Chapter 13, Chartwell, 8 April 1936
Baldwin had retired to Chequers over the Easter break. The Cabinet had held an inconsequential meeting to discuss the ongoing Italian offensive in Ethiopia, the German Rhineland plebiscite, some economic proposals from Chamberlain, and some initial discussions on the King’s coronation plans. The only thing of consequence had been virtually waved through, and so with relief (that the matter had been universally approved) and trepidation (at what must be done), he had dispatched the news to those interested parties.
One of those parties was dressed in the least statesmanlike way imaginable, with a disgustingly muddy blue suit, a battered homburg on his head. In one hand he held a trowel, dripping with cement, the other was clutched greedily at a cigar. He saw a figure approaching and, tossing the cement-encrusted cigar aside, glowered.
“Bloody cement is too wet,” he said to no one in particular. The figure approached.
“Darling, I’ve got Roger Keyes on the telephone, from his constituency.”
“Is it about Baldwin?” He virtually shouted.
“How would I know, I went to get you.”
He felt a heavy feeling descend upon him, the old dog of depression;
surely he thought,
if it was good news the old bugger would have telephoned me rather than Roger. “Bugger it. On my way.” He threw out a filthy hand towards his wife.
“You’re a mess!”
“Compared to Stanley bloody Baldwin I come with the cleanest of hands” he riposted. “He is nothing but a countrified businessman who seemed to have reached office by accident.” He stomped towards the pantry and grabbed the phone, wondering if he had been too damming in his verdict on the Prime Minister.
“Winston? Winston?” Keyes’ voice rasped down the receiver.
“Hello Roger, how are we?”
“You’ll never guess what he’s done now. The Defence Coordination job.”
Churchill’s fears were confirmed. “Go on," was all that he could say.
“Sir Thomas Inskip.”
The syllable, when it came, was in an eruption of volcanic rage. “No!”
“Oh yes, Winston. The Cabinet met yesterday. Wood didn’t want you, neither did Runciman. Margesson was particularly hostile.”
Churchill chuckled, bitterly. “Quite the tally of enemies I have.”
“Your people are out of the Cabinet, Winston, not in it!” Keyes was angry, more so that Churchill didn’t seem particularly enraged.
“But the
Daily Telegraph article?”
“The one saying that your name was being ‘prominently mentioned’? Don’t think that it came up.”
“Anthony?”
Keyes paused, suggesting, at least in Churchill’s assessment, that Eden had been Keyes’ mole in the Cabinet. “Anthony is keeping his powder dry. He wants to sort out rearmament, but with Baldwin and Neville bloody Chamberlain calling the shots.”
Churchill huffed his agreement. “Ah Neville, the heir presumptive.”
“A ha,” Keyes agreed. “And that’s part of it. Sam Hoare has been open that Baldwin will not have you in the Cabinet when the discussion of the succession comes up. He thinks that having you in the Cabinet would be disruptive.”
“Thank you for letting me know, Roger,” Churchill growled. “Austen wants to meet next week after Easter, I wondered if this was the topic.”
“Probably,” Keyes said, before adopting a more gossipy tone. “Y’know that Austen turned it down before it was even really offered, argued passionately that you were the stand out man. Even when Neville was offered the job.”
“Neville Chamberlain at Defence Coordination?” Churchill was chilled by that news.
“Yes. Still Baldwin’s loyal deputy, living in Eleven Downing Street, just moved sideways in Cabinet. Baldwin thought that Neville could do the job.”
“That man,” he said to Clementine who was hovering close by, as much as Keyes over the phone, “knows nothing about foreign and defence affairs. Occasionally he stumbles over the truth, but hastily picks himself up and hurries on as if nothing had happened.”
“So, Winston, it’s Inskip. A laywer with no record on defence or foreign matters.”
“I thought, for a moment, after the Goertz case…”
“…stop dreaming, Winston. He’s tucked away, in prison. He got his four years.”
“But I thought that it might catalyse our Cabinet, get them induced, into action!”
Keyes adopted a sarcastic tone. “It has, Winston, they’ve given us the gift of bloody Inskip!”
“Thank you for telling me Roger, we shall speak again, soon.”
He replaced the receiver and scowled at Clementine. “I now realise, Clemmie, that that bloody man will not tolerate me in his Cabinet by choice.”
“Can some of the backbenchers cajole him? Maybe Bracken?”
“He is unassailable, Clemmie, just as the Beaver said after the election, I am finished,” he said forlornly. “Baldwin has such a majority that he does not need to take make compromises.” He sagged onto a stool, half dried globs of cement falling all around him to Clementine’s disgust. Clementine, knowing the symptoms of the ‘black dog’ of depression that occasionally descended, quietly left him to it.
He had been too bold, he realised, and too confident in assuming that Baldwin would send for him. The PM was too much of a ‘leave it alone’ man to want the Churchill juggernaut careering around his Cabinet. He accepted, and had quickly accepted, that he had lost the battle over the Defence Coordination job. His next skirmish was likely to come over the proposed Ministry of Supply. He would be more discreet, he would make it clear that what mattered was that that the thing was established with the
right man, not necessarily his man (or him), in post.
But he still had to do something about bloody Inskip. All he had, he thought sadly, were words. Perhaps, of all his great gifts, his constant companion had been bloody words. Words spoken, at rallies, in the Commons, words written, in his books, and in the newspapers. It was this latter form that had suddenly gripped his imagination. He was going to write, in a strident but not too challenging way, on the state of Britain’s foreign relations. He snatched, greedily, at a pen and on the back of a scrap of paper (coming from one of Clemmie’s magazines: he made a mental note to make it up to her). It was incoherent, and lacked a structure, but it was a start as he scribbled.
“The Germans claim that the Treaty of Locarno has been ruptured by the Franco-Soviet pact. That is their case and it is one that should be argued before the world in The Hague. The French have expressed themselves willing to submit this point to arbitration and to abide by the result. Germany should be asked to act in the same spirit and to agree. If the German case is good and the League pronounces that the Treaty of Locarno has been vitiated by the Franco-Soviet pact, then clearly the German action, although utterly wrong in in method, can not be seriously challenged by the League of Nations.”
“I desire to see the collective forces of the world invested with overwhelming power. If you are going to depend on a slight margin, one way or the other, you will have war. But if you get five or ten to one on one side, bound rigorously by the Covenant of the League of Nations, and the conventions which they own, then you may have an opportunity of a settlement which will heal the wounds of the world. Let us have this blessed union of power and of justice: ‘agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him’.”
“I believe that we shall find our greatest safety in cooperating with the other powers of Europe, not taking a leading part, but coming in with all the neutral states. We shall make a great mistake to separate ourselves entirely from them at this juncture. Whatever way we turn, there is risk. But the least risk and the greatest help will be found in recreating the Concert of Europe.”
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GAME NOTES
I agonise over Churchill – doing him justice is so hard.
If this Chapter feels haphazardly written then I apologise; it started off by being focussed on Baldwin at Chequers, summarising the points that led to Churchill being kept out of Baldwin’s cabinet (more on this later) and Inskip, in a textbook example of ‘last man standing’, being the nominee for Minister for Defence Coordination. Then it became Winston, in his garden reading a letter from Baldwin telling him why he wasn’t going to be put forward (entirely fictional, there was, as far as my research can find, no direct contact between them), and then, after realising that the wily Baldwin wouldn’t take the political risk of committing his thoughts to a man deemed so unstable as Winston was, you had this, a tip off from an ally. Given that most of the gossip came from Cabinet, it would have had to have come from someone there – I’ve floated Eden (but kept it vague), but Duff Cooper and Walter Elliot were also involved in the debate about this and neither was keen on Baldwin’s ideas.
The list of candidates was as mad as I have portrayed: Churchill, (Austen) Chamberlain, (Neville) Chamberlain, Walter Elliot, Ramsay Macdonald (astonishingly) and Sam Hoare, all were touted as potential candidates, which says, in my view a lot for the lack of vision for the role and the freedom of manoeuvre available to Baldwin. The quotation from Beaverbrook cited by Churchill is true, and eerily prescient; Baldwin was so secure in power that he could afford to deal with Churchill most carefully. But was he hostile to Winston? There are many views on this from arguments that he wanted Winston kept out of the way, to others in which he is playing a canny game by prophetically lining Winston up for wartime leadership. There is a quote, which I have seen in a number of sources, saying “we must save Winston to be our fighting Prime Minister.” How accurate this is (or even if it was said at all) is debatable, but perhaps I am prejudiced. For me, the bottom line is that Baldwin wanted a harmonious Cabinet, with measured rearmament and a light touch on foreign affairs. Churchill at Defence Coordination would have been wonderful to watch, but would have created (for Baldwin) as many headaches as it solved.
The reference to the ‘Goertz’ case is the infamous spying case of Hermann Goertz, who was convicted of spying the week after the Rhineland action. I would, genuinely, have loved to have been his defence barrister. “Members of the Jury, you must banish from your mind all that you have heard and read about Germany over the weekend” does not make for compelling advocacy! He was, as Winston mentions, sent to prison for four years a couple of weeks later.
Keyes was real, and lived an incredibly rich life with successful careers in the Royal Navy and then in Parliament. His finest moment, as a Parliamentarian, was probably his contribution (in full uniform, defying Parliamentary convention) to the Norway Debate in 1940.
And so, we have Churchill, in the wilderness (although still well connected) making walls in his garden. For the photo alone, I have enjoyed creating this update.
@El Pip: I’m going to disagree on a couple of points, rarely. Monsell did as good a job as a Cabinet Minister in Stanley Baldwin’s National Government was ever likely to (yes, that bar is very, very low). I think that you expect too much of him – it’s the job of his civil servants (and in the case of a military ministry, the ‘uniformed’ flunkies) to inform him. He was, I think, misinformed, in a suite of areas. Having Tom Phillips on the Naval Staff can’t have helped…
I also think that you’re underplaying the requirements of swapping the 14” for something, well, bigger, and I will explore this after the political detonations are out of the way. I appreciate that this is the lawyer lecturing the engineer, armed with nothing more than GCSE physics and maths (and the good grades obtained despite staring at Sarah H’s bottom for the better part of two years), but the guns and their storing, delivery and firing system is, in many ways,
the ship. I can only think to the nightmare of the recent T45 fiasco, built around a (world beating) radar and the Aster missiles. I’m not sure that such a change was within the UK’s means at this stage – and I think we’re at the last easy moment to start mucking with the build.
@stnylan: I can only apologise for the outburst mon brave. I genuinely love reading comments, even
@El Pip's 
, and am grateful whenever someone takes the time to offer their thoughts. To have that effort wasted because of incompetence is maddening.
@Cromwell: Thank you, Sir, as ever.
@TheButterflyComposer: Yes, but this is ’36 not ’45 (or even ’41) and that isn’t known yet. And I am not writing them off just yet – to quote Eric Grove (he’s a hoot, BTW, if you can hear him speak) “the best thing to kill the other person’s ugly monster is your own ugly monster. At least until naval bombing comes into its own.”
@stnylan: Agreed.
@Captured Joe: I’ve always been a Renown fan – heaven knows why! Although (and I’ll get my coat) I love Vanguard. I think that she is a beautiful ship, despite her armament.
@cm_spitfire: Welcome! Take a seat, make sure your blackout curtain is in place, tune into the wireless, and there’ll be some Woolton Pie ready in a bit. I genuinely hope that you continue to enjoy the AAR.
@El Pip: Completely agree – a different set of circumstances would require a different solution.
@Specialist290: Thank you for the summary – I agree that the three big naval powers all have a reasonably similar set up.
@stnylan: Agreed – and in 1936 foretelling any of this would be a folly.
@TheButterflyComposer: I’ve often wondered about the shape of an RN that does something utterly radical after the Washington Treaty (sort of like the French had to with their contre-torpilleurs, but for bigger ship types, and on a grander scale).
@DensleyBlair: Sorry! I’m trying to please a broad church here!
As for postwar architecture, some of it is truly awful, but there is something to the Barbican in London (I know that’s a minority view). My own part of the world gave us, however, these horrors on the eye:
Yup, it’s pretty grim.
As for left wingers, truly heroic struggles misled by well-meaning but incompetent or criminally malignant leaders.
@El Pip: Ha! I think we’ve done navy stuff for a while…
