheathed their sword, he had lunged for his; he could never back away from a challenge. But at heart he still believed that the miners were right and the mineowners wrong. When the TUC collapsed he had written Baldwin: “To-night surrender. Tomorrow magnanimity.” He had been moved to pity by Macmillan’s descriptions of the hovels in which the miners lived, their brutish working conditions, and their sickly children. Now that members of the other unions had gone back to work, ending the threat to domestic tranquillity, he was eager to settle the grievances in the coalfields, which were still idle. To his dismay, the strike there dragged on for more than five months, and he and Amery were the only members of the cabinet who urged action. “I’m all on the miners’ side now,” he told Boothby after closing down the Gazette. Baldwin, departing for an extended holiday at Aix-les-Bains, left the matter in Winston’s hands.²¹⁴

It was a delicate, heartbreaking—and, in the end, doomed—task. The Tory ministers’ hostility toward the coal strikers was unabated. By the sheer force of will, intellect, and volubility, Winston preserved the workers’ right to picket peacefully; he throttled legislation to outlaw strikes when, in his words, “a majority of those affected are in favour of it”; he used Treasury funds, not to subsidize the mines’ proprietors, but to build miners’ homes and fund “training schemes and other forms of assistance for displaced miners”; and he saved the workers’ right to the secret ballot—the owners argued that this would increase the number of strikes—because he was “convinced that the majority of working men would adopt sound and sensible attitudes,” and because private polling, in his view, restricted the influence of the unions’ “extremist members.”²¹⁵

MacDonald, he knew, was close to Herbert Smith, the president of the miners’ union. On Winston’s initiative, Churchill and MacDonald held two long, secret meetings, first at Chartwell and then in Sir Abe Bailey’s London home on Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch. Smith had authorized MacDonald to speak for him, and the two men forged an agreement. Winston then drew up an ultimatum to be delivered to the colliery proprietors, omitting the strikers’ most extravagant demands but including those terms which were minimal for them and the Labour party. Keeping Baldwin informed, he laid this compromise before the cabinet: “Do not, I beg you, throw this chance upon the rubbish heap of so many others.” His colleagues disapproved of this proposal—they thought it gave the workers too much—but, as one said afterward, “We couldn’t repudiate Winston.” The real question, as he had told MacDonald, was whether the coal barons would bow to the ultimatum. It was “quite likely,” he had said, that they “might refuse to come, or, if they did come, might take a line that would make progress impossible.” In that event, the government “would make no secret of their opinion that they were in the wrong,” but “the powers of actual coercion that the Government possesses are very limited.” The miners now believed that Churchill was their best hope; the Evening Standard reported that both they and the TUC, asked to choose between Winston and any other member of the government, had expressed “a marked preference for Mr Churchill as mediator.”²¹⁶

It proved an impossible task. The owners, speaking through Evan Williams, the president of the Mining Association of Great Britain, refused to make any concession whatever. They knew the men were desperate, growing hungrier every day, with winter dead ahead. Thomas Jones described one meeting between Williams and Churchill as “acute and at times acrimonious,” but Williams wouldn’t budge. He fought every attempt at reconciliation. They met again at No. 10; Jones called it “a ding-dong debate” which accomplished nothing. Winston’s anger at the owners grew. He poured it out in letters to Clementine. She replied: “I fear you are having a very anxious and difficult time”; the proprietors’ position, she said, seemed “hard and cruel.” He wrote her that the talks were leading toward a “serious collision.” She hoped he wasn’t shouldering the other ministers aside and thus alienating them: “You are having an anxious but a thrilling and engrossing time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes—I suppose Steel-Maitland and George Lane-Fox [secretary for mines] are not often allowed near the trough? If the cat were Minister of Labour or Mines she would not give up her place there without a few ‘miaows.’ ”²¹⁷

But Steel-Maitland and Lane-Fox would cede the miners nothing. And Baldwin, when he returned to London, agreed with them. Churchill proposed statutory intervention. Other wealthy contributors to Tory coffers had taken an interest in the talks, however, and when Winston wrote Baldwin, “I do hope that a little employers’ agitation will not prevent H.M.G. from advancing with courage & conviction against… detractors of the public interest,” he found that the agitation of Williams’s clients had done just that. The most the prime minister would promise was a toothless appeal tribunal. After Churchill scorned “the greedy appetites of the coal trade,” two of his closest friends, Birkenhead and Lord Londonderry, reproached him. Londonderry, a mineowner and one of Winston’s cousins, argued that the owners were fighting bolshevism. Winston replied: “With those parts of your letter which deal with the necessity for combating Bolshevism I am in entire accord. But there could be no worse way of combating Bolshevism than to identify the Conservative Party and His Majesty’s Government with the employers, and particularly with a body of employers like those headed by Mr Evan Williams…. The duty of the Government is to occupy an impartial position in the interests of the State and of the whole community…. You say that the Owners are fighting Socialism. It is not the business of Coal Owners as Coal Owners to fight Socialism. If they declare it their duty, how can they blame the Miners’ Federation for pursuing political ends? The business of the Coal Owners is to manage their industry successfully, to insist upon sound economic conditions as regards hours and wages, and to fight Socialism as citizens and not as owners of a particular class of property.”²¹⁸

It was hopeless. He wanted to warn the owners that if they continued to be “unreasonable,” the government would appoint arbitrators and fix a national minimum wage. It seemed clear to him that a few rich Englishmen, and they alone, were blocking a settlement. When they refused even to participate in tripartite talks with the government and the union, he told the cabinet that their position was “wholly wrong and unreasonable, an attitude without precedent in recent times,” and charged that they had even influenced Tory whips in the House, who had “been at some of the Ministers, urging them to do nothing.” Certainly the cabinet’s reluctance to subject the owners to any pressure whatever is singular; the impasse, after all, was eroding the national economy. Harold Laski, after accompanying miner delegates to one meeting, wrote a friend that he thought Baldwin “quite tragic… hard and a little cynical and impatient of all criticism…. Churchill who was there was bigger and more skillful in every way—he knew how to negotiate. Baldwin merely blundering uncouthly.” Of the 1,250,000 union members, 100,000 demoralized men had returned to work by early October. Boothby, like Macmillan, went into the coalfields to talk to strikers. On October 9 he wrote Churchill from the Carlton Club: “It is the impression, growing every day, that the Government has now divested itself of all responsibility for the conduct of our national industries… that despite the promise of the first months it has become… a Government of reaction.” It would, he continued, “be difficult to exaggerate the effect of your vigorous intervention in the mining dispute last month” or “the disappointment which attended the failure of your efforts.” In the end the owners’ obduracy was triumphant. As Leo Amery wrote later: “The miners straggled back to the pits on the owners’ terms, including longer hours, a beaten and resentful army.”²¹⁹

Worse followed. In the wake of the broken strike, the parliamentary Conservatives passed a wave of antilabor legislation. All the gains Churchill had achieved for the unions were abolished. Picketing was outlawed; no worker could be disciplined for refusing to join a strike deemed “illegal”; the attorney general was authorized to seize union funds; the Trades Dispute Act of 1906, which exempted unions from legal suit, was repealed. In a blow at the Labour party, unions were prohibited from collecting money from their members for political purposes unless they had secured their written consent. For Churchill, the low point came when a delegation of miners arrived at the Treasury and charged him with betraying them. Jones wrote in his diary that this was grossly unfair; that Winston had tried “to go to great lengths in the way of legislation on hours, wages and conditions—which terrified his colleagues.” But all the workmen knew was that he had failed them. Smith, their leader, stood before Winston, trembling with rage. Gaunt and pale, he was a symbol of their deprivation; born in a Lancashire workhouse, the posthumous son of a miner killed in a mine accident, he himself had begun working in the pits on his tenth birthday. Later he would write of this meeting: “We said to Churchill: ‘We understand you were a man of courage, but you have broken down at the first fence. You have dismounted. Have you been doing wrong while the masters have been away; and got reprimanded?’ He did not like it.”²²⁰

He hated it, and could not reply; he understood their bitterness, for he shared it. In less than two years he would grasp the magnitude of his error in putting England back on the gold standard. Writing Grigg on July 2, 1928, he dealt savagely with the financial experts who had urged him to do it: “They have caused an immense amount of misery and impoverishment by their rough and pedantic handling of the problem. In ruined homes, in demoralised workmen, in discouraged industry, in embarrassed finances, in inflated debt and cruel taxation we have paid the price.” Eleven years after the tumult of 1926 he wrote that industrial strife “has introduced a narrowing element into our public life. It has been a keenly felt impediment to our productive and competitive power. It has become the main foundation of a socialist political party which has ruled the State greatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again.”²²¹ Churchill was not the only statesman to be baffled by twentieth-century economics. He was, however, among the very few British Conservatives who had seen the justice of the workers’ cause. It is not the least of the ironies in his career that within twenty years, when he was at the peak of his achievements, their resentment would coalesce to drive him from office.

Today’s Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after mid-century, when the communications revolution led to expectations of instantaneity, are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the lightning of cause will be swiftly followed by the thunderclap of effect. Great political sea changes move at a testudinal pace, however. Change is preceded by reappraisals, false starts, and frequent setbacks. William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in 1831, yet over thirty years passed before Lincoln freed the slaves. The big Swede christened Joseph Hagglund and remembered as Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad on November 19, 1915. It would be another generation before organized labor was ready to test its strength. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, in 1928. Not until the later stages of World War II would it become available to physicians, and then in limited supply. The American Equal Rights Association was founded by New York feminists on May 10, 1866, but their great-great-granddaughters are still struggling to realize their dream. Even so cataclysmic an event as the First World War did not reach its maximum impact until more than ten years after the Armistice, when Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer reached audiences ready, at last, to believe what, until then, had been thought unbelievable.

So it was with the general strike of 1926 and the career of Winston Churchill. During the three years which followed, he rode a crest of acclaim in the middle and upper classes, unbruised by the grievances of those at both ends of the political spectrum who had been angered by his performance during the nine days and the long aftermath. The strike had been broken, the government had won, the miners were back in the pits, and he had been the cabinet’s most colorful cheerleader. His mistakes were unobserved; hardly anyone understood economics anyway. But he certainly sounded as though he did. Each budget speech was more brilliant than the last. Altogether he presided over five Budget Days, a record matched only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone, each of whom became prime minister. Bets were made on when Churchill would move into No. 10. His only rival was the rising star Neville Chamberlain, and even Chamberlain wrote of him in 1928: “One doesn’t often come across a real man of genius or, perhaps, appreciate him when one does. Winston is such a man.” It was generally agreed that Churchill was mellowing. Lord Winterton wrote: “The remarkable thing about him is the way he has suddenly acquired, quite late in Parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humor and banter on almost all occasions; no one used to ‘suffer fools ungladly’ more fully than Winston; now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House, and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally—a great accretion to his already formidable Parliamentary power.”²²²

His wit could still wound—“Politics are very much like war,” he said; “we even use poison gas at times”—and once he devastated a hostile woman MP who berated him during a dinner party, ending her diatribe by observing with scorn: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.” “And you, madam,” Churchill replied, “are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.” Yet his humor now was often gentle, even self-deprecating. After a small dinner at Pratt’s Club in London, F.E. proposed that Lord Melchett, the richest man in the party, should pay the bill. Winston demurred: “My dear Freddie, surely you would not deprive me of the pride and pleasure of giving a crust to Croesus?” After he had switched parties and Baldwin had made him chancellor, Churchill said: “You know, the family motto of the House of Marlborough from which I descend is ‘Faithful but Unfortunate.’ ” A gushing woman asked him: “Doesn’t it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you speak the hall is packed to overflowing?” Winston said: “It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that, if instead of making a political speech, I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.”²²³

Baldwin was dazzled by him, and during these years, when there was no threat to it, their relationship approached genuine friendship. On the evening of each Budget Day the prime minister sent the King an appraisal of the chancellor’s presentation. Each was giddier than the last. In one he wrote that Churchill “has a power of attraction which nobody in the House of Commons can excel.” Another spoke of Churchill’s “masterpiece of cleverness and ingenuity.” In a third, reporting on a speech which had lasted three and a half hours, he wrote: “The House became intensely interested in watching a master in the art of oratory and tantalizing the imagination unfold his ideas in a speech packed with ideas, yet so simple and clear that there could be no possible misunderstanding.” Then he sent Winston himself a note: “I hate to use the word ‘brilliant’: it has been worked to death and is too suggestive of brilliantine: but, if I may use it in its pristine virginity, so to speak, it is the right one. I congratulate you with both hands.” Some veteran MPs across the aisle were also impressed. Lloyd George called him “the merriest tax collector since the days of Robin Hood.” And the press, for once, was on his side. Cartoonists depicted him as the “Smiling Chancellor,” and “Winsome Winston.” The Times of India commented: “In appearance Mr Churchill is almost jovial; one can imagine him, dressed in a cowl, the incarnation of the jolly monks and friars of centuries ago.”²²⁴

Of course, there were those who saw him very differently. Ardent Labour MPs attacked him relentlessly, Snowden crying after one budget speech: “There is not one penny of relief for the wage-earning classes. Shorn of all the glamour of the Right Honourable Gentleman’s eloquence, this is his Budget. No more of a rich man’s Budget has ever been presented. It will not take long for the glamour to disappear, and then the great toiling masses will realize the true character of this Budget, and will realize, too, that the Tory Party is still more than ever what Lord George Hamilton declared many years ago: ‘A party that looks after its own friends, whether it be in office or out of office.’ ” On Churchill’s own side of the House, Conservative back-benchers had not forgotten his stands on Home Rule and Free Trade, and their wrath was rekindled in 1928, when, led by Leo Amery, they made a fresh attempt to follow the American example and introduce protective tariffs, arguing that they would put a million Englishmen back to work. Churchill blocked them; Baldwin supported him. Amery wrote angrily in his diary of “the whole attitude of the Cabinet under Winston’s influence, and the PM’s decision not to do anything”; Lane-Fox noted that the protectionists were “now very angry and a lot is going on. It is the first sign of a real party fissure that I have yet seen.” The storm was small and it passed quickly. Winston wrote Clementine: “Really I feel vy independent of them all.”²²⁵

That was precisely his problem. His independence had become a point of political vulnerability. Of all the major prewar public men, he alone had survived; as A. G. Gardiner put it, “Like the camomile, the more he is trodden on, the more he flourishes.” Yet after nearly three decades in public life he still floated free of any power base. Epping was a mere convenience. Unlike most senior members of the House, he had no national following, controlled no political hierarchy. Party discipline has always been taken more seriously in Britain than in the United States, and Churchill had been a disciplinary problem all his life. Beaverbrook noted that he “neither tied the Liberals to him nor conciliated the Tories.” Gardiner wrote in 1926: “If he changes parties with the facility of partners at a dance, he has always been true to the only Party he really believes in—that which is assembled under the hat of Mr. Winston Churchill.” Gwynne’s Morning Post, now more generous in tone, observed: “Mr Churchill is still his own Party, and the chief of the partisans. He still sees himself as the only digit in the sum of things, all other men as mere cyphers, whose function it is to follow after and multiply his personal value a million-fold.” Harold Nicolson saw him as “the most interesting man in London. He is more than interesting: he is a phenomenon, an enigma. How can a man so versatile and so brilliant avoid being considered volatile and unsound?” Arthur Ponsonby, who had switched allegiance from the Liberals to Labour, wrote Eddie Marsh that Winston was “far and away the most talented man in political life…. But that does not prevent me from feeling politically he is a great danger, largely because of his love of crises and faulty judgment. He once said to me years ago, ‘I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.’ ”²²⁶

The Conservative party’s rank and file didn’t want anything to happen, ever. They could identify with Neville Chamberlain, not with Churchill. Winston could have won their loyalty at the Treasury had he pursued traditional Conservative fiscal policies. Instead, he had alienated them by introducing welfare legislation. In Parliament he was not Scottish, Welsh, or a representative of the Midlands; he was known only as a Londoner who had been elected by none of London’s constituencies. That was a grave weakness in a man who hoped to become No. 10’s next occupant. He seemed completely unaware of the danger inherent in an eminence acquired solely by ministerial talents, parliamentary skills, and Baldwin’s fosterage. The Weekly Dispatch of July 10, 1927, reported that during the past week the chancellor had filled more pages in Hansard than any other six MPs put together; that he, not Baldwin, was leading the party, and doing it adroitly; and that he “also has a way of dealing with the Socialists which, while it never lacks anything in force or directness, yet appeals to their sense of fair play and good humour. ‘Winston is up!’ empties the smoking room quicker than any other announcement.” The piece ended: “Yet with all his talents and his force of character, the main body of conservatives would never follow him as Prime Minister.” Even Baldwin doubted that the Tories would choose Churchill as his successor. “Our people like him,” he wrote a friend in September 1927. “They love listening to him in the House, look on him as a star turn, and settle down in the stalls with anticipatory grins. But for leadership, they would turn him down every time.”²²⁷

The real complaint about Churchill’s years at the Exchequer is that for the only time in his life he ignored his instincts. Intuition had warned him to shun the goldmongers, but, uncharacteristically unsure of himself, he learned the rules of fiscal orthodoxy and, for the most part, followed them. His policies were not wholly unimaginative; he established a reparations pool, whereby the Treasury would be enriched by German goods sold in Britain, and—over the strong objections of Neville Chamberlain—he introduced the rating apportionment bill of 1928 (actually young Harold Macmillan’s idea), under which industry and agriculture were provided with local tax relief, the gap in income being plugged by cuts in defense and a gasoline tax which brought in £15,000,000 a year. Because England’s economy had been crippled by the general strike, he had little room for maneuver in the two budgets following it. The deficits were met by a temporary tax on rubber tires and increased levies on wines, matches, and tobacco; by taking £12,000,000 from the Road Fund; by reducing the brewers’ credit period by a month; and by rescheduling property taxes. But it was all legerdemain—“jugglery and deceit,” as Snowden called it. Winston himself acknowledged that he had drawn on his “adventitious resources.” Grigg pointed out that “in spite of all the Keynesian gibes, his main object was always the reduction of unemployment.” Tinkering wouldn’t do the job, however, and Churchill shied away from the deficits and bold governmental intervention Roosevelt would introduce within a few years in the depressed United States. Amery summed up Winston’s financial program in a letter to Baldwin: “A few hand-to-mouth dodges for picking up odd windfalls, a hope that better trade and a few millions saved by cheese-paring here and there may ride matters over the next year: that is the beginning and end of it.”²²⁸

It was certainly the end of it. Churchill’s last budget, presented on April 15, 1929, after the Tories had lost nine safe seats in by-elections over the past two months, offered little to calm their growing anxieties. His delivery, as always, was masterly. Taxpayers were to be allowed deductions for each child (“Another example of our general policy of helping the producer”). Labour’s demand for deficit spending was “the policy of buying a biscuit early in the morning and walking about all day looking for a dog to give it to.” The Sunday Times called his performance “the most brilliantly entertaining of modern Budget speeches,” and Harold Macmillan would write of the Churchillian style in his Winds of Change that none of the new generation of MPs “had ever heard anything of the kind… such mastery of language, such careful deployment of the arguments, such dexterous covering of any weak point.” But as political nourishment it was poor fare. He abolished taxes on tea, gambling, and railway passage; reduced taxes on motorcycles and bicycles; raised them on telephone service; and introduced new duties on tobacco, beer, and liquor. It was a swan song in falsetto. Grigg thought it not inappropriate. As chancellor, he said, Winston had “tended to overestimate revenue and underestimate expenditure,” had “convinced himself that there was a good deal to be said at that time for respectability… in economic affairs,” was “apt to spoil a brilliant project by not assuring himself in advance of sufficient resources to carry it through to the end,” and was “therefore reduced to all sorts of shifts and expedients in order to avoid having to go back on the policies on which he had perhaps too confidently embarked.”²²⁹ Yet it’s fair to add that during Churchill’s Exchequer tenure state benefits had been extended to 344,800 children, 236,800 widows, 450,000 Britons over sixty-five years old, and 227,000 over seventy. He may have been no better at handling Britain’s finances than his family’s, but here, as at home, he had established the right priorities.

In retrospect there is an air of foreboding about the English upper classes’ late 1920s, a feeling that everyone of consequence is wearing tennis whites, gabbling manically, and emptying magnums of Dom Perignon in a Rolls-Royce racing headlong toward the edge of a towering precipice. It is illusion, of course, a vision of hindsight. At the time these years seemed fruitful and teeming with hope. One pictures a typical country weekend, with the Duke of York striding off the eighteenth green, Sir Samuel Hoare immaculate and not even perspiring after winning three straight sets six–love, Rex Whistler absorbed in his painting, Balfour dozing in a leather armchair, Osbert Sitwell laughing his infectious laugh as the Prof describes his recent trip to India, and Churchill and Bernard Shaw arguing over teacups about Shaw’s newly published Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. In other homes Sir Jacob Epstein is sculpturing his Madonna and Child; Virginia Woolf is writing To the Lighthouse; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Trevelyan, his History of England; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; and A. A. Milne, to the delight of a much larger if less discriminating audience, Winnie-the-Pooh. In Washington, Andrew W. Mellon, “the best Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton,” is spreading his gospel, an echo of Sackville-West, that ostentatious consumption by the rich is a source of great pleasure for the poor. At No. 11 Downing Street a buoyant chancellor of the Exchequer is supplementing his ministerial salary by writing “The United States of Europe” for the Saturday Evening Post, and, for the Daily Telegraph, a series of articles exposing welfare cheats called “The Abuse of the ‘Dole.’ ” T. S. Eliot has become a British citizen. England is preparing to launch an experimental public television service. Bernard Shaw has concluded that in the absence of a world government, the British Empire is best qualified to rule the world. That world is at peace; Britain still dominates world politics. A disarmament conference, with the United States participating, is convening in Geneva. Germany has been admitted to the League of Nations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, sponsored by the U.S. secretary of state, has outlawed war and provided for a pacific settlement of disputes. Italy has just signed a twenty-year friendship treaty with Ethiopia.

Among those gulled by the Italian dictator, now in his fifth year of power, was Winston Churchill. Once the coal strike had ended he had plunged into his third Crisis volume and accepted an invitation from Roger Keyes, now an admiral, to join a week-long cruise on the Mediterranean. “On leaving you,” he wrote the admiral, “I am going to stay in Rome for a few days to see Mussolini (while he lasts), and I am taking with me my brother Jack, whom you know, and my boy Randolph.” After Christmas at Chartwell they departed aboard the Esperia. On January 4, 1927, he wrote Clementine from Genoa that he was greatly taken by the Fascist society: “This country gives the impression of discipline, order, smiling faces. A happy strict school—no talking among the pupils. Great changes have taken place since you & I disembarked [here] nearly 6 years ago.” The local Fascists and the employees at his hotel were particularly attentive: “They have been saluting in their impressive manner all over the place, &… gave us a most cordial welcome.”²³⁰

Correcting proofs until 2:30 A.M. in his hotel room, he sent them off to his publisher “under threats of vengeance from Mussolini if anything goes wrong.” In Rome he saw the Duce twice and then held what can only be described as an unfortunate press conference. It was perfectly clear, he said, that his host “thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understands it, of the Italian people.” Indeed: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” Englishmen had “not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form,” but when the time came “we shall succeed in grappling with Communism and choking the life out of it—of that I am absolutely sure.” In his opinion the Duce had “provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Here after, no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against cancerous growths, and every responsible labour leader in the country ought to feel his feet more firmly planted in resisting levelling and reckless doctrines.” As a consequence, “Externally, your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.”²³¹

Work: In London

The text of these remarks was published in The Times of January 21, 1927. Liberals and Labourites were choleric. The New Leader stormed: “We have always suspected that Mr Winston Churchill was a Fascist at heart. Now he has openly avowed it.” C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian was so incensed that he all but lay down and drummed his heels on the floor. Clementine wrote Winston: “Scott is I see vexed over your partiality to ‘Pussolini.’ ” Her husband was unruffled. He took the classic view of British foreign policy: England should support any continental regime which was hostile to England’s greatest enemy—in this case, at that time, Soviet Russia. Later, when the Duce became a piratical adventurer, Churchill would scorn him as “Mussolini the swine,” and “Mussolini the jackal.”²³²

Vesuvius obligingly erupted when Winston, Jack, and young Randolph visited Naples. Churchill played his last polo game on Malta (“It is dreadful giving it up for ever,” he wrote), reported to Clementine on their son (“The Rabbit is a very good travelling companion,” he disclosed, adding with relish: “We have played a great deal of chess in which I give him either a Queen or two castles, or even castle, bishop and knight—and still wallop him”), and, with Randolph, was received by Pope Pius XI. The audience was preceded by much wrangling over protocol. As an important minister serving under a Protestant monarch, Winston absolutely refused to kneel. They compromised on three bows as he entered the pontiff’s reception hall. Randolph later wrote in his memoirs: “The early part of the conversation was a little sticky. Then my father and the Pope got on to the subject of the Bolsheviks and had a jolly half hour saying what they thought of them.” After stops at Athens, Paris, Dieppe, and Consuelo’s villa at Eze, Churchill and his party arrived at Newhaven aboard the night ferry on January 29. A box of Treasury papers from Grigg awaited him in his car; he studied them on the way to Chartwell.²³³

Play: At Chartwell

Between the Exchequer and his publishers’ deadlines, nearly all his holidays were working holidays. He meant to take most of the summer of 1927 off, painting at Chartwell, entertaining friends there, and sweating over walls, dams, and ponds, but then he decided to start writing an account of his youth. It is his most delightful book. Subsequently serialized in the News Chronicle and published by Thornton Butterworth as My Early Life, it sold 13,753 copies in Britain, was issued by Scribner’s in the United States under the title A Roving Commission, appeared, condensed, in the Reader’s Digest, and was translated into thirteen languages and Braille. Not all his conceptions reached full term. He planned a book on socialism with the working title The Creed of Failure but abandoned it after outlining the first five chapters. Then T. E. Lawrence, now 338171 Aircraftman Shaw, suggested Churchill’s major biographical work, writing him from his RAF base: “If the Gods give you a rest, some day, won’t you write a life of the great Duke of Marlborough? About our only international general… and so few people seem to see it.”²³⁴

Winston’s immense output—he was still writing regularly for magazines and newspapers—was possible because of his extraordinary methods of work. Like Dr. Johnson producing his dictionary, he assembled a committee of researchers and secretaries and guided them as they tackled one topic after another. Asked about the thread of narrative, he said, “Oh, I have all that in my head.” And he continued to work all hours. However late his Chartwell guests had retired, he would pace his study, dictating; one visitor recalls wakening to hear “the sounds of footfalls on the boards and his familiar voice clearly audible.” In one month, he told Clementine, he had banked the equivalent of $72,414: a £6,000 advance for the Marlborough, £5,200 in stock dividends, £1,700 in World Crisis royalties, and nearly £2,000 from magazines—“a small fortune,” he wrote, of which he was “trying to keep 2,000 fluid for investment & speculation with Vickers & McGowan. This ‘mass of manoeuvre’ is of the utmost importance & must not be frittered away.” It seemed sound. But most of his investments were in the New York stock market. And the year was 1929.²³⁵

A few months earlier, during a finance bill debate, he had been stricken by influenza, and his slow recovery suggested a weakened constitution. Those around him were worried; they were afraid he was driving himself toward a nervous collapse. The only way to divert him from public or private work was to put him on a ship or a hunt, in front of an easel, or in the midst of a crowd. Beaverbrook persuaded him to spend five days sailing to Amsterdam and back on his private yacht; the Duke of Westminster induced him to fish and hunt stags in Scotland; by royal command he hunted grouse with George V at Balmoral and painted the Highland scene from his window there. (The painting was subsequently auctioned for £120.) He wrote a friend: “I had a particularly pleasant luncheon with the King when we went out deer-driving, and a very good talk about all sorts of things. I am very glad that he did not disapprove of my using the Ministerial room as a studio, and I took particular care to leave no spots on the Victorian tartans.”²³⁶ Especially sweet was a return trip to Belfast, where, on his last visit, he and Clementine had narrowly escaped a lynch mob. This time Queen’s University awarded him an honorary degree, and cheering students, after presenting him with a shillelagh and a “paddy hat,” rode him around on their shoulders.

The older Churchill children were in boarding school now, with only Mary at home, but Chartwell was never lonely. As a host he was as affable as ever. Convoys of friends arrived, some as early as Thursday, for long weekends. He greeted them eagerly and was genuinely sorry to see them leave. One guest wrote in his diary: “He was in a marvellous mood and just would not let us go. I played the piano and we talked on cricket, on music and politics.” The toys of war still fascinated him. James Lees-Milne, a friend of young Randolph’s, told Martin Gilbert of one evening when “we remained at that round table till after midnight. The table cloth had long ago been removed. Mr. Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought…. He got all worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.”²³⁷

His closest friend was still Birkenhead—F.E.—with the Prof a close second. He and Beaverbrook became somewhat less intimate. The publisher wanted Winston filmed by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which was gathering a celluloid history of the period using what he called “the new process of talking pictures.” The cameramen had already shot reels of Coolidge, Mussolini, and Poincaré. Churchill declined on the ground that “I am in a far humbler class than the individuals you mention, and have no right to such prominence.” This humility is suspicious, and, in fact, he had another motive. In 1928 Beaverbrook had asked permission to print the letter Winston had sent Bonar Law in 1915, begging Law not to dismiss him from the Admiralty. As one who often earned his living by quoting the correspondence of others, Churchill could hardly refuse, but his reply was curt: “You make me tear open old wounds and their sting returns. Certainly publish the letter as you propose, not as a thing thrust into publicity by me but on your own responsibility.”²³⁸ In addition, the flag of Free Trade was under fire again, and Beaverbrook was sponsoring the United Empire League, a lobby for tariffs. Now in 1929 the Conservatives had been in office for five years; Baldwin had to call for a general election. United Empire candidates were running well in by-elections. Free Trade had lost its great popularity, and the prime minister committed himself to tariff reform. It was the first of several issues which were to estrange Baldwin and Churchill. England’s political climate had changed, and once again, as in 1915 and 1922, Winston felt the chill of isolation gathering round, found that MPs of all parties were beginning to avoid him.

Any party in power tries to take the public’s pulse from time to time, and on September 2, 1928, Churchill had written the prime minister at Aix-les-Bains: “I cannot feel that there is any decisive drift agst us. But Labour will have a heavy class vote; & the Liberals will queer the pitch—(what else can they do?).” They could continue to join Labour in droves, and that is what they were doing. That winter the Tory sky darkened; of nine by-elections in what had been considered safe Conservative constituencies, Labour had won three and the Liberals two, and the four surviving Tories had narrowly escaped defeat. Party morale was deteriorating, the cabinet was apathetic, the number of jobless growing. Beaverbrook thought that “unemployment will be the one and only issue which counts.” Churchill, with whom he conferred, though their manner toward one another had become distant, disagreed with him, arguing that it was “confined to certain areas which will go against the Government anyhow.” Yet within a week Winston’s optimism had evaporated. He now despaired; the Conservatives were vulnerable on too many other issues. “He accepts electoral defeat in advance,” wrote Beaverbrook, though he added that “his judgement on such matters is worse than any prominent man I know.”²³⁹

In January, five months before the country went to the polls, Churchill told Baldwin that the voters should be warned that they faced a choice between socialism, which had been responsible for the general strike, and “modern” conservatism. The trend in all countries, he said, was toward cooperation between nations and a continuum of national policy; “women can feel these tide movements by instinct.” A graver, more delicate matter was dissension within the cabinet. Baldwin’s successor would be either Winston or Neville Chamberlain, minister of health, and several ministers shared Lord Derby’s view: “I believe in Winston’s capability if only he were a bit more steady. But you never know what kite he is going to fly next.” The first step for Chamberlain’s supporters was to get Churchill out of the Exchequer. Amery wrote the prime minister in March: “The essential thing is to move Winston…. In spite of all his brilliancy and verbal originality, he is entirely lacking in constructive thought and imagination…. He has been, in every direction, a paralysing negative influence, and the Party knows it and would breathe a profound sigh of relief if he were shifted.” The force behind the maneuvering was the man who stood to benefit from it. Chamberlain, who had suggested Winston’s appointment as chancellor, had resolved to evict the Churchills from No. 11. Baldwin, susceptible to pressure, contemplated appointing Churchill secretary of state for India, even though the viceroy thought Winston unsuitable because he was “out of sympathy” with Indian political aspirations and was even “rather disposed to despise” them. The prime minister made the offer anyway and Churchill flatly turned it down. Birkenhead was doing a good job at the India Office, he said, and he shared F.E.’s “deep misgivings about that vast sub-continent.” Nevertheless, determined to avoid friction with Chamberlain if possible, he wrote Baldwin that he wanted to “associate Neville” with major Treasury decisions. Neville declined. His objective hadn’t changed; he was turning to intrigue. Anticipating the possibility that the coming election might leave the Liberals holding the balance of power between the Tories and Labour, as in 1924, Churchill sounded out Lloyd George on his terms for a Conservative-Liberal alliance. This, Chamberlain told Baldwin, was disloyal. Baldwin disagreed, though he said that if the voting ended in a stalemate, he couldn’t possibly share responsibility with Lloyd George. Neville wrote in his diary: “S.B. said the King’s government must be carried on, but that he personally would not serve with L.G. I said I was in the same position; and S.B. said in that case he supposed the leadership would go to Winston.” Yet by spring it was obvious that Chamberlain had become Baldwin’s favorite minister. Churchill realized that making common cause with his Tory critics was impossible. He wrote Clementine: “I have made up my mind that if N. Ch. is made leader of the CP or anyone else of that kind, I clear out of politics & see if I cannot make you & the kittens a little more comfortable before I die. Only one goal still attracts me, & if that were barred I shd quit the dreary field for pastures new.”²⁴⁰

Polling was set for May 30. As a national figure Churchill was expected to stump for all Conservative candidates, but he faced a strong Liberal challenger in Epping, so while he was speaking elsewhere, Clementine took soundings among the voters there. “Darling,” she hastily scrawled, “I do hope you enjoy your Scotch Meetings—I wish I were coming with you. But I think it is wise for me to be here & start the ball rolling.” She rented an Epping cottage—“I think you will find this house a snug retreat,” she wrote him, “from which to sally forth on the constituency”—and, because there were no large halls in the town, ordered the erection of two huge tents in which Winston might address his constituents. Speaking in one of them he suggested that state insurance might be available, not just to wage earners, but to all Britons. It was his one positive note in an otherwise deplorable campaign. In Liverpool he denounced Ramsay MacDonald’s wartime pacifism: “I do not forget that, nor ought it to be forgotten.” The scientist Sir John Boyd-Orr had a surer sense of the country’s mood: “A ruling class living on dividends, masses of the people on the dole, and a Government trying to maintain an uneasy status quo is a picture which fills thinking people with despair.” Churchill meanwhile was calling for a vote of confidence in Baldwin’s “capable, sedate Government.” If MacDonald were returned to office, he predicted, Labour would “bring back the Russian Bolsheviks, who will immediately get busy in the mines and factories, as well as among the armed forces, planning another general strike.” On April 30, 1929, he addressed the nation by radio. Conservatives, he said, had given England peace abroad, stable government at home, honest administration, goodwill, public and private thrift, and relief from “the burden of galling rates.” He said: “Avoid chops and changes of policy; avoid thimble-riggers and three-card trick men; avoid all needless borrowing; and above all avoid, as you would the smallpox, class warfare and violent political strife.” The message wasn’t much, but the delivery was remarkable, and this time Beatrice Webb wasn’t the only one to remark on it. The next morning’s Daily Express commented on its effectiveness. Churchill’s performance, the editorial said, “knocked the six preceding broadcasts into a cocked hat… as an exhibition of polemical oratory it was superb. His voice was edged alternately with sarcasm and warning. There was a note in it of extraordinary intimacy with his audience. He began with statistics… and ended high on the pinnacle of perfervid patriotism.”²⁴¹

It is singular how the brightest of politicians can convince themselves, against all evidence, that they are going to win. On May 28 Winston told his constituents: “Victory is in the air.” It wasn’t. Two evenings later he joined Baldwin at No. 10 to follow the returns. Thomas Jones recalls that at one desk “sat the PM with narrow slips of paper on which he inscribed the… lists as they arrived.” At another “sat Winston doing similar lists in red ink, sipping whisky and soda, getting redder and redder, rising and going out often to glare at the machine himself, hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge. As Labour gain after Labour gain was announced, Winston became more and more flushed with anger, left his seat and confronted the machine in the passage; with his shoulders hunched he glared at the figures, tore the sheets and behaved as though if any more Labour gains came he would smash the whole apparatus. His ejaculations to the surrounding staff were quite unprintable.”²⁴²

By the following afternoon the final results were in: Labour, 288 seats; Conservatives, 260; Liberals, 59. Churchill himself had been reelected, but with only 48 percent of the vote. Among the losers were two of his young protégés, Macmillan and Alfred Duff Cooper. The Liberals once more held the balance of power. Churchill and Austen Chamberlain urged the prime minister to strike a bargain with Lloyd George. That was easy for them to say; they were old friends of George’s. But Baldwin, who had been the architect of George’s ruin in 1922, had decided that such an alliance was out of the question. After spending a weekend at Chequers thinking it over, he informed the cabinet he was going to resign. Ramsay MacDonald could take over again. All the Tory ministers then donned frock coats and boarded the Windsor train to hand the King their seals of office. Being a civil servant, Eddie Marsh could not continue as Churchill’s secretary; they parted tearfully. T. E. Lawrence wrote Eddie: “The General election means that Winston goes out, I suppose. For himself I’m glad. He’s a good fighter, and will do better out than in, and will come back in a stronger position than before. I want him to be PM somehow.” That view was not shared by the man now moving out of No. 10. According to Beaverbrook, Winston visited Baldwin in the prime minister’s House office—“the PM’s room”—and told him of a strong movement to oust William Henry Davison, the party manager. Davison, said Winston, had become a focus of unpopularity. “Baldwin told Churchill,” Beaverbrook wrote, “that there was nobody more unpopular than himself. The difficulty of carrying Churchill, said Baldwin, was one of the main reasons for losing the election.” If true, this was the first real break between the two men.²⁴³

Evicted from No. 11, the Churchills rented the London home of Venetia Montagu, Asquith’s old inamorata. Winston was planning a trip through Canada and the United States, to promote his books and line up editors and publishers for future writing assignments, and he left the details to Clementine. As a member of the Conservative Business Committee, or shadow cabinet, he expected to be an active Tory strategist and policymaker. “Do not hesitate to engage one or two extra servants,” he wrote her. “Now that we are in opposition we must gather colleagues & M.P.s together a little at lunch & dinner. Also I have now a few business people who are of importance. We ought to be able to have lunches of 8–10 often, & dinners of the same size about twice a week. You should have a staff equal to this.” But his assumption that he would be in the thick of things was unjustified. Baldwin had been right; many senior members of the party held him responsible for their defeat. This was revealed to him when Ramsay MacDonald had been in power less than a week. The new prime minister announced his intention to evacuate all British troops from Egypt except those in the canal zone. Winston objected vehemently, but “when I rose in my place on the Front Opposition Bench to interrogate the Government,” he wrote in a note long afterward, Baldwin “sat silent and disapproving. I immediately perceived that the… honoured leader did not think this was a good point to press. Murmurs and even cries of dissent from the Conservative benches were added to the hostile Government interruptions, and it was evident that I was almost alone in the House.”²⁴⁴

On August 3, 1929, the Empress of Australia steamed out of Southampton, bound for Quebec. Among its first-class passengers were Churchill; his brother, Jack; Randolph, now eighteen; and Jack’s young son Johnny. Winston spent most of the voyage working or attending to his personal exchequer. He wrote two pieces, “Will the British Empire Survive?” for Answers, and a profile of a peer for Nash’s Pall Mall. John Bull had already paid him for a piece on the election, “Why We Lost.” The Daily Telegraph had agreed to pay him £2,500 for ten articles on this trip. In addition, £1,000 in World Crisis royalties had arrived before he left London, and a sale of utility shares had brought him another £2,000. He invested every shilling he could spare in the New York stock market. Financial security, he wrote Clementine from the ship, was “a wonderful thing.”²⁴⁵

The warmth of his Canadian welcome was also wonderful. “The workmen in the streets,” he wrote her, “the girls who work the lifts, the ex-service men, the farmers, up to the highest functionaries have shewn such unaffected pleasure to see me & shake hands that I am profoundly touched.” The Canadian Pacific had put a stenographer-typist at his disposal for the journey across the continent, and Bernard Baruch had persuaded Charles Schwab to lend Churchill his private railway car, with double beds, private bathrooms, a parlor, a dining room (which Winston converted into an office), a kitchen, servants’ quarters, a refrigerator, fans, and a radio. The radio, he wrote Clementine, was especially useful: “The wireless is a great boon, and we hear regularly from [Horace] Vickers [his broker] about the stock markets. His news has, so far, been entirely satisfactory.” The passing scenery fascinated him. He wrote that he wanted “to see the country at close quarters, and nibble the grass and champ the branches.” To Randolph he said, “Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees to make pulp for those bloody newspapers and calling it civilization.”²⁴⁶

Along the way he paused to open exhibitions, dedicate memorials, consult with officials, and deliver speeches, in one of which he deplored proposals to reduce France’s army, reminding his audience that Germany had twice as many youths of military age as France, which had been invaded by Germans twice within living memory. After driving across the Rockies, which he painted, a sombrero shielding him from the sun, they visited Vancouver and took the ferry to Victoria, their last Canadian stop. The next day Randolph wrote in his diary: “We are now on the ship bound to Seattle, American soil and Prohibition. But we are well-equipped. My big flask is full of whisky and the little one contains brandy. I have reserves of both in medicine bottles. It is almost certain that we shall have no trouble. Still if we do, Papa pays the fine and I get the publicity.” Papa would have been hit by both; he had a case of brandy in stone hot-water bottles. In San Francisco the British consul general met their train and drove them southward through the redwoods. Winston wrote his wife that the greater part of their six-hundred-mile journey “lay through the woods with these enormous trees. They are really astonishing. One we saw, the biggest, 380 foot high, was three thousand or four thousand or even five thousand years old and it took fourteen of us to join our arms around its stem.”²⁴⁷

The high point of their California trip was a four-day visit with their chief California host, William Randolph Hearst, a fervent anglophobe who nevertheless wanted Churchill’s by-line in his papers. Winston was willing, though he drove a hard bargain: £40,000 for twenty-two pieces. He was dumbfounded by San Simeon, Hearst’s thirty-million-dollar castle. Blenheim pales beside San Simeon, a composite of all the European palaces and cathedrals the owner had admired, with tapestries, sarcophagi, stained glass, corbels, choir stalls, Gothic rooms, carved staircases, fretwork-ornamented towers, stables, swimming pools, and tennis courts. The entire property was surrounded by a transplanted forest. The man of the house dwelt in a third-floor “Celestial Suite,” from which he descended in an elevator whose walls were hung with priceless paintings. Winston was charmed by Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, formerly an MGM star, and enchanted when they all went off on a picnic accompanied by sixteen pack mules loaded with caviar, champagne, and a hillbilly band. Of Hearst himself, Churchill wrote home that he was “most interesting to meet, & I got to like him—a grave simple child—with no doubt a nasty temper—playing with the most costly toys. A vast income always overspent: ceaseless building & collecting not vy discriminatingly works of art: two magnificent establishments, two charming wives [Mrs. Hearst and Marion]; complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy (to us at any rate) & the appearance of a Quaker elder—or perhaps better Mormon elder.” One afternoon the householder was conferring with his attorney when a maid rushed in. “Mr Churchill is fainting!” she cried. “He wants some turpentine!” Hearst rushed out to a terrace, where he found Winston painting, not fainting, awaiting a thinner for his oils and placidly puffing a fat cigar.²⁴⁸

Churchill and his party moved on to Santa Barbara and then, for five nights, to the Biltmore in Los Angeles—their hotel bills, Winston wrote, were paid by “a hearty Banker”—where they toured the Hollywood studios and were Hearst’s guests once again, at the Montmartre Club. That evening they dined with sixty guests, including Charlie Chaplin. Winston wrote his wife that Chaplin had “acted his new film for us in a wonderful way. It is to be his gt attempt to prove that the silent drama or pantomime is superior to the new talkies.”^* Randolph noted in his diary: “Papa wants him to act the young Napoleon and has promised to write the Scenario.” Instead, said Chaplin, he intended to play Jesus Christ. Churchill thought a moment and then asked: “Have you cleared the rights?”²⁴⁹

After a fishing expedition off Catalina Island (Winston caught a 188-pound swordfish in twenty minutes), his party proceeded eastward, again in Schwab’s private car, across the Mojave Desert, by the Grand Canyon, to Chicago. Baruch met him at the station there and introduced him to the Commercial Club. Asked about Ramsay MacDonald, who was also in the United States at the time, negotiating naval disarmament, Churchill replied that England was fortunate to be represented “by so experienced a statesman and so distinguished a man”—and then called for more British and American warships. On the Atlantic coast he paid a courtesy call on Herbert Hoover; toured Civil War battlefields, to pick up material for a series of Collier’s pieces; and was in New York, staying at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, when the market crashed. Still shaky on economics, he was slow to grasp what was happening. On the evening of “Black Tuesday,” when the stock market, honeycombed with credit, collapsed of its own weight, sixteen million shares changing hands, he dined at Bernard Baruch’s Fifth Avenue mansion. The other guests were bankers and financiers. When one rose to toast their British visitor, he addressed the company as “friends and former millionaires.”²⁵⁰