March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 36

By Leslie Hore-Belisha

The Rt. Hon. Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha (1893-1957), First Baron Hore-Belisha (1954), was a Liberal and National Liberal Member of Parliament for Plymouth Devonport from 1923 to 1945. In September 1939, as Secretary of State for War, he became Churchill’s colleague in the Neville Camberlain War Cabinet. In January 1940 he was sacked by Chamberlain as a divisive influence, although some thought the reason was anti-Semitism, or even the King’s disapproval over his supporting Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis. Churchill appointed him Minister for National Insurance in the brief 1945 Caretaker government. By then a Conservative, he was defeated for reelection by Labour’s Michael Foot. This article excerpted from his chapter by the same title in Churchill by His Contemporaries, edited by Charles Eade (London: Hutchinson, 1953).

I met Winston Churchill when I was a boy of ten, at my uncle’s house in Manchester in 1904. I had heard my uncle—a prominent Liberal in the area—talk about him as the classic proponent of Free Trade, on which Churchill had left the Conservative Party for the Liberals. From then onward I followed everything he did. I watched the papers for his speeches; I scanned the pictures of his latest dress. To my mother’s consternation I even went so far as to buy— and wear in private—a large winged collar. Thus the imagination of a small boy was captured.

I heard him speak again many years later at the Oxford Union when I was an undergraduate. I noticed that he had taken trouble to become the master of his case. I was also struck by his self-assurance. Later I heard from one of the dons with whom he had dined earlier that he had been highly apprehensive over the prospect of addressing undergraduates, though no one would have suspected that he had any fears about his speech, his audience, or the outcome of the debate. A self-confident manner is often a mask which conceals internal terror, as I myself know well.

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Since that early period I have come to know him more closely. We sat in the House of Commons together for many years. I have watched him from one angle or another in his years of promise, in his years of ministerial achievement, in his bitter years of isolation, and in his supreme moments as war leader and an architect of victory.

What is the secret of Sir Winston’s remarkable ability to impress, persuade and dominate, in his speeches, in conversation, in committee, in the Cabinet itself? Firstly, I think, one must recognise that Churchill naturally, and without apparent effort, looks and behaves like somebody important. He is “news” and looks news. Throughout his political career, whether in opposition or in government, he has always been in the forefront. In appearance, in manner, in dress and, above all, in speech, he is an individualist.

He gets the last ounce out of the English language, his unique command of which is one of his most persuasive gifts, by his characteristic modulations of voice and by his defiantly Anglo-Saxon pronunciation of foreign words. When he spoke of the “Narrzeees,” for instance, the very lengthening of the word carried with it his message of contempt. By these means he can, when he wishes, make not only every phrase but every word significant.

His unusual hats, which startled the public fancy in his early years, have given place to the cigar, an equally precious gift to the cartoonist. Perhaps such foibles call attention to himself. But what of his V-sign? There we have his knack of evoking a patriotic emotion. It is a gesture of genius.

But all that is spectacular, showing that an appeal can be addressed to the eye as well as to the ear. More fundamental is his meticulous study of the subject under discussion. With care and patience he builds up a case. First he reads every document to be found on the subject, and with Churchill to read is to remember.

Few have a greater capacity for assimilating facts. I have never known him to go into a conference with an ill-prepared or half-digested case. He knows when he enters a cabinet or committee meeting what he wants done. He has a scheme, a plan, a solution. Not for him the patient hearing while others sort out their views. He takes the initiative with his own proposal for others to support or, if so inclined, to attack. Many eminent statesmen, after listening to all sides of a case and carefully weighing the pros and cons, only then, and in a judicial manner, decide on a course of action. Balfour and Asquith were in this category.

But one would have an entirely wrong impression of Churchill if one visualised him only as a student of briefs and books and a protagonist of theoretical opinions. He believes in seeing for himself, and he has never lost that boyish characteristic of asking “how it works.” He enjoined on me in my own ministerial career not merely to accept advice but “always see for yourself. Once you have seen a thing working, you know how it works.”

Throughout his life he has followed this “see for yourself” practice. As a young soldier he went off to Cuba because, at that time, it was the only place where there was real fighting. As Home Secretary in 1910-11 he startled his political associates by going almost into the firing line in the “Battle of Sidney Street.” His top hat glistened among the policemen’s helmets. (See Christopher Harmon, “Anarchism and Fire,” FH 150.) As Prime Minister in war he took every opportunity of visiting the battlefronts, the munition factories, the airfields, the bomb-ruined houses of the people. It was all part of his method of getting to know the facts at first hand. Even the wall he built himself at Chartwell is a reflection of that part of his plan of life.

For the same reason he likes having models made of things that specially interest him. During the early part of the Second World War he had an idea for a machine for tunnelling underground to burrow beneath fortifications. So he had a model made, and having studied its possibilities he asked me to go the Admiralty and see it. His aim was to break the stalemate of position warfare, just as he had hoped to do in the First World War with the tank.

He always has a fresh and original approach to an old problem, often by introducing some new device or gadget. On this plane are his siren suit and his shoes which do up with zip fasteners instead of laces. I remember an occasion when I had lost a most important bunch of keys. Churchill heard about it and told me that he had once had the same misfortune. But, he added, it could never happen again, so far as he was concerned, because he now kept his keys on the ends of a thick, silver, snake-like chain. This chain, he explained, went round his back, threaded through the sides of his braces [suspenders] and the bunches of keys at either end rested safely in his trouser pockets. They could not be lost. After telling me all this he went one better and had a similar chain made for me, which I still have. I have not lost my keys since!

Graphs and maps likewise appeal to his visual imagination and they are often included in his armoury when he is presenting a case. When he was a critic of the government during the late 1930s I first learned of his interest in such things. He was advocating the use of the rocket in anti-aircraft warfare and he showed me diagrams to illustrate its ballistic characteristics. On the wall of my room at the War Office was a map of Europe, which impressed him. He liked to stand with his hands on his hips looking at it and discussing the problems of the future. I gave him this map and he hung it in his study at Chartwell.

His quest for knowledge is facilitated by innumerable contacts in all spheres of our national life. There was never a man with more sources of information. In the course of his career he has become Honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn, Chancellor of Bristol University, Honorary Academician Extraordinary of the Royal Academy, Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Surgeons, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Fellow of the Society of Engineers, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architecture, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Fellow of the Institute of Journalists, Fellow of the Zoological Society, Honorary Member of Lloyd’s, and so on; the list seems endless. In addition he is Hon. Colonel of several regiments, Hon. Air Commodore, and an Elder Brother of Trinity House. Far outside the range of Government Departments and Civil Servants do his antennae stretch.

He has a peculiar sensitivity of what is happening in the world and little escapes him. He does not wait until breakfast-time to read the morning newspapers, but often sends for them during the night when they come off the press. I have a vivid recollection of seeing him frequently in the Smoking Room in the House of Commons absorbed in the early editions of the evening newspapers. Only when he has finished reading them is he prepared to talk.

In his power to influence and persuade Churchill has another great asset—his dogged determination. If he cannot win his way in an argument he will probably propose the adjournment of the meeting to another day, when he will appear with weightier evidence, facts and information, and renew the attack. He never gives up and he never accepts a negative for an answer. How many prime ministers have felt themselves strong enough to call upon the House of Commons formally to reverse a vote deliberately given? Yet Churchill did this in the war on the issue of Equal Pay for Equal Work for male and female school-teachers during the passage of the Education Bill.

Consider how he has risen superior to electoral defeats. When I was first elected to the House of Commons in 1923, Churchill was not a Member. He had been defeated at Dundee. He stood again at Leicester West and was defeated. He then tried at the Abbey Division of Westminster and again the electors rejected him. Three defeats in a row would have been enough for most men, but Churchill was not discouraged. He presented himself to the people of the Epping Division of Essex, where, although his constituency was subdivided and is now called Woodford, he has remained ever since.

Never does he envisage failure. I recall Dame Margaret Lloyd George telling me how Churchill had bought a farm. He was quite new then to farming. “He insisted,” Dame Margaret said, “that he was ‘going to make it pay, whatever it costs.’”

The farm would be something of a recreation but it would also be a study and a new interest; something from which he could learn as he always does from his hobbies, whether painting, bricklaying, making an ornamental garden, or, in more recent years, horse racing.

In an analysis of the sources of his power and influence it would be impossible to overestimate his tremendous capacity for work, which is enhanced by an equal capacity for relaxation. With him this takes the form not of idleness but of a change of occupation. While his brain is at work, I have often noticed he has a singular facility of resting his body. He will, for instance, do much of his reading and writing propped up in bed.

Churchill is a tough opponent. He is conscious of his strength, and is not reluctant to let his adversary of the moment realise his confidence. I remember once being engaged in a controversy with him and he had hit me pretty hard. Then in conversation he said, “If you attack me I shall strike back and, remember, while you have a 3.7-inch gun I have a 12-inch gun.” This was a reference to the fact that he was prime minister, with all the authority of his position, whereas I was a critic. He gave his warning with a twinkle in his eye but I knew that he meant business. I gamely went into action, but it was not long before his high explosives and shrapnel were falling all around me.

This reminds me that he conceives argument almost as a military art, as anyone who follows his metaphors will realise. He is always “mustering” and “deploying.”

Those who have been close to Churchill know of his intense loyalty to friends, even if he falls out with them politically. While you are a friend you can expect support to the hilt. But you must know that if you cross him Churchill will be an unrelenting opponent. Yet even in the heat of the argument he will often retain a deep regard and even personal affection for the man he is fighting, particularly if the man he is fighting really fights back.

The impetus of Sir Winston Churchill’s vitality is within himself, but I have often wondered what it is in the conditions of his life that seems to free him from fret and strain. What is it that enables him during long bouts of activity to come into every round of a struggle apparently refreshed? Is it perhaps the loyalty and devotion with which he is sheltered in his home? Their career keeps politicians away from their families and deprives them of many human enjoyments. That is part of the forfeit exacted from those who live under the servitude which we call power. What a great solace and stimulus it is to a politician to have his base secure! Churchill alone knows how much he owes to his good fortune in this respect. Long may his public service and his domestic happiness continue.