Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: How a British Civil Servant Helped Cause the Second World War

PROLOGUE

A MAN I CAN DO BUSINESS WITH

If Hitler had been a British nobleman and Chamberlain a British working man with an inferiority complex, the thing could not have been better done.

– H

UGH

D

ALTON

When Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to meet Adolf Hitler on 15 September 1938 he was trying to save Europe from war. This was the mission that had dominated his time as Prime Minister, which had begun in May 1937, when Chamberlain had set out with the broad intention to ‘get on terms with the Germans’. This had narrowed to the specific goal of finding a peaceful resolution to Germany’s claims against Czechoslovakia, which had provoked a crisis that had been growing in intensity through the summer. France was treaty-bound to defend Czechoslovakia and Britain was loosely allied to France so a German attack would trigger a broad European war. A German attack was looking ever likelier and as a last-ditch move to ward one off, Chamberlain had proposed coming to Germany for a personal discussion with Hitler. Chamberlain was driven by a strong sense of personal mission. In an era long before summit diplomacy and international travel by air had become routine, his move was a dramatic intervention in the fullest sense, attracting widespread surprise and admiration.

Such was the amazement that greeted Chamberlain’s decision to fly to Germany that comparatively little attention was paid to the man who accompanied him on his journey, or why he should have been chosen: Sir Horace Wilson, GCB, GCMG, CBE. Wilson was a very senior civil servant, who acted as personal adviser to the Prime Minister. The string of initials after his name meant that not only was he a knight twice over, but he also held the top grade in the two most highly ranked orders of chivalry that someone not born into the aristocracy was ever likely to attain. He was Britain’s most powerful civil servant but, far more important, Wilson was Chamberlain’s closest confidant and one of his few personal friends. Even before Chamberlain became Prime Minister, he and Wilson had been allies in a well-hidden but deep-seated struggle over how to handle the crisis that led to the abdication of Edward VIII, the gravest threat to Britain’s constitutional stability for a generation. The flight to Munich was also, in part, Wilson’s project. He and Chamberlain had thought up the idea of a summit meeting with Hitler in the course of one of the late-night private conversations that characterised their relationship. They had given it the suitably melodramatic code-name of ‘Plan Z’.

Wilson fully appreciated the loneliness of Chamberlain’s position, especially as he struggled with questions of war or peace. He saw that part of his job lay in keeping up Chamberlain’s morale when faced with the risks of his work and the criticism inevitable for any politician. As the plane droned on its five-hour flight from Heston aerodrome to Munich through turbulent weather, Wilson read out to Chamberlain a selection of the letters that had poured into Downing Street praising the Prime Minister’s courage and initiative in undertaking the mission to preserve peace.¹ Chamberlain and Wilson had already spent long hours poring over detailed maps showing the boundaries between Czech- and German-speaking areas. Moreover, Chamberlain saw the purpose of the mission as, above all, to establish a personal dialogue with the German leader rather than detailed negotiation.

The third and most junior member of the party was William Strang, the head of the Foreign Office’s Central Department, which handled the London end of relations with Germany, although he was far from an expert on the details of the regime. At Munich they were joined by Sir Nevile Henderson, the strongly pro-appeasement British ambassador to Berlin. Together they travelled to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.

There were good reasons to query why Chamberlain had chosen Wilson for the mission. Wilson had very little experience of diplomatic negotiations and no direct knowledge of the Nazi regime, and he spoke no German. Few insiders, however, were surprised that Wilson had been chosen and not a professional diplomat. Relations between Downing Street and the Foreign Office had deteriorated over the previous year. Chamberlain and Wilson had come to lose confidence in both its political master, Lord Halifax, and the professional diplomats. They saw the diplomats’ willingness to take a harder line with Hitler as a risky approach that might provoke him into precipitate action. A number of members of the Foreign Office, most notably Sir Robert Vansittart, its former permanent secretary, were violently opposed to Chamberlain’s policy and behaved as a form of opposition party. Downing Street, in particular Wilson, was aware that it could not count on the normal professional loyalty of every member of the Foreign Office. Strang was a forbidding and disciplined figure whose private reservations about appeasement remained well enough hidden for him still to be acceptable. Wilson shared Chamberlain’s utter confidence that the policy of appeasing Hitler was the only possible way to avert war. He had been deeply involved in the British attempts to find a basis for agreement between Germany and Czechoslovakia over the summer. These had focused on establishing a formula for surrender, which the Czechs could be forced to accept. Wilson had a low opinion of the Czechs and feared they might threaten peace by holding out against the Germans.

When the British party arrived at the Berghof, the substantial business of the mission began almost immediately: a private conversation between Hitler and Chamberlain. It had been agreed beforehand to exclude Germany’s ferociously anti-British foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop had been the German ambassador to London from 1936 to 1938, but had failed to build a good, lasting relationship between the countries, which had embittered him against the British. Chamberlain wanted to have a direct man-to-man conversation with Hitler. The only other person present was Paul Schmidt, the chief interpreter for the Auswärtiges Amt, the German foreign ministry, whom Hitler passed off as a neutral figure. Afterwards there was an unseemly wrangle when the Germans refused to give the British Schmidt’s note of the meeting, because it was a ‘personal’ conversation. This left Chamberlain to reconstruct the conversation from memory. The British choice for the structure of the meeting had already put them at a disadvantage.

The conversation between Hitler and Chamberlain lasted three hours. Hitler was still in the state of exaltation brought on by addressing the faithful at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg a few days before, and he began with a tirade against the supposed iniquities of the Czech government and attacked Britain for interfering in an area of purely German interests. Somewhere along the way he brought up the naval agreement signed between Britain and Germany in 1935 and said it proved that he would never be at war with England. Even though in the next breath, Hitler threatened to denounce the agreement, Chamberlain still latched on to this as a hopeful sign. Hitler over-reached himself by stating bluntly that he would settle the Sudeten question ‘one way or another’ (‘so oder so’), implicitly by force. This gave Chamberlain the opening to ask why Hitler had then accepted the offer of talks at all and the conversation ended with Hitler agreeing to negotiate a solution.

The other members of the British party did not play a substantive part in the discussions. Wilson did, though, speak informally to a number of the Germans after Chamberlain’s conversation with Hitler and what he was told greatly influenced how the British – above all Chamberlain – thought that the meeting with Hitler had gone. What Wilson heard gave him the impression that Chamberlain’s initiative had been ‘a bold master-stroke in diplomacy’.² He first spoke to Ernst von Weizsäcker, the professional head of the Auswärtiges Amt. Weizsäcker worked for Ribbentrop but was an old-style professional diplomat, who despised his upstart, incompetent politicised boss and strove for friendly relations between Britain and Germany. He told Wilson that Chamberlain had ‘made just the right impression’ on Hitler. According to Schmidt and Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to London, Hitler had been ‘impressed’ by Chamberlain, appreciating his ‘directness … and the rapidity with which he grasped the essentials of the situation’. Wilson next spoke to Walther Hewel, whom he described simply as Ribbentrop’s personal secretary, thus accidentally letting slip how poorly briefed he was about the German side at the Berghof. Hewel was much more than a foreign ministry official. He was a long-standing friend of Hitler, who had been imprisoned with him following the attempted Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, as well as being one of the very few people in Hitler’s inner circle who could pass as a decent human being. This might explain why he had the unenviable task of liaising between Hitler and Ribbentrop, who was a byword for cravenness and treachery as well as stupidity. Hewel told Wilson that Hitler felt he was dealing with ‘a man’ … ‘& one with whom I can do business’.³ The only German who did not sing Hitler’s praises of Chamberlain to Wilson was Ribbentrop himself.

Wilson took all these honeyed words at face value and passed them on to Chamberlain and, later, the Cabinet uncritically. He took Ribbentrop’s failure to say anything about Hitler’s ‘favourable view’ of Chamberlain as merely ‘characteristic’. Wilson recognised that different camps of opinion existed on the German side, but did not attempt any deeper analysis of how this might affect what each group said or did. Over the preceding months he had immersed himself in the minutiae of population distribution in the Sudetenland but not in how the Germans’ foreign policy machine worked. The German side presented almost a precise mirror image of the British one: the German professional diplomats were anxious for peace, whilst the political leaders – Hitler and Ribbentrop – were indifferent to the risk of war; the British leaders – Chamberlain with Wilson in support – were desperate for peace, whilst large sections of the Foreign Office were prepared to risk war. Before the talks Weizsäcker had told Wilson, ‘This visit must succeed.’⁴ Wilson missed the logical consequence of this: that Weizsäcker and his colleagues would do whatever was necessary to ensure that the visit did succeed. Keeping up Chamberlain’s commitment to the negotiations with some well-placed encouragement was an obvious starting point. Weizsäcker was aware of the rift within the British camp and knew that Chamberlain and Wilson were much more committed to the search for a peaceful solution than some members of the Foreign Office.

Chamberlain’s most recent biographer describes this blizzard of praise as ‘flattery cynically calculated to exploit Chamberlain’s vanity and it more than succeeded’.⁵ Chamberlain’s vanity was one of his most regrettable features. It was not just a character flaw; it was a professional weakness. He was quite incapable of spotting even the most transparent flattery. Like Wilson he took the Germans’ comments at face value and they deeply influenced him. He was particularly taken with Hewel’s claim that the Führer had been impressed by his manliness. He quoted it to his sister in an infamous letter which also described Hitler as ‘a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word’.⁶ Chamberlain’s grotesque misreading of Hitler and their mutual relationship led him to declare to the Cabinet on his return to London ‘that the Führer had been most favourably impressed [by him]. This was of the utmost importance, since the future conduct of these negotiations depended mainly upon personal contacts.’⁷

Chamberlain’s belief that he had developed a viable rapport with Hitler survived the gruelling negotiations during the fortnight after his first visit to Germany. It held the hope of ultimate success. The detailed discussions promised at the Berghof took place a few days later at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Here Hitler began by accepting one deal, then back-tracked and pushed up his demands against the Czechs. Even after this Chamberlain claimed to the Cabinet that ‘he had now established an influence over Herr Hitler, and that the latter trusted him and was willing to work with him’.⁸ A Cabinet revolt was only averted by a solo mission to Berlin by Wilson, ostensibly to present a firm line, but in reality to ram home the fact that he and his master were willing to force the Czechs to accept a deal. Conflict was averted at the last moment, when Hitler blinked and accepted the intervention of Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, who proposed four-power talks to settle Czechoslovakia’s fate. At the ensuing conference in Munich – another long flight for Chamberlain and Wilson followed by a draining late-night session – Britain, France, Germany and Italy duly dismembered Czechoslovakia without reference to that country’s democratic government. The Munich agreement was a piece of brutal realpolitik but it averted war. It did not, though, satisfy Chamberlain’s ambitions to dispel the risk of war entirely and he set out to improve on this harsh piece of diplomatic pragmatism by securing a lasting guarantee of peace that went far beyond the removal of a single potential conflict. Immediately after the agreement had been signed Chamberlain sought a private meeting with Hitler. He wanted him to sign a brief Anglo-German declaration that Strang had drafted for him. The declaration read:

We … are agreed in recognising that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again.

We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

Chamberlain had added the reference to the Naval Agreement to the first draft against the objections of Strang, who felt the agreement was actually something to be ashamed of.⁹ Strang was probably right. The most important result of the Naval Agreement was to make the French believe that the British were prepared to cut side-deals with Hitler to protect their own interests. As an exercise in arms limitation it was a near-total failure: the Germans disregarded its restrictions on the expansion of their navy from the start. The only reason to bring it into the declaration was that Chamberlain took at face value Hitler’s claim that the agreement meant there would be no war between Germany and Britain. Chamberlain was trying to mine an illusory seam of goodwill that he thought he had glimpsed at the Berghof.

Chamberlain presented the declaration to Hitler at his modest flat in Munich the morning after the agreement had been signed. Hitler signed it without modification or serious discussion. Almost everyone involved gave a conflicting account of the meeting. Perhaps predictably, Chamberlain believed that Hitler had signed the Anglo-German Declaration with enthusiasm after ‘a very friendly and pleasant talk’.¹⁰ His was the only unequivocally optimistic and positive account of the meeting; the others make plain that the whole proceeding fell well short of the basic requirements of a piece of serious diplomacy. Strang commented in his memoirs, ‘Never was a diplomatic document so summarily agreed upon.’¹¹ Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, Lord Dunglass (later Prime Minister under the name Sir Alec Douglas-Home), who was the only member of the British delegation to accompany Chamberlain to Hitler’s flat, wrote later that Hitler signed ‘almost perfunctorily’.¹² Schmidt, the interpreter, found Hitler ill disposed and absent-minded during the conversation and hesitant over signing the declaration.¹³

To Chamberlain the declaration was his true achievement at Munich. It was the piece of paper that he read and then held up to the crowds at Heston aerodrome on his return to London. It was the declaration that Chamberlain proclaimed in Downing Street brought ‘peace for our time’. It was the document that Chamberlain believed was ‘only a prelude to a larger settlement in which all of Europe may find peace’.¹⁴ The four-power Munich agreement that had dismembered Czechoslovakia was mentioned only in passing. Chamberlain uncritically lapped up the praise lavished on him as the man who saved Europe’s peace; he believed that he had achieved something that would last – a true revolution in the diplomacy of Europe – and not merely that he had resolved one especially dangerous crisis. The Anglo-German Declaration was the result of Chamberlain’s deluded belief that he had established a relationship of trust and respect with Hitler that he could use to pursue his policy of rapprochement.

Chamberlain’s confidence in his relationship with Hitler rested on illusion. There was at least one senior British diplomat who could have given Chamberlain a far more accurate account of what the Führer thought of him and his efforts. Ivone Kirkpatrick, the head of chancery, in effect number two at the British embassy, had been there since 1933. He spoke German fluently and had built up an extensive network of well-informed German contacts. In the First World War he had been an intelligence officer, running agents behind German lines. He was not a promising target for the efforts of the German diplomats. Hewel attempted precisely the same soft soap on Kirkpatrick as he had on Wilson: ‘[Hewel] was at pains to persuade me that Mr Chamberlain’s visit had been worthwhile. It was an excellent thing, he said, that the two men should have become acquainted, and he could tell me that Hitler had acquired a high regard for Mr Chamberlain…’¹⁵ He found, however, that he was dealing with someone far better briefed. Kirkpatrick was already well informed as to Hitler’s true opinion of Chamberlain and that it was entirely different to the story that Hewel was peddling.

I knew this was bunkum and said so to Hewel. My reliable informants in the German camp had already made it clear to me that Hitler regarded the Prime Minister as an impertinent busybody who spoke the outmoded jargon of an out-moded democracy. The umbrella, which to the ordinary German was the symbol of peace, was in Hitler’s view only a subject of derision.

It is unlikely that Kirkpatrick had any opportunity to correct Wilson’s naive acceptance of German flattery, still less to counteract its effect on Chamberlain. As far as Wilson was concerned, Kirkpatrick could be tolerated as an interpreter and minute-taker. Serious advice was not required from anyone who did not share the view that Hitler should be trusted.

The version of the Berghof conversation that the Germans had fed Wilson was a fabrication. Hitler described Chamberlain to Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, who was closest to him of all the senior Nazis, as an ‘ice-cold Englishman’.¹⁶ That was the most complimentary he got. Immediately after the meeting Hitler claimed to Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker that he had manoeuvred Chamberlain into a corner and gave no hint of any admiration for him at any level.¹⁷ Moreover, Hitler had in fact taken a particular personal dislike to the British Prime Minister. The record abounds with tales of the vulgar abuse Hitler applied to Chamberlain in the aftermath of Munich. One, in particular, gives the lie to the story which Hewel had tried to sell – successfully to Wilson, unsuccessfully to Kirkpatrick – that Hitler had been impressed by Chamberlain’s masculinity. A few weeks later Hitler was boasting to German journalists that his strong nerves had enabled him to out-bluff Édouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, and Chamberlain, whom he described respectively as ‘quaking in his trousers’ and as a ‘miserable floppy-cock’ (‘jämmerlicher Schlappschwanz’).¹⁸

Notes

1. John Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 108, fn 2; Leonard Mosley, On Borrowed Time: How World War II Began (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 36; their information almost certainly came from Strang, whom Mosley interviewed

2. NA CAB 24/279 The prime minister’s visit to Germany

3. NA CAB 24/279 The prime minister’s visit to Germany

4. NA CAB 24/279 The prime minister’s visit to Germany

5. Self, Neville Chamberlain , p. 314

6. Neville Chamberlain papers, NC18/1/1069 Chamberlain to Ida 19 September 1938

7. NA CAB 23/95 Meeting of 17 September 1938

8. NA CAB 23/95/6

9. Lord Strang, Home and Abroad (London: André Deutsch, 1956), p. 147

10. Neville Chamberlain papers, NC18/1/1070 Chamberlain to Hilda 2 October 1938

11. Strang, Home and Abroad , p. 147

12. Lord Home, The Way the Wind Blows: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1976), p. 64

13. Paul Schmidt, Statist auf Diplomatischer Bühne 1923–45 (Bonn: Athenäum, 1949), p. 417

14. Chamberlain speech at Heston aerodrome, quoted in Neville Chamberlain, In Search of Peace: Speeches (1937–1938) , ed. Arthur Bryant (London: Hutchinson, 1939), p. 302

15. Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle: Memoirs of Ivone Kirkpatrick (London: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 121f

16. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: sämtliche Fragmente , ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987), 18 September 1938

17. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Memoirs of Ernst von Weizsäcker (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), p. 150

18. Fritz Hesse, Das Spiel um Deutschland (Munich: List, 1953), p. 151

CHAPTER ONE

PERSONAL DISCOURTESY IS HIS CHIEF WEAPON

Lloyd George and Churchill have a good case, but personal discourtesy will not help them, and that is C’s chief weapon.

– C

HARLES

H

OBHOUSE

,

FELLOW

MEMBER

OF

THE

A

SQUITH

C

ABINET

In 1908, Winston Churchill was a golden boy in British politics. His ascent of the greasy pole had been so breathtakingly rapid that it gave him the air of someone irresistibly destined for the greatest prizes. Everything seemed to be on Churchill’s side. He was the grandson of a duke in an era when such things still mattered and his father had been a glamorous politician who had reached the rank of Chancellor of the Exchequer at the youthful age of thirty-seven. His widowed mother remained one of the high-society beauties of her day and a regular feature at the most distinguished dinner tables. Churchill had had a spectacular career in Britain’s imperial wars as a cavalry officer and journalist, culminating in a heroic escape from a Boer prison. He had been elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament and then defected to the Liberals through a mixture of opportunism and an objection on principle to the Conservatives’ turn away from free trade. He had come under the wing of the Liberals’ rising star, the charismatic and radical David Lloyd George, who was also moving up rapidly through the ranks of British politics. Herbert Asquith had become Prime Minister that year and promoted Lloyd George to Chancellor of the Exchequer, creating a vacancy at the Cabinet table into which Churchill moved as though by right.

Then as now, a seat in Cabinet was the vital career stepping stone for a politician who aimed for the top. Churchill achieved it at the age of only thirty-three, making him the youngest man to enter the Cabinet in over forty years. His ministerial job brimmed with promise. He replaced Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade, which Lloyd George had transformed from its dusty legacy as the seventeenth-century body set up to organise the development of Britain’s colonies. Lloyd George had made the Board of Trade the nerve centre of his schemes to modernise British society, industry and commerce. His measures had touched a swathe of different shipping, patent and industrial statistics. He proved an adept arbitrator in tense industrial negotiations in the rail, cotton and coal industries. Churchill succeeded him with a brief to drive Lloyd George’s working of modernisation even further forward. It was the start of a powerful, volatile and often uneasy relationship between the radical Welsh solicitor and the Duke’s grandson, both ultimately outsiders, both supremely self-confident.¹ Churchill was to introduce huge social reforms, embracing minimum wages, labour exchanges and compulsory unemployment insurance. Churchill was the architect of the National Insurance Act of 1911, which set the groundwork for a cornerstone of Britain’s structure of social security that endures today.

Churchill’s rapid rise through the ranks provoked the inevitable crop of jealous denigration, but some of it had the ring of truth; there were deep flaws in his character. He was the archetypal young man in a hurry. The story ran that the fairy who had been assigned responsibility for him at birth was overly generous in giving him every talent available. When this was reported to her line manager, she was instructed to remove one of the talents. It was the talent of judgement that she chose. He was also a notably abrasive personality, which he tried to rationalise away by splitting his life into separate compartments: the one of work, where frank and brutal dialogue was the norm but implied no ill will, and the one of social life, where everyone was friendly. It was the spirit embodied in the rule of the ‘Other Club’, a prestigious and secretive dining group of which Churchill was a founder, that ‘nothing in the Rules of Intercourse of the club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics’. Not everyone swallowed Churchill’s light-heartedness or his ingenious system of distinctions. One of his Cabinet colleagues complained that ‘personal discourtesy’ was Churchill’s ‘chief weapon’.²

Churchill ran the Board of Trade with his usual flair and dynamism, but with minimal interest in the happiness or otherwise of the people who worked for him. Churchill wanted to achieve goals, not build happy organisations. He did not make the Board of Trade a happy place to be. Churchill lacked the interpersonal skills of Lloyd George and it showed. Lloyd George had adroitly managed his junior minister at the Board of Trade, Hudson Kearley, already a successful and well-established businessman in his own right. He had left Kearley in sole charge of his own areas of the ministry whilst Lloyd George attended to matters of high policy.³ Churchill reversed this practice and, true to his later habits, began to intervene directly in every aspect of the Board of Trade’s activities. Kearley had hoped vainly for a seat in Cabinet himself and did not take kindly to being subordinated to a far younger and less experienced man who had been promoted over him. Churchill was not noted for his tact with anyone, least of all people who worked for him. Kearley’s interest in the Board of Trade began to tail away.

Within a few months, the unhappy state of affairs became painfully obvious at one meeting chaired by Churchill.⁴ A very junior member of Kearley’s team in his mid-twenties found himself with a huge challenge to surmount. His minister was ill, perhaps diplomatically, and not present at the meeting, so the junior had to speak on his behalf. There was no guarantee that Churchill would agree with him. The young man was Horace Wilson, and he had none of Churchill’s advantages in life. He had been raised on the fringes of the working class at the then dowdy seaside resort of Bournemouth. He had received no more than a basic education and had entered the Civil Service as a boy clerk, the lowest form of life. But he was ambitious, dedicated, intelligent and competent. He took a degree in economics at night school. In 1908, Wilson had just been advanced to the rank of assistant for special enquiries in the statistical department of the ministry, the first step up from humble clerkship towards responsibility and influence. It was a tribute to the social inclusiveness of the Civil Service that someone of his age and background should have had his feet on even this lowly rung in the ladder. The Civil Service was a generation ahead of the armed services and the other bodies at the top of British society. Under Queen Victoria, the state had begun to regulate vast swathes of society and industry, creating the need for a larger and more professional Civil Service to superintend it all. Previously heretical ideas of recruitment and promotion on merit had become accepted.

Wilson had a job to do that would have been daunting for anyone of his age and standing in the friendliest of environments; the atmosphere that day became anything but friendly. Churchill objected strongly to the case that Wilson presented on behalf of his minister and made this brutally plain. Churchill’s rejection of what Wilson said went far beyond annoyance at being contradicted and spilled over into the violent abuse of a man who was only doing a job he was duty-bound to do. Churchill insulted Wilson personally – ‘overbearingly’, in Wilson’s account – and told him to get back to his job as a junior civil servant. It was a tirade that would have been painful to hear had it been directed at a fellow minister of equal standing in the rough and tumble of political argument, but here it was a toe-curling ordeal for Wilson’s professional equals and superiors who had to listen. The yawning social and hierarchical gap between Churchill and the target of his abuse meant that Wilson had practically no means of defence or retaliation.

Churchill did make a perfunctory attempt at an apology a few days later, but it was a small drop of balm on an open wound. Turning on all his boyish charm, he admitted to Wilson, ‘I’m afraid I was rather hard on you at that Committee the other day’, or something to that effect. Churchill’s charm was strong enough for Wilson to label the performance ‘irresistible’, but it did not undo the damage. It was feeble and a lame trivialisation of a piece of grotesquely unfair behaviour. It was all very well for the high-flying politicians and establishment figures of the Other Club to socialise amicably over dinner in the Pinafore Room of the Savoy Hotel, setting aside their daytime arguments, and quite another thing for someone of their standing to pour out his ‘asperity and rancour’ on a defenceless junior and expect him to take it all in good spirit.

The episode did not damage Wilson’s career. Churchill was hot-tempered, but rarely bore grudges and anyway moved on to another, even more important job less than two years later. It was almost twenty years until their paths crossed again, but the event was still fresh in Wilson’s mind for many more years than that. Well into his retirement, it was the anecdote he used to capture Churchill’s essential nature. Even after a long career that had given him every opportunity to see the best and worst of the way senior figures in public life behaved, he still saw fit to label Churchill’s behaviour at the Board of Trade meeting as ‘most offensive and ungentlemanly’. His verdict at the time can only be imagined. By any standard, Churchill had behaved with a shocking lack of professionalism, to say nothing of his personal arrogance and petulance.

Churchill had also sinned against one of the unwritten rules for someone starting out on almost any career: ‘Be nice to people when you’re on your way up as you’ll meet them again when you’re on your way down.’ In the narrow world of Westminster and Whitehall, the memory of a single piece of thoughtless behaviour can linger for a long time. The professional acquaintanceship of Churchill and Wilson had got off on the wrong foot and was doomed to stay there. No one could have predicted accurately what the coming decades would bring to Wilson, the newly promoted Civil Service clerk. But Churchill was never a man for regretful hindsight.

* * *

Over the next two decades, Wilson enjoyed a stellar ascent through the ranks of the Civil Service whilst Churchill’s career moved far more erratically. Wilson was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He had a calm, unruffled and patient personality that translated into exceptional skills as a mediator in industrial disputes, and this was just what was required at that time. Since the turn of the century, labour disputes had often been poisonous and violent. When the First World War imposed a total war economy on Britain, the tone softened but the need for good labour relations was as urgent as before. Labour was a resource that required adroit management, and the relevant parts of the Board of Trade provided the nucleus of a separate, full-scale Ministry of Labour in 1916. In 1921, Wilson became the ministry’s chief civil servant before he had even reached the age of forty.

Twenty years after the fateful Board of Trade committee, Churchill was again a prominent government minister, but one who was starting to look like a man with a great future behind him. Much of it was due to Churchill’s own misjudgements. Seven years after the Board of Trade incident, Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had carried the can for his own many mistakes and those of others in the naval and military attacks on Turkey through the Dardanelles, which culminated in the futile bloodbath of Gallipoli. He had been edged out of government and had bolted from Westminster to serve on the Western Front, leaving a growing reputation for poor judgement and impulsiveness. When Lloyd George became Prime Minister in a coalition government in 1917, it was only with the greatest difficulty that he overcame the hostility and suspicion of his Conservative allies towards Churchill as a defector and brought him back into the Cabinet. This effect was magnified by growing mainstream Conservative hatred of Lloyd George and his coalition government. After Lloyd George was unseated by the coup mounted by Conservative back-benchers gathered at Carlton House in 1922, Churchill lost his seat in Parliament at the ensuing general election. Churchill returned to the Conservative fold and won a new seat in Parliament under their new leader, Stanley Baldwin, in 1924. To near-universal amazement (including his own) he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. But he was there on sufferance. The mood in the party had swung firmly against the men of Lloyd George’s coalition and Churchill had no local or sectional power base to set against this. Lloyd George himself, Churchill’s patron and early supporter, had been firmly pushed into the wilderness, from which he would never return. Churchill’s future prospects were not bright.

In the early months of Churchill’s time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he returned to the happy hunting ground of his Board of Trade days, strengthening social reform through enhanced national insurance, and he was able to score a victory over Sir Horace Wilson’s more conservative instincts. Churchill’s scheme featured a sharp rise in the contributions to be paid by agricultural workers, which Wilson opposed as too radical. Churchill won the battle although Wilson sniped back in a rearguard action fought over the civil servant’s preferred battlefield, the minutiae of policies, when they actually had to be transformed into practical measures. Churchill might have had his small victory, but it was a false dawn. The remainder of Churchill’s time as Chancellor was a disappointment. If, as is sometimes theorised, Baldwin had given Churchill this big job in the knowledge that he was unsuited to it and that he would suffer thereby, he had achieved his goal. Churchill was on the down escalator of politics; Wilson was on the up escalator of bureaucracy.

Wilson had already achieved much for someone of his background, but he was now poised to enter the inner sanctums. The General Strike of 1926 brought Wilson into the heart of government. In any crisis, formal job titles and descriptions count for little. What matters is how close you are to the seat of power, how often your advice is called for by the people at the top, and how much your judgement is trusted. The ordinary calculations of routine politics are suspended. Wilson was one of the handful of close advisers who helped Baldwin tackle one of the country’s most threatening internal crises ever, which many feared – and some hoped – would trigger a revolution. He had the advantage of technical knowledge; his familiarity with the trade unions and their leaders was far more detailed and extensive than practically any minister’s. More importantly, he was a man who inspired confidence and, confronted with the enormous risks involved, that was a prize quality for the government. As the crisis unfolded, Wilson helped make the key decisions taken at Downing Street. Baldwin was a man of great patience and even temper, who did not deal in provocation, but he could be far more brutal than his avuncular image led people to expect. When the strike finally collapsed, Baldwin chose Wilson to deliver the coup de grâce to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) leaders, telling them that only unconditional surrender was acceptable.⁵ Baldwin had decided that the moment had arrived to tell the unions unequivocally that it was the government that ruled the country and not them. The handling of the General Strike is usually considered to be one of Baldwin’s greatest successes – if not his greatest success – as Prime Minister, and Wilson shared fully in the achievement. But it earned Wilson undying hatred from the union leaders.

As Wilson sat firmly at the centre of the government’s handling of the General Strike, Churchill was held on the periphery. He was allocated the minor job of editing the British Gazette, the government’s strike-breaking newspaper. Churchill fumed that Wilson should be entrusted with conversations with the miners whilst he was left ‘meandering all over the place’.⁶ Baldwin was aware that subtler negotiating abilities than Churchill had at his command were needed. Churchill fared no better in the aftermath. As the miners fought on alone, Churchill pleaded for a conciliatory approach, but the hardliners, with Wilson to the fore, set the policy of facing the miners down to abject surrender.

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Churchill could at least take consolation from his waning political career in his private passions: his house Chartwell in Kent, writing history (which was also vital to funding his extravagant lifestyle), painting and, his most recent and quirkiest hobby, brick-laying. In 1928, Churchill’s brick-laying triggered a bizarre episode that saw him flirt with the world of unionised labour, when he found himself in the highly unaccustomed position of seeking the advice of Horace Wilson on a most sensitive topic. Churchill’s new hobby caught the eye of a journalist who gleefully reported to the country that it had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who laid bricks for relaxation. The story unleashed the usual flood of correspondence. Some of the letters criticised – fairly – Churchill’s strictly amateur technique in the work, but there was one more kindly disposed from Alderman James Lane, Labour Mayor of Battersea, who suggested that Churchill might wish to join his union, the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers (AUBTW), if he wished to pursue his involvement in this ‘honourable occupation’ and, in time, to improve his skills. Membership would offer Churchill advantages such as one shilling (5p) a day in strike pay and extra unemployment benefit.⁷ It would have been a gentle and undemanding stunt that could have softened Churchill’s aristocratic and anti-union image; Churchill was inclined to accept.

Before he committed himself, Churchill took the precaution of seeking the advice of Wilson, then still the country’s chief Civil Service expert on trade union matters, on whether he might be letting himself in for ‘wrangles’.⁸ Wilson replied genially but with the faintest hint of irony that ‘it would be pleasing to know you had joined. The trade is well paid and you could always earn a living at it.’⁹ Wilson’s levity and superficial geniality towards Churchill was doubly out of character; he was usually conservative and highly averse to risk. He normally reserved his understated but acerbic sense of humour for those he trusted. The suggestion that Churchill might find himself in search of alternative employment to politics was not calculated to appeal. On a more practical level, Wilson assured Churchill that he would be within his rights to opt out of the political levy, the portion of the union membership fee that went to fund the Labour Party. He concluded with another light-hearted note, confessing uncertainty as to what should be done if the AUBTW nominated Churchill as a delegate to the TUC.

With a green light from the head civil servant at the Ministry of Labour, Churchill applied to join and was inducted into membership by a delighted Alderman Lane in the august surroundings of Churchill’s own office at the Treasury. His membership card read, ‘Winston S. Churchill, Westerham, Kent. Occupation, bricklayer.’ Churchill’s arrival in the ranks of organised labour attracted even more press coverage than the news that he had taken up brick-laying, with headlines such as ‘New Role for Versatile Winston’. The cheery mood, though, was doomed to be short-lived as Churchill was beset by the ‘wrangles’ of which he had expected Wilson would be able to warn him.

Churchill was not the only one to spot the opportunity for a little cheap publicity. The AUBTW had a distinct political bent to the left – it recently had voted to campaign against the government’s rearmament measures – and there were plenty of members ready to make capital out of an easy target. A flood of protests flowed in and the union’s executive council voted that Churchill had been ineligible for membership on the pernickety pretexts that he had failed to state how long he had been laying bricks and that his cheque for the membership fee had not been cashed. Churchill publicly challenged this decision, but there the matter rested: a light-hearted, well-meant gesture transformed into a futile squabble. At fault was political miscalculation. Churchill had not sought Wilson’s advice on this aspect of the matter and, strictly speaking, it was not Wilson’s job to volunteer such advice to someone who was not a minister in his department, but it is hard to imagine that Churchill was pleased with the outcome.

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The following year, the political wheel of fortune began to turn far against Churchill. The Conservatives lost the 1929 general election, so Churchill ceased to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. More fatefully for him, the Labour government that took over initiated a policy that immediately inspired him to passionate opposition. In the face of growing Indian nationalism, the Labour government launched a series of round-table discussions that embraced Britain’s major parties to identify ways in which India might move towards some form of autonomous rule with dominion status as the ultimate goal. From the start Churchill fought this bitterly and continued to do so after the Labour government was replaced by a ‘National’ coalition government in the wake of the economic crisis in 1931. This put him immediately at odds with the leaders of the Conservative Party, the dominant element in the new government, who took over the Labour government’s India policy. Churchill was not offered a post in the National Government either when it was formed or when a general election later in 1931 confirmed it in office with an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons.

The search for a reform of Britain’s relationship with India ground on and ultimately led to the India Act of 1935. The measures in the Act were limited, ambiguous and so heavily compromised that it was never possible to implement it in any meaningful sense. It dwindled into irrelevancy and was entirely forgotten as the changed world after 1945 swept India to full independence, but it still caused one of the most venomous internecine rifts the Conservative Party suffered in the twentieth century. A large group of Conservatives – the ‘diehards’ – were violently opposed to anything but a continuation of the British Raj with no reform whatsoever and fought a long and often bitter rearguard action against the Act.

With his habitual blend of passionate conviction and political opportunism, Churchill was the leading figure amongst the diehards, but they did not fully trust him.¹⁰. He committed a major tactical blunder in instigating the ‘Committee of Privileges’ affair and confusing the India campaign with personal loyalty to himself.¹¹ If Churchill ever intended opposing the India Act to build a significant personal following amongst Conservative MPs, it was a resounding failure. The exercise gave Churchill the opportunity to display his oratorical talents, but little more. It confirmed his status as a trouble-maker and left Baldwin with little inclination to bring him back into government. The India Act campaign marked the start of Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’, when he spent ten years out of office, on the fringes of mainstream politics and with apparently shrivelling prospects of returning to power.

Churchill was an exile but not a rebel. He maintained an outward show of loyalty to Baldwin’s government and still nourished hopes of returning to the Cabinet. Baldwin was willing to dangle hopes of office, however faint, in front of Churchill to soften his criticism of the government. This process reached its peak in March 1936, when Baldwin bowed to complaints at the slow pace of rearmament and created the post of Minister of Defence Coordination, as a token that he was taking the question seriously. The new job would have provided an appropriate platform from which Churchill could have driven rearmament forward, but this was not Baldwin’s intention at all. The job was given to Sir Thomas Inskip, an Anglican evangelical lawyer, whose political moment of glory had been to talk down moves to reform the Church of England’s prayer book. Chamberlain had advised Baldwin to reject Churchill, for the ‘excellent reason … that [his] known opinions & history might well embarrass any Govt which they joined at this moment’.¹² Inskip’s appointment is one of the many routinely described as the worst or most extraordinary since Caligula made his horse a consul. In reality, he proved a low-key but effective chairman in discussions amongst the armed services on priorities.

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With an odd symmetry, Wilson’s career went through a rocky patch in the early 1930s but not remotely as severe as Churchill’s. In 1929, he had moved from the Ministry of Labour to act as the chief civil servant to the Labour minister Jimmy Thomas, who had been tasked with finding a solution to the surge in Britain’s unemployment during the slump. It was a challenging if not impossible job, and the experiment soon collapsed ignominiously. Wilson was out of a job, but he was far too valuable a man for the Civil Service to dispense with lightly. Unlike Churchill, his technical abilities and unchallenging conformity were widely recognised. A job was invented for him to keep him on the Civil Service payroll. He became chief industrial adviser, with no specific remit or department attached. In practice, he operated as the very senior odd-job man for economic matters that did not neatly fall into anyone else’s sphere. He organised and ran the British Civil Service group that went to the Imperial Conference at Ottawa in 1932. The conference failed completely to mobilise the resources and trade of the Empire to counteract the slump, but it was universally recognised that the support provided to the British delegation was far superior to any other country’s, and Wilson was justly credited with this. Ottawa cemented his high standing in the eyes of both Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, who provided the backbone of the National Government’s domestic policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

This all served as the springboard to Wilson’s next career step, which was to take him to the heights of power and, finally, to public disgrace and obscurity. His career became intertwined with the schemes of his ultimate boss, Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the Civil Service. Fisher had immense ambitions for his own job and the Civil Service as a whole. By dint of some far-fetched constitutional theorising, he believed that his job entitled him to be the Prime Minister’s chief adviser. Fisher