April 5, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 154, SPRING 2012

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

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125 YEARS AGO
Spring 1887 • Age 12
“By return post please!!!”

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Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration was set for 21 June, and Winston wished to attend, writing his mother on 24 May, “I wish the Jubilee was here very much.” By 11 June, as Randolph Churchill explained in the official biography, he was concerned:

Miss Thomson doesn’t want me to go home for the Jubilee and because she says that I shall have no place in Westminster Abbey and so it is not worth going. Also that you will be very busy and unable to be with me much. Now you know that this is not the case. I want to see Buffalo Bill & the Play as you promised me. I shall be very disappointed, disappointed is not the word I shall be miserable, after you have promised me, and all, I shall never trust your promises again. But I know that Mummy loves her Winny much too much for that.

Write to Miss Thomson and say that you have promised me and you want to have me home….Remember for my sake. am quite well but in a torment about coming home it would upset me entirely if you were to stop me.

The next day he decided that his mother needed more help and thoughtfully drafted a letter for her to send to Miss Thomson: “Could you allow Winston to come up to London, on Saturday the 18th for the Jubilee. I should like him to see the procession very much, and I also promised him that he should come up for the Jubilee.” Three days later, with no letter from his mother, Winston was in full panic:

I am nearly mad with suspense. Miss Thomson says that she will let me go if you write to ask for me. For my sake write before it is too late. Write to Miss Thomson by return post please!!!

The suspense finally ended when his mother’s letter arrived in time, and Winston made it to the Jubilee.

100 YEARS AGO
Spring 1912 • Age 37
“War will never come in our time”

Germany was on British minds. The former Tory prime minister A. J. Balfour wrote to Churchill on 22 March that a war with “no other object than to restore the Germanic Empire of Charlemagne in a modern form appears to me at once so wicked and so stupid as to be almost incredible. Many in France, Balfour added, “regard a war in May as inevitable….But imagine it being possible to talk about war as inevitable when there is no quarrel, and nothing to fight over! We live in strange times!”

Churchill did not think war with Germany was inevitable, despite his recent speech suggesting that the German Navy was a “luxury” while the British Navy was a necessity. To this end, he proposed in April a “naval holiday” for Germany and Britain in 1913: Should Germany cease building ships for a year, he said, Great Britain would do the same. The speech led to informal communications between Churchill and the Kaiser, through their mutual friend Sir Ernest Cassel. Unfortunately, the Kaiser expressed “his great regret…that such an arrangement would only be possible between allies.”

Around the same time Albert Ballin, a German shipping magnate and the Kaiser’s closest adviser on maritime matters, wrote Cassel suggesting that Churchill send an unofficial message, by way of Cassel, to the Kaiser. Churchill records in The World Crisis that “in compliance I therefore wrote the following letter for the Emperor’s eye”:

I am deeply impressed by the Emperor’s great consideration….I suppose it is difficult for either country to realize how formidable it appears to the eyes of the other. Certainly it must be almost impossible for Germany, with her splendid armies and warlike population capable of holding their native soil against all comers, and situated inland with road and railway communications on every side, to appreciate the sentiments with which an island State like Britain views the steady and remorseless development of a rival naval power of the very highest efficiency. The more we admire the wonderful work that has been done in the swift creation of German naval strength, the stronger, the deeper and the more preoccupying those sentiments become. Patience, however, and good temper accomplish much; and as the years pass many difficulties and dangers seem to settle themselves peacefully.

The message apparently fell on deaf ears. There was no naval holiday, yet Churchill continued to believe that war with Germany was not inevitable, and said so on 15 May in London:

But, my lords and gentlemen, a war may go on for a long time before any decision is obtained. Or again, and this is much the more likely of the two contingencies, it is more likely that we should act, as we shall do, with discretion, with sobriety, with sincerity, with simplicity, with good-will to all nations—with prejudice and rancour against none. It is more likely, and I say it with sincere conviction, that war will never come in our time and perhaps will have passed from the world, at any rate for a period which our most adventurous imagination enables us to foresee.

75 YEARS AGO
Spring 1937 • Age 62
“Safety is fatally imperiled”

Twenty-five years before, Churchill could say with “sincere conviction” that “war will never come in our time.” He did not believe that now. “We seem to be moving, drifting, steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class,” he said in the House, “towards some hideous catastrophe. Everybody wishes to stop it, but they do not know how.”

His speech was well received but, when Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister the following month, no office was offered to Churchill.

Churchill received an invitation from the German Ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to meet German Field Marshal Blomberg at a luncheon on 15 May: “I do not know whether you have met General Feldmarshal von Blomberg before, but I am sure you will like him, and a talk between you and him might be useful from every point of view.”

Churchill replied, “It would give my wife and me great pleasure to accept your kind invitation….I have never yet made his acquaintance, but some time ago our Military Attaché in Berlin, Colonel Hotblack, told me that the Field Marshal had spoken to him appreciatively about some of my writings on the war. In consequence I ventured to send him a copy of one of my volumes, receiving in response a most agreeable acknowledgement.”

MacLean which said that by 1938 the Royal Air Force would have “neither the means of offence or defence.” This was followed by a memorandum from Sir Cyril Deverell, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, on the status of the British tank program. In June, the French Minister for Air, Pierre Cot, sent WSC a secret memorandum on German military

Churchill continued to receive defense information from a variety of sources at home and abroad. Wing-Commander C.T. Anderson gave him a letter from Group Captain Lachlan MacLean which said that by 1938 the Royal Air Force would have “neither the means of offence or defence.” This was followed by a memorandum from Sir Cyril Deverell, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, on the status of the British tank program. In June, the French Minister for Air, Pierre Cot, sent WSC a secret memorandum on German military strength. At a luncheon with the Anti- Nazi Council on 4 June, Churchill said:

I feel our country’s safety is fatally imperiled both by its lack of arms and by the Government’s attitude towards the Nazi gangsters. It is fostering in them the dangerous belief that they need not fear interference by us whatever they do. That can only encourage those savages to acts of aggression and violence of every kind. I have, therefore, chosen to go my own way and to act independently in order to further the safety of our country and of the civilization without which we cannot survive as a nation.

Churchill consulted his solicitors about a potential libel action based on a passage from a Coronation Commentary by Geoffrey Dennis: “Those who came out as King’s champions were an unprepossessing company. An unstable ambitious politician, flitting from party to party, extreme reactionary, himself the first-fruit of the first famous snob-dollar marriage; ‘half an alien and wholly undesirable’ as long ago was said.”

Churchill believed this was defamatory, claiming his view was “absolutely confirmed” by “two separate high legal opinions.” Perhaps his solicitors were telling their client what he wanted to hear, because the famous barrister they consulted, Sir Patrick Hastings, didn’t think much of Churchill’s chances:

I find it difficult to say that this most offensive paragraph amounts to an actionable libel. To say of a politician that he is “unstable, ambitious or reactionary” would not of itself in my opinion be defamatory. On the other hand to say that his is “a flitter from party to party and wholly undesirable” might but not necessarily would be held to be prima facia actionable. I must however point out that a plea of justification would of course be open to a Defendant as well as the much more dangerous plea of fair comment….I must point out the great danger of starting an action unless it is intended to bring it to trial in the event of the defendant setting up a defence. Such an action once started and thereafter abandoned is a most unfortunate occurrence.

In the event, Churchill did not file a libel action.

50 YEARS AGO
Spring 1962 • Age 87
Reading at Sea

In April Churchill enjoyed a cruise of the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis, aboard the Greek’s floating palace, the Christina. Still a voracious reader, Sir Winston took many books along to read, including Pasha’s War in the Desert, Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Robert Graves’s Claudius the God.

Back in Britain by the end of the month, Churchill spent most of May and June at Chartwell with occasional visits to London—The Other Club on 10 May, a birthday dinner for Lord Beaverbrook on 25 May, and lunch with Beaverbrook on 3 June