November 10, 2015

Finest Hour 169, Summer 2015

Page 36

By Michael McMenamin


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125 Years Ago

Spring 1890 • Age 15

“I Will Get Papa to Get You a Gun and a Pony”

On 10 July 1890, Winston received a letter from J. W. Spedding, the Secretary of the London Habitation of the Primrose League, enclosing his diploma as a “knight” of the League. Spedding explained that, since he was resigning as Secretary, Churchill was likely “the last member I will make. I am proud to add such an illustrious name to the register.”

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The Primrose League was founded in 1883—ostensibly named after Benjamin Disraeli’s favorite flower—to “support…the Conservative Cause” and “to fight for free enterprise.” Lord Randolph Churchill was instrumental in its founding and held the Number 1 membership card. At the insistence of his wife and mother, women were full members. The full members— knights and dames—paid annual dues of half a crown and associate members a few pence. In 1890, when Churchill became a member, there were a total of 910,852 members, including more than 60,000 knights and 48,000 dames. Twenty years later, the League had more than two million members.

Seven years after he became a member, Churchill gave his first political speech to the Bath Habitation of the Primrose League on 26 July 1897.

Winston’s mother, in a letter to him at Harrow on 19 September 1890, attempted to bribe him into not smoking: “Darling Winston, I hope you will try & not smoke. If only you knew how foolish & how silly you look doing it you wd give it up, at least for a few years. If you will give it up & work hard this term to pass yr preliminary I will get Papa to get you a gun & a pony.” In reply, Churchill agreed to do so, but for only half a year: “I will leave off smoking at any rate for 6 months because I think you are right.”

100 Years Ago

Spring 1915 • Age 40

“There Was a Great Deal of Truth in What Mr. Churchill Had Said”

Churchill was out at the Admiralty in May and accepted Prime Minister Asquith’s appointment to the ceremonial Duchy of Lancaster, but he stayed in the Cabinet. More importantly, he stayed on as a member of the War Council, the body responsible for directing the overall war strategy. He believed this position would enable his voice to be heard and his opinions taken seriously by the ministers of the new coalition government. But with no staff and no ministerial duties, Churchill’s advice fell on deaf ears.

In July, Lord Kitchener, the Minister of War, suggested that Churchill visit the Dardanelles and report to the War Council on conditions there and prospects for the future. Churchill was eager to go, and both the Prime Minister and Arthur Balfour, his Conservative Party successor at the Admiralty, supported him in this.

The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the King were aware of Churchill’s mission and both approved. Unfortunately, except for Balfour, his new Conservative colleagues—and old enemies—in the Cabinet were not aware and, when informed, did not approve. The Conservative leader Bonar Law—whom Churchill had accused of near-treasonous activities during the Irish Home Rule Crisis the previous year—warned Asquith on 19 July that Churchill’s trip might provoke a “serious crisis” within the National Government. Faced with this opposition, Churchill decided not to go.

At a Dardanelles Committee meeting on 20 August, Churchill argued against a new offensive on the Western Front. In doing so, he clashed with Kitchener. The Committee’s minutes indicate that Kitchener “admitted that there was a great deal of truth in what Mr. Churchill had said, but unfortunately we had to make war as we must and not as we should like to.” Kitchener went on to say that trench warfare was “very irksome” for the French and that an offensive on the Western Front was necessary for “the morale of the French Army.” The Committee approved a new Western Front offensive, which meant there would not be sufficient troops available to take Constantinople—for which Churchill had argued.

Early in September, Sir John French, the commander of British troops in Europe, proposed that Churchill take command of a brigade on the Western Front. His advice increasingly being unheeded, Churchill was in favor of accepting and secured Asquith’s consent. Kitchener, however, vetoed the idea, doubtless recalling his clash with Churchill the month before.

Given the continuing Conservative hostility toward Churchill over his treatment of them the year before, when many of them were encouraging, if not inciting, civil war in Ulster in response to the Irish being granted Home Rule, he received unexpected support in September from an old enemy, Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionists in the House of Commons, whom Churchill had also accused of a “treasonable conspiracy,” along with Bonar Law, over Irish Home Rule.

At the outset of the war, Carson had sent Churchill “a friendly line from an opponent” on 5 August 1914 expressing “my appreciation of the patriotic & courageous way you have acted in the present grave crisis.” Carson went on to assure Churchill “for whatever it is worth my present admiration of what you have done will not be transitory & I wish you every comfort & assurance in yr present anxieties that yr most devoted friends cd desire for you.”

Carson was true to his word after being appointed Attorney-General in the new National Government. Carson wrote Churchill on 19 September:

Are we going to allow everlasting drift on the policy of the Dardanelles?…

Now you know I speak vy plainly—I daresay rudely—but I am going to say that no one is held more responsible for the Dardanelles policy than yrself! Now if the clear policy of certain victory at any cost is adopted by the Cabinet, I will back it, but it must be no narrow margin nor estimates framed “to do the best we can.”

Churchill’s and Carson’s views on Asquith’s prosecution of the war would be shared by a growing number of MPs in the coming year and would lead in the latter part of 1916 to his replacement as Prime Minister by Lloyd George.

75 Years Ago

Spring 1940 • Age 65

“What a Slender Thread the Greatest of Things Can Hang By”

Churchill told the House of Commons on 18 June to avoid looking for scapegoats in previous administrations whose decisions in the thirties had led Great Britain to the brink of defeat: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

During this stressful period, Churchill’s propensity for not suffering fools gladly even in the best of times gained the upper hand, so much so that his wife Clementine wrote him about it in a letter on 27 June where she referred to his “rough, sarcastic & overbearing manner.” She went on to add that “if an idea is suggested, you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.” She pointed out that with the exception of the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Speaker of the House of Commons “you can sack anyone & everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness & if possible Olympic calm.”

Evidence that Churchill took his wife’s advice to heart is found in a 29 August letter from an American, Rear-Admiral Robert Ghormley, whom Churchill had taken the day before on a visit to coastal defense sites at Dover and Ramsgate. In it he thanked Churchill and expressed his thanks that “a man loaded with responsibility can at the same time be the genial host you were.”

Churchill would have been on his best behavior with an American, however, because his private view of the United States at the time was that it “was very good in applauding the valiant deeds of others.”

His private view of the French at the time was no less bitter. After the Royal Navy had sunk three French battle-cruisers at Oran in a five-minute battle that killed more than 1,200 French sailors on 3 July, he praised in the Commons “the characteristic courage of the French Navy.” Privately, he said that “The French were now fighting with all their vigor for the first time since the war broke out.”

Churchill had no similar thoughts about the young pilots who were fighting the Battle of Britain in the air, privately telling dinner guests at Chequers on 11 August that Britain’s future rested entirely on the airmen’s shoulders: “What a slender thread the greatest of things can hang by.” On 16 August, Churchill was in the operations room at Uxbridge when all of Britain’s fighter squadrons were engaged with the enemy. As they left, Churchill said to General Ismay: “Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.” Then, after five minutes of silence, Churchill gave voice to the immortal words, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

From 26 August through 6 September, more than 600 German bombers a day attacked English cities and airfields. On 7 September, 200 bombers hit London, killing 300 civilians. When Churchill visited an air-raid shelter where forty people had died, the survivors and their relatives greeted him with cries of  “We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it ’em back.” Churchill was so moved that he broke down in tears, prompting one woman to say, “You see, he really cares, he’s crying.”

With London’s weekly death toll close to 1,000, Churchill gave a broadcast to the nation in which he said that Hitler “has now resolved to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.”

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