Churchill (3 page)

All his exploits figured largely in his newspaper articles. But by 1900 he felt he had exhausted the opportunities of South Africa, where the war had settled into an exacting but dull guerrilla campaign. He hurried home. He had achieved the fame he sought, made himself conspicuous (his photograph appeared over a hundred times in newspapers in the year 1900), and returned to London a hero. He quickly published two books,
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria
and
Ian Hamilton’s March.
Cashing in further on his fame, he gave a series of public lectures in Britain, Canada, and the United States. These efforts left him with a capital of £10,000, which was invested for him by his father’s financial adviser, Sir Ernest Cassel. In addition, he had a row of medals: the Spanish Cross of the Order of Military Merit, First Class; the India Medal 1895, with clasp; the Queen’s Sudan Medal 1896-98, no clasp; the Khedive’s Sudan Medal, with clasp; and the Queen’s South Africa Medal, with six clasps. He also earned the Cuban Campaign Medal 1895-98 from Spain. He had meanwhile taken his first steps in politics. He contested Oldham for the Tories in 1899, and won it in the “khaki election” the following year. In all these rapid developments, he had accumulated a number of critics and even enemies, and a reputation for being brash, arrogant, presumptuous, disobedient, boastful, and a bounder. He was accused of abusing his position as a British officer and his civilian status as a journalist, and of breaking his word of honor as a war prisoner. Among the orthodox and “right thinking,” the mention of his name raised hackles. On the other hand he was the best-known young man of his generation. When he took the corner seat above the gangway in the House of Commons to make his maiden speech in February 1901—it was the seat occupied by his father for his resignation speech in 1886—he was barely twenty-six. It was not bad going.

Liberal Statesman

C
hurchill was now in the House of Commons. But what for? Personal advancement, certainly. He thirsted for office, power, and the chance to make history. Personal vindication, too: to avenge his father’s failure by becoming prime minister himself. But were there not higher motives? Did not altruistic elements coexist with his ambition, vanity, and lust for success? Did he have a political philosophy? A book has been written on the subject but leaves one little wiser. Churchill, then and always, was a mass of contradictions.

Churchill’s experiences as a young warrior confirmed and intensified his imperialism. The empire was a splendid thing: enormous, world-embracing, seemingly all-powerful, certainly gorgeously colorful, exciting, offering dazzling opportunities for the progress and fulfillment of all races, provided the white elite who ran it kept their nerve and self-confidence. Churchill never lacked either and was anxious to display them in ruling an empire whose outward show stood for everything he loved and enjoyed. He also had certain gut instincts which fitted in well at a time when the great-power “scramble for Africa” was at its height. From the Sudan in 1899 he wrote to his mother: “I have a keen aboriginal desire to kill some of these odious dervishes . . . I anticipate enjoying the exercise very much.”

At the same time Churchill had a warm and tender heart and a perceptive insight into the darker side of power. He saw the horror of empire as well as its splendor. He loved to be top dog. But he felt for the underdog.
The River War,
for instance, was an accurate and unflinching account of what he saw. He told his cousin Ivor Guest: “I do not think the book will bring me many friends, [but] in writing the great thing is to be honest.” It angered Kitchener and many others, another item in the growing dossier of “Churchill’s unreliability.” The official reports after Omdurman said the wounded Dervishes “received every attention.” In fact, he told his mother, their treatment was disgraceful and most were just slaughtered. Kitchener, he told her, was “a vulgar, common man—without much of the non-brutal elements in his composition.” This was toned down in the book. Even so, he dealt with the question of the wounded Dervishes honestly, and he added: “The stern and un-pitying spirit of the commander was communicated to his troops.” In a sense, he disapproved of the whole expedition insofar as it was a gigantic reprisal for the murder of Gordon. He wrote: “It may be that the gods forbad vengeance to man because they reserved for themselves so intoxicating a drink. But the cup should not be drained to the bottom. The dregs are often filthy tasting.”

It would be untrue to say that Churchill, as a young politician and junior minister at the Colonial Office, kept an eagle eye open for the blemishes of empire. But when they attracted his attention he spoke out. He expressed his concern for the six hundred Tibetans killed by the machine guns of the Younghusband expedition to Lhasa, and for the twenty-five Zulu rebels deported to Saint Helena and who, he said, were starving there. He was quick to speak out for the Boers in giving a generous peace and reconciliation. In his maiden speech in the Commons, made immediately after taking the oath, his opening words were: “If I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field.” This was not the least courageous of the five hundred major speeches he was to make in the Commons over the next sixty years. Nor did his eagerness to see war, and the relish he took in it and in medal collecting, blind him to its inescapable horrors, or prevent him from taking every opportunity to warn fellow MPs about its nature. In another speech in his first year in Parliament, he said that colonial wars were beastly, marked by atrocities and senseless slaughters. But a European war would be infinitely worse. He was “alarmed,” he said, by the “composure,” even “glibness,” with which MPs and, worse, ministers talked of a possible European war: “A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heart-rending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentration, to one end, of every vital energy in the community.” He added: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.” These prophetic words were spoken more than a dozen years before the catastrophe occurred in 1914. Churchill was never a warmonger as his enemies claimed. On the contrary: he warned against it just as urgently as he warned against unpreparedness for it—the two were indivisible. But Churchill was sufficient of a realist to grasp that wars will come, and that a victorious one, however dreadful, is preferable to a lost one.

In a broader sense, it is not easy to classify Churchill. He had a historian’s mind, eager to grapple with facts, actualities, to answer the who, how, where, when questions, rather than a philosopher’s, mesmerized by abstractions with their whys and wherefores. He was born a Tory and entered Parliament as one. But he was unhappy on the Tories’ benches. Salisbury, the man who had destroyed his father, ceased to be leader in 1902 but, on retiring, handed over to his nephew, A. J. Balfour, cool, aloof, calculating rather than impulsive. Now,
he
had a philosopher’s mind, and Churchill found it uncongenial, although they moved in similar circles and remained nominally friends until Balfour’s death in 1930. Churchill had no desire to serve under him. Moreover, Balfour had got himself and his party into a muddle over free trade; Joe Chamberlain, having split the old Liberal Party over Ireland in 1886, now split the Tories over his plan to reimpose protective tariffs. Churchill’s constituency, Oldham, was a free trade town and he was, too, both by interest and by choice. Moreover, it was really a Liberal seat which he had won by a fluke in the “khaki” landslide of 1900, and he was more likely to hold it as a Liberal. The Tories had been predominant for twenty years but the wind of change was now blowing and the young man, sniffing it, wanted it to fill his sails. So he “crossed over” in 1904 and fought and won Oldham as a Liberal in the 1906 election, which returned a huge Liberal majority. This caused fury among the right-thinking, and they added a hefty item to Churchill’s dossier of unreliability.

He was not a party man. That was the truth. His loyalty belonged to the national interest, and his own. At one time or another he stood for Parliament under six labels: Conservative, Liberal, Coalition, Constitutionalist, Unionist, and National Conservative. This was partly due to his failure to find a safe seat, or one he could hold. For his first quarter century in the Commons he moved between Oldham (1900-1906), North-West Manchester (1906-8), and Dundee, which he scrambled into in 1908 and finally lost in 1922, being then outside the Commons for over a year. This dictated his return to the Conservatives. He said: “Anyone can rat. It takes real skill to re-rat.” His reward was that he at last got a safe seat he could hold in all seasons, Epping in Essex (later called Wood-ford), which he retained for thirty-five years, once as a Constitutionalist, twice as a Unionist, once as a National Conservative, and five times as a simple Conservative, usually with enormous majorities. This safe seat, near London, was of enormous benefit to his career. He never had to worry about it.

All the same, if Churchill was ever anything, he was a Liberal (as well as a traditionalist and a small-c conservative). There is a curious story about this, told to me by the Labour MP “Curly” Mallalieu in 1962, when Churchill was in his eighties, though still an MP. There is, or was, a curious contraption called the “House of Lords Lift” in which peers were elevated to the upper floor of Parliament, mere MPs being allowed to use it only if injured or decrepit. Churchill had permanent permission, and Curly had hurt himself playing football. One day when he got in he found Churchill there. The old man glared and said: “Who are you? ” “I’m Bill Mallalieu, sir, MP for Huddersfield.” “What party?” “Labour, sir.” “Ah. I’m a Liberal.
Always have been.
” The fiendish glee with which he made this remark was memorable.

Churchill’s courage in crossing the floor made him a marked man, and it was no surprise when the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, made him undersecretary to the colonies in 1905. He was only thirty-one, and the office was important, for his boss, Lord Elgin, was in the Lords, and Churchill had to do all the Commons business covering the entire world himself, and stand up to the Tory heavyweights, including Joe Chamberlain, the first to make the colonies a fashionable, key job, the road to the top. But standing up to this opposition from the front bench was precisely what Churchill was good at, then and always. He was fluent, resourceful, witty, and always well briefed. He enjoyed himself on his feet and did his best to interest, even enthrall, and always to entertain the House with his sallies and jokes, his moments of indignation, real or simulated, his obvious love of words and the relish with which he brought them out, not least his huge pleasure in the rituals of the Commons and his reverence for its traditions. Members always love those who love the House, and Churchill plainly did.

He also loved his job, with its telegrams, king’s messengers in uniform, red leather dispatch boxes, and important visitors, black, yellow, and white, from all over the world. He was certainly conspicuous. His name came up in a conversation between Rudyard Kipling, the Orpheus of the empire, and one of its greatest builders, Cecil Rhodes—how one wishes a transcript had survived. Churchill paid an official visit to the East African colonies in 1907, traveling with his devoted secretary “Eddie” Marsh, a fixture in his official life for the next twenty-five years. Going up from the coast to the Ugandan plateau by the new railway, Churchill described it as “like travelling up the beanstalk into fairyland.” He made the most of the trip uphill by standing on the cowcatcher of the engine as it puffed its way through the jungle, a typical Churchill touch of vainglory which duly made its way into the newspapers and caused tut-tut-ting. In Uganda and Kenya he went on safari with Marsh and 350 porters. In India he had stuck wild pig but could not afford big game. Now he shot rhino, zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle, sending his trophies back to London to be stuffed and mounted by the leading taxidermist, Rowland Ward of Piccadilly. Oddly enough, through a characteristic piece of Churchillian expediency, to avoid criticism of misuse of public funds the trip had been paid for by the
Strand Magazine,
and in return he wrote articles which, extended to book form, became
My African Journey.
Like so many of his activities, this combination of office with journalism would be impossible now. Indeed, it raised eyebrows at the time.

Churchill had become a Privy Counsellor that year; and the next, when H. H. Asquith succeeded “C-B” as prime minister, he was brought into the cabinet. Going to the Colonial Office had been Churchill’s idea. He had originally been offered the plum job of financial secretary to the treasury, but he had preferred to work off his global ideas for the colonies (his book is full of schemes for industrializing Africa and harnessing the Nile). Now, however, he wanted to get his teeth into home politics and eagerly accepted Asquith’s invitation to succeed Lloyd George, who was promoted to chancellor of the exchequer, as president of the Board of Trade. It was dazzling to reach cabinet rank when only thirty-four, and the post also brought the opportunity to work with LG, with whom he forged a precarious friendship and a more solid policy alliance to bring about an English version of the “welfare state” Bismarck had introduced in Germany.