May 9, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 144, AUTUMN 2009

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

==================

125 years ago
Autumn, 1884 • Age 9
“I should like to be with you on that beautiful ship”

2024 International Churchill Conference

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

More

While Winston enjoyed his years in Brighton more than his time at St. George’s, it was not immediately apparent in his grades for the fall term: he finished at the very bottom of his class in mathematics,English and French, and close to the bottom in conduct. Nevertheless, he wrote his mother on 28 October: “I am quite happy here.”

On the 3rd of December, Lord Randolph left on a four month journey to India in preparation for being named Secretary of State for India in the next Tory government. His family saw him off. Winston wrote to him two days later: “I should like to be with you on that beautiful ship”;and to his mother the day after: “I wrote to Papa yesterday. The Holidays begin on the 19th so there are not many more days before I shall come home. Will you send me Everest’s address. The examinations have begun. Now I must say good-bye with love and kisses….”

100 years ago
Autumn, 1909 • Age 34
“I will never love any woman in the world but you”

Churchill visited Germany early in the autumn, at the Kaiser’s invitation, to observe German Army maneuvers. Upon his return, he went to Dundee to attend to constituency matters while Clemmie took their new daughter Diana for several weeks in October to the Crest Hotel in Sussex. While there Winston wrote to her on 17 October, passing on a choice piece of gossip about H. G. Wells and his new novel about free love:

Churchill’s deep and romantic love for his wife during this time is reflected in a letter to her on 25 October, quoted only in Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life: “I would like so much to take you to my arms all cold & gleaming from your bath.” In light of that plainly amorous passage and Winston’s lifelong fidelity his letter of 10 November is surprising, replying to what appears to be a case of unwarranted suspicions by her:

Dearest it worries me v[er]y much that you should seem to nurse such absolutely wild suspicions….I could not conceive my self forming any other attachment than that to which I have fastened the happiness of my life here below. And it offends my best nature that you should—against your true instinct—indulge small emotions & wounding doubts. You ought to trust me for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you….

Mary Soames wrote in her collection of her parents’ letters that she showed this letter to her mother fifty years later who did not recall what had prompted it.

A general election campaign began in December when the House of Lords took the constitutionally unprecedented step of rejecting the House of Commons budget. Churchill was one of the most prominent Liberal speakers:

The House of Lords have struck a hard blow for the aggrandisement of their own privileges, committed an act of unscrupulous party warfare outside of the wide limitations of their constitutional rights….Well, then, you must remember that the House of Lords have very lately made a public-spirited offer of the highest importance. They have offered to take over the whole business of governing the country. (Laughter.) They have offered to save us the trouble and the worry and the vexation and the anxiety of governing ourselves. The only thing they do not offer to take over is the expense. (Cheers.) But everything else is to be done for us. We put the penny in the slot; they do the rest….

Mr. Balfour says that a single chamber is impossible in finance. This is the same Mr. Balfour who only a year ago at Dumfries said, “It is the House of Commons and not the House of Lords which settles uncontrolled our financial system.” There is one of the flattest, nakedest contradiction in terms which has ever been recorded of the leader of a great party.

Now I come to the third great argument of Lord Curzon. “All civilisation,” he said…has been the work of aristocracies.” (Laughter.) They liked that in Oldham. (Laughter.) There was not a duke, not an earl, not a marquis, not a viscount in Oldham who did not feel that a compliment had been paid to him.

75 years ago
Autumn, 1934 • Age 59
“First requisite of peace”

During the last week in September and the first three weeks of October, Winston and Clemmie were guests of their friend Lord Moyne on his yacht Rosaura for a cruise in the Mediterranean visiting Athens, Cyprus, Turkey, Beirut, Damascus, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Amman, Akaba, Cairo and Alexandria.

On 16 November, Churchill gave a speech broadcast by the BBC on the causes of war in which, among other things, he suggested armaments per se were not to blame:

But history shows on many a page that armaments are not necessarily a cause of war and that the want of them is no guarantee of peace….Indeed the lucid intervals of peace and order only occur in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being. And civilisation has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and discipline.

He also said that dwelling on the horror of war would not prevent it:

Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors, and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photographs before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage….All this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so.

But how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves? That is the question we have to ask.

Earlier in November, Churchill had met with Mira Slade, who had spent much time in India. Churchill told her that while he opposed Gandhi from a political standpoint, he had “the greatest admiration for his work in the moral and social uplift of his people.” When he left, Churchill asked her to “take Mr. Gandhi my kind regards and tell him I should have liked to have seen him at the time of the Round Table Conference.”

On four separate dates in November, Churchill’s devotion to individual liberty was on display when he opposed a government gambling bill which legalized gambling on dog racing and football but prohibited participating in national sweepstakes. Churchill was appalled at the hypocrisy of “setting up hundreds of casinos for dog racing” while providing fines and imprisonment for those guilty people who break the law by participating in a national Derby sweepstake, i.e., the Irish Sweepstakes. Even more hypocritical, in Churchill’s eyes, was the fact that it was

class legislation of the most objectionable character [because] [r]ich people have not the slightest difficulty in gambling to their heart’s content. The provisions of the Bill make it perfectly clear that the Carlton Club, and, I dare say, the National Liberal Club…will have every facility to conduct their [own] sweeps. 

But worst of all, according to Churchill, was the violation of individual liberty which would follow the Bill’s passage, specifically (1) the “censorship of the Press,” who would be prohibited from publishing lists of winners of the Irish Sweepstakes; (2) violation of “the doctrine that an Englishman’s home is an Englishman’s castle” by permitting police to enter private dwellings “looking through everything that is there” in search of contraband sweepstakes tickets; and (3) the “almost continuous rummaging of His Majesty’s mail…tamper(ing) with the privacy of the correspondence of people in this country, many letters being opened without the need,” which was to him “a very great abuse… for what I consider, and what nine men out of 10 in this House and this country consider, a very trivial matter.”

The Government was seeking the support of the Labour Party for the Bill and at one point, Churchill directed his comments to the Opposition. “I put it to the Leader of the Opposition who all his life has fought for liberty” he said “that they owe it to themselves and their movement, in view of what is taking place all over the world, to be particularly careful, on all questions which arise, to preserve the liberty of the individual.” Speaking to the Government bench , he said “You have lost your sense of proportion.” As with his warnings on German rearmament, few were listening and the Bil passed.

50 years ago
Autumn, 1959 • Age 84
“I will trust the citizens do not bear me any ill will”

On the eve of his 85th birthday Churchill’s campaign for re-election continued as a general election was scheduled for October. After speaking at Woodford on 29 September, he then spoke on 6 October at Walthamstow on behalf of the Conservative MP John Harvey. Three days later Churchill was reelected for the ninth consecutive time since 1924. It was to be his last term in Parliament.

German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Churchill at his home in Hyde Park Gate on 18 November where they talked about world affairs and Adenauer’s distrust of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. For his birthday, Adenauer sent Churchill a print of Bonn which had been under siege by John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough.

Churchill replied in a thank-you letter, “I trust the citizens do not bear me any inherited ill will!” with no apparent sense of irony that, Bonn having been the target, along with all other German cities, of intensive Allied bombing during the war, any ill-will borne by its citizens toward him would have had a more recent cause than his ancestor’s siege of the city.