March 12, 2015

No Seat, No Appendix…

The Coalition Government of Lloyd George was coming apart. One critic said that it had “produced at the centre an atmosphere more like an oriental court at which favourites struggled unceasingly for position than anything seen in Britain for a century or more.” Another commented, “I never heard principles or the welfare of the country mentioned.”

“…without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix.”

Tory leadership was severely divided on whether to continue supporting the Coalition. Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead were solid supporters; Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin were not.

Churchill’s fellow Harrovian Leo Avery invited all Tory MPs to meet at the Carlton Club. He was responding to backbench concerns about their election prospects. Everyone was specifically watching the forthcoming by-election in Newport, where a Tory candidate was running against the Coalition.

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The Tory victory in the by-election swung the Carlton Club MPs against the Coalition. Lloyd George resigned and Bonar Law became Prime Minister upon his election as Tory leader. Parliament was quickly dissolved and a general election was called, to be fought on party lines.

Churchill, who would have been in the middle of all of this, missed much of it. He was undergoing surgery for appendicitis. Maurice Hankey’s diary, as recorded by Martin Gilbert, tells this wonderful story: “On coming to from his anesthetics Churchill immediately cried, ‘Who has got in for Newport? Give me a newspaper.’ The doctor told him he could not have it and must keep quiet. Shortly after, the doctor returned and found Winston unconscious again with four or five newspapers lying on the bed.”

As soon as he could, Churchill wrote his Dundee constituency saying he would stand as a Liberal and asked for their support against the Labour and Communist candidates, hoping that the Conservatives would stay with him. He would eventually have to face not only Conservatives but also an anti-Coalition Asquith Liberal candidate.

Appendicitis was a much more serious illness than it is today and Churchill had to fight the election from his bed in a nursing home. To represent him in his constituency he sent his wife, who took her seven week old daughter Mary with her. The local press, no friends of the Churchills, maliciously referred to Mary as Clementine’s “unbaptised infant.”

Clementine spoke at six meetings and gallantly faced hostile crowds, even to the extent of having sneezing powder break up one meeting.

Four days before the election, Churchill arrived at Dundee’s Royal Hotel and prepared to address a friendly crowd at Caird Hall. Two days later he faced a much less friendly group at Drill Hall, which he described as follows: “I was struck by the looks of passionate hatred on the faces of some of the younger men and women. Indeed, but for my helpless condition, I am sure they would have attacked me.” Clementine had earlier written her husband that he should not be seen with a bodyguard. “If you bring Sgt. Thompson tell him to conceal himself tactfully as it would not do if the populace thought you were afraid of them.”

Churchill received less than fourteen percent of the total vote. He was out of Parliament for the first time in twenty-two years. He later told the King that he had always held Dundee by speeches and argument, which required three weeks campaigning. He could not do it in three days. (As he would later say to Roosevelt about Yalta, “Even the Almighty took seven.”) Nationally, Bonar Law’s Tories won a commanding majority in the Commons.

Churchill did not believe that his political career was finished. When told that his activity of writing a book about the previous war was like “digging up a cemetery” he replied: “Yes, but with a resurrection.” As the year ended, Churchill was, in his own words, “without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix.”

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