Gandhi & Churchill (105 page)

Churchill had saved England from the Nazis, but he could not save it from itself. And out of the gathering shadows came familiar voices full of reproach and scorn, reminding him of how much he had fallen short.

One afternoon in late November 1947 Churchill was painting in his studio. On an easel was a portrait of his father done in 1886 for the Belfast Conservative Club; it had recently passed into his hands. Winston was working on making a copy, when he suddenly felt a strange sensation.
^*138
“I turned around with my palette in my hand,” Churchill says, “and there, sitting in my red leather upright chair, was my father.”

Looking fit and in his prime, with the familiar exquisite mustache and tall silk hat, the former chancellor of the exchequer and secretary of state for India asked his son what he was doing. He was astonished to learn what year it was. “So more than fifty years have passed,” Randolph mused. “A lot must have happened.”

“Oh yes indeed,” his son answered. He proceeded to give his father’s ghost a vivid account of the half-century since his death. He began with the Boer War and General Roberts. (“I appointed him Commander-in-Chief in India when I was Secretary of State,” the ghost exclaimed, adding proudly, “That was the year I annexed Burma.”) Then Winston summarized the rest: two terrifying world wars, the rise of democracy and the decline of civility, socialist governments and women voters, bombed cities and death camps that were “human slaughter pens like the Chicago stockyards,” an American partnership and a renewed Russian menace. He threw in the latest news of horse racing and the monarchy, along with the creation of a free Ireland.

“And India, is that all right? And Burma?” the ghost asked.

“Alas,” Winston had to answer, “they have gone down the drain.”

Randolph groaned. “To relieve his consternation,” Winston recounted, “I said, ‘But perhaps they will come back and join the English speaking world.’”

Otherwise, he had to admit, “Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria, and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.” In the end the will of the people still prevailed, as Churchill believed it should. “You brought me up to that,” he told his father.

This, however, brought on an outburst. “I never brought you up to anything!” the ghost exploded. “I was not going to talk politics with a boy like you ever. Bottom of the school! Never passed any examinations, except for the Cavalry! Wrote stilted letters…You were very fond of playing soldiers, so I settled for the Army. I hope you had a successful military career.”

“I was a major in the Yeomanry,” Churchill answered proudly. His father was less than impressed.

The ghost had to leave but had some final words.

“Winston, you have told me a terrible tale. I would never have believed that such things could happen. I am glad I did not live to see them.” Then he added, “Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.” Then the ghost struck a match for his cigar and vanished.

“The chair was empty,” Churchill remembered. “The illusion had passed.” Only the disapproval of a long-dead father, and the sense of inward failure in the midst of outward triumph, remained.
¹⁸

For six long years Churchill labored in the vineyards of parliamentary opposition. Then suddenly in October 1951 the voters returned him and the Conservatives to office. He had become bitterly critical of the direction Labour was leading the country: nationalizing Britain’s steel and coal and transport industries, creating a National Health Service, raising union wages and expanding the welfare state. “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,” he told an audience in 1948. “Unless we can free our country while time remains…our place in the world will be lost forever.”
¹⁹

Millions felt otherwise. After the hardships and suffering of total war, Britain’s decline, like the loss of India, meant little to them. They saw Churchill and the Tories as shades of a discredited past, men determined to turn back the clock and snatch away what little they still had—which, after six years of Labour’s command economy, continued rationing, and high unemployment, was little enough.

On election eve Churchill’s grandson Winston went with him to Devonport to campaign for Randolph, who was standing as a Conservative candidate. They appeared that night at Plymouth Hoe, where Francis Drake had once stood to await the coming of the Spanish Armada, and where now “a seething mass of people” came to cheer their candidate, the future Labour leader Michael Foot, and boo the Tory leader and his son.

Years later young Winston would remember how “the mob was filled with such rage and hatred” of the Churchills that they were “howling like a pack of hyenas baying for blood.” Ten policemen had to escort the Churchills past the crowd, who spat and kicked their shins and even pulled Randolph’s wife’s hair.
²⁰
Needless to say, Randolph lost the seat.

Although Randolph lost, the Conservatives managed to win. And Winston Churchill was suddenly back at Number 10. With old stalwarts like Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and “Pug” Ismay in his cabinet, Churchill believed he was poised to renew “the glories of our island home.” Ironically, however, the next decade of Tory rule would only speed up Britain’s decline, with Churchill reluctantly but helplessly leading the way.

The explanation was bitter but simple. The debacle of 1945 had broken the Tories’ nerve and to a degree Churchill’s. Nothing must be done to rile a fickle and disgruntled British public, they decided, least of all Britain’s trade unions. Men who had made their names fighting appeasement abroad in the 1930s became enthusiastic appeasers at home in the 1950s.

Churchill’s agenda as prime minister was depressingly limited: “housing, red meat,
^*139
and not getting scuppered.”
²¹
Public spending continued to grow faster than the British economy, especially on subsidized housing. Apart from reversing Labour’s nationalization of the iron and steel industries, the new Tory government did nothing to loosen the commanding grip of the State on the national economy—or even to scrutinize the public corporations set up to do the commanding. The so-called Tory “Middle Way” was born, which meant trying to maintain a compromise between embracing American-style capitalism and surrendering to outright socialism. The “Middle Way” would dominate British conservative thinking for the next decade and beyond, until the advent of Margaret Thatcher.

This approach suited Churchill. Although an economic liberal, he was no libertarian either. As president of the Board of Trade in 1909 he had been, after all, the original father of the welfare state. He had no more admiration for (or understanding of) “unfettered capitalism” than Attlee and the Labourites did. But in the 1950s it was the Trades Union Congress, with its eleven million members, that most worried him. Minister of Labor Walter Monckton “had direct orders from Churchill to appease the unions,” his private secretary Sir David Hunt recalled.
²²
This meant conceding wage hikes regardless of productivity. It meant permitting closed union shops; collective bargaining so that strikes against one company could force a settlement on others; and union members vetoing any major technological change that might mean loss of jobs. All these would become the ugly hallmarks of British industrial policy, and nearly all began during Churchill’s premiership. They would also doom Britain to a steady slide into economic obsolescence and social discontent.

The disintegration of Churchill’s national policy was matched by the disintegration of his family life. Both his son Randolph and his daughter Sarah had become hopeless alcoholics, victims of what Clementine secretly considered “the drink gene” from her side of the family (although their father’s prodigious example certainly did not help). Randolph became prematurely aged, gray and haggard, bitter about his own political failure and two failed marriages, facing the fact that he would never inherit Chartwell.
^*140

Sarah had looks, brains, and the ambition to build a career for herself on the stage. But she “was petrified before [her father’s] greatness,” remembered a friend, the actress Judy Campbell. “That was why she longed to be a star, and when she failed, everything collapsed around her.”
²³
Meanwhile Churchill’s manic-depressive “black dog” moods became the permanent possession of his other daughter, Diana, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1953 and would spend the rest of her life in and out of mental clinics, undergoing electroshock therapy. In 1963 she would take her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

The only bright spots in Winston’s life were his continuing love for Clemmie—“It would have been impossible for any ordinary man to go through what I have had to get through in peace and war without her devoted aid,” he liked to say in later years—and his grandson Winston Spencer Churchill. Young Winston spent part of most summer and winter vacations at Chartwell, helping his grandfather lay the brick walls he was still building around the house, visiting the Landrace pigs Churchill kept as part of the farm (“A dog looks up to a man,” Churchill would tell him, “a cat looks down on man, but a pig will look you in the eye and see his equal!”), and joining him in the swimming pool.

“Well do I remember,” the grandson would write later, “the tremendous splash when Grandpapa, already seventy-six years of age, plunged into the swimming pool from the diving board,” or seeing him in the summer evenings, “beneath the great cedar that stands on the lawn below the house, wrapped in a rug on a
chaise-longue
bathed in the evening sun, gazing out over the distant view or dozing peacefully with an extinct and soggy cigar still firmly in his mouth.”
²⁴

None of this outward vitality could quite disguise the fact that Churchill’s health was failing. More than a year after the end of the war, Churchill told his doctor he could still work all day without tiring.
²⁵
But then one morning in February 1947 Churchill called to complain of feeling “wheezy.” That December Moran visited him in Marrakesh, and “I could see then he was sliding, almost imperceptibly into old age.” The years of exuberant eating and drinking, and arteries hardening, were finally taking their toll.

The first stroke hit on August 23, 1949—characteristically, as he was playing cards at two o’clock in the morning at Monte Carlo. Afterward he told his doctor, “There seems to be a veil between me and things,” and he described a cramping sensation across his shoulder blades. Otherwise he remained in good spirits, his memory unimpaired.

Moran told him it had been a stroke. “Will I have another?” Churchill asked anxiously. “There may be an election…I may have to take over again.” Then he grinned. “It feels like being balanced between the Treasury bench and death. But I don’t worry. Fate must take its course.”
²⁶

He seemed to recover, and fate carried him to the Treasury bench one more time. Returning to power, and the accession of a young new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, served to revive his spirits. “I, whose youth was passed in the August, unchallenged, and tranquil glories of the Victorian Age,” he declared, “may well feel a thrill in invoking, once more, the prayer and Anthem, ‘God save the queen!’”
²⁷

Then on June 24, 1953, Churchill was speaking at a dinner for Italian prime minister Alcide de Gasperi. As the guests left, Churchill suddenly stopped and slumped into a chair. The wife of art historian Kenneth Clark, who was sitting beside him, held his hand as he mumbled, “I want a friend. They put too much on me. Foreign affairs…” until his voice trailed off.
²⁸
Clementine learned what had happened and said he must immediately go to bed. Jock Colville sent the waiters away so that Churchill could be helped out of the room. “I think they thought he had had too much to drink,” Colville remembered later.

In fact, it had been a massive stroke, far worse than the earlier one. For months Churchill made a slow recovery, while the cabinet, terrified that his incapacity might mean the loss of their offices and power, did their best to keep the truth hidden from the public. A small team of intimates, including Jock Colville and Churchill’s son-in-law Christopher Soames, read state papers and made decisions for him, even though only Soames was an actual member of the government. Meanwhile news of Churchill’s stroke was hushed up or downplayed. For almost two months “neither Queen nor Parliament nor people was allowed to know that Britain was without an effective, legally constituted leader.”
²⁹

To his doctor Lord Moran Winston spoke of death. “He did not believe in another world; only in black velvet—eternal sleep.” He also admitted that “talking tires me.” But by August he had recovered enough to continue working on his history of the Second World War and to meet with the cabinet. In September he was ready to fly down again to Monte Carlo. But the stroke had shaken his confidence and slowed his faculties. When he made a trip in November 1953 to Bermuda to meet with President Eisenhower, his energy noticeably flagged. “Sometimes at meals,” Colville told the doctor, “Winston is very apathetic. Then Clemmie gives him a rebuke, he’ll pull himself together and be quite normal.”
³⁰

On November 30, 1954, Churchill and the nation celebrated his eightieth birthday. His doctor was able to draw up a grim count of the illnesses that this remarkable man had suffered and endured since he had known him. Two strokes, one of them massive; a heart attack in 1941 after the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse;
three bouts of pneumonia, including the one during Gandhi’s hunger strike in 1943.
³¹
All but twenty-six members of Parliament from all parties signed a birthday greeting, and Clement Attlee gave a graceful speech in the House recalling Churchill’s fifty-year career.