All Behind You, Winston

Churchill's Great Coalition 1940-45

Roger Hermiston

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781781316641
• eBook ISBN: 9781781314845
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

All Behind You, Winston tells the story of the most remarkable gathering of leaders in modern British history: the War Ministry that saw the country through its darkest - and finest - hour.

When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, it was not with the unanimous support of Westminster or the country. For many, Lord Halifax was the obvious choice to succeed Neville Chamberlain, and Churchill's grasp of the Home Front appeared uncertain at best. He assembled around him, however, a Cabinet of 'all the talents'; which would variously mobilise, arm, feed, fund, shelter, evacuate, heal and, ultimately, save Britain. Among these remarkable men - and women - were Churchill's rivals Lord Halifax and Sir Stafford Cripps, the loyal and dogged Clement Attlee, titanic egos such as Lord Beaverbrook and John Reith, the popular department store owner Lord Woolton (the man who kept the nation fed), the propagandist and playboy Duff Cooper, and many of the statesmen who would go on to build the New Jerusalem in peacetime. By 1945 they had not only steered the country to victory, they had also ensured Churchill's inviolable position in our national myth - an outcome that had seemed far from likely five years earlier.

In a series of character-driven chapters, Roger Hermiston, a former deputy editor on Radio 4-s Today and the author of The Greatest Traitor, tells the behind-closed-doors story of the key figures and key ministries, delving deep into the archives to bring to life a Cabinet that was both the brain and the conscience of the nation.

Chapter One

‘A Ministry of all the Talents’

10 to 15 May 1940

In May 1936 Winston Churchill, then a backbencher, had pressed the Conservative-led national government of Stanley Baldwin to sharpen its defence policy in the face of the aggressive intent of Japan, Italy and, above all, Germany. The MP for Epping, in the latest of a series of speeches on rearmament, told the House of Commons that a new ministry of supply was needed to co-ordinate the work of the three service ministries – army, navy and air force – and put them on a stronger footing. To accusations that he was warmongering, he responded, ‘Is there a man in the House who would not sacrifice his right hand here and now for the assurance that there would be no war in Europe for twenty years?’

Baldwin and Churchill had been close allies in government in the 1920s, as Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer respectively, before drifting apart over the issues of dominion status for India and rearmament. In the face of this latest attack, Baldwin, who regarded Churchill as an exasperated uncle might view an unruly nephew, confided to the deputy Cabinet secretary, Thomas Jones, a pointed insight into the character of his old ally: ‘When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said “No one person has a right to so many gifts”, picked him up and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgement and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.’

Four years on, even as Churchill finally reached the ‘top of the greasy pole’ – as Benjamin Disraeli had once put it – those doubts still persisted among many at Westminster. While his courage, drive and charisma were undeniable, and it could be hoped that age – he was now sixty-five – had brought him the wisdom Baldwin had felt was lacking, politicians of all parties still viewed Churchill as troublesome, and worried about his impetuosity and egotism. ‘Winston the adventurer’ had an innate relish for warfare, born of the feats of his famous ancestor John, Duke of Marlborough, and his own military exploits in Cuba, India and Sudan. On the eve of the First World War he had written to his wife Clementine, ‘I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a horrible fascination to me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity.’ On 10 May 1940 this was a great strength, but also a potential danger. He had been proved right about the threat posed by the Nazis, so it was grudgingly accepted that he at least ought to be given the chance to lead his country against it. He was not trusted, however, and he began his premiership very much on trial.

In forming a coalition government it certainly helped that Churchill’s own career had never been circumscribed by party affiliation. He had entered Parliament in 1900, as the Conservative MP for Oldham; a predictable choice, given the Tory circles he had moved in, and the example provided by his father, Randolph, who had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Salisbury’s administration in the 1880s. But Winston had become disaffected with the Tories, vigorously denouncing their association with wealth and property. He had left the party in 1904, after which had followed twenty years with the Liberals under the premierships of Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George. In 1924, however, increasingly alarmed by the spread of socialism and the rise of the Labour Party, he had ‘re-ratted’ to the Conservative fold; his return had been greeted reluctantly, although he had remained there ever since.

Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate who was a close friend and kindred spirit, once put Churchill’s shifting loyalties in this characteristically blunt, if inflated fashion. ‘He has been everything in every party. He has held every view on every question. He has been apparently quite sincere in all his views. Perhaps he has convinced himself. But he is utterly unreliable in his mental attitude.’ If Churchill had a consistent political vision, it was wrapped up in a sense of Britain’s historical continuity stretching back way beyond the Victorian era into which he was born. For him, the history of England was that of the onward march of individual liberty; fought for at home, but also spread throughout the world with the British Empire. As a domestic politician, he adhered to Edmund Burke’s view that ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’. Hand in hand with that awareness of the necessity for occasional reform went his upholding of the ideal of ‘noblesse oblige’, by which enlightened men of his (aristocratic) class had a clear public duty to govern justly, and address the sufferings of the poor and disadvantaged.

Whatever political label might be bestowed on him – liberal, reactionary, eighteenth-century Whig, Victorian Tory paternalist – Churchill’s experience in government was unmatched. Having gained his first post as under-secretary of state for the colonies in 1905, he had thereafter, in both Liberal and Conservative administrations, served in almost every important Cabinet and government position, bar that of foreign secretary. After a reforming stint as President of the Board of Trade, during which he introduced unemployment insurance and labour exchanges (1908), Churchill had gone on to become home secretary (1910), First Lord of the Admiralty (1911), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1915), Minister of Munitions (1917), Secretary of State for War and Air (1919), Secretary of State for the Colonies (1921) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924), before finally returning to the Admiralty in 1939 in Chamberlain’s War Cabinet.

Discussions about his ‘judgement’ often harked back to his first spell at the Admiralty, to the Gallipoli campaign in early 1915. As First Lord he had conceived a bold plan to forge an indirect route to victory from the east, while the two sides were bogged down in interminable trench warfare on the Western Front. The Royal Navy was to force its way through the Dardanelles Straits and take Constantinople, thus knocking Turkey out of the war, securing a supply route for Britain’s hard-pressed ally Russia, and inspiring the Balkan states to join the Allied war effort against Austro-Hungary, thereby pressuring Germany.

When the naval assault foundered and the subsequent land attacks disintegrated into a bloody mess on the Gallipoli peninsula in early 1916, with up to a quarter of a million Allied casualties, the generals and politicians ran for cover, leaving the architect of the campaign to shoulder nearly all the responsibility for its failure. Among those who led the retreat from the battlefront in December 1915 had been Major Clement Attlee of the 6th South Lancashire Regiment. The last-but-one man to be evacuated from Suvla Bay, he refused to pin the blame on Churchill. Many years later he would say of Gallipoli that ‘the strategic conception was sound – the trouble was that it was never adequately supported’.

So when the Labour leader arrived at the Admiralty late on Friday, 10 May 1940, to start negotiations over the new coalition, he bore no resentment over the new Prime Minister’s past military ‘adventures’. And since Labour had jettisoned its pacifist foreign policy, he and his deputy Arthur Greenwood had stood shoulder to shoulder with Churchill in opposition to appeasement.

For his part, Churchill recognised the debt he owed Labour for administering the final, knockout blow against Chamberlain. He knew he needed all the friends and allies he could find, as many in his own party were furious at Chamberlain’s departure and willing him to fail. On a deeper level, at this moment of national crisis, he understood that his administration had to command the broadest possible support. As the talks commenced, therefore, Attlee and Greenwood would find him in receptive mood.

Few rooms in Whitehall resonated with such history as the magnificent Admiralty Board Room. It was here on the night of 6 November 1805 that an exhausted, sweat-stained officer had arrived to tell William Marsden, first secretary to the Admiralty, ‘Sir, we have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson.’ A huge portrait of the admiral, painted in 1799 by Leonardo Guzzardi after the Battle of the Nile, occupied a large portion of one wall.

The three men who sat down to business, overlooked by Nelson, on that Friday evening in May 1940 hailed from a wide spectrum of British life. Churchill was blessed with the accident of privilege. After his upbringing in the monumental surroundings of Blenheim Palace, cosseted by servants, he had been naturally drawn into high society through his vivacious mother, Jennie, while his father Randolph’s dealings at the very top of government had given him some early awareness of politics. For a man with Churchill’s talents and pedigree, entry into the inner sanctums of British life had been virtually guaranteed.

Labour’s leaders came from humbler backgrounds, although Attlee’s, in particular, had not been disadvantaged. The son of a respected London solicitor, he had at first followed the natural course of a comfortable, conventional middle-class life: attending Haileybury College, a public school; reading history at Oxford; and being called to the bar by the Inner Temple. His ‘conversion’ to socialism had come only after his first exposure to the raw poverty in London’s East End while helping out at a boys’ club in Stepney. Greenwood, by contrast, had received a more obvious Labour upbringing. The son of a painter and decorator from Hunslet, Leeds, he had been educated at the local board school before winning a scholarship to Yorkshire College (later Leeds University), where he had studied history and economics. While Attlee, the social worker, had helped to improve basic living conditions among the poor of London, Greenwood, the teacher, had sought to raise aspirations when lecturing for the Workers’ Educational Association in Leeds.

Both men had cut their teeth in government as members of Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated 1929–31 administration. As Minister of Health, Greenwood had been one of its more successful members, improving widows’ pensions and introducing the Housing Act (1930), which permitted slum clearance and rebuilding. Attlee had served in the less significant roles of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Postmaster General. Yet when Labour eventually called time on the leadership of the pacifist George Lansbury in 1935, it was the diffident Attlee who topped the ballot, with the gregarious Greenwood third (after Herbert Morrison). Even so, the tall, thin Greenwood, with his ready smile and hearty laugh, was undoubtedly one of the country’s best-liked politicians; his weakness, which was by now well established, was drink. Attlee, sober, seemingly shy, with a laconic manner of speaking, was less affable and harder to read. His critics had repeatedly underestimated him, however; his quiet leadership had been efficient and effective, not least during the dying days of the Chamberlain administration.

Attlee and Greenwood had arrived for their negotiations with Churchill determined to claim Labour’s reward for toppling Chamberlain, but not to be obstructive. ‘I was very conscious that in the First World War there had been a lot of haggling over places,’ Attlee recalled. ‘It seemed to me that this was the reason for some of the failures of the military show then, and I was determined we would not haggle this time.’ In the event there was no need for him to worry. Both he and Greenwood were offered places in a War Cabinet of five, and Churchill reassured them that Labour would be allocated more than a third of the positions in the government. For a party with just a quarter of the seats in Parliament, these were rich spoils.

The sticking point was the future of Neville Chamberlain. Churchill had originally wanted to offer his predecessor – who remained leader of the Conservative Party – the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, a prospect that horrified not just Labour, but the various groups of Tory rebels. Instead he now proposed to make him Leader of the House of Commons. But again, Attlee ‘was absolutely opposed to that. I didn’t think the House would stand it and certainly our people wouldn’t.’ Churchill quickly dropped the idea, although it was eventually agreed Chamberlain would stay in the War Cabinet in the still important role of Lord President of the Council.

There was swift agreement about the ‘service’ ministers: Sir Archibald Sinclair (air), Labour’s A.V. Alexander (navy) and Anthony Eden (War Office). Then the discussion moved on to the home and economic portfolios, with Churchill indicating he was keen to have Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton and particularly Ernest Bevin on board. Mobilising the country’s workforce for the war effort would be crucial, and popular consent could not be gained by appointing Tory ministers tainted by the hardship and unemployment of the 1930s. Churchill saw Bevin, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and a giant in the Labour movement, as the man best placed to command the respect of the working class. Attlee agreed to sound out ‘Ernie’ in the morning. Bevin was not an MP, so if he were willing to join the government he would quickly need to be found a constituency.

‘It is probably easier to form a Cabinet, especially a Coalition Cabinet, in the heat of battle than in quiet times,’ Churchill would observe later. ‘The sense of duty dominates all else, and personal claims recede.’ The process was further oiled by Attlee’s pragmatism. He did not press Churchill to include colleagues he believed fell short of the mark. So there was no position for Frederick Pethwick-Lawrence, former Financial Secretary to the Treasury: ‘too old’, was Attlee’s judgement (at sixty-eight he was just three years older than the Prime Minister). Nor did he recommend a place for so senior a figure as Hastings Lee-Smith, former President of the Board of Education: ‘too slow’. These were ‘bourgeois’ MPs – like himself – and Attlee was keen to ensure a strong working-class representation in the new government.

Amicable and productive, this first session of coalition-building went on until the early hours. Attlee and Greenwood then left to report the results, by telephone, to their colleagues at the Labour conference in Bournemouth; Churchill, with no similar party obligations, conferred with his inner circle before retiring to bed at 3 a.m. It had been a ‘pleasant talk’, he reflected later; there would be much more of it in the days to come.

The new Prime Minister received a sympathetic press on Saturday morning. ‘our war premier churchill’ was the front-page headline in the Daily Mirror, whose leader writer asserted that ‘He is one of those who have never been deceived by the character and purpose of our treacherous enemies.’ In similar vein, the Daily Express opined, ‘No man is better fitted to form a wartime Cabinet. He understands the mind of Hitler. He is capable of developing the powers of ingenuity and resource that this war demands. He will answer daring with daring.’ The most glowing praise of all came, perhaps unexpectedly, from the Manchester Guardian, which asserted that Churchill ‘has the confidence of the nation even more than had Mr Lloyd George when he became prime minister [in 1916]’.

Around Westminster, in offices emptied of civil servants for the Whitsun bank holiday, anxious ministers spent a lonely day waiting for a telephone call or, even better, a summons from the Admiralty. Meanwhile, the clubs and restaurants in St James’s were unusually busy. Groups of MPs sat around disseminating the latest rumour and gossip – as well as the occasional hard fact – about the composition of the new government.

At 11 a.m., following fresh discussions with Churchill at Admiralty House, Attlee returned to the Commons and phoned Ernest Bevin at Transport House (the TGWU’s headquarters on Smith Square), where the union boss had arrived to collect his papers before his journey down to Bournemouth. Bevin told Attlee he approved of Labour’s decision to join the Tories in coalition. ‘You helped to bring the other fellow down; if the party did not take its share of responsibility, they would say we were not great citizens but cowards.’ But on the idea that he should join the government, as Minister of Labour, he wavered: ‘You have sprung it on me.’ When they met face-to-face a few hours later, in Attlee’s office, Bevin confided his fears that the Ministry of Labour would remain ‘a glorified conciliation board’. The Labour leader assured him that it would be central to the war effort with added, substantial powers, so Bevin agreed to talk it through with the Trades Union Congress that weekend.

Over at the Liberal Party’s headquarters in London’s Gayfere Street, Sir Archibald Sinclair was delighted to receive an offer to become Secretary of State for Air, although he was perturbed that such a senior role did not merit a place for himself – and thus his party – in the War Cabinet. He wrote to Churchill, ‘this is a formidable difficulty, and unfortunately it is emphasised by the fact that I gave this as my reason for refusing the invitation of your predecessor at the beginning of the war’. Sinclair would be assuaged, however, by assurances that he would be invited to War Cabinet when there were ‘major questions of policy’ to discuss, and that this would be made clear when the announcement of his position appeared in the newspapers.

At 5.30 p.m. Attlee phoned Dalton and his colleagues in Bournemouth to keep them abreast of developments, and to seek the approval of the National Executive Committee for the government posts he had been offered. Herbert Morrison was unimpressed, saying ‘it didn’t sound like a Government which would stand up any better than the last one, and that it would not impress the public’. Others on the NEC wanted assurances that MPs with backgrounds and expertise in industry would find places in the new government. On this, Attlee, after consultation with Churchill, was able to satisfy them, and at 6 p.m., by a vote of 17 to 1, the committee finally agreed that Labour should join the coalition under the terms offered.

So at 9 p.m. on Saturday night, the first appointments to the new government were released to the press. The five-man War Cabinet was to comprise Churchill (Prime Minister and Minister of Defence), Chamberlain (Lord President), Attlee (Lord Privy Seal), Lord Halifax (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) and Greenwood (Minister without Portfolio). The others were Sinclair (Secretary of State for Air), A.V. Alexander (First Lord of the Admiralty) and Anthony Eden (Secretary of State for War). From these appointments seasoned political onlookers deduced that Churchill had learned two key lessons from his experience in government in the previous war. First, the smaller a War Cabinet the more quickly and efficiently decisions could be made. Second, having witnessed the then Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s failure to control his generals on the Western Front, he was determined that military policy should stay in the hands of politicians, not soldiers or sailors. To the latter end, appointing himself Minister of Defence as well as Prime Minister made him the permanent chair of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet, which included the service ministers (war, air and the Admiralty) and their chiefs of staff. In addition, it would emerge that Churchill was also to lead the Chiefs of Staff Committee, where he could deal with the heads of the armed services directly, in the absence of their political masters.

At noon on Sunday, Churchill’s first appointees were summoned to Buckingham Palace to be formally sworn in to their new offices. Of these, Eden was the one with reason not to be entirely satisfied with his position. At the outbreak of war, he was disappointed not to be given a service ministry; now he had one, but without a place in the War Cabinet where many felt he belonged. The charming, idealistic yet hard working forty-three-year-old already had significant government experience, as Lord Privy Seal with a special brief for the League of Nations (1933–5), and then as foreign secretary (1935–8). While Churchill had his own group of loyal followers in the House of Commons dubbed ‘The Old Guard’, Eden had his devotees too – derisively named ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 ‘A Ministry of all the Talents’
• 2 ‘No longer two nations but one’
• 3 The Beaverbrook Effect
• 4 ‘A troglodyte existence’
• 5 ‘A New Magna Carta’
• 6 ‘Uncle Fred’s Recipe for Survival’
• 7 ‘Riding the dung cart’
• 8 ‘The Ascendancy of Stafford Cripps’
• 9 ‘Ringing the bells of victory’
• 10 ‘Slaying the five giants’
• 11 ‘A grand job to be done for the nation’
• 12 ‘Should we tell the Russians?’
• 13 ‘Buzz bombs and flying gas mains’
• 14 ‘A light shining on every helmet’
• Postscript
• References
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations
• Copyright