May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 108, Autumn 2000

Page 18

By Michael McMenamin


One hundred years ago:

Autumn 1900 • Age 26

“…you must remember how much money means to me…”

Money, or his lack of it, was very much on Churchill’s mind after his election to Parliament for Oldham on 2 October. Thereafter, he toured the country during the remainder of the three-week polling period speaking on behalf of many Conservative candidates, including Balfour and Chamberlain. Of a proposed lecture tour in England after the election concluded, he wrote to his mother, “But you must remember how much money means to me and how much I need it for political expense and other purposes, and if I can make £3000 by giving a score of lectures in the big towns throughout England on the purely military aspect of the [Boer] war, it is very hard for me to refuse….” Churchill didn’t refuse and ended up with over £3700 for twentynine speeches during a thirty-day period in November. In one speech, he defended British tactics in South Africa against accusations that they constituted “atrocious barbarities…[in] violation of all the practices of civilised warfare,” stating that “the justification of the measures resorted to in order to put an end to guerrilla warfare is that no methods, however stringent, or painful, or severe, can possibly cost so much misery as the continuance of the anarchy and disorder now prevailing.”

Churchill had even higher hopes for a lucrative pay day from a North America tour. As he wrote his mother: “I will not go to the United States unless guaranteed at least £1000 a month for three months and I should expect a great deal more. Five thousand pounds is not too much for making oneself so cheap.” It was not to be. In the event, he was to clear only £1600 in a tour which started on 8 December and continued through 2 February 1901.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

Seventy-five years ago:

Autumn 1925 -Age 51

“The Twelve Apostles of Reassurance”

Churchill spent October 1925 delivering almost a daily series of speeches defending his economic policy and his first Budget against criticism from friend and foe alike. In a speech at Colchester, Churchill mocked those who had attacked his income tax cuts: “In that Budget I committed some serious crimes. I reduced the income-tax, and I differentiated the income-tax in favour of the smaller income-tax payer….I have been scolded for these evil deeds [but] if the Economy Committee over which the Prime Minister is presiding almost every day has not reaped the harvest of economy which it hopes to achieve, it is quite possible that it may be my duty to make amends in practical form for the past, and to restore to the taxpayer some portion at least of the burdens of which I so wrongfully robbed him.”

At the Engineers’ Club Annual Dinner at the Savoy on October 23rd, he surveyed in his optimistic fashion the economic picture: “I have been accused of not taking a sufficiently gloomy view of affairs. All I said was that things are not getting worse and that there is even a probability that they may get better. I can give twelve principal reasons which justify that conclusion. I call them the ‘Twelve Apostles of Reassurance’….Our share in the oversea trade of the world has not diminished since the war. It is true that there is a reduced amount of world oversea trade, but of that reduced trade we possess, in fact, slightly a larger proportion than before the war….There has been, if not a great, yet an appreciable diminution in the cost of living during the year….The consuming power of the people has not diminished, but has been maintained, and in many important commodities it has increased….The number of people who reached the employable age last year was 100,000. Still, there are 250,000 more people at work today in Great Britain than a year ago….What is the moral conclusion to draw from this recital? It is to ‘leave off barracking the Government, leave off trying to rattle the new party, leave off crying down the national credit, leave off spreading tales of despondency and alarm, and fear throughout the British Empire and the world. Show some measure of gratitude and fair play to the men who are called upon to bear the responsibilities of the day.'”

Nevertheless, the spectre of a national strike in the coming spring was never far from Churchill’s thoughts. He rarely passed up an opportunity to criticize Arthur Cook, leader of the Mine Workers Union. In his speech at the Engineer’s Club, he concluded his rosy appraisal of the economy with a warning accusing Cook and the miners of being influenced by the Communists: “All the brighter prospects will be shattered and overclouded if next spring we are exposed to a serious industrial convulsion in the coalfield or on the railways, but we are still hopeful that we will be able to carry our tray of crockery until we have safely placed it on the national table.”

Churchill’s anti-labor reputation stems, quite unfairly, from this period where the unions were seeking to use the strike weapon not to secure higher wages or better working conditions but rather to force a general election and a hoped-for Socialist victory and the nationalization of coal mines. Churchill saw Socialism as a threat to prosperity and its cousin, Communism, as a threat to liberty. As he said in a speech at the Opera House in Tunbridge Wells near his home in Chartwell on 28 November, “The Socialist in his folly, and the Communist in his malice, would undermine and fatally wreck the pillars of our national prosperity…. the Communist thinks he can smash his way through by violence, and the Socialist believes he can do it by humbug….The British Socialists are well known to be the dullest in the world. They have never contributed anything even to the building up of the Socialist philosophy. They have merely gulped down what Karl Marx and Lenin have handed over to them.”

Fifty years ago:

Autumn 1950 • Age 76

“My dearest Pamela…I cherish yr signal across the years…”

In October Churchill celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his election to the House of Commons. That same month, in a felicitous coincidence, the House of Commons returned to its prewar Chamber in Westminster, which had been destroyed ten years earlier by Nazi bombs and was now rebuilt, at Churchill’s direction, to its identical, albeit cramped, configuration. Churchill remarked: “I am a child of the House of Commons and have been here, I believe, longer than anyone. I was much upset when I was violently thrown out of my collective cradle. I certainly wanted to get back to it as soon as possible….It excites world wonder in the parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.”

In October Pamela Plowden, his first love, now Lady Lytton, wrote to him reminding him that fifty years earlier he had, unsuccessfully, proposed marriage. His gracious reply is still affecting today: “My dearest Pamela…it is not till now that I can tell you how much I cherish yr signal across the years, from the days when I was [not only] a freak—always that—but much hated & ruled out, but there was one who saw some qualities, & it is to you that I am most deeply grateful. Do let us meet again soon. The Parl. will be sitting in November & perhaps you wd come & Lunch one day. Clemmie will telephone a plan. Fifty years!—how stunning! but after all it is better than a hundred. Then there wd not be memory. With my deepest thoughts & love. From Winston.”

For his birthday on 30 November, Churchill addressed the House of Commons on the differences between the aftermaths of the two world wars: “After the First War, when the victors had disarmed the Germans and their allies, no powerful organised army remained upon the scene except the French Army. After this war, the armed might of Russia emerged steadily year by year, almost month by month, as a rock shows more and more above an ebbing tide. The second difference, which arose out of the realization of the first, was that the United States, instead of retiring into isolation, instead of demanding full and prompt repayment of debts and disinteresting herself in Europe…has come forward step by step as die knowledge of the situation has dawned upon her and has made the great counterpoise upon which the freedom and the future of our civilization depends.”

Twenty-five years ago:

Autumn 1975

“Everybody is in the front line”

In November, Winston Churchill, MP for Stretford, Lines., appealed for a £100,000 reward for information leading to conviction of IRA terrorists who had killed a Stretford soldier, one of three, in South Armagh. Asked whether his suggestion made him an IRA target, Winston Churchill replied, “Everyone is in the front line. Who knows where the IRA will strike as we go about our daily business?”

Myth-shattering was in vogue as J. H. McCarthy, senior lecturer in History at the University of South Wales, suggested that Churchill worried during the war that Australian PM Menzies was after his job—a view reflected much later in a book by another Australian critic, David Day. Meanwhile John Bartlett, headmaster of one of Churchill’s old schools, proclaimed that WSC was not the dunce he had proclaimed himself: “In his last year he was top of the class in every subject except geography.” Churchill’s famous failure in his Latin exam at Harrow, Bartlett said, was owed simply to “a very bad attack of exam nerves. It’s common…has nothing to do with merit.”

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.