May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 30

Action This Day Summer 1886, 1911, 1936, 1961

By Michael McMenamin

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125 Years Ago
Summer 1886 • Age 11
“A little cash would be welcome.”

The summer of 1886 saw the beginning of Lord Randolph’s short-lived tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. It was to end barely six months later. In the general election, the Conservatives won 316 seats which, combined with the Liberal Unionists’ 78, gave the ConservativeUnionist coalition a majority of 118.

Winston was aware of his father’s political activities. After his father had been reelected but before the Tory margin was known he wrote to his mother: “I am very glad Papa got in for South Paddington by so great a majority. I think that was a victory! I hope the conservatives will get in, do you think they will?” In a letter to his mother on 13 July, he showed surprising political sophistication for an eleven-year-old: “Do you think the conservatives will get in without any of the unionist liberals?” In this letter he importuned his mother to allow him to learn to play the cello: “I want to know if I may learn the Violoncello or if not The Violin instead of the Piano, I feel that I shall never get on much in learning to Play the piano, but I want to learn the violoncello very much indeed and as several of the other boys are going to learn I should like to very much, so I hope you will give sanction. I would be delighted.” He closed his letter with a not untypical plea: “I am very sorry to say that I am bankrupt and a little cash would be welcome.”

In a letter to his mother on 27July, two days before Lord Randolph was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston inquired as to his future: “I received Papa’s letter this morning, it was so kind of him to write to me when he was so busy. Do you think he will be Secretary of State for India, or that he will have a new post.” His mother had written to him following his 13 July letter and its cello plea but, as Winston pointed out in this letter, “you have not said anything about the Violoncello in your letter.”

100 Years Ago
Summer 1911 • Age 36
“Perhaps the time is coming.”

The summer of 1911 was one of the hottest, and labor strikes began among the dock workers in June, followed by partial strikes by railway workers and food shortages in London, Liverpool and Manchester. As with the strikes at Tonypandy, Churchill as Home Secretary was in the middle of things. The King himself was concerned, telegraphing Churchill on 16 August 1911: “Accounts from Liverpool show that the situation there more like revolution than a strike. Trust that Govt while inducing strike leaders and masters to come to terms will take steps to ensure protection of life & property.”

As he had during the miners’ strike in Tonypandy and elsewhere, Churchill called upon local authorities to make the fullest use of police before calling in troops. Troops were requested by local authorities on several occasions, however, when civil order had broken down. The railway strikes ended on 20 August after Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George persuaded employers to recognize and bargain with the unions. On 20 August the King wrote to Churchill: “Your telegram informing me that the Railway strike has been declared at an end has given me the greatest satisfaction. I feel convinced that prompt measure taken by you prevented loss of life in different parts of the country.”

The season was more significant to Churchill in that he began to reconsider his view that Germany was no threat to Britain, prompted when the Germans sent the gunboat Panther to the port of Agadir in Morocco. Winston being Winston, he did not hesitate to share his thoughts with Prime Minister Asquith, Foreign Secretary Grey, Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George and First Lord of the Admiralty McKenna (whom he eventually replaced). In a memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August, Churchill foretold with uncanny precision how a German attack on France would develop, and what Britain should do in response to aid Belgium and France in that eventuality.

On 30 August, Churchill wrote Grey: “Perhaps the time is coming when decisive action will be necessary. Please consider the following policy for use if and when the Morocco negotiations fail.” He went on to recommend a triple alliance with Russia and France to “safeguard the independence of Belgium, Holland and Denmark,” provided those three resisted any German invasion.

On 13 September, Churchill wrote McKenna on naval policy in the event of war: “The British government should guarantee to pay full indemnity for all British or neutral ships sunk or captured by the enemy in the course of bringing necessaries of life and manufacture to this country.” The same day, Churchill wrote Asquith criticizing naval policy: “Are you sure that the ships we have at Cromarty are strong enough to defeat the whole German High-Seas fleet? If not they shd be reinforced without delay….Are you sure that the admty realise the serious situation of Europe? I am told they are nearly all on leave at the present time.” Churchill repeated this same criticism of the Admiralty the next day in a letter to Lloyd George.

75 Years Ago
Summer 1936 • Age 61
“It has not been a pleasant task.”

Hitler’s foreign policy had changed the face of Europe. The acquiescence of France and Great Britain to Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, coupled with Germany’s being the only major power to support Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, the countries of southeast Europe knew they would have to make their peace with Germany since France and Britain would not keep them out of Germany’s orbit.

In Britain, Churchill’s cousin Frederick Guest warned him that though “Baldwin is tired,” if he wished to be Prime Minister he must temper his criticisms of the government. Churchill had remained quiet over the Rhineland, but ignoring Guest’s advice, he attacked the government the next day for “half measures and procrastinations,” and being

weak, careless and seemingly incapable of realizing the awful degeneration which is taking place….At any rate my conscience is clear. I have done my best during the last three years and more to give timely warning of what was happening abroad, and of the dangerous plight into which we were being led or lulled. It has not been a pleasant task. It has certainly been a very thankless task….I have been mocked and censured as a scare-monger and even as a war-monger, by those whose complacency and inertia have brought us all nearer to war and war nearer to us all.

They were closer to war then even Churchill knew. While German propaganda was touting (as some historians do today) Hitler’s “economic miracle,” Germany’s economy was in bad shape. Hitler had engaged in massive deficit spending in order to rearm. While unemployment had been reduced from six to 2.5 million, 14% of the workforce was still unemployed, not including another million in labour service camps populated largely by communists, socialists, Jews and other declared enemies. Reserves of the Reichsbank had been reduced from 973,000,000 reichsmarks to only 72,000,000 by 1936.

Stephen Roberts, an economic historian from Australia who spent 1936 studying in Germany, concluded: “The Nazi state is being financed by short term loans….She can get nowhere until she returns to normal economic conditions, but she is afraid to try to get back to those, because she fears economic collapse and social upheaval if she does so.”

Knowing this, Hitler realized that war was the only way out of the box, which is what he had intended all along. Hermann Göring’s four-year plan in 1936 was designed to facilitate a series of short contained conflicts, after each of which Hitler would digest his conquest and move on to the next. Churchill was afraid of this. He wrote to a friend on 2 July: “I fear that by the summer of next year, the Germans will be so strong as to dominate all our thoughts.”

Churchill supported Austen Chamberlain’s request for a secret session of Parliament to discuss defense issues, but Prime Minister Baldwin refused. He did agree to receive a parliamentary deputation led by Austen, Lord Salisbury and Churchill, on 28-29 July. At the conclusion of the first day, Churchill said: “Permit me to end upon this thought which preys upon me. The months slip by rapidly. If we delay too long in repairing our defences we may be forbidden by superior power to complete the process.”

On the second day, Churchill addressed Baldwin’s excuse that the country was not ready to support all that Churchill wanted to improve national defence. Baldwin said he did not believe Germany was rearming in order to fight Britain. He even suggested circumstances under which he would throw France under the bus—as his successor was to do with Czechoslovakia: “I am not going to get this country into a war with anybody for the League of Nations or anybody else or for anything else. There is one danger, of course, which has probably been in all your minds—supposing the Russians and Germans got fighting and the French went in as the allies of Russia owing to that appalling pact they made; you would not feel you were obliged to go and help France, would you? If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”

Baldwin would get his wish in three years, when the Bolshies and the Nazis joined to carve up Poland.

50 Years Ago
Summer 1961 • Age 86
“He is a wonderful boy.”

Churchill spent much of June at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where Anthony Montague Browne wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, “I think Sir Winston is bored. There is nobody about at all.”

He returned to London early in July and, with Clementine, entertained Lord Beaverbrook and Lady Dunn at Chartwell on the 16th. On August 12th they had a visit from Lord Montgomery, who paid many such calls on the fast-aging Sir Winston. Monty managed to elicit from Churchill his opinion that Balfour had been “the best leader we have had in this century”—better than Lloyd George, who “had not been as good.” Churchill said that Baldwin had been a poor leader and that Chamberlain had been better. “But then you see I am prejudiced. The first thing [Neville Chamberlain] did when the war started was to ask me to join his government.”

Later in August, his son Randolph and the American Kay Halle—who had wanted to marry each other thirty years earlier but were dissuaded by their respective parents—were lunching at Chartwell when Churchill rose and proposed a toast to John F. Kennedy: “Kay, let us drink to your great President.” In late August, Churchill returned to Monte Carlo, accompanied by his grandson Winston. In a letter to Clementine he wrote, “I am daily astonished by the development I see in my namesake. He is a wonderful boy. I am so glad I have got to know him.”