Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965). Britain's greatest prime minister, saviour of his country, inspiring orator, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature; Churchill was born at Blenheim palace in 1874, the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill and grandson of the 7th duke of Marlborough. His mother was the American heiress Jennie Jerome. Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, he served with the 4th Hussars in Cuba, Malakand, Tirah, and Sudan (1895–8) and rode in the lancers' charge at Omdurman. Between 1899 and 1900 he was a war correspondent in South Africa, where he was captured by the Boers but escaped. He enjoyed wars and was the first prime minister since the duke of Wellington to have fought in battle. He saw active service in the trenches for a few months in 1916 and during the Second World War, when London was being bombed, confessed that he ‘loved the bangs’. After 1945 his martial spirit was held against him and ill-founded accusations of war-mongering were made.

In 1900 he entered the House of Commons as a Conservative but crossed the floor within four years to join the Liberals on the issue of free trade. Returned as a Liberal at the next election, he gained his first ministerial experience under Campbell-Bannerman as under-secretary for the colonies. Asquith brought him into the cabinet at the age of 33 as president of the Board of Trade (1908) and moved him to the Home Office before he had reached the age of 35 (1910). By now Churchill had married Clementine Hozier (1908)—to whom he proposed four times before he won acceptance. She provided him with a stable emotional base for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, along with Lloyd George, he played a major part in laying the foundations of the welfare state by establishing labour exchanges and social insurance. His tenure of the Home Office, on the other hand, is remembered for the myth that he sent troops to Wales to crush the striking miners of Tonypandy (1910) and for his appearance at the siege of Sidney Street (1911).

In 1911 he became 1st lord of the Admiralty and a historical figure of significance for the first time. Completing the work of the recently retired Admiral Fisher, he replaced dreadnoughts with super-dreadnoughts, established a naval air service, and began the conversion of the fleet from coal to oil. In the words of historian M. D. R. Foot, ‘the outbreak of war in 1914 found much the world's strongest fleet fully mobilised at its war stations, and able to exercise an international impact, which, over four and a quarter years proved decisive. It was as much Fisher's achievement as Churchill's, but neither could have achieved as much as he did without the other.’

Having the fleet ready was one of Churchill's contributions to the British war effort between 1914 and 1918. Another was the part he played in the development of the tank. However, he was remembered most of all for conceiving the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, designed to shorten the war by removing Turkey and allowing the western allies to link up with Russia. Approved by the war cabinet and given the half-hearted support of Fisher (who had been recalled in 1914 but who in Churchill's own words ‘went mad’ the following year), the attack on Gallipoli failed due to naval delays and the lack of troops to effect a surprise landing. In its wake, Asquith was forced to form a coalition with the Conservatives, who loathed Churchill as a renegade, and had him transferred to become chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Lacking any influence over the course of the war, Churchill resigned and took command of a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in France. A few months later he was recalled by Lloyd George to become minister of munitions, although his influence on events remained minimal. Between 1918 and 1920 he was secretary of state for war and air, in which capacity he was responsible for running down the planned post-war Royal Air Force from 154 squadrons to 24, with only two for home defence. He was also responsible for ensuring that demobilization proceeded peacefully, a task which he fulfilled successfully. His attempts, on the other hand, to persuade his colleagues to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Russia were unsuccessful. Intervention did take place—to prevent allied stores falling into German hands—but Churchill had to organize the withdrawal of British troops. His true instincts, however, became well known and played their part in building up his image as an arch-enemy of the organized working class. The Tonypandy myth, plus his role during the 1926 General Strike, helped consolidate this reputation.

In 1921 he became colonial secretary and made a treaty with the Irish Free State. He also negotiated a peace settlement with the Arabs, advised by T. E. Lawrence. Although he opposed Lloyd George's policy towards the Turks, he gave his prime minister vociferous support over the Chanak crisis of 1922. When the coalition fell a few months later, he was defeated in the 1922 election and began work on his history of the First World War, the first volume of which was published in 1923 (it was completed in 1931). A friend quipped: ‘Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis.’

Returning to the Commons in October 1924, he was offered the chancellorship of the Exchequer by Baldwin and rejoined the Conservative Party. In 1925 he put Great Britain back on the gold standard, unfortunately at the pre-war parity of £1 = $1, which was of little help to British exporters. Three years later he introduced the ‘ten-year rule’, whereby the service estimates would be prepared on the assumption that no war was likely for the next ten years. Meanwhile, he was only prevented from running down the navy as he had already run down the RAF by the threatened resignation of the entire Board of Admiralty. Even so, much of the grand fleet he had controlled before 1914 was broken up. In the General Strike of 1926, he took overall command of the government newspaper the British Gazette. This reinforced the hostility of organized labour towards him, but in fact he was not as bellicose against the miners as people assumed. Churchill's star, however, was set to wane. With the fall of Baldwin's government in 1929, he was out of office for the next ten years.

Churchill himself turned the 1930s into his wilderness years by choosing to wander in the political desert. His attacks on constitutional progress in India, inspired by a romantic vision of the India of his youth, and his defence of Edward VIII found little response among a British public used to the idea of independent dominions and determined not to have an American divorcee as queen at any price. Nor was Churchill able to capture the public imagination as the ideological foe of fascism. He admired Mussolini and sympathized with Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Finally, on the great economic questions of the day—unemployment, protection, recovery—he had little to say, unlike Lloyd George, who in the words of A. J. P. Taylor ‘produced a rich stock of creative ideas’.

In the 1930s, however, Churchill did take up the cause of resistance to Nazi Germany. There were many obstacles to this and British governments were all too well aware of them: pacifist sentiment after the First World War; belief in the League of Nations; sympathy for Germany's desire to rewrite the treaty of Versailles; not least, fear of the bomber. The Treasury in particular opposed rearmament, also with good cause: America's refusal to provide loans; war debts from the First World War; fear of inflation and the crowding-out of civilian investment; difficulties with management and labour if the economy had to be directed; a possible taxpayers' revolt; the lack of sufficient gold and foreign currency reserves to import both food and raw materials in wartime. After a year of war, Britain, it predicted, would be bankrupt. The chiefs of staff, for their part, advised that it would be impossible to fight a war on three fronts simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan around the globe. Britain would simply lose. The Foreign Office, finally, asked just who our allies were going to be. America was neutral, the dominions unpredictable, and even if the Soviets could be brought in, an alliance with them might push Franco into the arms of the axis and close off the Mediterranean. The appeasers, therefore, had a good case. Churchill, on the other hand, was a sort of appeaser too. He did not believe that war was inevitable and knew that Hitler wanted Britain as an ally. However, he believed that a grand alliance against the dictator would make him moderate his plans, at which stage his grievances could be considered. If not, perhaps he could be overthrown before it came to war. But if Germany would not see reason, then war it would be. He envisaged that war, however, as one in which Britain would make her contribution with sea and air power. He thought a continental army a mistake.

When war came, Churchill returned to the Admiralty, although he acted as if he were already prime minister. Almost immediately he became involved in a madcap scheme to send an expeditionary force to Norway, ostensibly to help save Finland from the Russians, but in practice to cut off Swedish iron ore from the Germans. The lack of air cover, however, meant that the whole campaign was a disaster. Ironically, Chamberlain was blamed and Churchill became prime minister at the head of a national government.

As leader, Churchill was a mixture of ruthlessness and impetuosity. Concerned to do everything possible to win the war, in practice he had few means of doing so. Still, he did what he could, which meant the bombing offensive, plus the Mediterranean campaign. Determined to have action, he prodded and sacked his generals and made many mistakes—sinking the French fleet at Oran, invading Greece, defending Crete, neglecting the Far East. Yet his position as prime minister was secure, since he had become in the summer of 1940 the spirit of British resistance incarnate, defying the Nazis with speeches of supreme eloquence that reflected the emotional mood of the nation precisely. His real hope of victory depended on the entry of the USA, and when that happened, Churchill persuaded the Americans both to make Europe the primary theatre of the war and to participate in the north African campaign. When Hitler attacked Stalin, he immediately offered aid to the Soviets, his only war aim being the destruction of Nazi Germany. Towards the end of the war, in October 1944, aware of US plans to send their troops home once the war was over, he signed the Percentages agreement with Stalin, dividing the Balkans into spheres of influence and saving Greece from communism.

As war leader, Churchill had little time for the home front. Nor was he much interested in post-war planning. When the Beveridge Report was published in 1942, he doubted whether a bankrupt Britain would be able to afford the welfare state which it envisaged. In any case, he had left domestic affairs to Attlee and his Labour colleagues, which proved a mistake. For it was to them that the electorate turned in July 1945 once victory had been secured over Germany. Churchill was still adored and respected, but the voters guessed that he was not the man for post-war reconstruction. As leader of the Conservative Party and of the opposition, on the other hand, he was more politically secure than he had ever been before in peacetime. His voice continued to be heard in international affairs and, just as he had warned against the rising threat from Hitler, he now warned against the ‘iron curtain’ which was descending over Europe. He also spoke out in favour of a united Europe, although he never meant that Britain should be part of it.

In 1951 he returned as prime minister. He was now 77 years old, had suffered two strokes, and would suffer two more. Yet his government was highly successful. Eden shone as foreign secretary, Macmillan built a record number of council houses, and nothing was done to undermine the welfare state, inherited from Labour. Churchill attempted to arrange a summit conference with the Soviets after the death of Stalin in 1953, but Eisenhower would hear none of it. He in turn rejected Eisenhower's request the following year to involve the British in Vietnam to save the French. In April 1955 he agreed to retire as prime minister, completing a career without equal among democratic politicians. He was Father of the House of Commons when he gave up his seat in 1964 and died the following year. Churchill was given a state funeral, and buried in Bladon churchyard on the Blenheim estate. No attempts to revise or belittle his reputation have yet proved successful.

Andrew Sanders

Bibliography

Gilbert, M. , Churchill: A Life (New York, 1991);
Sked, A., and and Cook, C. , Post-War Britain: A Political History, 1945–1992 (Harmondsworth, 1993).