March 22, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 19

By Michael McMenamin

21 JUNE 1955: “I am most grateful to you, my Lord Mayor, for the great kindness with which you have spoken about my work and character, and I shall not hesitate to include it among my testimonials if ever I should be looking for another job.”

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125 YEARS AGO:

Summer1880 • Age5

“The Radicals stirred uneasily”

The “Fourth Party”––that informal group of feisty MPs including Winston’s father Lord Randolph, Sir Henry Wolfe, Harold Gorst and Arthur Balfour––continued to bedevil the new Liberal government. The occasion was the government’s introduction of the “Employers’ Liability Bill,” intended to ameliorate the harsh effects of the common law which held an employer liable for injuries done third parties by his servants’ negligence, but not for injuries to servants through the negligence of other servants or the employer himself.

As Churchill wrote in Lord Randolph Churchill, the bill was badly written “and was, both in principle and drafting, an amateurish suggestion which might, indeed, sound very plausible and accommodating; but which had not been clearly thought out in a scientific spirit with the advantages of official information. [The Fourth Party] saw that a Bill had practically been thrown to the House to be moulded into shape by debate. They resolved to address themselves conscientiously to the task of perfecting the crude conceptions of the Government.” But the Fourth Party’s “assistance” left the Liberal Party wrong-footed because, while the Government “had expected that Tory opposition would naturally take the form of a defence of the employers’ position, the Fourth Party proceeded to criticise the measure entirely in the interests of the working class. This secured them two advantages, which it may be presumed they desired equally. First, it was in accordance with the spirit of Lord Beaconsfield’s progressive Toryism and would really benefit the labouring people, for whose sake the Bill was designed. Secondly, nothing could be more embarrassing to a Liberal Government than Conservative opposition on the grounds that the Bill did not go far enough. [The Government] found themselves between two fires. Below the gangway the Radicals stirred uneasily at such unanswerable argument and behind the Treasury Bench the wealthiest supporters of the party were gnashing their teeth at such reckless proposals.”

100 YEARS AGO:

Summer 1905 • Age 30

“A story by Edgar Allen Poe”

The Tory government of Arthur Balfour, Lord Randolph’s old Fourth Party colleague, was on its last legs and would be gone before winter set in. Churchill was eager to hasten its demise, helpfully suggesting on the floor of the House on 31 July that Prime Minister Balfour might benefit from reading a Poe story. According to the synopsis in the Complete Speeches:

“He was reading the other day a story by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar––he wondered whether the Prime Minister had read that story, for if not it might repay his study. The point of the story which made it applicable to the present situation was that M. Valdemar was approaching the crisis of a fatal illness when he was placed in a mesmeric trance, in which state he continued above seven months––that was not, indeed, so long as the Government had continued in that state. It was uncertain whether death had or had not supervened, but while M. Valdemar was in that state he retained the power of making certain feeble and erratic motions with his limbs, and even of answering in a stertorous and obscure manner questions which were put to him under the influence of mesmerism. [Ministerial cries of ‘Oh!’] At length the time came when it was necessary to awaken him. He did not intend to inflict on the House the grim and morbid details with which that awakening was described, but he commended the whole story to the right hon. Gentleman opposite and his colleagues for their reading in the holidays. It might be found a source of instruction and profit.”

75 YEARS AGO:

Summer 1930 • Age 55

“Why I am unhappy”

Churchill disagreed profoundly with the Socialist government’s policy in three key areas: India, Egypt and the Navy. In a speech at Minster on 20 August, he explained: “The Times has observed that I have had an unhappy session in the House of Commons. That might well be true [laughter]—and I propose to tell you plainly why I am unhappy. First, I am unhappy about India. The wild Pathan tribesmen have actually come out of their mountains on to the plains of India and are molesting and insulting a famous city (Peshawar) with a large garrison of British and Indian troops. Such a lamentable spectacle would have been impossible in former times. To go into the mountains to fight an Afridi is like going into the water to fight a shark; but here is the shark coming out on to the beach!….Those tribesmen came only because they had been led to believe that Lord Irwin’s Government was clearing out of India and that rich spoils lay open to their raids. There is the sinister feature of the event.”

Churchill then turned to Egypt: “The Socialist Government is eager to scuttle out of Egypt and to withdraw our troops in Cairo, where they have preserved order and made progress possible for fifty years….One would almost think they were trying to breed a civil war in Egypt as serpents might be bred in the Zoo. There is a quarrel in Egypt between a fanatic Parliament and a despotic King….When the Egyptian Parliament rose against the King they sent British battleships to Alexandria and held the British troops in Cairo in readiness to put down the rebellion. As soon as order had been restored for the moment in the streets they told the Foreign Office official, whom they had made High Commissioner, to invite the leaders of the rebellion to lunch in order that they and their followers might not be downhearted. This was the first time that running with the hare and hunting with the hounds had ever been elevated into the deliberate policy of a great Power towards the people of a small country for whose well-being she had accepted an international responsibility.”

Finally, Churchill turned to the naval disarmament treaty with the United States and Japan: “The immediately practical peril of the Naval Treaty to us is in Asia and in Europe. We have bound ourselves by a solemn endorsement to restrict our Navy while all others are increasing theirs, so that we should not be able when the treaty has been carried out to defend our trade and interests in the Far East against any hostile Asiatic Power with a modern fleet, nor bring our food supplies through the Mediterranean and the Channel in the face of the French submarines and flotillas. When the treaty has been carried out we shall be defenseless at sea so far as our food supply is concerned, and dependent upon the good will and self-restraint of foreign nations as we have never been since the days of Charles II.”

50 YEARS AGO:

Summer 1955 • Age 80

“Every rule should have an exception”

On 21 June, 1955, Churchill spoke at the Guildhall in London on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of himself: “I regard it as a very high honour that the City of London should decide to set up a statue of me in this famous Guildhall, which I have so often visited and spoken in during the last half century. I must admit that I think that the House of Commons has made a good rule in not erecting monuments to people in their lifetime. But I entirely agree that every rule should have an exception. The fact that you have done so in my case will both prove the rule, and emphasize the compliment.”

Churchill then poked gentle fun at the expense of his old nemesis, John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State: “I am most grateful to you, my Lord Mayor, for the great kindness with which you have spoken about my work and character, and I shall not hesitate to include it among my testimonials if ever I should be looking for another job. If I were not already ruddy in complexion I should certainly have blushed in a noticeable manner. My hope is that your successors will not find it their duty in my lifetime at any rate, to make any ‘agonizing reappraisal,’ to quote a famous and up-to-date diplomatic expression, of the verdict you have pronounced with so much eloquence and generosity.”

In July the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse lunched with Churchill at Chartwell, noting the occasion later in his diary: “Before lunch I was summoned up to his bedroom, and there, at last, was the so familiar face, much aged: that of an old man who had gone back to his baby looks. The eyes a cloudy blue, a little bloodshot, spectacles on snub nose, a large cigar rolled round in his mouth. He had been at work––‘I like work.’ Beside the bed a small aluminium pail for cigar-ash; before him, stretching right across the bed, a tray-desk, on which were the long galleys of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He welcomed me with a touch of old-fashioned exaggerated courtesy, as if the honour were his that the professional historian had come to see him. I returned the compliment, sincerely meant, that he had beaten the professionals at their own game, that his Marlborough was an historical masterpiece along with Trevelyan’s Age of Queen Anne….He talked about the Labour Party, with no animus or opposition: all that had dropped away with the years. He did not speak like a party-man, indeed he never had been a mere party-politician, had sat loosely to party-ties. I noticed that he referred to the Tories, not as ‘we’ but as ‘they’–as if he sat on some Olympus above the party struggle, as indeed he did.”

(For Rowse’s complete account of this fascinating visit, see Finest Hour 81 or our website page 412.)