June 11, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 34

By Michael McMenamin


One hundred years ago:

Winter 1898-99 • Age 24

Polo and The River War

Early in December 1898, Churchill returned to India to play in the annual Inter-Regimental Polo Tournament. On board ship, he worked on his manuscript for The River War, writing his mother on 11 December: “I have however made good progress with the book. Three vy long chapters are now almost entirely completed. The chapter describing the fall of Khartoum Gordon’s death etc is I think quite the most lofty passage I have ever written.” He offered as an example one sentence about the Mahdi who had been orphaned as a child (Martin Gilbert suggests that this may have been based on Churchill’s own experience with his father): “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong: and a boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he escape the perils of youth, an independence and a vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days.”

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Churchill had strong feelings about Kitchener and his destruction of the Mahdi’s Tomb, writing in The River War. “By Sir H. Kitchener’s orders, the Tomb has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head was separated from the body, and, to quote the official explanation, ‘preserved for future disposal’….If the people of the Sudan cared no more for the Mahdi, then it was an act of vandalism and folly to destroy the only fine building which might attract the traveller and interest the historian.”

On 9 February 1899, one week before the Polo Tournament, Churchill fell down some stairs, spraining both ankles and dislocating his right shoulder. It was this dislocation, rather less prosaic than grabbing at a quayside ring on arriving in India, as stated in My Early Life, which long caused him discomfort. [See Barbara Langworth, “Churchill and Polo,” FH’72. -Ed.] He wrote his mother: “I fear I shall not be able to play in the Tournament as my arm is weak and stiff & may come out again at any moment. It is one of the most unfortunate things that I have ever had happen to me and is a bitter disappointment.” In the event, Churchill played in the Tournament, with his right arm strapped to his side. He led his team to victory in the finals where, bound arm and all, he scored three of his team’s four goals.

Churchill left India in late March, never to return. Christine Lewis, a young American girl he befriended on the voyage from India to Egypt, describes Churchill’s typically late arrival: “The gangplank was about to be raised when down the wharf ran a freckled, red-haired young man in a rumpled suit carrying an immense tin cake box…. We found him a most amusing fellow traveler—full of fun, with a delightful sense of humor….Every day he sat beside us on the deck, working intensely on his book. He paid no attention to the gay chatter of young people as he wrote and rewrote in that peculiar small hand….Perhaps his one fault at this time was being a little too sure about everything, which the other young people did not always appreciate.” [See the Churchill-Lewis Correspondence, available from Churchill Stores. -Ed.]

Seventy-five years ago:

Winter 1923-24* Age 49

Fighting for a Comeback (1)

On 6 December 1923, Churchill lost the West Leicester by-election, his last campaign as a Liberal free trader, the issue over which he left the Tories in 1904. Churchill pulled no punches in the campaign, belying the claim of his enemies that he was currying favor with the Conservatives in order to foster a return to their ranks by attacking personally the Tory Leader Stanley Baldwin. In a speech given 26 November 1923, he compared Baldwin to “the March Hare and the Mad Hatter” and ridiculed Baldwin’s self-characterization as “a plain, blunt man,” calling him “as rich as any man in Leicester.” When not engaging in personalities, Churchill enhanced his reputation as the most effective political defender of free trade in his time: “What is the use of pretending that this greatest of all exporting nations has got to lie down pusillanimously behind a network of tariffs, cowering in our own markets, living by taking in each other’s washing, feeding like a dog on its own tail? [Laughter.]”

Like many before and since, Baldwin overestimated the electoral appeal of protectionism. The Conservatives returned to office with a reduced margin, having lost 88 seats. But Churchill’s divided Liberal Party was busy arranging its own demise. Former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith made clear on 12 December that his wing—the larger wing—of the Liberals would support Labour over the Conservatives, ensuring Britain its first Socialist government. Churchill signaled his disagreement in a letter to The Times on 18 January 1924: “The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war.” On 21 January 1924, the Liberals voted with Labour to oust Baldwin, and Ramsay MacDonald formed his government. That same day marked the beginning of Churchill’s eventual return to the Conservative Party of his youth.

In March Churchill campaigned at a by-election in Westminster as “an Independent Anti-Socialist Candidate,” claiming that “I have been fighting Socialist candidates in every election I have fought since 1908.” In a speech on 11 March 1924, Churchill’s prescient attack on socialism highlighted its inherent contradictions and foreshadowed its intellectual collapse 65 years later:

“It is an absurd delusion that the industries of this country can be conducted through committees of elected politicians. One-tenth of the dose of Socialism which ruined Russia would kill Great Britain stone dead….[M]en with pedant and pedagogic minds and doctrinaire views, men with a desire to rule out exactly what every one of their fellow-citizens was to do and was not to do from dawn to dusk, from one year’s end to another, in pursuance of their goal, have in the history of the world brought untold miseries upon millions. [Cheers.]”

Churchill described in Thoughts and Adventures the Socialists who opposed him in that election: “Of course there are the rowdy meetings…shouting interruptions…and every kind of nasty question carefully thought out and sent up to the Chair by vehement-looking pasty youths or young short-haired women of bulldog appearance.” In vivid contrast, Churchill writes that he received “…all kinds of support. Dukes, jockeys, prize-fighters, courtiers, actors and business men all developed a keen partisanship. The chorus girls of Daly’s Theatre sat up all night addressing the envelopes and despatching the election address. It was most cheering and refreshing to see so many young and beautiful women of every rank in life, ardently working in a purely disinterested cause, not unconnected with myself.”

Fifty years ago:

Winter 1948-49 • Age 74

Fighting for a Comeback (2)

Twenty-five years later saw Churchill as Leader of the Opposition making the same attacks on Socialists, speaking against a bill to nationalize the iron and steel industries: “I say this is not a Bill, it is a plot; not a plan to increase production, but an operation in restraint of trade. It is not a plan to help our patient struggling people, but a burglar’s jemmy to crack the capitalist crib. [Laughter.]

“The Rt. Hon. Gentleman laughs, but he lives on the exertions of 80 percent of industries still free and all his hopes are founded on their activities. Those free industries constitute practically the whole of our export trade…but still they are carrying the whole burden of our life and represent our only solvent economic earning power.”

While complimenting Labour’s stand against the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin, he was critical of its refusal to recognize the new state of Israel, for which he blamed the anti-semitism of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin:

“Whether the Rt. Hon. Gentleman likes it or not, and whether we like it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years….I say that the Conservative Party has done a great task over twenty-five years, with Parliaments which had a Conservative majority, in trying to build a Jewish National Home in Palestine, and now that it has come into being, it is England that refuses to recognize it, and, by our actions, we find ourselves regarded as its most bitter enemies. All this is due, not only to mental inertia or lack of grip on the part of the Ministers concerned, but also, I am afraid, to the very strong and direct streak of bias and prejudice on the part of the Foreign Secretary. I do not feel any great confidence that he has not got a prejudice against the Jews in Palestine.”

In the same address, responding to the criticisms that Palestine could not accommodate the explosive growth of the Arab and Jewish populations—more than doubling in the previous 25 years— Churchill conveyed his optimistic vision of people as a resource and an asset rather than a liability: “The idea that only a limited number of people can live in a country is a profound illusion; it all depends on their co-operative and inventive power. There are more people today living twenty storeys above the ground in i New York than were living on the ground in New York 100 years ago. There is no limit to the ingenuity of man if it is properly and vigorously applied under conditions of peace and justice.”

Twenty-five years ago:

Winter 1973-74

A Portrait by Giugiaro

Finest Hour would publish only two issues in 1974, for it was having editor troubles. Dalton Newfield, declaring that “no working man could hold successfully both the offices of President and editor,” had recruited Stephen King (not that Stephen King) as editor, but King had been unable to complete an issue. Wearily Dal gathered up the makings of issue #30, sixteen pages long, and produced another edition full of interest.

The cover was a favorite of Dal, who wrote: “There is Sir Winston! There is the rotundity of his later life and the humor of which he is so justifiably famous dominating the portrait—yet there is also the wide brow of his exceeding intelligence, the furrows of his concern for the world and even that shrewdness that enabled him to effect his dreams despite opposition from every quarter. Surely the artist must have steeped himself in the Churchill Story ere he drew the first line of this exceptional portrait?

“Not so! Giugiaro writes, ‘At that time I liked to make pictures of that kind as a hobby, taking the inspiration for most of them from the most famous personalities in the political, movie and show world.’ But Sr. Giugiaro has claims to supremacy in his field, which is the design of automobiles. He has been with Fiat and Bertone, and now is a principal at Ital Design. A few of his many credits include Alfa Romeo’s Sprint Speciale, Alfasud, Canguro and Giulia GT; Iso’s Rivolta, Fidia and Grifo; Ferrari’s 250GT; Fiat’s 850 Spyder; de Tomaso’s Mangusta; Maserati’s Ghibli; Porsche’s Tapiro and Lotus’s Esprit.” Coincidentally, Giugiaro had come to the notice of America’s automotive press when Automobile Quarterly published a feature on his designs (Spring 1971, Vol. 9, No. 3)—the same issue where Dai’s successor as editor of Finest Hour published his first automotive article, “The Glorious Madness of Kaiser-Frazer”….

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