June 27, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 132, AUTUMN 2006

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

ABSTRACT
Readers note: This installment was received too late for the Summer issue. —Ed.

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125 YEARS AGO:
Summer 1881 • Age 6
“A most difficult child to manage”

Ireland was still a dominant issue in the House of Commons. While Gladstone’s Land Bill for Ireland had given the Irish fixity of tenure on the land, free rents, and free sale (“the three Fs”), it did not ease the situation, proving correct Lord Randolph Churchill’s prediction that reform in the face of a suspension of civil liberties would not work.

In return, the Liberal Party began to attack Lord Randolph in language reminiscent of his own. Lord Hartington publicly called him “vile, contumacious and lying,” prompting Lord Randolph to challenge Hartington to a duel, using as a representative Captain O’Shea, the cuckolded husband of the mistress of Irish Nationalist party leader Charles Parnell. In the event, Hartington apologized and no duel was forthcoming.

On 12 July, Lady Randolph sent her mother a favorable report on her six-year-old: “Winston is a very good boy, and is getting on with his lessons, but he is a most difficult child to manage.” That same summer, Celia Sandys reports, Winston wrote his first known letter to his mother: “My dear Mamma, I am so glad you are coming to see us. I had such a nice bathe in the sea today. Love to Papa. Your loving Winston.”

100 YEARS AGO:
Summer 1906 • Age 31
“Made distinctly powerful”

Churchill was actively involved at the Colonial Office in guiding government policy toward self-government in South Africa, both in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. Uncertainty over the form of self-government in the Boer territories was adversely affecting economic conditions and Churchill had asked the head of the Colonial Office, Lord Elgin, for a decision: “The fact which glares me in the face is that a six-months’ delay in settling the fundamentals of the constitution will, through economic pressure and political uncertainty, drive many British voters from the Transvaal, and alienate from the Mother Country the affections of the rest.”

Elgin did so and on 31 July, Churchill gave a major speech in Parliament in which he outlined the nature of self-government in the Transvaal including instituting universal white male suffrage and eliminating the previous qualification of property ownership. The Conservative Party attacked the proposal. Arthur Balfour, a former Fourth Party colleague of Churchill’s late father, described it as “the most reckless experiment ever tried in the development of a great colonial policy.” In contrast, Churchill’s friend, General Ian Hamilton, wrote to him from South Africa on 2 August 1906 congratulating him:

…on the occasion of your brilliant and moving speech on Tuesday night. No other thing that has happened lately has given me so much pleasure for, as a staunch upholder of your genius, I have, during the last two months had to begin again my arguments with numerous people supposed to be more or less your friends, as to the possibilities of your failure. I feel now that the last bad corner has been turned, and that those who a week ago were busy shaking their heads over your supposed decline will now be amongst the most eager to applaud.

That summer, Churchill and his American mentor Bourke Cockran exchanged long letters on the new state of affairs occasioned by the Liberal Party’s smashing 1906 victory. Cockran wrote to Churchill that the election

seems to have made one reputation, and to have unmade several. Looking at it from this distance, its productive results appear to be embodied and exhausted in yourself, its destructive efficiency in the ruin of the Tory Party, and the complete collapse of Balfour, Chamberlain, and the men who have been its leaders for fifteen years. Your position seems to be the only one made distinctly powerful by the campaign itself. On the other side, there does not appear to be anything visible more than some wreckage, with here and there a few survivors clinging to it in rather forlorn shape….Is there any chance of your coming to this country during the autumn? There will be very interesting elections in November, including a new House of Representatives and a governor in New York State. This struggle is almost certain to develop the issues on which the next Presidential election will be fought, and it is more than likely that its result will foreshadow the candidates on both sides. If you come, needless to say I shall insist upon the pleasure of taking charge of you.

Churchill promptly replied, telling his friend:

I am prepared to claim the Manchester election as a great event. Manchester was the home of Free Trade, Free Trade was assailed. I left my party and went to Manchester to contest its great commercial division, and the division which contains the historic Free Trade Hall. When I went, Manchester and Salford were represented by nine Conservative members—all with more or less pronounced Protectionist views— including the Prime Minister. The result of the Poll dispossessed all these nine gentlemen from seats which many of them had held for twenty years, and installed in their place—by immense majorities—nine Liberal or Labour members all definitely pledged to Free Trade. The results of this electoral turn over, which, so far as I know, is unexampled
in English political history, were undoubtedly effective throughout Lancashire.

Churchill added that he would like to be able to come to the United States in the autumn, “but that would be to make adventurous plans.” He expressed the view that Cockran’s Democrats would “show the world the solution of some of the economic and sociological questions by which we are puzzled.” If there was an American “revolution of property,” he added, he hoped England would be quick to adopt it, perhaps gaining the advantages of the French Revolution “without its excesses.”

Later that summer, Churchill was invited by Kaiser Wilhelm to observe German army maneuvers to be held in September in Silesia. In a letter to Lord Elgin on 14 September, Churchill wrote that “there is a massive simplicity & force about German military arrangements which grows upon the observer.” He later told his Aunt Leonie: “I am very thankful there is a sea between that army and England.”

75 YEARS AGO:
Summer 1931 • Age 56
“In the absence of Winston

Churchill was still estranged from the Conservative Party for his stand on India. He now began to turn his attention to the growing problem of Germany, isolating himself still more. In June 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was seeking further disarmament beyond what Britain had already done. Speaking in rebuttal, Churchill said that Britain’s disarmament during the 1920s had made it extremely vulnerable and its army no more than “a glorified police force.” He opposed Britain putting any further pressure on France to disarm: “The sudden disappearance or undue weakening of that factor of unquestionable French military superiority may open the floodgates of measureless consequence England’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger.”

Churchill made that danger clear in an article for the Hearst papers on 10 August 1931: “German youth mounting in its broad swelling flood will never accept the conditions and implications of the Treaty of Versailles.”

Meanwhile, the Depression continued to worsen, causing MacDonald to approach the Conservatives for a coalition government with the Labour Parry. Churchill opposed it. But in August, the King asked MacDonald to form an all-party national government which the Conservatives and Liberals readily agreed to join. Neither Churchill nor Lloyd George was invited to be a member, prompting Sir Samuel Hoare to write to Neville Chamberlain: “As we have said several times in the last few days, we have had some great good luck in the absence of Winston and L.G.”

50 YEARS AGO:
Summer 1956 • Age 81
“Following the principle of

‘More than enough'” On 26 July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Initially, Churchill was supportive of the British government’s position, telling his wife in a letter: “We have taken a line which will put the Canal effectively on its international basis and will also make it secure till long after 1968.”

Prime Minister Anthony Eden kept Churchill informed as die crisis continued. On 6 August, Churchill secretly met with Eden and advised him that in any military attack on Egypt he should “generally follow the principle of’more than enough.'”

Significantly, however, Churchill also cautioned Eden against retaking control of the Canal, preferring it be placed under international control. In a typewritten note to Eden dictated on his way to their meeting he said: “the more one thinks about taking over the Canal, the less one likes it. The long causeway could be easily obstructed by a succession of mines. We should get much of the blame of stopping work, if it is to be to the moment of our attack a smooth running show.”

Churchill spent most of the summer at Chartwell, working on his History of the English Speaking Peoples. In September, he flew to the South of France for a visit with Emery and Wendy Reves. While there, Eden sent him a letter on the evolving situation concerning Suez: “I am not happy at the way things are developing here.” 

 

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