For the military side, Churchill asked a former Chief of Staff to Mountbatten, General Sir Henry Pownall, to be his assistant. Naval aspects were put in the hands of Commodore G.R.G. Allen. Churchill asked General Ismay, the former head of his Defence Office, to keep a watching brief over what was being written; Ismay was always ready to contribute his own recollections of those events which Churchill could not remember in detail. Dozens of other contemporaries sent Churchill diary extracts of particular episodes he wished to describe.
An enormous expenditure of time and energy went into the preparation of the war memoirs. A young barrister, Denis Kelly, was employed to sort out Churchill's own archive at Chartwell. Two new secretaries, Lettice Marston and Chips Gemmell, joined Jo Sturdee and Elizabeth Gilliatt.
Whether at Chartwell, in London, or on his travels, work on the memoirs became a feature of Churchill's daily life. Also, at Attlee's request, on March 31 he set out his views on the importance of a peacetime co-ordinator for the supply needs of the three Defence Services, drawing Attlee's attention not to his own advocacy of this in 1936 but to a memorandum by his father, dated 21 March 1890, advocating the appointment of someone who 'would as it were set up a great shop from which the military and naval heads could procure most of the supplies they need'. The 'advent of the Air', Churchill commented, had made such a project 'indispensable'.
The underlying theme of the Fulton speech was also something that Churchill found an opportunity to reiterate in Britain. On May 7, on receiving the Freedom of Westminster, he declared, 'The supreme hope and prime endeavour is to reach a good and faithful understanding with Soviet Russia.' In the Commons on June 5 he warned that 'the Sovietising and, in many cases, the Communising' of Central and Eastern Europe, 'against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people of many of these regions, will not be achieved in any permanent manner without giving rise to evils and conflicts which are horrible to contemplate'. The crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet forces in 1956 was to take place in Churchill's lifetime; the 'Czech Spring' of 1968, likewise brought to an abrupt end by the Soviets, took place three years after his death.
Churchill now studied the literature of the United States of Europe movement. But when he was told on June 19 that its main object was in fact 'to restrain Russia' he at once wrote to one of those who wished him to join it, 'I think it would be a pity for me to join an organisation which had such a markedly anti-Russian bent.' He planned to set out his own vision of a United Europe during a speech in Zurich. On August 23 he left Chartwell for the Villa Choisi on the shore of Lake Geneva. The villa had been put at his disposal by the local canton of Bursinel. There, in the pleasant seclusion of an idyllic lakeside setting, he worked at his speech, continued with his war memoirs, and painted.
Churchill stayed at the Villa Choisi for four weeks. Clementine and Mary were with him, as were two of his four secretaries, Elizabeth Gilliatt and Lettice Marston. 'We are having a delightful time here with every comfort and the strictest privacy,' Churchill wrote to a friend on August 29. 'I find lots to paint in the garden.'
Speaking at the University of Zurich on September 19, Churchill appealed for 'a kind of United States of Europe'. But where to start, he asked his listeners, and he went on to say that he had a proposal that would 'astonish' them, 'The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany.' There could be no revival of Europe 'without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany'.
Churchill's appeal for the reconciliation of France and West Germany, as a prelude to a United Europe, was made, he said, in the shadow of an 'awful agency of destruction', the atom bomb. If used by 'several warring nations', the bomb would not only bring to an end 'all that we call civilisation, but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself'. Hence the urgency in ending the long-standing feud between the two great nations of Western Europe. The process 'must begin now'. But he did not limit the process of reconciliation to Europe alone. The work needed 'friends and sponsors', Britain and the Commonwealth, as well as 'mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia-for then indeed all would be well'.
Once more, Churchill had spoken about Russia, not as a permanent adversary, but as a potential partner. As for his call for Franco-German reconciliation, 'The French are startled, as they were bound to be,' Leo Amery told him, 'but the idea will sink in all the same.'
That autumn Randolph wrote to his father to complain about the possibility of land nationalisation. Churchill replied: 'I am opposed to State-ownership of all the land, but we must not conceal from ourselves that we should be much stronger if the soil of our country were divided up among two or three million people, instead of twenty or thirty thousand. Man is a land animal. Even rabbits are allowed to have warrens, and foxes have earths.'
Churchill's own 'earth' was Chartwell. That autumn, fearing that his income was such that he could no longer afford to maintain it, he spoke gloomily to his friend Lord Camrose about having to put it on the market. When Camrose asked whether he would accept £50,000, he replied with a chuckle that for such a sum, the 1990 equivalent of a million pounds, he would 'throw in the corpse as well'. Camrose at once suggested that a consortium of wealthy men buy it for that amount, allow Churchill to live in it for the rest of his life for a nominal rent of £350 a year, and on his death give it to the National Trust as a permanent memorial. Churchill was delighted. He would leave 'lots of papers and documents in the house', he said, and went on to tell Camrose that he had always thought that he would like to be buried at Chartwell, and that the proposal made his mind 'definite' on that point.
The money was quickly raised, from seventeen benefactors, including Camrose himself. Then, as Churchill worked at Chartwell on his war memoirs, Camrose, who had gone specially to New York, and Emery Reves, negotiated the sale of the memoirs in the United States. Churchill would receive $1.4 million, the 1946 equivalent of £5.6 million in 1990. His money worries were over, especially in regard to the legacy that he would be able to leave to his grandchildren, in the form of a trust. There was no way to repay this generosity, Mary later wrote to him, 'except by our loving gratitude, which overflows, and trying to show our children and dependents the same largeness of heart and steadfastness of love which you have always shown to yours'.
Seven secretaries were drawn into the memoir-writing task, including Clementine's secretary Grace Hamblin. Bill Deakin became a regular commuter between the vaults under Whitehall and Chartwell. 'Everything was devoted to his memoirs,' Deakin later recalled. 'He concentrated ruthlessly on this. He saw it as his monument.' There was also the persistent call of politics; Churchill had no intention of neglecting his part as Leader of the Opposition. At Blackpool, on October 5, he declared his support for profit-sharing schemes and 'intimate consultation' between employers and employees, intended to make the employee a 'partner'. He also reiterated his call for the creation of a United States of Europe, which ought, he declared in a public statement that October, to stretch 'from the Atlantic to the Black Sea'. Until that could be done, a start should be made in Western Europe. Russia, he told Attlee on October 10, would not march westward to the North Sea or the Atlantic for two reasons: 'The first is their virtue and self-restraint. The second, the possession by the United States of the atomic bomb.'
To a friend who feared that a United Europe would serve only to challenge the Soviet bloc, Churchill wrote on October 19: 'I am not attracted to a Western bloc as a final solution. The ideal should be EUROPE.' To divide Europe into two opposing blocs, east and west, would be a 'vice'. Without the 'resurrection and reconciliation of Europe', he wrote to a Labour MP on November 7, 'there is no hope for the world'. To General de Gaulle, who was then a private citizen but whose support for a United Europe he now sought, Churchill wrote on November 26, 'It is my conviction that if France could take Western Germany by the hand and, with full English co-operation, rally her to the West and to European civilisation, this would indeed be a glorious victory and make amends for all we have gone through, and perhaps save us having to go through a lot more.'
De Gaulle replied that Churchill's call for reconciliation between France and Germany had been 'badly received' in France. Nor would Attlee allow any formal Labour Party association with a small all-Party Handling Group which Churchill had just set up, to win Parliamentary support for a European Federation. But Churchill did not give up. 'Life slips away,' he wrote to Louis Spears, 'but one fights with what strength remains for the things one cares about.'
On November 30 Churchill was seventy-two. Among the things he cared about was the retention of British sovereignty in India, and the creation of a Jewish State in at least some part of Palestine. The Labour Government opposed both courses. It also opposed a compromise suggestion which Churchill made in the Commons that, on both the Indian and Palestine questions, Britain should 'invoke the aid' of the United Nations. That winter Churchill spent much of his time at Chartwell writing his memoirs. 'It is a colossal undertaking and I may well collapse before the load is carried to the top of the hill,' he wrote to Attlee on December 28. 'However, it is a good thing to get a certain amount of material together which, if not history, will still at least be a contribution thereto.'
***
On 11 February 1947 Churchill and Clementine were at St Margaret's, Westminster, for the marriage of their daughter Mary to Christopher Soames, a Guards Officer whom she had met when he was Assistant Military Attaché in Paris. Henceforth, Soames was to be a boon companion to Churchill, helping him in the management of Chartwell Farm, which he had just acquired together with other land near Chartwell itself, and accompanying him on many of his journeys overseas.
Churchill's joy at the marriage of his youngest daughter was followed by sadness: his brother Jack was dying. On February 20 he spoke to a friend of 'my dear Jack, every day washed nearer the reef, at which he glares with undaunted eyes'. Three days later Jack died. 'I know you loved him dearly,' Sarah wrote to her father, 'and he adored you, with a love untinged by envy of the triumphs, excitements and high destiny of your life.' To Lord Quickswood, his former best man, Lord Hugh Cecil, Churchill wrote in reply to his letter of condolence: 'We have always been attached to one another, & after his house was blown up in the war he lived with me at No. 10 or the Annexe. He had no fear & little pain. Death seems very easy at the end of the road. Do you think we shall be allowed to sleep a long time? I hope so. (Ready to serve if really required). The only thing Jack worried about was England. I told him it would be all right.'
***
To ensure the adequate defence of England, Churchill gave his support to the Labour Government's National Service Bill, making all men between the ages of 18 and 26 liable for conscription for eighteen months. But he could not resist telling the House, during the debate on March 31, in a reference to Attlee and A.V. Alexander: 'It is certainly an irony of fate that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence should be the men to bring a Conscription Bill before the House now, after two years of peace, when all our enemies have surrendered unconditionally. Why, these were the very politicians who, four months before the outbreak of the war, led their followers into the Lobby against the principle of compulsory military service, and then had the face to accuse the Conservative Party of being "guilty men".'
When, under pressure from its left wing, the Labour Government reduced the term of conscription to a year, Churchill told the House: 'The title of Minister of Defence should be changed. He should be called the "Minister for Defence unless attacked". What a lamentable exhibition he has made of himself.' Churchill was even more angered when Attlee announced that Britain would withdraw from its role as protector of Greece and Turkey, and do so within thirty-eight days. But he was delighted when Truman immediately took up the mantle of defender of 'free people' trying to maintain their independence 'against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes'. This Truman Doctrine, as it became known, came into force on May 22. 'I cannot resist,' Churchill had written to Truman ten days earlier, 'after the year that has passed and all that has happened, writing to tell you how much I admire what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world, since we were together.'
Churchill wrote this letter on the day after his return from Paris, whither he had gone to receive the Médaille Militaire. Clementine had advised him not to attend the ceremony in his wartime Air Commodore's uniform, writing to him before he left:
I would like to persuade you to wear Civilian clothes during your Paris visit. To me, air-force uniform except when worn by the Air Crews is rather bogus. And it is not as an Air-Commodore that you conquered in the War but in your capacity & power as a Statesman.
All the political vicissitudes during the years of Exile qualified you for un-limited & supreme power when you took command of the Nation. You do not need to wear your medals to show your prowess. I feel the blue uniform is for you fancy-dress, & I am proud of my plain Civilian Pig.
Churchill at first deferred to Clementine's advice, telling his valet, 'I shall wear civilian clothes and take no uniform at all.' But in the event he took his uniform, and wore it at the ceremony at the Cour des Invalides, where he was presented with the medal, and at the Arc de Triomphe, where he laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
On May 20 Churchill was asked by Attlee to accept a non-partisan policy towards India. The Labour Government's plan was to divide India into two States, the predominantly Hindu 'India' and the predominantly Muslim 'Pakistan', each to be granted Dominion Status with the right of eventual independence. This plan of partition, which had been insisted upon by the leaders of the Muslim minority, was also acceptable to the leaders of the Indian Congress Party and to the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. On May 20 Mountbatten went with Attlee to see Churchill, who accepted the Labour leader's appeal; the Conservative Party would not oppose the legislation needed to grant Dominion Status to India.
Thus, in an act of conciliation, ended Churchill's hope, for which he had earlier fought so hard, to maintain some form of British rule in India, at least at the centre. Churchill was true to his word; when the Indian Independence Bill was presented to the House of Commons on July 4, it was supported by the Conservatives. On August 4, in a further gesture of conciliation, this time towards Communist Eastern Europe, he told a Conservative rally at Blenheim, 'We do not wish the slightest ill to those who dwell on the east of that Iron Curtain, which was never of our making. On the contrary, our prosperity and happiness would rise with theirs,' and he went on to make an appeal that was to be answered only a quarter of a century after his death: 'Let there be sunshine on both sides of the Iron Curtain; and if ever the sunshine should be equal on both sides, the Curtain will be no more. It will vanish away like the mists of morning and melt in the warm light of happy days and cheerful friendship.'
***
That autumn Churchill took a lead in trying to rally both Conservative and Liberal forces against the Labour Government, which had now proposed the nationalisation of the steel industry. 'It is forty-one years,' he said during a Party political broadcast on August 16, 'since, as a young Liberal Minister in Mr Asquith's Government, arguing against this same Socialist fallacy, I said: "The existing organisation of society is driven by one mainspring-competitive selection. It may be a very imperfect organisation of society, but it is all we have got between us and barbarism." I should now have to add totalitarianism, which indeed is only state-organised barbarism.'
Living mainly at Chartwell, Churchill continued to work on the first two volumes of his war memoirs. He was also active in persuading the Conservative Party to oppose the Burma Independence Bill, speaking against the Bill on November 5. Commenting on a recent statement by Attlee about India, whose Independence Bill the Conservatives had not opposed, he spoke of 'the impressive scene, with the quiet little man and his quiet little voice sweeping away our position in India'. India had at least remained in the Commonwealth; the aim of the new Bill 'is to cut Burma out of the Empire altogether, and to make her a foreign Power'. To this he was totally opposed. His fear was that anarchy would follow swiftly upon a British withdrawal. When Arthur Henderson, for the Government, spoke of the need to allow the Burmese to enjoy 'the same democratic freedom that we enjoy ourselves', he retorted with a bitter reference to the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India: 'What about the deaths of half a million people in India? Enjoying democratic freedom!'
When the House divided at the end of the debate, there were 288 votes cast for Burmese independence, and 114 against; Churchill was angry that so few Members, scarcely half the House, had bothered to be present on what, for Labour MPs, 'must be a joy-day'.
On November 30 Churchill was seventy-three. That night there was a dinner party at Hyde Park Gate. 'Winston was in sombre mood, convinced that this country is destined to suffer the most agonising economic distress,' Colville wrote in his diary. 'He says that the anxiety he suffered during the Battle of the Atlantic was "a mere pup" in comparison. We could only get through if we had the power of the spirit, the unity, and the absence of envy, malice and hatred which are now so conspicuously lacking. Never in his life had he felt such despair, and he blamed it on the Government, whose "insatiable lust for power is only equalled by their incurable impotence in exercising it".' Colville added, 'The phrases and epigrams rolled out in the old way, but I missed the indomitable hope and conviction which characterised the Prime Minister of 1940-41.'
On December 6, when he received the Freedom of the City of Manchester, Churchill spoke openly of his anxieties, warning that Socialism, 'that is to say the substitution of State control by officials for private enterprise', would make it impossible for Britain to sustain its existing population. At least a quarter of the population would have to 'disappear in one way or another' as living standards fell. Emigration, 'even if practised on a scale never before dreamed of, could not operate in time to prevent this melancholy decline'.
Four days after his Manchester speech Churchill left Northolt by air, in search of sun, and determined to make progress on his war memoirs. From Paris he flew to Marrakech, where for a month he painted and worked on his war memoirs. Unease at the future was not easily set aside, however. To Clementine, who had not felt up to the expedition, he wrote on December 12: 'I continue to be depressed about the future. I really do not see how our poor island is going to earn its living when there are so many difficulties around us, and so much ill-will and divisions at home. However I hope to blot all this out of my mind for a few weeks.'
Painting and writing went well, with sets of printer's proofs and historical notes arriving almost daily. But with the onset of a bad cough, Churchill asked Lord Moran to join him. Moran did so, bringing with him Clementine. Both were relieved that it was not another bout of pneumonia, and Churchill, likewise relieved, was quickly out of bed and back at work, and at his easel.
***
On 4 January 1948 Burma became an independent republic. That day, Lord Cherwell flew out to join Churchill at Marrakech, bringing with him eight chapters of the war memoirs that had been scrutinised by Edward Marsh. Further notes and suggestions arrived that week from the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Not all criticism was equally well received. When Emery Reves wrote that, in his considered opinion, there were too many documents quoted in full in the narrative, and that considerable rewriting was needed to weave them into the text, Churchill was cast down. It was Sarah who sought to set his mind at rest. 'You are the best historian-the best journalist-the best poet,' she wrote. 'Shut yourself up and only listen to a very few, and even then, write this book from the heart of yourself, from the knowledge you have, and let it stand & fall by that. It will stand-everyone will listen to your story. I hate to see you pale & no longer happily preoccupied.'
Reves could also give welcome advice; on January 14 he opposed the title Churchill had chosen for the first volume, 'Downward Path', as it 'sounds somewhat discouraging'. Churchill then chose another title from a selection that Reves sent him; the book would be called 'The Gathering Storm'.
Churchill left Marrakech on January 18. Four days later he spoke in the Commons during the debate on Foreign Affairs. The only way to avoid a conflict with Russia, he declared, was to 'bring matters to a head with the Soviet Government, and, by formal diplomatic processes, with all their privacy and gravity, to arrive at a lasting settlement'. This was the very word, 'settlement', that he had used in his Fulton speech.
The Soviet Union seemed in no mood for compromise. On February 21 the Czechoslovak Communist Party, on orders from Moscow, seized power in Prague. When four Czech refugees, including General Ingr, the Minister of Defence in the wartime Czech Government-in-Exile, came to Hyde Park Gate to seek his advice, Churchill asked both Bevin and the American Ambassador, Lewis Douglas, to receive them. He also told his former Military Secretary, Ian Jacob, who had recently been appointed head of the BBC's Overseas Service, that one of the Czechs had told him that 'the BBC is listened to now in Czechoslovakia even more than in the war, but that there is a feeling that the best use of this great opportunity is not being made'.
Following the subjugation of Czechoslovakia to Communist rule, Churchill was stirred to a fierce reflection. On April 17 Lewis Douglas reported to Washington, after a talk with Churchill about the Soviet grip on Eastern Germany, 'He believes that now is the time, promptly, to tell the Soviets that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon Eastern Germany, withdrawing to the Polish frontier, we will raze their cities.'
***
On April 19 Life began the serialisation of the first volume of Churchill's war memoirs. It was the beginning of a massive public readership, enhanced when the volume itself was published, and renewed with the appearance of each of the subsequent five volumes. These formed the first fully-documented account of the war, and the only account written by one of the Big Three. Sales were enormous, both at home and abroad.
The central theme in the first volume was the weakness of the democracies in the face of tyranny before 1939, and of the national hatreds and rancours built up during the inter-war years. On May 7, at the inaugural meeting of the Congress of Europe in The Hague, Churchill made a powerful plea for letting 'national rancours and revenges die'. He also urged 'progressively effacing frontiers and barriers which aggravate and congeal our divisions', and he welcomed the West German delegates to the Congress, describing the 'German problem' as that of restoring the economic life of Germany and reviving 'the ancient fame of the German race without thereby exposing their neighbours and ourselves to any rebuilding or reassertion of their military power, of which we still bear the scars'.
The question to be asked, Churchill told his listeners at The Hague, was: 'Why should so many millions of humble homes in Europe, aye, much of its enlightenment and culture, sit quaking at the dread of the policeman's knock? That is the question we have to answer here. That is the question which perhaps we have the power to answer here. After all, Europe has only to arise and stand in her own majesty, faithfulness and virtue, to confront all forms of tyranny, ancient or modern, Nazi or Communist, with forces which are unconquerable, and which if asserted in good time may never be challenged again.'
Two days later, in Amsterdam, Churchill spoke of how he understood the 'toils and sufferings' of the Germans, the Russians, and the Japanese. 'It is not against any race or nation that we range ourselves. It is against tyranny in all its forms.' To this end, Churchill supported the French proposal, first made at The Hague less than three months after his own speech there, for a European Assembly. He was angered when Attlee told him, in a private letter, that it was Bevin's view that the Foreign Secretary 'could not for the time commit himself' to such an Assembly. In reply, Churchill expressed his hope that the Government would find it possible to 'place themselves more in line with Western European opinion'. But the Labour leaders shied away from a commitment to Europe that was unpopular with their rank and file members.
***
Twice that summer Churchill was in conflict with the Party which he led. In his memoirs he had castigated Chamberlain's foreign policy and feebleness. In the Commons he demanded that Britain recognise the newly declared State of Israel. On June 2 Henry Channon noted in his diary, after a lunch given in Churchill's honour at the Savoy Hotel: 'His reception was tepid, but not in the least unfriendly-though gone is the rapture of yesteryear. I think that the Party resents both his unimpaired criticism of Munich, recently published, and his alleged pro-Zionist leanings.'
Such sentiments did not deter Churchill from continuing to seek British recognition for Israel, or from criticising in his memoirs those policies with which he had disagreed. But to those who were preparing his draft chapters he wrote that summer, 'Full justice must be done to the other side', and he made frequent efforts to make sure that the views of those to whom he had been opposed were given a place in his narrative. 'You must understand,' he explained to Ismay, 'that it is no part of my plan to be needlessly unkind to the men we chose at the time, who no doubt did their best.' But offence could still be caused: several aggrieved generals sought changes in future editions, which Churchill agreed to. When Volume Two was published, three French generals, together with the son of a fourth, protested. In sending these protests to Churchill, Emery Reves commented: 'It seems that your memoirs have aroused the aggressive spirit of the French generals which was so sadly lacking in 1939. Perhaps it was a mistake not to publish this second volume at the beginning of the war.'
Churchill did not dismiss out of hand the criticisms made by the French generals; indeed, they were much in his mind when, in a special preface for the French edition, he wrote: 'The facts which I testify are that the French army was not given a good chance before the war by the politicians or the Chamber, and secondly that it was ripped apart by the incursion of the German armour on a scale and in a manner which few of us, whether in office or in private station, could foresee. Thus for all the bravery of its soldiers and the skill of its commanders its men never had their chance of fighting it out with the Germans, front to front and face to face.'
Current affairs impinged on Churchill's writing that summer when, on June 24, the Soviet forces in Eastern Germany imposed a total road and rail blockade into and out of Berlin. Ernest Bevin spoke out against the Soviet stranglehold, and a massive air-lift was organised, to fly in vital supplies to Berlin around the clock. Bevin was 'right to speak for a united Britain', Churchill told his constituents on July 10. But he was still uneasy. 'The gravity of events makes me anxious,' he wrote to Montgomery on July 18. 'I trust we are not approaching another "Munich". For such a crime by a British Government there would be no forgiveness.' Nine days later, viewing the crisis from its widest perspective, he wrote to Eisenhower, who had just decided not to stand for the Presidency of the United States, that what was needed to avert a third world war was 'a settlement with Soviet Russia as a result of which they would retire to their own country and dwell there, I trust, in contentment'. It was 'vital for the future', Churchill added, that the moment for such a settlement should be chosen 'when they will realise that the United States and its Allies possess overwhelming force'.
***
On August 22 Churchill and Clementine left England for Aix-en-Provence, where, at the Hôtel du Roy René, he worked on his war memoirs. He also pondered the resolution of the Berlin blockade, telling a friend who visited him: 'I would have it out with them now. If we do not, war might come. I would say to them, quite politely: "The day we quit Berlin, you will have to quit Moscow."' To Eden, he suggested that the showdown should be delayed for a year, when the American Air Force 'will have a third more atomic bombs and better, and far more effective, means of delivery, both by airplanes and from the bases they are developing, the largest of which is in East Anglia'. What Churchill did not know was that the Labour Government was already developing Britain's own atom bomb.
From Aix, Churchill moved on September 20 to Beaverbrook's villa, La Capponcina, on the Côte d'Azur. Clementine returned to London. The daily despatch of historical queries from Churchill to his advisers continued until Churchill's return to Chartwell on October 2. From there he made several journeys to speak about the need for 'resistance to tyranny in all its forms', a phrase he used at Biggin Hill, near Chartwell, in a speech to 615 Squadron on October 5, and again four days later at Llandudno, in North Wales, to a Conservative Party rally, where he said, of the Russians: 'Let them release their grip upon the satellite States of Europe. Let them retire to their own country, which is one-sixth of the land surface of the globe. Let them liberate by their departure the eleven ancient capitals of Eastern Europe which they now hold in their clutches.' Churchill added, in an echo of his advice with regard to Germany in 1932, 'The western nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power, and before the Russians have got it too.'
***
On November 27, three days before his seventy-fourth birthday, Churchill, so Time reported, 'donned jodhpurs, fortified himself with rum punch and galloped off to hounds astride a borrowed horse'. A month later he left England once more for Paris and the South of France, where he again stayed for two weeks at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. It was while he was there that he read the statement in an American officer's memoirs that, in 1944, 'a full-scale invasion of the Balkans was no longer contemplated'. Churchill was already the victim of a growing misrepresentation of many aspects of his wartime strategy. Of this statement he replied: 'No one ever contemplated at any time a full scale invasion of the Balkans. This is one of the silly stories that the Americans have propagated. I never myself contemplated anything but commando and partisan assistance.'
Churchill was back in England on 13 January 1949. Six weeks later he returned to Europe, to speak in Brussels in favour of the establishment of a European Court of Human Rights. There must, he said in his speech to the Council of the European Movement on February 26, be some means by which events such as the recent arrest and imprisonment in Hungary of Cardinal Mindszenty 'can be brought to the test of impartial justice'. Nor could the supporters of a United Europe 'rest content', he said, with the division of Europe into 'the free and the unfree': the Europe 'we seek to unite is all Europe'.
***
That March, Churchill planned to visit the United States, having been invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On the way there, he intended to stay for a while in Jamaica with Lord Beaverbrook. But Clementine opposed this first phase of his journey at what she called, in a note which she sent him on March 5, 'this moment of doubt and discouragement among our followers'. The Conservative rank and file were growing uneasy at the continuing Labour rule. There was also unease at Churchill's leadership, which many Tories felt was not firm or decisive enough. This had become clear at the series of more than thirty luncheons which Clementine had arranged at Hyde Park Gate so that her husband could meet as many Conservative backbenchers as possible. To stay with Beaverbrook, she warned, would 'increase that doubt & discouragement. It would seem cynical and an insult to the Party'.
Clementine's letter continued: 'You often tease me and call me "pink" but believe me I feel it very much. I do not mind if you resign the Leadership when things are good, but I can't bear you to be accepted murmuringly and uneasily. In my humble way I have tried to help, with political lunches here, visits to Woodford, attending to your constituency correspondence. But now & then I have felt chilled & discouraged by the deepening knowledge that you do only just as much as will keep you in Power. But that much is not enough in these hard anxious times.'
Churchill accepted his wife's advice. 'The political situation here is uneasy,' he wrote to Beaverbrook five days later, 'and I do not feel I ought to be away so long.' Then, on March 18, he sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for New York. It was almost exactly fifty-five years since he had first crossed the Atlantic, 'which', he wrote to the Cunard White Star Line, 'is a long time as human lives go'. Speaking in New York on March 25, he praised the recently signed Atlantic Pact, the forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO. The American people, he said, were 'in it because there's no way out, but if we pool our luck and share our fortunes I think you will have no reason to regret it'. The Pact was necessary because, he said, 'you have not only to convince the Soviet Government that you have superior force-that they are confronted by superior force-but that you are not restrained by any moral consideration, if the case arose, from using that force with complete material ruthlessness. And that is the greatest chance of peace, the surest road to peace. Then, the Communists will make a bargain.'
Europe would have been 'Communised' some time ago, Churchill said, and London would have been 'under bombardment', but for the deterrent effect of the atom bomb in the hands of the United States. He reiterated this point during a private talk with Truman at the White House a few days later, when he urged the President to make public that the United States was indeed prepared to use the atom bomb to defend democracy. Then, on March 31, after travelling by train to Boston, he gave the speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for which he had come to the States. 'Little did we guess,' he said, recalling the year 1900, 'that what has been called the Century of the Common Man would witness, as its outstanding feature, more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries put together in the history of the world.' Communism had now created a 'fundamental schism' with the rest of mankind. But he did not believe that any people could be held in thrall for ever. 'The machinery of propaganda,' he said, 'may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time, but the soul of man thus held in trance, or frozen in a long night, can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.'
The 'aim and ideal' today, Churchill went on, were friendship with Russia. If, however, there was to be a war of nerves, 'let us make sure our nerves are strong and are fortified by the deepest convictions of our hearts. If we persevere steadfastly together, and allow no appeasement of tyranny and wrong-doing in any form, it may not be our nerve, or the structure of our civilisation, which will break-and peace will be preserved.'
On April 7, as Churchill was on his way back to Britain on board the Queen Mary, Truman made the statement which Churchill had urged him to make. He would 'not hesitate', he said, to use the atom bomb if it were necessary for the welfare of the United States, or if the fate of the democracies of the world were at stake. This statement, Churchill wrote to a friend after his return to Britain, 'will, I have no doubt, be a help to the cause of peace', while to Truman he wrote two months later: 'I was greatly impressed by your statement about not fearing to use the atomic bomb if the need arose. I am sure this will do more than anything else to ward off the catastrophe of a third world war.'
The need for a unity of all democratic forces influenced even Churchill's attitude to India. Less than two years after his acceptance of the Indian Independence Bill, he accepted a further Labour Government proposal, that India could remain in the Commonwealth as an independent republic. 'I have no doubt,' Churchill told a leading Conservative Peer, Lord Salisbury, on April 28, 'that it is our duty to do all we can to make a success of the new system.' And in the House of Commons that day he spoke of how the 'dangers and difficulties' shared in common by all states 'may well make new harmonies with India and, indeed, with large parts of Asia'.
Churchill's decision to welcome the Republic of India into the Commonwealth was accepted by his Party. To Field Marshal Smuts, who objected to it, he wrote a month later, 'When I asked myself the question, "Would I rather have them in, even on these terms, or let them go altogether?" my heart gave the answer, "I want them in." Nehru has certainly shown magnanimity after sixteen years' imprisonment.' Churchill continued, 'The opposition to Communism affords a growing bond of unity.' Even the Burmese, whose independence he had opposed, might have a place in the new scheme of things. 'It is possible, even, that Burma may take a second-class ticket back,' he wrote to Lord Salisbury. 'This I should welcome. Perhaps you will remember the difficulty I had to get the Party to vote against the Burma Independence Bill. But now, in their tragedy and misery, many Burmese must be turning their minds back to the palmy days of Queen Victoria.' Churchill added: 'These may be but the vain dreams of an aged man. However, I cannot despair.'
***
That summer Churchill went to Italy, once more accompanied by sufficient secretaries and boxes of papers to enable him to continue work on the fourth volume of his war memoirs. Clementine went with him, as did General Ismay and Bill Deakin. They stayed first at Gardone, on Lake Como, and then at Carezza. The working holiday was broken off in mid-August, when Churchill travelled to Strasbourg, for the inaugural meeting of the Council of Europe, as head of the British Parliamentary Opposition section. Herbert Morrison headed the Government section. One of Churchill's fellow-Conservative delegates, Harold Macmillan, was amazed at how Churchill entered into the spirit of debate and politics. 'He walked about, chatted to each representative, went into the smoking-room, and generally took a lot of trouble to win the sympathetic affection of his new Parliamentary colleagues.' For four days, Churchill entertained French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian delegates at his villa. Then, in his speech on August 17, he called upon the Council of Europe to act as a 'European unit' in the United Nations. Looking round the hall, he asked, in a dramatic outburst, 'Where are the Germans?'
Churchill pressed the Council to invite a West German delegation to join its deliberations as soon as possible. This must be done before the end of the month. The year ahead was 'too precious to lose. If lost, it might be lost for ever. It might not be a year. It might be the year.' It was only by the 'growth and gathering of the united sentiment of Europeanism, vocal here and listened to all over the world', he said, 'that we shall succeed in taking, not executive decision, but a leading and active part in the revival of the greatest of continents, which has fallen into the worst of misery'. As Churchill had suggested, West Germany was invited to attend the Council of Europe; though the decision was not made until the next session, held in Paris at the beginning of November. Within two years, she had been made a full member with full voting rights.
From Strasbourg, Churchill went south to the French Riviera, where, once more ensconced at La Capponcina, and helped by Denis Kelly, he was to resume work for a few days on his war memoirs before returning to Strasbourg. The film star Merle Oberon was also a guest; on the afternoon of August 23 Churchill, suitably attired, turned somersaults in the sea to amuse her. Kelly later recalled how 'as we sat afterwards drinking dry martinis in our towels, he suddenly put his own weak whisky and soda on the bar, looked at my skinny body and grunted, "Denis, you're a disgrace to the British Empire."'
That evening Churchill played cards with Beaverbrook. When he got up from the table for a moment, he found that his right leg had gone to sleep. He continued playing, but then noticed a 'cramp' in his right arm. That night, not aware that anything serious was wrong, he discussed with Kelly his worries about Beaverbrook's anti-Americanism. 'Those people don't know what it's all about,' he said, as he splashed about in his bath.
In the morning Churchill realised that all was not well. The cramps had persisted, and he found that he could not write very easily. Lord Moran was summoned from London and flew out at once. Churchill had suffered a mild stroke. When he tried to do so he found that he could not sign his name. His return visit to Strasbourg was at once cancelled, as was a plan he had made to go to Switzerland for a short painting holiday. For three days he stopped work altogether, except to practise his signature, asking Elizabeth Gilliatt again and again, 'Is it all right?' On the fourth day he felt well enough to do some dictation.
Worried and irritated that it might be noticed that the stroke, which was kept strictly secret, had slightly impaired his gait, Churchill returned to England by air on August 31, flying to Biggin Hill and being driven straight to Chartwell. On September 3 he went to Epsom, where he saw Colonist II, a racehorse that he had recently bought. But he made no public speech until October 13, when he spoke at the Conservative Trades Union Congress in London, and then, on the following day, to the annual Conservative Conference, also held in London. Six days later he was in Bristol, to deliver the Chancellor's address at the honorary degree ceremony. On October 21 he spoke again, at the annual Alamein Reunion in the Albert Hall.
Whenever possible that autumn, Churchill stayed at Chartwell. There, on September 16, he had executed a seven-year Deed of Covenant in favour of Lord Moran's wife, so that she would receive £500 a year free of tax. This was the second seven-year deed he had signed for her; in the money values of 1990 it was the equivalent of £8,000 a year. Knowing that his doctor was not well-off, he insisted upon helping. 'I hope you will not forbid me to do this,' he wrote.
There had been many other acts of generosity on Churchill's part, both in financial help and moral support. For more than twenty years he had been paying his son's often substantial debts, and when Randolph's first marriage had broken down he made generous provision for Pamela. He had ensured that the two daughters of his secretary Violet Pearman, who had died shortly after the outbreak of war, while in her early forties, would be provided for. In the 1930s and 1940s several Ministers with personal problems, including Eden, had gone to see him and had received his help. In 1937 Ethel Snowden, the widow of one of his most forceful Labour critics, Philip Snowden, wrote to him, on reading his obituary of her husband: 'Your generosity to a political opponent marks you for ever in my eyes the "great gentleman" I have always thought you. Had I been in trouble which I could not control myself, there is none to whom I should have felt I could come with more confidence that I should be gently treated.'
***
Throughout September and October, work on the war memoirs continued; there was a constant revision of the chapters as Churchill received, from many of the participants in the drama, the criticisms he had sought from them. Dozens of letters with suggestions and answers to queries were scrutinised by Kelly and Deakin, who then worked with their master to amend the chapters accordingly. 'You must admit I have made a prodigious effort,' Churchill said to his publisher, Desmond Flower, when his task was finally done. On November 2, in London, Churchill spoke at the National Book Exhibition. 'Writing a book is an adventure,' he said. 'To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.'
That month Churchill was seventy-five. The fourth volume of his war memoirs was now on the verge of completion, set back only briefly when a bad cold, in the second week of December, forced him to stay in bed for a week at Hyde Park Gate. On December 19 he was back at Chartwell, 'in grand form', Archibald Sinclair told a friend, 'as lively, and incessant, in his conversation as he was in Cabinet in the old days, eating, drinking and smoking as voraciously as ever.' Sinclair added: 'He took me around the farms, showed me short-horns, and Jerseys and then a huge brick henhouse which he had built himself, "Chickenham Palace". Alongside was a noisome & messy little piece of ground, "Chickenham Palace Gardens". "What kind of hens?" I asked. "Oh, I don't bother about the details," growled Winston.'
On December 29, Churchill left England once more, his fourth overseas journey that year, for Madeira, which he had last seen fifty years earlier on his way to the Boer War. He had intended to stay for several weeks, in order to complete the fourth volume of his memoirs. To expedite this, Deakin again joined him in the New Year. But within a week of their work having begun, Attlee announced that there would be a General Election on February 23. Churchill had to hurry back to England; he flew back on 12 January 1950 and, beginning the following day, held a series of consultations at Chartwell about the Conservative election manifesto. Churchill wanted two words to be given particular stress, 'incentive' and 'stimulus'.
To Clementine, who had remained in Madeira, Churchill telegraphed on January 16: 'Hope all has been pleasant. Here nothing but toil and moil.' That day he went up to London, where further consultations were held each day at Hyde Park Gate. 'One day we were nine hours in the dining room,' Churchill told his wife on January 19. Two days later he made the first Conservative Party political broadcast of the campaign, telling his listeners that the choice before them was 'whether we should take another plunge into Socialist regimentation, or by a strong effort, regain the freedom, initiative and opportunity of British life'.
On the morning of January 24 Churchill again felt unwell. 'Everything went misty,' he told Lord Moran, who, in assuring him that it was not a stroke, told him, 'You seem to get arterial spasms when you are very tired.' The election campaign had to go on; Churchill enlisted the help of two young men to draft his speeches for him, Reginald Maudling, a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, and George Christ, editor of the Conservative Party's weekly newsletter. They helped him prepare his constituency speech of January 28, in which he attacked the nationalisation record of the Labour Government; the Bank of England had been nationalised in 1945, Coal, Civil Aviation and Transport in 1946, Electricity in 1947, and Gas in 1948. The Iron and Steel Bill, which had passed its second reading in November 1948, and was awaiting only the Labour victory for its implementation, 'we shall repeal', Churchill declared. He repeated this pledge at Leeds on February 4.
From Leeds, Churchill travelled to Cardiff, where he quoted Lloyd George's warning of twenty-five years earlier that 'Socialism means the community in bonds'. From Cardiff he went to Devonport, to speak in Randolph's election campaign. Then he returned to his constituency, before travelling north to Edinburgh, where on February 14 he spoke of his hope that it might be possible to find some 'more exalted and august foundation for peace' than the atom bomb. He could not help 'coming back', he said, to the idea 'of another talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level'. Then, using the word 'summit' for the first time in reference to talks between world leaders, he said: 'The idea appeals to me of a supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds, so that each can live their life, if not in friendship, at least without the hatreds of the cold war. You must be careful to mark my words in these matters because I have not always been proved wrong. It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit, if such a thing were possible.'
Following this expression of hope for a 'parley at the summit' to end the Cold War, Churchill returned to London, and then on to Chartwell. On the following day, February 16, it was widely reported that he had died. He at once issued a Press statement in which he declared, 'I am informed from many quarters that a rumour has been put about that I died this morning. This is quite untrue.' Then, in an effort to pinpoint the source of the rumour, he added, 'It is however a good sample of the whispering campaign which has been set on foot. It would have been more artistic to keep this one for Polling Day.'
In the final Conservative Party political broadcast, on February 17, Churchill called for 'one heave' of Britain's shoulders to 'shake herself free' from Socialism. He then travelled north to Manchester, for a final speech before polling day. On February 23 he cast his vote in his constituency, returning to Hyde Park Gate to hear the results over the radio during the early hours. By midday on February 24 it was clear that Labour was to remain in power. But if the nine Liberal seats were taken into account, it could muster an overall majority of only six.
Both Churchill's sons-in-law, Duncan Sandys and Christopher Soames, had been elected. But Randolph had lost, albeit narrowly; it was his fourth failed attempt to enter Parliament. Churchill remained Leader of the Opposition. A move had begun, in Conservative circles, to have him replaced as Leader by someone younger, almost certainly Anthony Eden. But Churchill was confident that he could lead his Party into victory at the next election, which could not be far off. One unsuccessful candidate, Anthony Barber, who twenty years later became Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to him, 'To most of the young candidates like myself it was a great inspiration to have a man of your personality and experience at the helm, and I hope you will not consider it either impertinent or commonplace when I say that your leadership since the end of the war has been one of the most vital factors which has brought our Party back to its present position.'
Churchill returned to Chartwell, determined to finish the fourth and fifth volumes of his war memoirs before the next election, and thus leaving only one more volume to be done later. Often working late into the night, he dictated large sections of the narrative to a new secretary, Jane Portal. In Parliament, he continued to speak forcefully against the Attlee Government, first on March 7, again on March 16. Henry Channon noted in his diary on March 16: 'Winston spoke in the Defence debate for over an hour and seemed in the highest spirits. No extinct volcano he.' On March 28 Churchill spoke in the Commons again, arguing that the time had come for West Germany to take a part in Western defence. 'Britain and France united,' he said, 'should stretch forth hands of friendship to Germany, and thus, if successful, enable Europe to live again.'
***
On May 16 Churchill was the guest of honour at a luncheon of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee. He knew that his speech would be a test of their willingness to continue to have him as Party Leader. He had prepared it with care, setting out what he saw as the Party's policies at home and abroad; the 'individual right to freedom' at home, no more nationalisation, working with the Liberals against Labour, seeking a United Europe, bringing Germany back into Europe, being strong in the face of Russia. 'The word "appeasement" is not popular,' he said, 'but appeasement has its place in all policy. Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong. It is a terrible thing for a famous nation like Britain to do it the wrong way round.'
Churchill was gratified by the warmth of his reception, telling the backbenchers: 'I hope you will give me as your Leader the confidence and the sympathy which I require. Your welcome here today has removed the barrier which had risen in my mind.' He would come more frequently to their meetings, he said, and hoped also to see their Executive 'at regular intervals'. He would also set up a Committee of the Shadow Cabinet to prepare the Party for the next election. Two days later, in Edinburgh, Churchill made a sustained attack on the Labour Government's policy of high and punitive taxation, and on the 'utter failure' of nationalisation. 'We proclaim the State is the servant and not the master of the people,' he said. As before, he was helped in preparing his speech by George Christ, but he did not always use the draft speech Christ had given him. On one occasion, in thanking Christ for his draft he also apologised. 'The fact that I did not use it,' he wrote, 'in no way detracts from the help you gave me. It gave me a rope with which to crawl ashore till I could walk on my own feet up the beach.' The amount of speechmaking which Churchill undertook was formidable for a man of seventy-five. 'I have had a tremendous pitch,' he wrote to Randolph on May 21; 'three speeches, and two nights in the train.'
Old age, however, was taking its toll; on May 25 the distinguished neurologist Sir Russell Brain told Churchill that the reason why the 'tightness' over his shoulders had increased was that the cells in his brain which received sensory messages from the shoulder were dead. Within a month a second specialist, Sir Victor Negus, confirmed that Churchill was suffering from increasing deafness, telling him that he would no longer be able to hear 'the twittering of birds and children's piping voices'. But he soldiered on, working throughout June at his war memoirs, with Deakin and Kelly alternating as his weekend helpers. Deakin later recalled his master's 'enormous power of living for the moment, the most intense concentration I have ever known'.
Churchill was back in London on June 26, when, in the House of Commons, he denounced the Labour Government's refusal to participate in a conference in Paris designed to set up a coal and steel pool for Western Europe. Britain's absence, he said, might 'spoil the hopes of a general settlement' and 'derange the balance of Europe'. He went on to explain, 'I am all for a reconciliation between France and Germany, and for receiving Germany back into the European family, but this implies, as I have always insisted, that Britain and France should in the main act together so as to be able to deal on even terms with Germany, which is so much stronger than France alone.' The Labour Government's refusal to participate in the conference revealed, he said, 'a squalid attitude'. In this same speech, he supported the Labour Government's adherence to United Nations action, following a North Korean invasion of South Korea; on July 5 he gave Conservative support for the Government in its motion to send troops to resist the 'unprovoked aggression' by the North.
On July 27 Churchill called for a Secret Session of the House to discuss the worldwide build-up of Soviet armed forces. Attlee opposed the call and the House divided. Churchill's appeal failed, but by only a single vote, 295 against 296. He now prepared to speak at the opening session of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, to urge the creation of a European Army. On August 6 he flew from Biggin Hill to Strasbourg where, for the next four days, he worked on his speech. Macmillan, who was with him, wrote in his diary on August 10, 'One cannot but admire his extraordinary attention to detail and desire to perfect and improve.'
Churchill made his speech on August 11, appealing to all the Western European countries to 'bear their share and do their best' in the military defence of Europe. He was 'very glad', he said, that the Germans, 'amid their own problems, have come here to share our perils and augment our strength'. The freedom and civilisation of Western Europe lay 'under the shadow of Russian Communist aggression', supported by enormous armaments. If the Germans threw in their lot with Western Europe, 'we should hold their safety and freedom as sacred as our own'. A 'real defensive front' had now to be created in Europe. 'Those who serve supreme causes must not consider what they can get but what they can give. Let that be our rivalry in these years that lie before us.'
Churchill's resolution in favour of a European Army was passed by 89 votes to 5, with 27 abstentions, mostly the British Labour Party delegates. The strength of the vote gave Churchill a sense of considerable achievement. The West Germans agreed to make a contribution of five or six divisions to the European Army; France accepted this. 'The ending of the quarrel between France and Germany,' Churchill wrote to Truman on August 13, 'by what is really a sublime act on the part of the French leaders, and a fine manifestation of the confidence which Western Germany has in our, and your, good faith and goodwill, is I feel an immense step forward towards the kind of world for which you and I are striving. It is also the best hope of avoiding a third World War.'
Returning to England, on August 26 Churchill made a Party political broadcast in which he regretted that the Government had ignored his appeal at Edinburgh in February 1949 for a meeting with the Soviet leaders 'at the summit'. The 'only way' to deal with Communist Russia, he said, was by having 'superior strength in one form or another, and then acting with reason and fairness'. In the Commons on September 12 he criticised the Government for allowing the continued sale of machine tools to Russia. It was 'intolerable to think', Churchill told the House, that British troops were being sent into action 'at one end of the world', Korea, 'while we are supplying, or are about to supply, if not the actual weapons of war, the means to make weapons of war, to those who are trying to kill them or get them killed'.
'I should think,' Churchill told the House, 'that the feeling of the great majority of those in this House would be that no more machine-tools of a war-making character and no more machines or engines which could be used for war-making purposes should be sent from this country to Soviet Russia or the Soviet satellite nations while the present tension continues.' Churchill's appeal was successful, and sale of machine tools was halted. But he was unsuccessful a week later in trying to persuade the Government not to bring into force the nationalisation of iron and steel at a time when the nation was so evenly divided on the issue, and 'disturbing the smooth and efficient working of an industry vital to our defence programme'.
On October 1 Churchill celebrated a rare anniversary for any politician, the fiftieth anniversary of his first election to Parliament. Ten days later he flew to Denmark, to receive an honorary degree from the University of Copenhagen. After listening to the fulsome words of introduction about his years as war leader, he replied, 'I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express the unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.' The war was again in Churchill's thoughts at the end of October when the House of Commons at last returned to its pre-war Chamber in the Palace of Westminster, from which it had been bombed out in May 1941.
Speaking after Attlee, Churchill described himself as 'a child of the House of Commons', and added: 'The Prime Minister said-and said quite truly-that the House of Commons was the workshop of democracy. But it has other claims, too. It is the champion of the people against executive oppression. I am not making a Party point; that is quite unfitting on such an occasion. But the House of Commons has ever been the controller and, if need be, the changer of the rulers of the day and of the Ministers appointed by the Crown. It stands forever against oligarchy and one-man power. All these traditions, which have brought us into being over hundreds of years, carrying a large proportion of the commanding thought of the human race with us, all these traditions received new draughts of life as the franchise was extended until it became universal. The House of Commons stands for freedom and law.'
Churchill was touched that Attlee decided to name an un-bombed arch in the Commons the 'Churchill Arch'. A week later, a snap division led to an anti-Government majority of six; 'sugar for the birds', Churchill called it. But as it was not a Vote of Confidence, the Government had no need to resign.
***
On November 30 Churchill was seventy-six. That day, in a Foreign Affairs debate in the Commons, he again advocated a meeting at the summit, calling it, and even the process leading up to it, 'the best hope of avoiding a third world war, not by appeasement of opponents from weakness, but by wise measures, fair play from strength, and the proof of unconquerable resolve'. Two weeks later, during a debate on the international situation, he praised Attlee's support for close Anglo-American relations, and endorsed Attlee's support for West German rearmament. The decision to accept a rearmed West Germany as an integral part of Western European defence, had been made by Attlee and Bevin against the wishes of most of their Cabinet colleagues; they knew, however, that despite Party, and Foreign Office, hostility, they could rely on Churchill to bring the Conservatives, half the electorate, to support the policy and make it bi-partisan, as Churchill had earlier done on Indian independence.
Three days after his speech in support of Attlee's defence policy, Churchill left London by air for Casablanca, then travelled by car to Marrakech, where he hoped to complete the fifth volume of his war memoirs. 'I have worked as much as eight hours a day in my bed, which is very comfortable,' he reported to Clementine on Christmas Day. As well as the work on the memoirs, he enjoyed almost daily excursions for painting and picnicking. 'I came here to play', he added in a wistful postscript, 'but so far it has only been work under physically agreeable conditions.'
On New Year's Day 1951 Churchill set off by car to find 'a sunlit painting paradise he found it at Tinerhir, across the High Atlas mountains, and stayed there for two days. On his return to Marrakech, Kelly, who had come out with him, returned to London; but Deakin flew out on January 5, together with Churchill's daughter Diana. Two days later Clementine joined them, in time for a second expedition across the mountains to Tinerhir. Amid these pleasant excursions, not only Volume Five but also Volume Six, the last, made progress towards completion.
On January 20, after more than seven weeks in the sun, Churchill returned from Marrakech to London, where he plunged back into the political struggle, seeking constantly to undermine the precarious Labour majority in the Commons. But a majority of six could not be tripped up, particularly when, as in the vote of No Confidence on February 15, during which Churchill led the Conservative onslaught, six of the nine Liberals voted with the Government. Five days later, on another division, the Government secured a majority of eight. That March, Ernest Bevin was forced by illness to resign. In a Party political broadcast on March 17 Churchill praised 'his steadfast resistance to Communist aggression' and his strengthening of Britain's ties with the United States.
In the Commons and in the country Churchill continued to criticise Labour policies. On May 18, in Glasgow, as Chinese and United Nations forces were battling in Korea, he rebuked the Labour benches for their pro-Chinese and anti-American sentiments, 'although it is the Chinese who are killing our men and the Americans who are helping us'. On June 7 he led the Opposition in a debate that lasted for twenty-one hours. Harold Macmillan commented: 'Conscious that many people feel he is too old to form a Government and that this will probably be used as a cry against him at the election, he has used these days to give a demonstration of energy and vitality. He has voted in every division, made a series of brilliant little speeches; shown all his qualities of humour and sarcasm; and crowned all by a remarkable breakfast (at 7.30 a.m.) of eggs, bacon, sausages and coffee, followed by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar. This latter feat commanded general admiration. He has been praised every day for all this by Lord Beaverbrook's newspapers; he has driven in and out of Palace Yard among groups of admiring and cheering sightseers, and altogether nothing remains except for Colonist II to win the Ascot Gold Cup this afternoon.'
Clementine did not approve of her husband's new-found racing enthusiasm. 'I do think this is a queer new facet in Winston's variegated life,' she had written to a friend in May, and she added: 'Before he bought the horse (I can't think why) he had hardly been on a racecourse in his life. I must say I don't find it madly amusing.' But for Churchill it was a new pleasure. When, at a race at Hurst Park earlier in the year, Colonist II had come in first, beating Above Board, in the royal colours, he wrote to Princess Elizabeth, 'I wish indeed we could both have been victorious-but that would have been no foundation for the excitement and liveliness of the Turf.'
***
The summer passed with Labour still in power. On June 27 the Shadow Cabinet discussed the nationalisation of Iranian oil by the new Prime Minister, Dr Mossadeq. The main assets acquired by Mossadeq were the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's oil wells and refinery at Abadan, which Churchill himself had secured for Britain in 1914. Churchill was worried about the ability of the Soviet Union to take advantage of the Iran imbroglio. 'Limitless supplies of oil,' he telegraphed to Truman on June 29, 'would remove the greatest deterrent upon a major Russian aggression.' Churchill showed his telegram to the new Labour Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, who wrote to him in reply, 'I think this message might be very helpful, and I am glad you sent it.'
Speaking in the Commons on July 30, Churchill welcomed Truman's despatch of a mediator to Teheran. He was 'most anxious', he said, 'to encourage the United States Navy to take a leading part in the Mediterranean.' Since the end of the war 'I have always been anxious that the United States should become more interested in what is taking place in Persia and in Egypt'. During his speech he criticised the British Government for not being willing to challenge Egypt's refusal to allow ships bound for Israel to go through the Suez Canal; Britain should have done this 'two years ago, or supported Israel in doing it two years ago', and he went on to ask, 'Why could we not have refused all military exports, and all payments on the ground of sterling balances, until the matter was satisfactorily settled?'
'He was in tremendous form,' Macmillan noted in his diary, adding that by his speech Churchill had 'established a complete ascendancy over the Party and indeed over the House'.
Churchill was in ebullient mood; on August 3 The Times, in a leading article, praised his newly published fourth volume and, quoting one of Roosevelt's wartime telegrams to Churchill, 'It's fun to be in the same decade as you', commented, 'Many readers will feel the same sort of exhilaration as they turn the pages of this most graphic and revealing autobiography.' The author, meanwhile, was busy putting the finishing touches to the proofs of his fifth volume, telling Clementine on the day of The Times review: 'I am virtually re-writing the early chapters of Volume Five as I deal with them. They take four or five hours apiece, and there are twenty in all. You may imagine I have little time for my other cares-the fish, indoors and out-of-doors, the farm, the robin (who has absconded). Still, I am sleeping a great deal, averaging about nine hours in the twenty-four.'
Clementine was on holiday in France, at Annecy in the Haute Savoie. On August 15 Churchill left England to join her. There, without any of his 'young gentlemen' to help him, he worked for a week on Volume Five, dictating his revisions to Jane Portal. 'He had this premonition,' she later recalled, 'that he would be Prime Minister after the next election; a very strong premonition that he would get back. He talked about it all the time.' After a week at Annecy, bad weather persuaded Churchill to travel further south. He chose Venice, where he was able to bathe in the warm waters of the Lido.
While at Venice, Churchill completed the final revisions of his fifth volume. On September 12 he was back in England. Eight days later he received a short note from Attlee: 'My dear Churchill, I have decided to have a General Election in October. I am announcing it tonight after the nine o'clock news. Yours sincerely, C.R. Attlee.' Churchill began at once to help prepare the Party manifesto. He was 'very conscious', he told several of his senior Conservative colleagues that day, of the difficulties that would face any Conservative administration, both at home and abroad, reflecting with disarming candour that 'he could not add to his reputation; he could only hazard it'.
The General Election campaign of 1951 was the sixteenth time Churchill had gone to the hustings since 1899. On October 2 he made his first speech of the campaign, at Liverpool. On the following day the Conservative Manifesto was published; it contained one surprise item, a promise to introduce an Excess Profits Levy on armaments manufacturers during the period of rearmament. This levy was Churchill's own idea; he remembered his hostility to the high profits made by arms manufacturers in the First World War, and also before 1939, and did not wish this to be repeated during his own administration.
As the General Election campaign gathered in intensity, the Daily Mirror coined a phrase which caused Churchill great distress. 'Whose finger do they want on the trigger,' it asked, 'Attlee's or Churchill's?' To this Churchill answered, in a speech in his constituency on October 6, 'I am sure we do not want any fingers upon any trigger. Least of all do we want a fumbling finger.' He did not believe that a third world war was inevitable, but if it came it would not be a British finger pulling the trigger that started it. 'It may be a Russian finger, or an American finger, or a United Nations Organisation finger, but it cannot be a British finger.' Britain's influence in the world was not what it was 'in bygone days'. He could indeed wish it were greater, 'because I am sure it would be used, as it has always been used to the utmost, to prevent a life-and-death struggle between the nations'.
On October 8 Churchill made the first Conservative Party political broadcast of the campaign. The difference between the Conservative and Socialist outlooks, he said, was the difference between the ladder and the queue: 'We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait his place until his turn comes.' Churchill also spoke of 'a profound longing for some breathing space, for some pause amid the frenzy.' Commenting on this broadcast, David Butler, an expert on electioneering, wrote: 'In his moderation and vigour, in his clarity and technical adroitness in delivery, Mr Churchill gave the best Conservative broadcast of the election, perhaps the best broadcast for any Party. It was thought by many to be his finest personal effort since the war.'
Churchill now spoke at Election meetings almost every day: on October 23 he told an audience at Plymouth that if he remained in public life he would strive to make 'an important contribution to the prevention of a third world war, and to bringing the peace that every land fervently desired'. He prayed that he might have this opportunity. 'It is the last prize I seek to win.'
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Polling took place on October 25. That morning, in a graphic visual reiteration of its 'finger on the trigger' question of two weeks earlier, the Daily Mirror published a photograph of a man with a cigar, in close half-profile, with the caption, 'Whose finger on the trigger?' This accusation, for which Churchill quickly secured a formal apology, did not prevent his return to power. Although the actual number of Labour votes cast was slightly greater than the number of votes cast for the Conservatives, the Conservatives won 321 seats as against 295 for Labour. The Liberal seats fell from nine to six.
Among the Conservative candidates, Randolph was yet again unsuccessful; he was never to stand for Parliament again. On the evening of October 26 his father went to Buckingham Palace, where once again, as in May 1940 and May 1945, he was asked by the King to form a Government. 'I do hope Winston will be able to help the country,' Clementine wrote to a friend. 'It will be up-hill work, but he has a willing eager heart.'
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