August 1, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 13

Action This Day – Winter 1879-80, 1904-05, 1929-30, 1954-55

By Michael McMenamin

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125 Years Ago:
Winter 1879-80 • Age 5
“Lord Randolph hurried back.”

Winston, his parents and his new brother Jack, born in Dublin on 4 February (see also “Leading Churchill Myths,” page 11 of this issue), returned to England from Ireland in March in anticipation of Parliament being dissolved and a new election being held. As Churchill wrote in his biography of Lord Randolph: “Members of Parliament were forthwith scattered to defend their seats….Lord Randolph hurried back to Woodstock and arrived, as we may judge from the account he gave his mother, none too soon.”

Churchill quotes from Lord Randolph’s letter to his mother on his visit to the “family constituency”: “I have now been round the constituency and seen everybody, except a few people in Woodstock whom I have not yet seen….I know well how difficult, almost impossible, it is to please poor people. Nor do I blame your agent for not doing all they ask or for not finding employment for them; that no doubt was out of his power. What I do blame him for, and what I am sure my father and you will blame him for, is for having provoked against himself a great deal of ill will, and having treated these poor people, and farmers, with rudeness and worse than rudeness.”

100 Years Ago:
Winter 1904-05 • Age 30
“Something stupid was usually done.”

Churchill continued, throughout the winter, to tour the country, speaking formidably against the government and his former colleagues in a series of colorful if not personal attacks.

28 December 1904, Malmesbury: “Mr. Chamberlain’s changes constitute a world’s record. They are more like some unusual acrobatic feat than an ordinary political transformation. There is a feat called ‘looping the loop’ on the London stage. It is a very difficult and dangerous thing to do. Sometimes it succeeds; sometimes it fails….Until the great dispute between free trade and protection is settled one way or the other there can be no real prosperity in the land. To all questions and complaints his Majesty’s Ministers have a single answer, ‘Send us back to office for seven more years,’ they cry, ‘and we will shut out the foreign devils and the goods the foreign devils make.’ What a programme for the 20th century! What an appeal to a civilized nation! What a new year’s greeting to mankind!…[A] country which tries to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and endeavouring to lift himself up by the handle. What a mockery to the poor people in distress to say, ‘Our remedy is to increase the price of food and clothing.’ Free trade may not be the best policy for the millionaire; it is the best policy for the millions.”

17 July 1905, Manchester: “I notice that Mr. Joynson-Hicks at the Manchester Carlton Club the other night—and really I do not know how to describe it except in his own words—said, ‘The main principle of the fiscal policy of the Conservative party to-day was that some change was desirable’….It reminds me that my father used to say that when he heard people going about saying, ‘Something must be done, something must be done,’ he always noticed that something very stupid was usually done.”

19 January 1905, London: “Lord Selborne is engaged in ‘thinking imperially.’ That must be a very restful occupation, because while engaged in it he does not require to use ordinary purposes of thought in the ordinary manner at all.”

6 February 1905, Gainsborough: “Protection is the art of doing business at a loss. The more we carry out the principle of Protection the greater and the deeper will be the loss. None can complain that Mr. Chamberlain has not laid his proposals fairly and fully before the country. I only wish that the Prime Minister would imitate him.”

On one occasion in Manchester, Churchill ascribed feminine qualities to Prime Minister Balfour for not dissolving Parliament and holding a new election, a tactic utilized most recently by the newly-elected governor of California, who called his political opponents “girliemen”: “I have never believed for a moment in any prospect of a dissolution on this part. Abdications have taken place in the history of the world, but if you look at the course of history you will see that they have usually been made by masculine rather than by feminine monarchs. Kings have abdicated but never queens, and it is one of the attractive qualities of Mr. Balfour that his nature displays a certain femininity. No doubt it is that element of his nature which prompts him to cling to office on any terms to the last possible moment.”

75 Years Ago:
Winter 1929-30 • Age 55
“Hooch: The Middle Road.”

Free trade still captured Churchill’s attention twenty-five years later as Lord Beaverbrook’s protectionist “Empire Free Trade” initiative in his newspapers began to gain Conservative support. Harold Nicolson noted in January that WSC “feels too old to fight it. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he said, ‘I should have welcomed such a combat; now I dread it.’”

Churchill was happier to take up American prohibition, in an address to the Allied Brewery Traders Association Diner at the Savoy Hotel in London on 17 March: “A very different situation exists on the other side of the Atlantic, to which I have recently paid a most interesting visit….After two months’ experience of the full rigours of prohibition I am bound to say that I do not feel one penny the worse. But there is one feature of the prohibition movement which excites my indignation. There are still people in the United States who obtain indulgence in alcoholic liquor, and among those people I heard the expression ‘hooch’ sometimes used. It caused me great pain. What an expression to describe one of the gifts of the gods to man. It is a coarse, brutish, and squalid expression. On those terms they may reduce all the romance of life to baseness. It is a most dangerous thing to invade the inward and fundamental rights of individuals. Governments do not exist for the purpose of invading those rights, but to enable individuals to exercise their rights so long as they do not trench upon the interests or the rights of others. The intrusion into the sphere of individual liberty is always followed by evils and by reactions, which produce a whole crop of unfortunate events. The visit to the United States convinced me more than anything else had that the British method of regulated liberty, tempered by high taxation, produces far better results upon the health and temperance of the community, as well as upon the receipts of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We take the middle road.”

50 Years Ago:
Winter 1954-55 • Age 80
“What do you want to see me about?”

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden continued to press Churchill to set a date for stepping down as Prime Minister. He saw the PM on 21 December and noted afterward in his diary: “…he said ‘What do you want to see me about?’ in his most aggressive tone. I said that he had had my letter and said he should be ready to discuss it. And slowly the argument began….but when I had made it quite clear that I was not interested in taking over at the end of June he eventually agreed to meeting at 3 p.m. with the people I chose. But it was all most grudging.”

At the meeting, “W rounded on me and said it was clear we wanted him out. Nobody contradicted him….What the result of all this may be I cannot tell except that the old man feels bitterly towards me, but this I cannot help. The colleagues are unanimous about drawling Cabinets, the failure to take decisions, the general atmosphere of après moi le déluge‚ and someone had to give a heave.” Even Harold Macmillan, heretofore a Churchill ally, was backing Eden, telling Churchill’s physician Lord Moran, “When the moment comes Winston will have to decide how he goes; he has missed so many curtains, when he could have gone with everyone applauding, that it won’t be as easy now.”

Churchill himself decided privately to resign on 5 April, at the beginning of Parliament’s Easter Recess, telling his Private Secretary John Colville, “I have lost interest; I am tired of it all.” But when Eisenhower raised the prospect of a meeting with the British and French in Paris as a prelude to Churchill’s long-treasured summit meeting with the Russians, Churchill once again told Eden all bets were off on his resignation, prompting Eden to raise the subject in a full Cabinet meeting.

There, “most of the Ministers seemed very embarrassed,” WSC wrote his wife. “I made it clear that I should be guided by what I believed was my duty and nothing else, and that any Minister who disagreed could always send in his resignation. The poor Cabinet, most of whom knew nothing about the inner story, seemed puzzled and worried. Of course, as you know, only one thing has influenced me, and that is the possibility of arranging with Ike for a top level meeting in the near future with the Soviets. Otherwise I am very ready to hand over responsibility.”

Colville recorded in his diary: “W began to form a cold hatred of Eden who, he repeatedly said, had done more to thwart him and prevent him pursuing the policy he thought right than anybody else. But he also admitted to me on several occasions that the prospect of giving everything up, after nearly sixty years in public life, was a terrible wrench. He saw no reason why he should go: he was only doing it for Anthony. He sought to persuade his intimate friends, and himself, that he was being hounded from office.”

In the event, the Americans soon made it clear that they were not contemplating an early meeting with the Russians and the PM returned to his decision to resign in April.

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