Beat: Online Poker is RIGGED

johnnydrama · #1 11-05-2007, 03:03 PM

I was never one to believe all that crap about rigged poker. But things that make you go hummm....

This donk was never sitting with more that $1. I stacked him a few hands earlier and he only bought back in for $0.50.

Of course he reloads to the max $2 exactly at the right time. Note his stack on the previous hand

Coincidence!!!??

Ultimate Bet No-Limit Hold'em, $.02 BB (9 handed) Hand History converter Courtesy of PokerZion.com

Button ($.14)
SB ($.46)
Hero ($1.68)
UTG ($.10)
Villian ($.42)
MP1 ($1.32)
MP2 ($1.09)
MP3 ($1.84)
CO ($.83)

Preflop: Hero is BB with K[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], A[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img].
7 folds, SB completes, Hero checks.

Flop: ($0.04) J[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], K[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] (2 players)
SB bets $0.02, Hero raises to $0.06, SB calls $0.04.

Turn: ($0.16) 6[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $0.4, SB folds.

Final Pot: $0.56

Results: No showdown. Hero wins $0.56.

Ultimate Bet No-Limit Hold'em, $.02 BB (9 handed) Hand History converter Courtesy of PokerZion.com

CO ($.14)
Button ($.38)
Hero ($1.75)
BB ($.10)
Villian ($2)
UTG+1 ($1.32)
MP1 ($1.09)
MP2 ($1.84)
MP3 ($.83)

Preflop: Hero is SB with A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img].
Villian calls $0.02, 2 folds, MP2 calls $0.02, 2 folds, Button raises to $0.04, Hero raises to $0.16, 1 fold, Villian calls $0.14, MP2 raises to $0.7, Button folds, Hero raises to $1.75 (All-In), Villian calls $1.59, MP2 calls $1.05.

Flop: ($5.31) 4[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], 8[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], 4[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] (3 players, 1 all-in)
Villian checks, MP2 bets $0.09 (All-In), Villian calls $0.09.

Turn: ($5.49) 9[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] (3 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($5.49) T[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] (3 players, 2 all-in)

Final Pot: $5.49

Results :
Hero has Ad As (two pair, aces and fours).
Villian has Ac Qc (flush, ace high).
MP2 has Kd Kh (two pair, kings and fours).
Outcome: Villain wins $5.49.

thac · #2 11-05-2007, 03:05 PM

OH NOES DEY BE STEELIN MAH PENNYS

Stake Monster · #3 11-05-2007, 03:05 PM

Dan87 · #4 11-05-2007, 03:12 PM

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965), prime minister, was born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the family home of the dukes of Marlborough, on 30 November 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill (1849–1895), was the third son of the seventh duke and a descendant of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, Queen Anne's commander-in-chief during the War of the Spanish Succession. His mother, Jeanette (Jennie) Churchill (1854–1921), was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York financier whose ancestors had fought against the British in the American War of Independence. According to a Jerome family tradition accepted by Churchill himself, Jennie's mother, Clara, was of Iroquois descent, but proof is lacking.
Childhood
Jennie and Lord Randolph were married at the British embassy in Paris on 15 April 1874. Winston Churchill's date of birth has given rise to speculation that he was conceived before the wedding, but the only certainty is that he was born prematurely. Preparations were made for the birth to take place in London, but after slipping and falling during a visit to Blenheim Jennie went into labour, the local doctor was summoned, and the baby was delivered at 1.30 a.m. on 30 November.

When the seventh duke was appointed viceroy of Ireland in January 1877, the Churchills moved to Dublin. Winston was accompanied by his nanny, Mrs Elizabeth Everest, who took him for walks in Phoenix Park and warned him against a group of evil men known as Fenians. Shortly after the birth of his brother John Strange Spencer (Jack) Churchill (1880–1947) in February 1880, the family returned to London, where Winston began to build up an impressive collection of toy soldiers in the nursery. At eight he was sent to a boarding-school at Ascot where the headmaster took a pleasure in flogging the boys until their bottoms ran with blood. Winston performed well in some subjects but his reports often referred to his unruly behaviour. According to one authority, he was birched for stealing sugar from the pantry and retaliated by kicking the headmaster's straw hat to pieces (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.53). When he fell ill his parents transferred him to a school at Brighton where he was much happier but came bottom of the class for conduct.

Neither of Churchill's parents lacked affection for Winston, but they gave him little attention and he felt profoundly neglected. Lord Randolph's short and troubled life was devoted mainly to politics: Winston could recall only two or three long and intimate conversations with him. Lady Randolph, meanwhile, revelled in high society. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star’, Churchill wrote. ‘I loved her dearly—but at a distance’ (Churchill, Early Life, 19). Unlike his brother, Winston developed a powerful ego. His letters home from boarding-school were full of demands for attention, and protests against his parents' failure to meet his wishes. He was fortunate to discover in Mrs Everest a surrogate parent who gave him the love and admiration he craved. He responded with remarkably open displays of affection for his ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’. Inviting her to Harrow, he showed her around the school and walked arm in arm with her up the High Street while other boys jeered at him. During her final illness in July 1895 Churchill, by this time a Sandhurst cadet, rushed to her bedside, afterwards arranging the funeral and the erection of a headstone on her grave. In his novel Savrola (1900) he brought her to life again as the hero's faithful housekeeper, Bettine.
Harrow and Sandhurst
Churchill entered Harrow in April 1888. Convinced that his son was not clever enough for university, Lord Randolph was impressed by the enthusiasm with which he manoeuvred his army of toy soldiers; he arranged for him to enter the army class, which prepared boys for Sandhurst. Legend has it that Winston was academically a bit of a dunce, but he demonstrated great ability in English, history, and chemistry, subjects that captured his imagination. Mathematics, however, baffled him and in spite of personal tuition from the headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon, he detested Latin. Like Richmal Crompton's fictional hero William, whom in many ways he resembled, the schoolboy Winston was a courageous individualist who flouted the rules and got into scrapes. He lacked self-discipline and his teachers often complained of slovenly or unruly behaviour, but censure or punishment served only to provoke him into a long and indignant defence of his actions. Inevitably, perhaps, team sports held little appeal for him, but in spite of frequent bouts of ill health he was a strong swimmer, excelled at rifle shooting, and won the public schools fencing championship in 1892. None of this could appease his father's wrath when he twice failed the entrance exams for Sandhurst, passing in at the third attempt with marks too low to qualify him for the infantry. Lord Randolph's response was a remarkably cruel letter in which he threatened to break off all contact with his son and warned: ‘if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.197).

At Sandhurst, which he entered as an infantry cadet in September 1893, Churchill enjoyed himself. Military topics such as tactics or fortifications were far more appealing to him than mathematics, and horsemanship the greatest of pleasures. In high spirits and working hard, he eventually passed out twentieth out of 130. During his final term he also plunged, for the first time, into public controversy. When the eminent moral reformer Mrs Ormiston Chant organized a campaign to exclude prostitutes from the bar of the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, Churchill incited some of his fellow cadets to riot and pull down the screens which had been put up to separate prostitutes from theatregoers. ‘Ladies of the Empire’, Churchill declared in an impromptu speech, ‘I stand for Liberty!’ (Gilbert, Life, 46–7).

Churchill's late adolescence was overshadowed by the physical and mental decline of Lord Randolph, who had risen to be chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Salisbury's government of 1886, but overplayed his hand, resigned, and never held office again. As a gentleman cadet Churchill had begun to win his father's respect, but just as the relationship between father and son was about to ripen it was cut short by Lord Randolph's death, at the age of forty-five, on 24 January 1895. His neurologist, Dr Buzzard, diagnosed his illness as syphilis, though it has recently been argued that his symptoms could have been caused by a tumour on the brain (Mather, 23–8).
Cavalry officer and war correspondent: Cuba, India, and Omdurman
Although unaware of Buzzard's diagnosis, Churchill believed that Lord Randolph's death, like that of his brother the eighth duke of Marlborough, ‘was yet further proof that the Churchills died young’ (Gilbert, Life, 49). Driven by the need to appease his father's ghost and vindicate his reputation, he was desperate to make his mark before it was too late. But he was also free at last of Lord Randolph's restraining hand and ready to embark on adventures of his own. After passing out from Sandhurst he obtained his commission (20 February 1895) as a cavalry officer in the Queen's Own hussars. Here he acquired a passion for polo, a game he was to enjoy playing for the next three decades. But much as he enjoyed soldiering he regarded it as a means to an end: the making of a reputation that would propel him into the House of Commons. In October 1895 he travelled with his friend Reggie Barnes to Cuba to report on the rebellion against Spanish rule for the Daily Graphic. Visiting New York en route he was entertained by the Irish-American politician Bourke Cockran, an old flame of Lady Randolph, whose eloquence and oratory made a lasting impression on him. Churchill's twenty-first birthday (30 November 1895) found him in the company of Spanish forces suppressing a rebellion in Cuba. Here he saw shots fired in anger for the first time, and acquired two lifelong habits: Havana cigars, and siestas.

In October 1896 Churchill sailed with his regiment to India. Comfortably quartered in the British military compound at Bangalore, he displayed little interest in the subcontinent around him, but followed the political news from home with the eagerness and frustration of an exile. With his thoughts fixed firmly on a parliamentary career, he was worried by the fact that unlike so many other ambitious young men he lacked a university education. Enlisting the aid of Lady Randolph, he pursued a remarkable programme of self-education. During the long afternoons while the regiment rested, he devoured the works of Plato, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Macaulay, Hallam, Lecky, Darwin, and Winwood Reade, supplemented by volumes of the Annual Register, in which he annotated the summaries of old parliamentary debates with imaginary contributions of his own. Churchill's reading affected both his prose style, which he modelled on Gibbon and Macaulay, and his view of the world. Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, a classic of Victorian atheism, completed his loss of faith in orthodox Christianity and left him with a sombre vision of a godless universe in which humanity was destined, nevertheless, to progress through the conflict between the more advanced and the more backward races. He passed for a time through an aggressively anti-religious phase, but this eventually gave way to a more tolerant belief in the workings of some kind of divine providence.

Churchill's belief that he was destined to accomplish great things was accompanied by a daring scheme of self-advertisement. He told Lady Randolph,
A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the Company's star. Thence hot-foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box. (Churchill and Gilbert, Companion, vol. 1, pt 2, p. 676)
Between 1897 and 1900, with the aid of assiduous lobbying by his mother, he managed to fight in three of Queen Victoria's wars while doubling as a war correspondent and turning all three of his experiences into books.

When the attacks of Afghan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India led to the formation of a punitive expeditionary force, under the command of Sir Bindon Blood, Churchill obtained an attachment to the force and a contract as a war correspondent with the Daily Telegraph. He took part in several skirmishes in which he came under fire and witnessed acts of barbarism by both sides. On his return to Bangalore he expanded his reports into his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), which combined an incisive narrative of the fighting with vivid accounts of the landscape and its inhabitants. By this time he was also writing a novel, Savrola (1900), a melodramatic tale of a liberal revolution in an autocratic Mediterranean state: the hero, Savrola, was a compound of himself and Lord Randolph. His work on the book was interrupted, in the summer of 1898, by the final stages of the campaign for the reconquest of the Sudan.

This time it was the Morning Post which commissioned Churchill to report the war. Overcoming the objections of Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force, Churchill obtained a temporary posting with the 21st lancers, and arrived in the Sudan in time to take part in the celebrated cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898), in which the regiment galloped by accident into a hidden ravine crammed with armed men. Churchill, who shot and killed at least three of the enemy with his Mauser pistol, was cool and courageous but lucky to survive a bout of hand-to-hand fighting in which 22 British officers and men were killed. Nevertheless he was eager to renew the charge at once. ‘Another fifty or sixty casualties would have made our performance historic’, he explained to Lady Randolph, ‘and made us proud of our race and our blood’ (Russell, 225). The charge of the lancers, however, was only a sideshow with no significance for the main battle, which ended in the defeat and mass slaughter of the Dervishes. Over 30,000 were killed, compared with 28 British officers and men—lancers included.

For a second time Churchill now expanded his war correspondence into a book: The River War (1899), a two-volume work in which the story of the campaign was firmly embedded in a remarkably sympathetic history of the Sudanese revolt against Egyptian rule. Churchill wrote:
Those whose practice it is to regard their own nation as possessing a monopoly of virtue and common sense are wont to ascribe every military enterprise of savage people to fanaticism. They calmly ignore obvious and legitimate motives … upon the whole there exists no better case for rebellion than presented itself to the Soudanese. (Churchill, River War, 1973, 22)
Churchill was also critical of aspects of British imperialism. He censured Kitchener for his part in the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb and the slaughter of wounded dervish soldiers. For all that, he never doubted the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British in Asia and Africa.
The South African War
In the spring of 1899 Churchill completed his tour of duty in India, returned home, and resigned his commission. By the time of the outbreak of the South African War, Churchill had negotiated a contract with the Morning Post which made him the highest-paid war correspondent of the day, with a salary of £250 per month and all expenses paid. The journalist J. B. Atkins, who sailed to South Africa on the same ship, recalled:
He was slim, slightly reddish-haired, pale, lively, frequently plunging along the deck ‘with neck out-thrust’ as Browning fancied Napoleon … when the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shone from him that he was almost transfigured. I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy. (Atkins, 122)
Hastening to the battle front, Churchill was accompanying an armoured train on a reconnaissance mission in Natal when the train was ambushed (15 November 1899). Revealing again an ice-cool nerve, he seized command of the situation and organized a successful attempt to free the engine, but was captured and interned with other British captives in the States Model School in Pretoria. Later it was sometimes alleged that Churchill gave his word to his captors that if released he would not take up arms against them, and subsequently broke his parole. As no promise to release him was ever made, this was untrue. But he did persuade Captain Aylmer Haldane and Sergeant-Major Brockie to include him in their escape plan, on the understanding that all three would leave together. In the event Churchill climbed out first and, finding that his fellow escapees were unable to join him, set off on his own. After a series of adventures worthy of John Buchan's hero Richard Hannay he escaped via Portuguese East Africa and arrived in triumph in Durban.

Standing out in sharp relief from the military disasters of ‘black week’, Churchill's exploits made him the hero of the hour. His new fame enabled him to override the objections of the War Office and assume once more the dual role of officer—lieutenant in the South African light horse—and war correspondent. In April 1900 he joined the column commanded by his friend Sir Ian Hamilton as it advanced through the Orange Free State to the Transvaal. Galloping over the veldt with his cousin and boon companion Charles Richard John Spencer (Sunny) Churchill, the ninth duke of Marlborough (1871–1934), fortified by regular supplies from Fortnum and Mason, and attended by his valet, Thomas Walden, Churchill was often in the thick of the fighting and again proved himself to be a first-class war correspondent. He turned his dispatches, this time with little adaptation, into two books: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), which included the story of his escape, and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). The South African War also left an enduring imprint on Churchill's thinking. It convinced him that war was too dangerous to be left to the generals.
Unionist MP
While on leave from India during the summer of 1897 Churchill had made contact with Conservative Party managers and delivered his first speech, at Claverton Manor outside Bath (26 June 1897). Two years later, when the sudden death of the MP for Oldham created a vacancy in one of the constituency's two seats, he was adopted as the Conservative candidate at the ensuing by-election, but was defeated by his Liberal opponent. In autumn 1900, when Lord Salisbury decided to call a general election, Churchill again stood for Oldham. This time his fame tipped the balance and he was returned with a small majority. As there was no autumn session of parliament he put the time to good use with a lecture tour of the United Kingdom, followed by a similar tour in the United States and Canada. The story of his escape from the Boers, accompanied by a magic-lantern show, netted him the handsome sum of £10,000, which he handed over to the banker Sir Ernest Cassel to invest on his behalf.

Churchill delivered his maiden speech to the House of Commons on 18 February 1901. While strongly supporting the war in South Africa he caused some alarm on the Conservative benches when he declared: ‘If I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field’ (Gilbert, Life, 139). Having acquired a considerable respect for the Boers he wished to see them offered generous peace terms, a theme he was to emphasize repeatedly over the next few years. Nor was this the only issue on which he diverged from the government. He launched a devastating attack on the secretary of state for war, St John Brodrick, whose proposals for army reform he condemned as increasing military expenditure for no strategic purpose. Imitating the parliamentary tactics once employed by his father, he organized with his friend Lord Hugh Cecil a group of young tory MPs who specialized in the harassment of their own leaders and called themselves the Hughligans. Increasingly in sympathy with the opposition, Churchill was closely in touch with Rosebery, Morley, and other leading Liberals.

Churchill was already a perennial subject of gossip and speculation. Physically he was unimpressive. At 5 feet 6½ inches, slenderly built, with a 31 inch chest, rounded shoulders, delicate skin, ginger hair, and a pugnacious baby face with twinkling blue eyes, he was striking but not handsome. Though he was a fluent writer, he spoke with a lisp and his speeches were the result of long and elaborate preparation. His practice at first was to deliver the whole of a speech from memory, but after an alarming experience in April 1904 in which he ‘dried up’ in the House of Commons, he never spoke without copious notes. On those who met him he generally made an instant and powerful impression, though not always a favourable one. Hyperactive and transparently on the make, he was far from the English ideal of a gentleman. To many of his fellow officers he appeared pushy and bumptious. Offspring though he was of the landed aristocracy, he belonged to a plutocratic milieu in which old and new wealth rubbed shoulders. His friends included great financiers like Cassel and Baron de Forest, who invited him aboard their yachts for Mediterranean cruises, or played host in magnificent villas and castles on the continent. Churchill enjoyed fox-hunting and country-house weekends but he was equally at home at the gambling tables of the French Riviera. Meeting him for the first time in July 1903, Beatrice Webb thought him ‘egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character. More of the American speculator than the English aristocrat’ (Diary, 287).
Joins the Liberals: Colonial Office
When Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister in May 1902, there was no place in the new government for Churchill. Then in May 1903 Joseph Chamberlain raised the banner of tariff reform. Churchill announced that he was strongly in favour of free trade and soon became one of the most active of the ‘free fooders’, a group of about sixty Conservative MPs fighting a losing battle for the cause. At the head of a divided party Balfour himself could only procrastinate, a predicament which laid him open to the taunts of Churchill, whose platform speeches combined lucid expositions of political economy with political slapstick. Most Conservative adherents of free trade decided to remain in the party, but Churchill, after some hesitation, crossed the floor of the house and took his seat, next to David Lloyd George, on the Liberal benches (31 May 1904). He had already accepted an invitation from the Liberal Association of North-West Manchester to contest the forthcoming general election as the free-trade candidate. During the next eighteen months, as the Balfour government drifted helplessly towards the rocks, Churchill attacked his former party with a ferocity that gave rise to lasting enmities and the accusation that he was a turncoat.

Churchill shrugged off charges of opportunism. It was the Conservatives, he argued, who had abandoned their principles. For good measure he claimed that he was following in the footsteps of his father, whose life he was then writing. In Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), he presented his father as a tory with increasingly radical sympathies, who would probably have opposed the South African War had he lived. His own Liberalism, therefore, could be construed as a continuation of tory democracy. Reviewers were not wholly persuaded by Churchill's portrait of his father as an earnest Victorian statesman, but they acclaimed the book as a literary tour de force and a well-documented political history in which the reputations of the living were handled with delicacy and tact.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became prime minister in December 1905 Churchill achieved ministerial office for the first time as under-secretary at the Colonial Office. One of his first acts was to appoint the civil servant and scholar Edward Marsh as his private secretary, a role in which he was to serve Churchill in every one of the offices he held between 1905 and 1929. In the ensuing general election the Liberals won a landslide victory and Churchill was elected MP for North-West Manchester.

Since the colonial secretary, Lord Elgin, was a member of the House of Lords, Churchill had the responsibility of handling colonial affairs in the Commons. In March 1906 his first important ministerial speech went badly wrong. While seeking to defend Milner from a motion of censure over the question of ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa he unwittingly gave the impression of gloating over his downfall, thus rubbing salt into Conservative wounds. Remembered against him for years to come, the episode was an early example of a flaw in his oratorical style: an overbearing manner that seemed intended to humiliate his opponents, of whose injured feelings he was largely unaware. In July he recovered with a statesmanlike speech announcing the restoration of self-government in the Transvaal, a policy to which he had made a significant contribution.

Delighted by his new responsibilities, Churchill ranged inquisitively over the affairs of scores of British colonies, annotating documents with a red fountain pen. As one historian has written: ‘He had a generous and sensitive, if highly paternalistic, sympathy for subject peoples, and a determination to see that justice was done to humble individuals throughout the empire’ (Hyam, 503). In autumn 1907 he set out on a tour of east Africa which began as a hunting expedition but turned into a semi-official inquiry into colonial affairs. In Kenya he went big-game hunting and investigated the conditions of African contract workers. In Uganda he visited Christian missions, took tea with Daudi Chewa, the eleven-year-old kabaka of Buganda, and took up with great enthusiasm the project for a dam across the Ripon Falls. It would, he concluded,
be hard to find a country where the conditions were more favourable than in Uganda to a practical experiment in State Socialism … A class of rulers is provided by an outside power as remote from, and in all that constitutes fitness to direct, as superior to the Baganda as Mr Wells's Martians would have been to us. (Churchill, African Journey, 70–71)
In the interludes Churchill dictated memoranda for the Colonial Office, and a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, later published as My African Journey (1908). Even in Africa he gave much thought to the future of politics at home and the prospects for the ‘new Liberalism’ of social reform, which had begun to attract him. On his return home he published an article, ‘The untrodden field in politics’, advocating a more active role for the state in the economy and the establishment of a national minimum standard to mitigate poverty.
Cabinet minister and marriage
When Asquith succeeded as prime minister in March 1908 he took the bold step of bringing Churchill into the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade (16 April 1908). At thirty-three, he was the youngest cabinet minister since 1866. Since constitutional convention required that a minister entering the cabinet must resign his seat, Churchill was compelled to contest Manchester North-West for a second time in a by-election, which he lost. He at once accepted an invitation to stand for the safe Liberal seat of Dundee, where he was returned at a by-election in May 1908 and remained MP until 1922.

A great admirer of beautiful women, but self-centred and gauche in their company, Churchill had already proposed to Pamela Plowden and Ethel Barrymore, only to be rejected by both. Then, at a dinner party early in 1908, he was re-introduced to Clementine Hozier (1885–1977) [see Churchill, Clementine Ogilvy Spencer], whom he had met briefly once before. Bowled over, he began an ardent courtship. In August he proposed, and was accepted, as they took shelter from the rain in the Temple of Diana overlooking the lake at Blenheim Palace. With Hugh Cecil as best man, and the bishop of St Asaph conducting the ceremony, Winston and Clementine were married at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 12 September 1908.

Churchill expected his wife to be a loyal follower, and it was a role she was content to play. The unhappy child of a disastrous marriage and a financially precarious home, Clementine found in Winston a faithful husband who loved her, sustained her in material comfort, and placed her in the front row of a great historical drama. He could never be accused of marrying for money or running after other women. She, for her part, was never uncritical of her husband or afraid to express her opinions. A lifelong Liberal, with a puritan streak, she never approved of his more louche tory companions such as F. E. Smith, a close friend from 1907 onwards, or Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, introduced to Churchill by ‘F. E.’ in 1911. Winston, nevertheless, discussed all his political affairs with her and she often gave him sound advice, which he seldom took. Given the dissimilarities between them, it was not surprising that Winston and Clementine sometimes quarrelled furiously. She once threw a dish of spinach at him, and missed. Nevertheless they were quick to make up after a row, and their marriage was sustained by a lifelong mutual affection expressed in their pet names for each other. Winston was always ‘Pug’ or ‘Pig’, Clementine ‘Kat’, and the children ‘the Kittens’. Their first child, Diana, was born in 1909. Their only son, Randolph Churchill followed in 1911, and Sarah in 1914. Marigold was born in 1918, but died in 1921, and the youngest daughter, Mary, was born in 1922.
Social policy at the Board of Trade
By the time of his marriage Churchill was working in close alliance with the ‘Welsh wizard’ David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer. As Asquith's daughter Violet observed, Lloyd George was undoubtedly the dominant partner:
His was the only personal leadership I have ever known Winston to accept unquestioningly in the whole of his career. He was fascinated by a mind more swift and agile than his own … From Lloyd George he was to learn the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George's native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference’. (Bonham-Carter, Churchill, 161)
Lloyd George encouraged Churchill to concentrate on social policy. Drawing on the advice of his officials he promoted three major reforms: the Trade Boards Act of 1909 which introduced statutory minimum wages into the ‘sweated trades’; state-run labour exchanges, planned by the young William Beveridge, whom Churchill recruited as a civil servant specifically for the purpose; and compulsory unemployment insurance, which later became a part of Lloyd George's National Insurance Act of 1911. Though none of these measures was especially controversial in itself, they were part of a wider radical strategy which Lloyd George and Churchill urged on the cabinet, and for which they campaigned at great public meetings. In order to pay for welfare reforms they demanded reductions in the defence budget, precipitating a cabinet crisis over the naval estimates of 1909. Proclaiming something very like their own foreign policy of peace with Germany, they denounced the prophets of a great European war as alarmists. The greatest threat to Britain's imperial might, Churchill declared, was from the internal decay of its people. But Liberalism, in his view, was the antithesis of socialism. ‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth’, he declared in May 1908. ‘Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty … Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference’ (Addison, 66).

When in April 1909 the House of Lords took the unprecedented step of rejecting the proposals of the ‘people's budget’ for increased taxes on the wealthy, Churchill as president of the budget league toured the country denouncing the peers and the Conservative Party. Collected and published in 1909 as The People's Rights, his speeches display him at his most radical. Conservatives, of course, detested both Lloyd George and Churchill, but Churchill was the more despised for ‘betraying’ both his party and his class. Indeed he was ostracized and traduced, as he recalled in old age:
They said that I beat Clemmie and that you could hear her crying as you passed our house. They said that I drugged, and if you rolled up my sleeve, my arm was a mass of piqures. We were cut by people we had known well and had looked on as friends. (Montague Brown, 147)
The Liberals meanwhile, though grateful for the loan of Churchill's talents, could never forget that he was an aristocrat who had begun his career as a soldier and a tory.
Home secretary
After the general election of January 1910 Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office, where his many responsibilities ranged from the supervision of the Metropolitan Police to the regulation of prisons, borstals, factories, coalmines, and shops. Churchill was eager to pursue an agenda of social reform. Persuaded by the arguments of eugenicists, who maintained that the ‘quality of the race’ was degenerating due to the multiplication of the ‘unfit’, he was briefly an enthusiastic supporter of the compulsory sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded’. Nothing came of this, but he did secure the passage of a bill to regulate the hours and conditions of shop assistants. In penal policy he made very active use of the home secretary's right to intervene, frequently mitigating the harsh sentences awarded by magistrates for petty crime. A firm believer in capital punishment, he nevertheless agonized over the fate of prisoners under sentence of death and reprieved many of them. His ambitious plans for reducing the number of petty criminals sent to prison were, however, thwarted by the brevity of his tenure of the Home Office.

Churchill's more constructive endeavours as home secretary were overshadowed by controversial problems of law and order. Although he was on record as favouring votes for women in principle, he detested the suffragettes for interrupting his meetings. Warning that he would not be ‘henpecked’ on the issue, he found reasons to object to the suffrage bill of 1910 and subjected it to a slashing attack in the House of Commons. In November 1910 a suffragette rally at Westminster was met by the police with extremely rough tactics in which several women were injured. Churchill was not personally responsible for ‘black Friday’, but he rejected all allegations against the police and refused to institute an inquiry.

Within a few days of black Friday a dispute in the south Wales coalfield led to a strike by miners employed by the Cambrian Colliery. Riots and looting broke out in the town of Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley and one of the rioters was fatally injured in a struggle with the Glamorganshire police. The local magistrates pleaded with the Home Office to authorize the dispatch of troops. Recognizing that any direct clash between troops and strikers might result in bloodshed, Churchill at first refused the request of the local authorities, and sent instead a contingent of the Metropolitan Police. But twenty-four hours later, when it was clear that the riots were continuing unabated, Churchill authorized the dispatch of troops. In a bold and imaginative stroke, which may have been unconstitutional, he appointed General Nevil Macready to command both troops and police, with instructions to ensure that the police acted as a buffer between the strikers and the troops. He thereby took control out of the hands of the local authorities, who might well have been tempted to employ both police and troops as strike-breakers.

Churchill's conduct of the Tonypandy affair prevented further bloodshed, but he was strongly attacked by Keir Hardie for condoning brutality on the part of the Metropolitan Police. Afterwards the legend grew that Churchill had sent troops to shoot down striking Welsh miners. Although this was a gross distortion, Churchill's response to industrial unrest was not always cool and measured. During the summer of 1911, when strikes in the docks spread to the railways, he was seized by a nightmare vision of a starving community held to ransom by industrial anarchists. Overriding the local authorities, he dispatched troops to many parts of the country and gave army commanders discretion to employ them. When rioters tried to prevent the movement of a train at Llanelli, troops opened fire and two of the rioters were shot dead. Together with Tonypandy, these events marked a turning point in Churchill's relations with the Labour Party and the trade unions. His record as a social reformer was eclipsed by his new reputation as a class warrior with a ‘Prussian’ love of order, maintained if necessary by military force.

The impression was deepened by a famous episode in January 1911. Hunted down by the police, a number of Russian anarchists, led by ‘Peter the Painter’, took refuge in a house in Sidney Street, in the East End of London, and fired at the police. Churchill hastened to the scene, where his conspicuous presence in the danger zone—recorded by a press photographer—led critics to accuse him of seizing operational control from the police. The charge was mistaken. When the house suddenly caught fire, Churchill confirmed the decision of the police to let it burn down, but otherwise he was simply an enthralled spectator whose antics caused much amusement. In the House of Commons Balfour enquired: ‘I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.409). Though he was still at the forefront of domestic politics, the soldier in Churchill was never far below the surface. As he explained to Clementine in May 1909:
I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgment on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations. (Soames, 23)
From 1910 onwards, contact with the intelligence services made Churchill apprehensive about German intentions and he began to think seriously about the implications of a major war. At about the same time, and possibly as a consequence, there were signs that he was moving to the right. In September 1910 Lloyd George told Churchill that he had two alternatives for the future: a coalition in which the Liberals and Conservatives reached a compromise over the issues that divided them, and a Liberal government with an advanced land and social policy. Churchill was all for a coalition and henceforth made various efforts to find common ground with his Conservative opponents. With a view to assuaging the bitterness caused by the House of Lords crisis, Churchill and F. E. Smith in May 1911 co-founded the Other Club, a bipartisan dining club of which the Liberal and Conservative chief whips were both members.
First lord of the Admiralty
The Agadir crisis of July–August 1911 aroused the strategist in Churchill and he composed for the cabinet an important paper entitled ‘Military aspects of the continental problem’. At Asquith's invitation he attended a critical meeting of the committee of imperial defence, which revealed a complete lack of co-ordination between the plans of the Admiralty and the War Office. Much impressed by Churchill's interventions, and by his obvious desire to take charge of the Royal Navy, Asquith appointed him first lord of the Admiralty in October 1911.

Tradition has it that when an admiral spoke reverently to him of naval tradition, Churchill retorted: ‘What are the traditions of the Navy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!’ In later years he explained that he had never said this, but wished that he had. His mission at the Admiralty was to modernize. Many of the reforms he proposed were inspired by the retired first sea lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher, with whom he was in almost daily contact. But Churchill, of course, also had great confidence in his own judgement and was ready to act boldly.

Churchill's first act was to replace three of the four sea lords. Sir Arthur Wilson was succeeded as first sea lord by Sir Francis Bridgeman, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German prince and naturalized British subject, was appointed second sea lord. A dashing young officer, David Beatty, became Churchill's naval secretary. Subsequently, in December 1912, Churchill coerced Bridgeman into retirement, appointing Battenberg in his place. Churchill displayed little respect for many of the senior officers of the Royal Navy, whom he regarded as unimaginative and set in their ways. One of his first actions, in line with Fisher's advice, was to establish a naval war staff of three divisions—operations, intelligence, and mobilization—to prepare and co-ordinate war plans. With the assistance of Herbert Richmond he sought to encourage the interest of naval officers in history and strategy, and helped to launch a new periodical, the Naval Review. Eager to explore almost every aspect of naval affairs, Churchill set out to discover the facts for himself. Making frequent use of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress—where he also entertained his political friends from time to time—he inspected ships, dockyards, and naval installations with a vigilant eye. In defiance of protocol he sometimes bypassed senior naval officers and sought information directly from junior officers or ordinary seamen.

Many of the admirals were unimpressed. According to the second sea lord, Sir John Jellicoe, Churchill's fatal error was ‘his entire inability to realize his own limitations as a civilian … quite ignorant of naval affairs’ (Marder, From the Dreadnought, 255). But the admirals, like so many of the experts Churchill was to encounter, were often blinkered by convention. ‘In matters of technical advance’, writes one historian of Churchill and the navy, ‘the First Lord was always in the van, always supporting the pioneers, always sweeping aside the obstruction of the unimaginative’ (Gretton, 117). With Fisher's encouragement he developed a fast division of battleships, the Queen Elizabeth class, equipped with the new 15 inch gun. He pressed on with converting the fleet from coal-fired to oil-fired engines. In June 1914 he announced that he had negotiated the purchase by the British government of 51 per cent of the shares in the Anglo-Iranian oil company, thus ensuring a guaranteed supply of oil for the fleet. He promoted the development of submarines and air power, wresting full control of the Royal Naval Air Service from the War Office. In 1913, much to Clementine's alarm, he took up flying lessons and took to the air 150 times, after which she persuaded him to give up flying—for the moment.

Churchill was determined that Britain should retain a clear margin of naval supremacy over Germany. In a speech in Glasgow on 8 February 1912 he argued that for Britain a large navy was a necessity whereas for Germany it was a ‘luxury’—a comment which provoked much German anger. When the draft of a new German naval law proposed a further increase in the size of the German fleet, Churchill obtained the cabinet's approval in principle for an expansion of the British naval programme. At the same time he refurbished his Liberal credentials by floating the idea of a ‘naval holiday’, or joint suspension of naval construction by both countries. Following the German rejection of this idea, Churchill sought a naval arrangement with France under which the British Mediterranean Fleet would be withdrawn and concentrated in home waters, leaving the French to patrol the Mediterranean. Since this would involve the British in a pledge to defend the channel and Atlantic coasts of France, it was tantamount to a military alliance. After long and complex arguments the cabinet agreed in July 1912, but Churchill's expansionist naval policy, and the strengthening of the Anglo-French entente, alienated the radical wing of the Liberal Party and confirmed growing speculation that he was ‘moving to the right’ or preparing to rejoin the Conservative Party. During the winter of 1913–14 Churchill's insistence on the construction of another four dreadnoughts, and a further increase in the naval estimates, led to a crisis in which he found himself at loggerheads with Lloyd George, the majority of the cabinet, and most of the Liberal Party. Only the delaying tactics of Asquith, and a last-minute decision by Lloyd George to concede most of Churchill's demands, averted his resignation.
Ulster crisis and federal devolution of the United Kingdom
As first lord, Churchill tended to concentrate on naval matters to the exclusion of everything else. ‘You have become a water creature’, Lloyd George told him in July 1912. ‘You think we all live in the sea, and all your thoughts are devoted to sea life, fishes and other aquatic creatures’ (Riddell, More Pages, 78). Nevertheless Churchill was actively involved in the greatest political issue of the day: Irish home rule. Lord Randolph Churchill had famously declared: ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’. His son took the opposite line, denouncing Bonar Law and the Conservatives for inciting rebellion. In February 1912 he attempted to confront a Unionist audience in Belfast in the very same hall in which his father had spoken in 1886, but so great was the threat to his safety that the meeting had to be moved at the last minute to the Celtic Road football stadium. In private, however, Churchill made persistent efforts to find a compromise. One possibility, which he proposed in the secrecy of the cabinet room in March 1911, was to include Ireland in an all-round scheme of federal devolution, with seven regional parliaments in England alongside parliaments for Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The cabinet, however, decided in favour of a single parliament for the whole of Ireland. In September 1912 he caused something of a sensation by airing the concept of federal devolution in a speech in Dundee. By analogy with the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, it became known as Churchill's plan to revive the ‘heptarchy’. Twice in that same year Churchill urged the cabinet, without success, to offer temporary exclusion from home rule to the predominantly protestant counties. During the winter of 1913–14 he was the principal go-between in a number of secret moves to promote a bipartisan settlement. On the Conservative side his main contact was F. E. Smith, who was both a personal friend and a fervent champion of Ulster. Churchill, it was said, was threatening to quit the cabinet if force were employed against Ulster: ‘You understand that if a shot is fired I shall go out’ (ibid., 194).

As the hour at which the Home Rule Bill would become law approached, the Ulster Unionists rejected out of hand a belated offer by Asquith to allow the protestant counties to opt out for a six-year period. Churchill now changed tack, arguing that, having obtained a compromise, the Ulster Unionists must accept it. He was also eager to restore his standing in the Liberal Party. In a speech at Bradford on 14 March 1914 he issued a stern warning that Ulster Unionists must agree to the government's plan or take the consequences: ‘There are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extended scale’, he declared (Rhodes James, 62).

Meanwhile the cabinet was much alarmed by police reports suggesting that the Ulster Volunteers were planning a military coup. A cabinet committee under Churchill authorized precautionary troop movements and Churchill himself, as first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the 5th battle squadron to steam to Lamlash, menacingly close to Belfast. His actions convinced the Conservatives that the government was planning an ‘Ulster pogrom’—an impression rapidly confirmed by the notorious episode of the ‘Curragh mutiny’, when fifty-seven of the seventy officers of the 3rd cavalry brigade declared that they would rather be dismissed than take part in the coercion of Ulster. Churchill often employed provocative language on the public platform while pursuing relatively conciliatory policies behind the scenes. Contemporaries, however, tended to equate extremism of style with extremism of intent. Churchill was partly to blame for the Conservative belief that he had attempted a pogrom. First World War: early naval engagements and the defence of Antwerp
On the eve of war in July 1914 Churchill wrote to his wife: ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.710). When Austria declared war on Serbia two days later, Churchill, acting with Asquith's approval, ordered the fleets to their battle stations. In the critical cabinet discussions over the next few days Churchill, Grey, and Haldane were consistently in favour of British intervention while others, including Lloyd George, wavered.

One historian wrote:
Churchill took a more active part in the day-to-day running of the war than any First Lord in history. His were many of the ideas for action; it was he who drafted many of the signals to the ships. He studied and analysed each operation with great care. (Gretton, 147)
Churchill's interventionism, which he scarcely bothered to conceal, was a double-edged sword. Though he stood to gain the credit from successful actions by the Royal Navy, he was sure to get the blame when things went wrong. During the first few months of the war the Germans achieved a number of naval successes for which Churchill was strongly criticized. In August two German battleships, the Goeben and the Breslau, escaped from the Adriatic through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. On 21 September Churchill boasted that if the German fleet did not come out and fight they would be ‘dug out like rats in a hole’ (Gilbert, Life, 281), but on the following day the Germans sank three British cruisers, with the loss of 1459 officers and men, off the Dogger Bank. Two more British cruisers were sunk at the battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November. On 16 December German battlecruisers shelled Scarborough and other east coast ports, killing or injuring 500 civilians. Criticism of the Admiralty mounted and was only partially offset by successful actions off the Falkland Islands (8 December) and the Dogger Bank (25 January 1915).

Enthralled by all aspects of the fighting, Churchill was eager to play a part in the land war and ingenious in stretching the Admiralty's responsibilities. He converted the naval reserve into the Royal Naval division, an infantry force of 15,000 men, in which many of his friends were commissioned as officers. Although Churchill promised that the division would later be transferred to the control of the War Office, he now had at his disposal something very like a private army. He also established what soon became known as his ‘Dunkirk circus’, three squadrons of aircraft which bombed German defences from airfields in northern France, protected by a force of Rolls-Royce cars with armour-plating. His response to the deadlock on the western front was to sponsor the idea of a ‘land ship’, an armoured troop carrier mounted on caterpillars, that would shield them from the field of fire as they approached the enemy trenches. A prototype was housed in the Admiralty basement.

For three-and-a-half days in October 1914 Churchill found himself in virtual command of a land battle. The Germans, advancing rapidly along the channel coast, were threatening the Belgian city of Antwerp. The cabinet dispatched Churchill to organize reinforcements and stiffen the resistance of the Belgian government. Churchill did a superb job organizing the defences of Antwerp and delaying the German advance. No sooner was he on the spot than his fascination with the conduct of military operations gained the upper hand. He called in as reinforcements the bulk of three battalions of the Royal Naval division and fired off a telegram offering to resign his cabinet post in return for a high-ranking command in the field. When Asquith read out the telegram to his colleagues there was a roar of laughter and Churchill was ordered home. The laughter illustrated the gulf between Churchill and the other politicians. The politicians were ultimately responsible for the conduct of the war, but since very few of them knew anything of military matters they relied heavily on the judgement of the generals and the admirals. Inside Churchill, however, was a generalissimo struggling to get out. As Churchill's critics saw it, his military ambitions were foolish and his melodramatic defence of Antwerp a tragic sequel to the farce of Sidney Street. When the city fell he was strongly attacked in the press for the apparent failure of the expedition. This, perhaps, was the moment at which long-held suspicions in the political world hardened into the conviction that he lacked judgement.
Gallipoli, removal from Admiralty, and resignation
In October 1914 the first sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced by anti-German prejudice to resign, and Churchill decided to recall the 73-year-old Fisher to take his place. ‘Those who knew them both’, wrote E. T. Williams, ‘realized that the arrangement involving such domineering characters, each used to having his own way, fond as they were of each other, would not work’ (DNB). For a time both Churchill and Fisher were excited by the possibility of a naval operation to capture the island of Borkum in the Baltic. But when the Russian government appealed urgently for action to relieve Turkish pressure in the Caucasus, Kitchener, the secretary for war, urged Churchill to undertake a naval demonstration at the Dardanelles. Churchill replied that a naval attack alone would be insufficient: a combined operation would probably be more effective. Kitchener, however, declared that he could not spare any troops, and again pressed the first lord to mount a naval demonstration. Churchill now dispatched a telegram to Admiral Carden, the commander of the Mediterranean squadron, seeking his opinion on whether it would be possible to force the Dardanelles with the aid of obsolete battleships surplus to requirements in home waters. Carden replied that he thought the Dardanelles might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships. Churchill became captivated by the vision of a fleet sailing through the Dardanelles, bombarding and destroying the Turkish forts and gun batteries on both sides of the straits, and provoking by their appearance in front of Constantinople a revolution and the withdrawal of Turkey from the war. The supply lines to and from Russia through the straits would be opened up, and the Balkan states rallied to the cause of the allies: at a stroke the military balance would be transformed.

Such was the vision. The outcome was a disaster. Both Kitchener and Churchill wavered between the concept of an operation carried out by ships alone, with troops landing subsequently as an occupation force, and a combined naval and military operation. A naval attack was finally launched on 18 March 1915 under the command of Admiral De Robeck. Whether it could ever have succeeded against the dual threat of minefield defences and gunfire from the Turkish forts remains a subject for debate. After the loss of three battleships De Robeck halted the attack and in spite of Churchill's pleas and injunctions refused to renew it. The war council now came down definitely in favour of a combined operation and the purely Churchillian phase of the action was over. After many delays and hesitations, a combined British, Australian, and New Zealand expeditionary force under the command of Churchill's friend Sir Ian Hamilton landed on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April. Within a few days it was clear that the troops were pinned down on a narrow stretch of beach with the Turks shelling them from the commanding heights above. The war council authorized further reinforcements, but there was no disguising the fact that the news was bad.

Fortune now deserted Churchill. From the start, Fisher had blown hot and cold about the Dardanelles. Increasingly overwrought and unstable, and fearful of losses, he suddenly cracked when Churchill, without consulting him, added two submarines from home waters to a list of reinforcements for the Mediterranean. On 15 May Fisher resigned and fled into hiding. Churchill might have weathered the storm but for the fact that Asquith, beset by a crisis over munitions, chose this moment to invite the Conservatives into a coalition. Eager to pay off old scores against Churchill, and fearful of his exploits as an amateur strategist, they insisted on his removal from the Admiralty and the war council. Asquith appointed him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, a post that was largely honorific, together with a place on the new Dardanelles committee.

The Gallipoli affair dragged on through the summer and autumn. Though casualties mounted and there was little sign of progress, Churchill continued to champion the operation with unquenchable enthusiasm. By October the majority of the Dardanelles committee had come to the conclusion that the operation should be abandoned and when at last the cabinet decided in favour of withdrawal, Churchill was left with no alternative but to resign from the government. One of the few redeeming features of the Gallipoli affair was the brilliant evacuation with which it was brought to a close in January 1916. By that time, however, some 46,000 allied troops, including 8700 Australians and 2700 New Zealanders, had been killed.

Churchill was, to a great extent, the scapegoat. It was Kitchener who first pressed for a naval operation and Asquith, as prime minister, who authorized it. Fisher concealed his early doubts and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm. Nor did Churchill's responsibility extend much beyond the naval attack on 18 March. The land campaign which began on 25 April was primarily the responsibility of the War Office. Nevertheless Churchill's own egotism and impetuosity were factors in his downfall. He was over-confident of success, trumpeting victory in advance and passionately supporting the operation long after most people had written it off. Gallipoli was a cross to which he nailed himself.

Churchill was devastated by his fall from grace in May 1915. ‘Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths’, he wrote, ‘or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure’ (Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, 307). Nothing could wholly fill the void, but his family proved a great source of strength. Clemmie was a loyal supporter in time of trouble as was Churchill's brother Jack, currently serving at Gallipoli, and his sister-in-law Gwendeline (Goonie). When the Winston Churchills had to leave Admiralty House, they went to live with Goonie and her two children, John and Peregrine, at 41 Cromwell Road. At the weekends the two families would gather at a weekend retreat: Hoe Farm, near Godalming. Here Churchill discovered a powerful antidote to depression. He took up oil-painting and was shown by Hazel Lavery, the wife of Sir John Lavery, how to daub the canvas with bold strokes and bright colours. Soon he was haunting Lavery's studio and painting alongside him. Churchill never claimed to be a professional artist, let alone a great one, but in the course of a lifetime he greatly enjoyed himself painting hundreds of pictures. Whenever he went on holiday abroad he took his easel and paints with him, and even managed to paint one picture during the Second World War—a view of Marrakesh, which he presented to President Roosevelt.
Out of office: the western front and Westminster
After his resignation in November 1915 Churchill sought active service and obtained from Sir John French a promise of the command of a brigade. In the interim he joined the 2nd battalion of the Grenadier Guards at Laventie for training. To Churchill's dismay, Asquith then vetoed his promotion to brigadier-general and ordered that he be given the command of a battalion instead. On 4 January 1916 Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill was placed in command of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He arranged for his friend Archibald (Archie) Sinclair, a highland laird and aspiring Liberal politician, to join him as second in command. Towards the end of January the battalion moved up to the front line, close to the village of Ploegsteert, near Messines on the Franco-Belgian frontier.

Churchill's arrival, and his unorthodox methods of command, caused much astonishment, and some resentment at first among the junior officers. But he proved a good commanding officer, combining leadership and inspiration with a great solicitude for the welfare of the ordinary soldier. He waged a successful campaign against lice, reduced punishments, and organized entertainments. The sector of the front on which he was served was relatively quiet and the battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) took place after he had returned home. But Churchill was frequently under fire and had a number of narrow escapes from death.

Much as Churchill enjoyed soldiering, his military ambitions were thwarted by his modest rank, and he feared that a prolonged absence from Westminster would deny him the chance to restore his fortunes. In March 1916 he returned home on leave to speak in the house but destroyed the effect of an otherwise powerful attack upon Balfour's conduct of the Admiralty with an ill-judged appeal for the return of Fisher as first sea lord. In May 1916 the amalgamation of his battalion with another led to the extinction of his command and gave him a presentable excuse for resigning his commission and coming home. Churchill had spent only 100 days at the front, but the experience had served to confirm his critical estimate of the British high command. To replenish his income, while keeping his name in the public eye, he began to write war commentaries for the press. He also made a number of speeches, critical of the conduct of the war, in the House of Commons. Eagerly awaiting the downfall of Asquith, he planned to ally himself with a victorious combination of Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Curzon, and Carson. They, however, were less eager to ally with him. In the political crisis of December 1916, Asquith was replaced by Lloyd George, but the Unionists under Bonar Law insisted that Churchill should be excluded from the new government.

Churchill's main achievement during this first period in the political wilderness was the partial rehabilitation of his reputation. In June 1916 Asquith agreed to the appointment of a commission to inquire into the responsibility for the Gallipoli operation. Though handicapped by Asquith's refusal to allow him access to the official records, Churchill devoted much of his time to preparing a very eloquent and plausible defence. The first report of the Dardanelles commission, published in March 1917, made it clear that Churchill was not solely or even principally responsible.

After the battle of the Somme, Churchill had come to the conclusion that great offensives on the western front were far more costly to the allies than to the enemy, and ought to be avoided until new methods of attack were invented or overwhelming numerical superiority achieved. In a secret session of the House of Commons on 10 May 1917, Churchill argued the case in a powerful speech. Here was one of the perennial sources of his survival in British politics. No one else could match his ability, on a good day, to sway the House of Commons by the force of his argument. Churchill for his part felt a deep and genuine respect for a body that could make or break him, but also something more: a romantic faith in the providential character of an institution at the heart of British history. One evening in March 1917 he was at the house in the company of Alexander MacCullum Scott, a backbench Liberal MP, who recorded the following scene in his diary:
As we were leaving the House late tonight, he called me into the Chamber to take a last look round. All was darkness except a ring of faint light all around under the gallery. We could dimly see the table, but walls and roof were invisible. ‘Look at it’, he said. ‘This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany's brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world's liberties.’ (MacCullum Scott diary, 5 March 1917, Glasgow University Library, MacCullum Scott MSS)
Minister of munitions
Fearful, perhaps, that Churchill would emerge as the new leader of the opposition, Lloyd George promised to restore him to office. In July 1917, with great difficulty, he obtained Bonar Law's consent to the appointment of Churchill as minister of munitions. Since his new post was outside the war cabinet, this appeared to meet Bonar Law's demand for the exclusion of Churchill from any part in the conduct of the war. Nevertheless 100 Conservative MPs signed a motion deploring his appointment, and the Conservative press complained loudly.

Accompanied by his bust of Napoleon, Churchill moved into the ministry's quarters in the former premises of the Metropole Hotel in Northumberland Avenue. Created by Lloyd George in 1915, it was already in full swing with a staff of 12,000 officials, two and a half million workers employed in its factories, and the output of guns and shells running at record levels. Churchill's brief was to ensure a continuous and increasing flow of production. He began by reorganizing the ministry itself, compressing fifty separate divisions into ten, and creating a munitions council which met daily to co-ordinate and determine policy. The next priority was industrial unrest. Production was threatened by strikes and Churchill took action to redress some of the most prominent grievances. He abolished the ‘leaving certificate’ which prevented workers in the munitions trades from moving from one employer to another. More controversially he authorized a 12 per cent bonus for s

Mrage · #5 11-05-2007, 03:14 PM

100% confirmed rigged

HeroInBlack · #6 11-05-2007, 03:18 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965), prime minister, was born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the family home of the dukes of Marlborough, on 30 November 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill (1849–1895), was the third son of the seventh duke and a descendant of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, Queen Anne's commander-in-chief during the War of the Spanish Succession. His mother, Jeanette (Jennie) Churchill (1854–1921), was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York financier whose ancestors had fought against the British in the American War of Independence. According to a Jerome family tradition accepted by Churchill himself, Jennie's mother, Clara, was of Iroquois descent, but proof is lacking.
Childhood
Jennie and Lord Randolph were married at the British embassy in Paris on 15 April 1874. Winston Churchill's date of birth has given rise to speculation that he was conceived before the wedding, but the only certainty is that he was born prematurely. Preparations were made for the birth to take place in London, but after slipping and falling during a visit to Blenheim Jennie went into labour, the local doctor was summoned, and the baby was delivered at 1.30 a.m. on 30 November.

When the seventh duke was appointed viceroy of Ireland in January 1877, the Churchills moved to Dublin. Winston was accompanied by his nanny, Mrs Elizabeth Everest, who took him for walks in Phoenix Park and warned him against a group of evil men known as Fenians. Shortly after the birth of his brother John Strange Spencer (Jack) Churchill (1880–1947) in February 1880, the family returned to London, where Winston began to build up an impressive collection of toy soldiers in the nursery. At eight he was sent to a boarding-school at Ascot where the headmaster took a pleasure in flogging the boys until their bottoms ran with blood. Winston performed well in some subjects but his reports often referred to his unruly behaviour. According to one authority, he was birched for stealing sugar from the pantry and retaliated by kicking the headmaster's straw hat to pieces (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.53). When he fell ill his parents transferred him to a school at Brighton where he was much happier but came bottom of the class for conduct.

Neither of Churchill's parents lacked affection for Winston, but they gave him little attention and he felt profoundly neglected. Lord Randolph's short and troubled life was devoted mainly to politics: Winston could recall only two or three long and intimate conversations with him. Lady Randolph, meanwhile, revelled in high society. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star’, Churchill wrote. ‘I loved her dearly—but at a distance’ (Churchill, Early Life, 19). Unlike his brother, Winston developed a powerful ego. His letters home from boarding-school were full of demands for attention, and protests against his parents' failure to meet his wishes. He was fortunate to discover in Mrs Everest a surrogate parent who gave him the love and admiration he craved. He responded with remarkably open displays of affection for his ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’. Inviting her to Harrow, he showed her around the school and walked arm in arm with her up the High Street while other boys jeered at him. During her final illness in July 1895 Churchill, by this time a Sandhurst cadet, rushed to her bedside, afterwards arranging the funeral and the erection of a headstone on her grave. In his novel Savrola (1900) he brought her to life again as the hero's faithful housekeeper, Bettine.
Harrow and Sandhurst
Churchill entered Harrow in April 1888. Convinced that his son was not clever enough for university, Lord Randolph was impressed by the enthusiasm with which he manoeuvred his army of toy soldiers; he arranged for him to enter the army class, which prepared boys for Sandhurst. Legend has it that Winston was academically a bit of a dunce, but he demonstrated great ability in English, history, and chemistry, subjects that captured his imagination. Mathematics, however, baffled him and in spite of personal tuition from the headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon, he detested Latin. Like Richmal Crompton's fictional hero William, whom in many ways he resembled, the schoolboy Winston was a courageous individualist who flouted the rules and got into scrapes. He lacked self-discipline and his teachers often complained of slovenly or unruly behaviour, but censure or punishment served only to provoke him into a long and indignant defence of his actions. Inevitably, perhaps, team sports held little appeal for him, but in spite of frequent bouts of ill health he was a strong swimmer, excelled at rifle shooting, and won the public schools fencing championship in 1892. None of this could appease his father's wrath when he twice failed the entrance exams for Sandhurst, passing in at the third attempt with marks too low to qualify him for the infantry. Lord Randolph's response was a remarkably cruel letter in which he threatened to break off all contact with his son and warned: ‘if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.197).

At Sandhurst, which he entered as an infantry cadet in September 1893, Churchill enjoyed himself. Military topics such as tactics or fortifications were far more appealing to him than mathematics, and horsemanship the greatest of pleasures. In high spirits and working hard, he eventually passed out twentieth out of 130. During his final term he also plunged, for the first time, into public controversy. When the eminent moral reformer Mrs Ormiston Chant organized a campaign to exclude prostitutes from the bar of the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, Churchill incited some of his fellow cadets to riot and pull down the screens which had been put up to separate prostitutes from theatregoers. ‘Ladies of the Empire’, Churchill declared in an impromptu speech, ‘I stand for Liberty!’ (Gilbert, Life, 46–7).

Churchill's late adolescence was overshadowed by the physical and mental decline of Lord Randolph, who had risen to be chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Salisbury's government of 1886, but overplayed his hand, resigned, and never held office again. As a gentleman cadet Churchill had begun to win his father's respect, but just as the relationship between father and son was about to ripen it was cut short by Lord Randolph's death, at the age of forty-five, on 24 January 1895. His neurologist, Dr Buzzard, diagnosed his illness as syphilis, though it has recently been argued that his symptoms could have been caused by a tumour on the brain (Mather, 23–8).
Cavalry officer and war correspondent: Cuba, India, and Omdurman
Although unaware of Buzzard's diagnosis, Churchill believed that Lord Randolph's death, like that of his brother the eighth duke of Marlborough, ‘was yet further proof that the Churchills died young’ (Gilbert, Life, 49). Driven by the need to appease his father's ghost and vindicate his reputation, he was desperate to make his mark before it was too late. But he was also free at last of Lord Randolph's restraining hand and ready to embark on adventures of his own. After passing out from Sandhurst he obtained his commission (20 February 1895) as a cavalry officer in the Queen's Own hussars. Here he acquired a passion for polo, a game he was to enjoy playing for the next three decades. But much as he enjoyed soldiering he regarded it as a means to an end: the making of a reputation that would propel him into the House of Commons. In October 1895 he travelled with his friend Reggie Barnes to Cuba to report on the rebellion against Spanish rule for the Daily Graphic. Visiting New York en route he was entertained by the Irish-American politician Bourke Cockran, an old flame of Lady Randolph, whose eloquence and oratory made a lasting impression on him. Churchill's twenty-first birthday (30 November 1895) found him in the company of Spanish forces suppressing a rebellion in Cuba. Here he saw shots fired in anger for the first time, and acquired two lifelong habits: Havana cigars, and siestas.

In October 1896 Churchill sailed with his regiment to India. Comfortably quartered in the British military compound at Bangalore, he displayed little interest in the subcontinent around him, but followed the political news from home with the eagerness and frustration of an exile. With his thoughts fixed firmly on a parliamentary career, he was worried by the fact that unlike so many other ambitious young men he lacked a university education. Enlisting the aid of Lady Randolph, he pursued a remarkable programme of self-education. During the long afternoons while the regiment rested, he devoured the works of Plato, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Macaulay, Hallam, Lecky, Darwin, and Winwood Reade, supplemented by volumes of the Annual Register, in which he annotated the summaries of old parliamentary debates with imaginary contributions of his own. Churchill's reading affected both his prose style, which he modelled on Gibbon and Macaulay, and his view of the world. Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, a classic of Victorian atheism, completed his loss of faith in orthodox Christianity and left him with a sombre vision of a godless universe in which humanity was destined, nevertheless, to progress through the conflict between the more advanced and the more backward races. He passed for a time through an aggressively anti-religious phase, but this eventually gave way to a more tolerant belief in the workings of some kind of divine providence.

Churchill's belief that he was destined to accomplish great things was accompanied by a daring scheme of self-advertisement. He told Lady Randolph,
A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the Company's star. Thence hot-foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box. (Churchill and Gilbert, Companion, vol. 1, pt 2, p. 676)
Between 1897 and 1900, with the aid of assiduous lobbying by his mother, he managed to fight in three of Queen Victoria's wars while doubling as a war correspondent and turning all three of his experiences into books.

When the attacks of Afghan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India led to the formation of a punitive expeditionary force, under the command of Sir Bindon Blood, Churchill obtained an attachment to the force and a contract as a war correspondent with the Daily Telegraph. He took part in several skirmishes in which he came under fire and witnessed acts of barbarism by both sides. On his return to Bangalore he expanded his reports into his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), which combined an incisive narrative of the fighting with vivid accounts of the landscape and its inhabitants. By this time he was also writing a novel, Savrola (1900), a melodramatic tale of a liberal revolution in an autocratic Mediterranean state: the hero, Savrola, was a compound of himself and Lord Randolph. His work on the book was interrupted, in the summer of 1898, by the final stages of the campaign for the reconquest of the Sudan.

This time it was the Morning Post which commissioned Churchill to report the war. Overcoming the objections of Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force, Churchill obtained a temporary posting with the 21st lancers, and arrived in the Sudan in time to take part in the celebrated cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898), in which the regiment galloped by accident into a hidden ravine crammed with armed men. Churchill, who shot and killed at least three of the enemy with his Mauser pistol, was cool and courageous but lucky to survive a bout of hand-to-hand fighting in which 22 British officers and men were killed. Nevertheless he was eager to renew the charge at once. ‘Another fifty or sixty casualties would have made our performance historic’, he explained to Lady Randolph, ‘and made us proud of our race and our blood’ (Russell, 225). The charge of the lancers, however, was only a sideshow with no significance for the main battle, which ended in the defeat and mass slaughter of the Dervishes. Over 30,000 were killed, compared with 28 British officers and men—lancers included.

For a second time Churchill now expanded his war correspondence into a book: The River War (1899), a two-volume work in which the story of the campaign was firmly embedded in a remarkably sympathetic history of the Sudanese revolt against Egyptian rule. Churchill wrote:
Those whose practice it is to regard their own nation as possessing a monopoly of virtue and common sense are wont to ascribe every military enterprise of savage people to fanaticism. They calmly ignore obvious and legitimate motives … upon the whole there exists no better case for rebellion than presented itself to the Soudanese. (Churchill, River War, 1973, 22)
Churchill was also critical of aspects of British imperialism. He censured Kitchener for his part in the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb and the slaughter of wounded dervish soldiers. For all that, he never doubted the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British in Asia and Africa.
The South African War
In the spring of 1899 Churchill completed his tour of duty in India, returned home, and resigned his commission. By the time of the outbreak of the South African War, Churchill had negotiated a contract with the Morning Post which made him the highest-paid war correspondent of the day, with a salary of £250 per month and all expenses paid. The journalist J. B. Atkins, who sailed to South Africa on the same ship, recalled:
He was slim, slightly reddish-haired, pale, lively, frequently plunging along the deck ‘with neck out-thrust’ as Browning fancied Napoleon … when the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shone from him that he was almost transfigured. I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy. (Atkins, 122)
Hastening to the battle front, Churchill was accompanying an armoured train on a reconnaissance mission in Natal when the train was ambushed (15 November 1899). Revealing again an ice-cool nerve, he seized command of the situation and organized a successful attempt to free the engine, but was captured and interned with other British captives in the States Model School in Pretoria. Later it was sometimes alleged that Churchill gave his word to his captors that if released he would not take up arms against them, and subsequently broke his parole. As no promise to release him was ever made, this was untrue. But he did persuade Captain Aylmer Haldane and Sergeant-Major Brockie to include him in their escape plan, on the understanding that all three would leave together. In the event Churchill climbed out first and, finding that his fellow escapees were unable to join him, set off on his own. After a series of adventures worthy of John Buchan's hero Richard Hannay he escaped via Portuguese East Africa and arrived in triumph in Durban.

Standing out in sharp relief from the military disasters of ‘black week’, Churchill's exploits made him the hero of the hour. His new fame enabled him to override the objections of the War Office and assume once more the dual role of officer—lieutenant in the South African light horse—and war correspondent. In April 1900 he joined the column commanded by his friend Sir Ian Hamilton as it advanced through the Orange Free State to the Transvaal. Galloping over the veldt with his cousin and boon companion Charles Richard John Spencer (Sunny) Churchill, the ninth duke of Marlborough (1871–1934), fortified by regular supplies from Fortnum and Mason, and attended by his valet, Thomas Walden, Churchill was often in the thick of the fighting and again proved himself to be a first-class war correspondent. He turned his dispatches, this time with little adaptation, into two books: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), which included the story of his escape, and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). The South African War also left an enduring imprint on Churchill's thinking. It convinced him that war was too dangerous to be left to the generals.
Unionist MP
While on leave from India during the summer of 1897 Churchill had made contact with Conservative Party managers and delivered his first speech, at Claverton Manor outside Bath (26 June 1897). Two years later, when the sudden death of the MP for Oldham created a vacancy in one of the constituency's two seats, he was adopted as the Conservative candidate at the ensuing by-election, but was defeated by his Liberal opponent. In autumn 1900, when Lord Salisbury decided to call a general election, Churchill again stood for Oldham. This time his fame tipped the balance and he was returned with a small majority. As there was no autumn session of parliament he put the time to good use with a lecture tour of the United Kingdom, followed by a similar tour in the United States and Canada. The story of his escape from the Boers, accompanied by a magic-lantern show, netted him the handsome sum of £10,000, which he handed over to the banker Sir Ernest Cassel to invest on his behalf.

Churchill delivered his maiden speech to the House of Commons on 18 February 1901. While strongly supporting the war in South Africa he caused some alarm on the Conservative benches when he declared: ‘If I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field’ (Gilbert, Life, 139). Having acquired a considerable respect for the Boers he wished to see them offered generous peace terms, a theme he was to emphasize repeatedly over the next few years. Nor was this the only issue on which he diverged from the government. He launched a devastating attack on the secretary of state for war, St John Brodrick, whose proposals for army reform he condemned as increasing military expenditure for no strategic purpose. Imitating the parliamentary tactics once employed by his father, he organized with his friend Lord Hugh Cecil a group of young tory MPs who specialized in the harassment of their own leaders and called themselves the Hughligans. Increasingly in sympathy with the opposition, Churchill was closely in touch with Rosebery, Morley, and other leading Liberals.

Churchill was already a perennial subject of gossip and speculation. Physically he was unimpressive. At 5 feet 6½ inches, slenderly built, with a 31 inch chest, rounded shoulders, delicate skin, ginger hair, and a pugnacious baby face with twinkling blue eyes, he was striking but not handsome. Though he was a fluent writer, he spoke with a lisp and his speeches were the result of long and elaborate preparation. His practice at first was to deliver the whole of a speech from memory, but after an alarming experience in April 1904 in which he ‘dried up’ in the House of Commons, he never spoke without copious notes. On those who met him he generally made an instant and powerful impression, though not always a favourable one. Hyperactive and transparently on the make, he was far from the English ideal of a gentleman. To many of his fellow officers he appeared pushy and bumptious. Offspring though he was of the landed aristocracy, he belonged to a plutocratic milieu in which old and new wealth rubbed shoulders. His friends included great financiers like Cassel and Baron de Forest, who invited him aboard their yachts for Mediterranean cruises, or played host in magnificent villas and castles on the continent. Churchill enjoyed fox-hunting and country-house weekends but he was equally at home at the gambling tables of the French Riviera. Meeting him for the first time in July 1903, Beatrice Webb thought him ‘egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character. More of the American speculator than the English aristocrat’ (Diary, 287).
Joins the Liberals: Colonial Office
When Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister in May 1902, there was no place in the new government for Churchill. Then in May 1903 Joseph Chamberlain raised the banner of tariff reform. Churchill announced that he was strongly in favour of free trade and soon became one of the most active of the ‘free fooders’, a group of about sixty Conservative MPs fighting a losing battle for the cause. At the head of a divided party Balfour himself could only procrastinate, a predicament which laid him open to the taunts of Churchill, whose platform speeches combined lucid expositions of political economy with political slapstick. Most Conservative adherents of free trade decided to remain in the party, but Churchill, after some hesitation, crossed the floor of the house and took his seat, next to David Lloyd George, on the Liberal benches (31 May 1904). He had already accepted an invitation from the Liberal Association of North-West Manchester to contest the forthcoming general election as the free-trade candidate. During the next eighteen months, as the Balfour government drifted helplessly towards the rocks, Churchill attacked his former party with a ferocity that gave rise to lasting enmities and the accusation that he was a turncoat.

Churchill shrugged off charges of opportunism. It was the Conservatives, he argued, who had abandoned their principles. For good measure he claimed that he was following in the footsteps of his father, whose life he was then writing. In Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), he presented his father as a tory with increasingly radical sympathies, who would probably have opposed the South African War had he lived. His own Liberalism, therefore, could be construed as a continuation of tory democracy. Reviewers were not wholly persuaded by Churchill's portrait of his father as an earnest Victorian statesman, but they acclaimed the book as a literary tour de force and a well-documented political history in which the reputations of the living were handled with delicacy and tact.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became prime minister in December 1905 Churchill achieved ministerial office for the first time as under-secretary at the Colonial Office. One of his first acts was to appoint the civil servant and scholar Edward Marsh as his private secretary, a role in which he was to serve Churchill in every one of the offices he held between 1905 and 1929. In the ensuing general election the Liberals won a landslide victory and Churchill was elected MP for North-West Manchester.

Since the colonial secretary, Lord Elgin, was a member of the House of Lords, Churchill had the responsibility of handling colonial affairs in the Commons. In March 1906 his first important ministerial speech went badly wrong. While seeking to defend Milner from a motion of censure over the question of ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa he unwittingly gave the impression of gloating over his downfall, thus rubbing salt into Conservative wounds. Remembered against him for years to come, the episode was an early example of a flaw in his oratorical style: an overbearing manner that seemed intended to humiliate his opponents, of whose injured feelings he was largely unaware. In July he recovered with a statesmanlike speech announcing the restoration of self-government in the Transvaal, a policy to which he had made a significant contribution.

Delighted by his new responsibilities, Churchill ranged inquisitively over the affairs of scores of British colonies, annotating documents with a red fountain pen. As one historian has written: ‘He had a generous and sensitive, if highly paternalistic, sympathy for subject peoples, and a determination to see that justice was done to humble individuals throughout the empire’ (Hyam, 503). In autumn 1907 he set out on a tour of east Africa which began as a hunting expedition but turned into a semi-official inquiry into colonial affairs. In Kenya he went big-game hunting and investigated the conditions of African contract workers. In Uganda he visited Christian missions, took tea with Daudi Chewa, the eleven-year-old kabaka of Buganda, and took up with great enthusiasm the project for a dam across the Ripon Falls. It would, he concluded,
be hard to find a country where the conditions were more favourable than in Uganda to a practical experiment in State Socialism … A class of rulers is provided by an outside power as remote from, and in all that constitutes fitness to direct, as superior to the Baganda as Mr Wells's Martians would have been to us. (Churchill, African Journey, 70–71)
In the interludes Churchill dictated memoranda for the Colonial Office, and a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, later published as My African Journey (1908). Even in Africa he gave much thought to the future of politics at home and the prospects for the ‘new Liberalism’ of social reform, which had begun to attract him. On his return home he published an article, ‘The untrodden field in politics’, advocating a more active role for the state in the economy and the establishment of a national minimum standard to mitigate poverty.
Cabinet minister and marriage
When Asquith succeeded as prime minister in March 1908 he took the bold step of bringing Churchill into the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade (16 April 1908). At thirty-three, he was the youngest cabinet minister since 1866. Since constitutional convention required that a minister entering the cabinet must resign his seat, Churchill was compelled to contest Manchester North-West for a second time in a by-election, which he lost. He at once accepted an invitation to stand for the safe Liberal seat of Dundee, where he was returned at a by-election in May 1908 and remained MP until 1922.

A great admirer of beautiful women, but self-centred and gauche in their company, Churchill had already proposed to Pamela Plowden and Ethel Barrymore, only to be rejected by both. Then, at a dinner party early in 1908, he was re-introduced to Clementine Hozier (1885–1977) [see Churchill, Clementine Ogilvy Spencer], whom he had met briefly once before. Bowled over, he began an ardent courtship. In August he proposed, and was accepted, as they took shelter from the rain in the Temple of Diana overlooking the lake at Blenheim Palace. With Hugh Cecil as best man, and the bishop of St Asaph conducting the ceremony, Winston and Clementine were married at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 12 September 1908.

Churchill expected his wife to be a loyal follower, and it was a role she was content to play. The unhappy child of a disastrous marriage and a financially precarious home, Clementine found in Winston a faithful husband who loved her, sustained her in material comfort, and placed her in the front row of a great historical drama. He could never be accused of marrying for money or running after other women. She, for her part, was never uncritical of her husband or afraid to express her opinions. A lifelong Liberal, with a puritan streak, she never approved of his more louche tory companions such as F. E. Smith, a close friend from 1907 onwards, or Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, introduced to Churchill by ‘F. E.’ in 1911. Winston, nevertheless, discussed all his political affairs with her and she often gave him sound advice, which he seldom took. Given the dissimilarities between them, it was not surprising that Winston and Clementine sometimes quarrelled furiously. She once threw a dish of spinach at him, and missed. Nevertheless they were quick to make up after a row, and their marriage was sustained by a lifelong mutual affection expressed in their pet names for each other. Winston was always ‘Pug’ or ‘Pig’, Clementine ‘Kat’, and the children ‘the Kittens’. Their first child, Diana, was born in 1909. Their only son, Randolph Churchill followed in 1911, and Sarah in 1914. Marigold was born in 1918, but died in 1921, and the youngest daughter, Mary, was born in 1922.
Social policy at the Board of Trade
By the time of his marriage Churchill was working in close alliance with the ‘Welsh wizard’ David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer. As Asquith's daughter Violet observed, Lloyd George was undoubtedly the dominant partner:
His was the only personal leadership I have ever known Winston to accept unquestioningly in the whole of his career. He was fascinated by a mind more swift and agile than his own … From Lloyd George he was to learn the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George's native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference’. (Bonham-Carter, Churchill, 161)
Lloyd George encouraged Churchill to concentrate on social policy. Drawing on the advice of his officials he promoted three major reforms: the Trade Boards Act of 1909 which introduced statutory minimum wages into the ‘sweated trades’; state-run labour exchanges, planned by the young William Beveridge, whom Churchill recruited as a civil servant specifically for the purpose; and compulsory unemployment insurance, which later became a part of Lloyd George's National Insurance Act of 1911. Though none of these measures was especially controversial in itself, they were part of a wider radical strategy which Lloyd George and Churchill urged on the cabinet, and for which they campaigned at great public meetings. In order to pay for welfare reforms they demanded reductions in the defence budget, precipitating a cabinet crisis over the naval estimates of 1909. Proclaiming something very like their own foreign policy of peace with Germany, they denounced the prophets of a great European war as alarmists. The greatest threat to Britain's imperial might, Churchill declared, was from the internal decay of its people. But Liberalism, in his view, was the antithesis of socialism. ‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth’, he declared in May 1908. ‘Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty … Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference’ (Addison, 66).

When in April 1909 the House of Lords took the unprecedented step of rejecting the proposals of the ‘people's budget’ for increased taxes on the wealthy, Churchill as president of the budget league toured the country denouncing the peers and the Conservative Party. Collected and published in 1909 as The People's Rights, his speeches display him at his most radical. Conservatives, of course, detested both Lloyd George and Churchill, but Churchill was the more despised for ‘betraying’ both his party and his class. Indeed he was ostracized and traduced, as he recalled in old age:
They said that I beat Clemmie and that you could hear her crying as you passed our house. They said that I drugged, and if you rolled up my sleeve, my arm was a mass of piqures. We were cut by people we had known well and had looked on as friends. (Montague Brown, 147)
The Liberals meanwhile, though grateful for the loan of Churchill's talents, could never forget that he was an aristocrat who had begun his career as a soldier and a tory.
Home secretary
After the general election of January 1910 Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office, where his many responsibilities ranged from the supervision of the Metropolitan Police to the regulation of prisons, borstals, factories, coalmines, and shops. Churchill was eager to pursue an agenda of social reform. Persuaded by the arguments of eugenicists, who maintained that the ‘quality of the race’ was degenerating due to the multiplication of the ‘unfit’, he was briefly an enthusiastic supporter of the compulsory sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded’. Nothing came of this, but he did secure the passage of a bill to regulate the hours and conditions of shop assistants. In penal policy he made very active use of the home secretary's right to intervene, frequently mitigating the harsh sentences awarded by magistrates for petty crime. A firm believer in capital punishment, he nevertheless agonized over the fate of prisoners under sentence of death and reprieved many of them. His ambitious plans for reducing the number of petty criminals sent to prison were, however, thwarted by the brevity of his tenure of the Home Office.

Churchill's more constructive endeavours as home secretary were overshadowed by controversial problems of law and order. Although he was on record as favouring votes for women in principle, he detested the suffragettes for interrupting his meetings. Warning that he would not be ‘henpecked’ on the issue, he found reasons to object to the suffrage bill of 1910 and subjected it to a slashing attack in the House of Commons. In November 1910 a suffragette rally at Westminster was met by the police with extremely rough tactics in which several women were injured. Churchill was not personally responsible for ‘black Friday’, but he rejected all allegations against the police and refused to institute an inquiry.

Within a few days of black Friday a dispute in the south Wales coalfield led to a strike by miners employed by the Cambrian Colliery. Riots and looting broke out in the town of Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley and one of the rioters was fatally injured in a struggle with the Glamorganshire police. The local magistrates pleaded with the Home Office to authorize the dispatch of troops. Recognizing that any direct clash between troops and strikers might result in bloodshed, Churchill at first refused the request of the local authorities, and sent instead a contingent of the Metropolitan Police. But twenty-four hours later, when it was clear that the riots were continuing unabated, Churchill authorized the dispatch of troops. In a bold and imaginative stroke, which may have been unconstitutional, he appointed General Nevil Macready to command both troops and police, with instructions to ensure that the police acted as a buffer between the strikers and the troops. He thereby took control out of the hands of the local authorities, who might well have been tempted to employ both police and troops as strike-breakers.

Churchill's conduct of the Tonypandy affair prevented further bloodshed, but he was strongly attacked by Keir Hardie for condoning brutality on the part of the Metropolitan Police. Afterwards the legend grew that Churchill had sent troops to shoot down striking Welsh miners. Although this was a gross distortion, Churchill's response to industrial unrest was not always cool and measured. During the summer of 1911, when strikes in the docks spread to the railways, he was seized by a nightmare vision of a starving community held to ransom by industrial anarchists. Overriding the local authorities, he dispatched troops to many parts of the country and gave army commanders discretion to employ them. When rioters tried to prevent the movement of a train at Llanelli, troops opened fire and two of the rioters were shot dead. Together with Tonypandy, these events marked a turning point in Churchill's relations with the Labour Party and the trade unions. His record as a social reformer was eclipsed by his new reputation as a class warrior with a ‘Prussian’ love of order, maintained if necessary by military force.

The impression was deepened by a famous episode in January 1911. Hunted down by the police, a number of Russian anarchists, led by ‘Peter the Painter’, took refuge in a house in Sidney Street, in the East End of London, and fired at the police. Churchill hastened to the scene, where his conspicuous presence in the danger zone—recorded by a press photographer—led critics to accuse him of seizing operational control from the police. The charge was mistaken. When the house suddenly caught fire, Churchill confirmed the decision of the police to let it burn down, but otherwise he was simply an enthralled spectator whose antics caused much amusement. In the House of Commons Balfour enquired: ‘I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.409). Though he was still at the forefront of domestic politics, the soldier in Churchill was never far below the surface. As he explained to Clementine in May 1909:
I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgment on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations. (Soames, 23)
From 1910 onwards, contact with the intelligence services made Churchill apprehensive about German intentions and he began to think seriously about the implications of a major war. At about the same time, and possibly as a consequence, there were signs that he was moving to the right. In September 1910 Lloyd George told Churchill that he had two alternatives for the future: a coalition in which the Liberals and Conservatives reached a compromise over the issues that divided them, and a Liberal government with an advanced land and social policy. Churchill was all for a coalition and henceforth made various efforts to find common ground with his Conservative opponents. With a view to assuaging the bitterness caused by the House of Lords crisis, Churchill and F. E. Smith in May 1911 co-founded the Other Club, a bipartisan dining club of which the Liberal and Conservative chief whips were both members.
First lord of the Admiralty
The Agadir crisis of July–August 1911 aroused the strategist in Churchill and he composed for the cabinet an important paper entitled ‘Military aspects of the continental problem’. At Asquith's invitation he attended a critical meeting of the committee of imperial defence, which revealed a complete lack of co-ordination between the plans of the Admiralty and the War Office. Much impressed by Churchill's interventions, and by his obvious desire to take charge of the Royal Navy, Asquith appointed him first lord of the Admiralty in October 1911.

Tradition has it that when an admiral spoke reverently to him of naval tradition, Churchill retorted: ‘What are the traditions of the Navy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!’ In later years he explained that he had never said this, but wished that he had. His mission at the Admiralty was to modernize. Many of the reforms he proposed were inspired by the retired first sea lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher, with whom he was in almost daily contact. But Churchill, of course, also had great confidence in his own judgement and was ready to act boldly.

Churchill's first act was to replace three of the four sea lords. Sir Arthur Wilson was succeeded as first sea lord by Sir Francis Bridgeman, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German prince and naturalized British subject, was appointed second sea lord. A dashing young officer, David Beatty, became Churchill's naval secretary. Subsequently, in December 1912, Churchill coerced Bridgeman into retirement, appointing Battenberg in his place. Churchill displayed little respect for many of the senior officers of the Royal Navy, whom he regarded as unimaginative and set in their ways. One of his first actions, in line with Fisher's advice, was to establish a naval war staff of three divisions—operations, intelligence, and mobilization—to prepare and co-ordinate war plans. With the assistance of Herbert Richmond he sought to encourage the interest of naval officers in history and strategy, and helped to launch a new periodical, the Naval Review. Eager to explore almost every aspect of naval affairs, Churchill set out to discover the facts for himself. Making frequent use of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress—where he also entertained his political friends from time to time—he inspected ships, dockyards, and naval installations with a vigilant eye. In defiance of protocol he sometimes bypassed senior naval officers and sought information directly from junior officers or ordinary seamen.

Many of the admirals were unimpressed. According to the second sea lord, Sir John Jellicoe, Churchill's fatal error was ‘his entire inability to realize his own limitations as a civilian … quite ignorant of naval affairs’ (Marder, From the Dreadnought, 255). But the admirals, like so many of the experts Churchill was to encounter, were often blinkered by convention. ‘In matters of technical advance’, writes one historian of Churchill and the navy, ‘the First Lord was always in the van, always supporting the pioneers, always sweeping aside the obstruction of the unimaginative’ (Gretton, 117). With Fisher's encouragement he developed a fast division of battleships, the Queen Elizabeth class, equipped with the new 15 inch gun. He pressed on with converting the fleet from coal-fired to oil-fired engines. In June 1914 he announced that he had negotiated the purchase by the British government of 51 per cent of the shares in the Anglo-Iranian oil company, thus ensuring a guaranteed supply of oil for the fleet. He promoted the development of submarines and air power, wresting full control of the Royal Naval Air Service from the War Office. In 1913, much to Clementine's alarm, he took up flying lessons and took to the air 150 times, after which she persuaded him to give up flying—for the moment.

Churchill was determined that Britain should retain a clear margin of naval supremacy over Germany. In a speech in Glasgow on 8 February 1912 he argued that for Britain a large navy was a necessity whereas for Germany it was a ‘luxury’—a comment which provoked much German anger. When the draft of a new German naval law proposed a further increase in the size of the German fleet, Churchill obtained the cabinet's approval in principle for an expansion of the British naval programme. At the same time he refurbished his Liberal credentials by floating the idea of a ‘naval holiday’, or joint suspension of naval construction by both countries. Following the German rejection of this idea, Churchill sought a naval arrangement with France under which the British Mediterranean Fleet would be withdrawn and concentrated in home waters, leaving the French to patrol the Mediterranean. Since this would involve the British in a pledge to defend the channel and Atlantic coasts of France, it was tantamount to a military alliance. After long and complex arguments the cabinet agreed in July 1912, but Churchill's expansionist naval policy, and the strengthening of the Anglo-French entente, alienated the radical wing of the Liberal Party and confirmed growing speculation that he was ‘moving to the right’ or preparing to rejoin the Conservative Party. During the winter of 1913–14 Churchill's insistence on the construction of another four dreadnoughts, and a further increase in the naval estimates, led to a crisis in which he found himself at loggerheads with Lloyd George, the majority of the cabinet, and most of the Liberal Party. Only the delaying tactics of Asquith, and a last-minute decision by Lloyd George to concede most of Churchill's demands, averted his resignation.
Ulster crisis and federal devolution of the United Kingdom
As first lord, Churchill tended to concentrate on naval matters to the exclusion of everything else. ‘You have become a water creature’, Lloyd George told him in July 1912. ‘You think we all live in the sea, and all your thoughts are devoted to sea life, fishes and other aquatic creatures’ (Riddell, More Pages, 78). Nevertheless Churchill was actively involved in the greatest political issue of the day: Irish home rule. Lord Randolph Churchill had famously declared: ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’. His son took the opposite line, denouncing Bonar Law and the Conservatives for inciting rebellion. In February 1912 he attempted to confront a Unionist audience in Belfast in the very same hall in which his father had spoken in 1886, but so great was the threat to his safety that the meeting had to be moved at the last minute to the Celtic Road football stadium. In private, however, Churchill made persistent efforts to find a compromise. One possibility, which he proposed in the secrecy of the cabinet room in March 1911, was to include Ireland in an all-round scheme of federal devolution, with seven regional parliaments in England alongside parliaments for Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The cabinet, however, decided in favour of a single parliament for the whole of Ireland. In September 1912 he caused something of a sensation by airing the concept of federal devolution in a speech in Dundee. By analogy with the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, it became known as Churchill's plan to revive the ‘heptarchy’. Twice in that same year Churchill urged the cabinet, without success, to offer temporary exclusion from home rule to the predominantly protestant counties. During the winter of 1913–14 he was the principal go-between in a number of secret moves to promote a bipartisan settlement. On the Conservative side his main contact was F. E. Smith, who was both a personal friend and a fervent champion of Ulster. Churchill, it was said, was threatening to quit the cabinet if force were employed against Ulster: ‘You understand that if a shot is fired I shall go out’ (ibid., 194).

As the hour at which the Home Rule Bill would become law approached, the Ulster Unionists rejected out of hand a belated offer by Asquith to allow the protestant counties to opt out for a six-year period. Churchill now changed tack, arguing that, having obtained a compromise, the Ulster Unionists must accept it. He was also eager to restore his standing in the Liberal Party. In a speech at Bradford on 14 March 1914 he issued a stern warning that Ulster Unionists must agree to the government's plan or take the consequences: ‘There are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extended scale’, he declared (Rhodes James, 62).

Meanwhile the cabinet was much alarmed by police reports suggesting that the Ulster Volunteers were planning a military coup. A cabinet committee under Churchill authorized precautionary troop movements and Churchill himself, as first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the 5th battle squadron to steam to Lamlash, menacingly close to Belfast. His actions convinced the Conservatives that the government was planning an ‘Ulster pogrom’—an impression rapidly confirmed by the notorious episode of the ‘Curragh mutiny’, when fifty-seven of the seventy officers of the 3rd cavalry brigade declared that they would rather be dismissed than take part in the coercion of Ulster. Churchill often employed provocative language on the public platform while pursuing relatively conciliatory policies behind the scenes. Contemporaries, however, tended to equate extremism of style with extremism of intent. Churchill was partly to blame for the Conservative belief that he had attempted a pogrom. First World War: early naval engagements and the defence of Antwerp
On the eve of war in July 1914 Churchill wrote to his wife: ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.710). When Austria declared war on Serbia two days later, Churchill, acting with Asquith's approval, ordered the fleets to their battle stations. In the critical cabinet discussions over the next few days Churchill, Grey, and Haldane were consistently in favour of British intervention while others, including Lloyd George, wavered.

One historian wrote:
Churchill took a more active part in the day-to-day running of the war than any First Lord in history. His were many of the ideas for action; it was he who drafted many of the signals to the ships. He studied and analysed each operation with great care. (Gretton, 147)
Churchill's interventionism, which he scarcely bothered to conceal, was a double-edged sword. Though he stood to gain the credit from successful actions by the Royal Navy, he was sure to get the blame when things went wrong. During the first few months of the war the Germans achieved a number of naval successes for which Churchill was strongly criticized. In August two German battleships, the Goeben and the Breslau, escaped from the Adriatic through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. On 21 September Churchill boasted that if the German fleet did not come out and fight they would be ‘dug out like rats in a hole’ (Gilbert, Life, 281), but on the following day the Germans sank three British cruisers, with the loss of 1459 officers and men, off the Dogger Bank. Two more British cruisers were sunk at the battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November. On 16 December German battlecruisers shelled Scarborough and other east coast ports, killing or injuring 500 civilians. Criticism of the Admiralty mounted and was only partially offset by successful actions off the Falkland Islands (8 December) and the Dogger Bank (25 January 1915).

Enthralled by all aspects of the fighting, Churchill was eager to play a part in the land war and ingenious in stretching the Admiralty's responsibilities. He converted the naval reserve into the Royal Naval division, an infantry force of 15,000 men, in which many of his friends were commissioned as officers. Although Churchill promised that the division would later be transferred to the control of the War Office, he now had at his disposal something very like a private army. He also established what soon became known as his ‘Dunkirk circus’, three squadrons of aircraft which bombed German defences from airfields in northern France, protected by a force of Rolls-Royce cars with armour-plating. His response to the deadlock on the western front was to sponsor the idea of a ‘land ship’, an armoured troop carrier mounted on caterpillars, that would shield them from the field of fire as they approached the enemy trenches. A prototype was housed in the Admiralty basement.

For three-and-a-half days in October 1914 Churchill found himself in virtual command of a land battle. The Germans, advancing rapidly along the channel coast, were threatening the Belgian city of Antwerp. The cabinet dispatched Churchill to organize reinforcements and stiffen the resistance of the Belgian government. Churchill did a superb job organizing the defences of Antwerp and delaying the German advance. No sooner was he on the spot than his fascination with the conduct of military operations gained the upper hand. He called in as reinforcements the bulk of three battalions of the Royal Naval division and fired off a telegram offering to resign his cabinet post in return for a high-ranking command in the field. When Asquith read out the telegram to his colleagues there was a roar of laughter and Churchill was ordered home. The laughter illustrated the gulf between Churchill and the other politicians. The politicians were ultimately responsible for the conduct of the war, but since very few of them knew anything of military matters they relied heavily on the judgement of the generals and the admirals. Inside Churchill, however, was a generalissimo struggling to get out. As Churchill's critics saw it, his military ambitions were foolish and his melodramatic defence of Antwerp a tragic sequel to the farce of Sidney Street. When the city fell he was strongly attacked in the press for the apparent failure of the expedition. This, perhaps, was the moment at which long-held suspicions in the political world hardened into the conviction that he lacked judgement.
Gallipoli, removal from Admiralty, and resignation
In October 1914 the first sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced by anti-German prejudice to resign, and Churchill decided to recall the 73-year-old Fisher to take his place. ‘Those who knew them both’, wrote E. T. Williams, ‘realized that the arrangement involving such domineering characters, each used to having his own way, fond as they were of each other, would not work’ (DNB). For a time both Churchill and Fisher were excited by the possibility of a naval operation to capture the island of Borkum in the Baltic. But when the Russian government appealed urgently for action to relieve Turkish pressure in the Caucasus, Kitchener, the secretary for war, urged Churchill to undertake a naval demonstration at the Dardanelles. Churchill replied that a naval attack alone would be insufficient: a combined operation would probably be more effective. Kitchener, however, declared that he could not spare any troops, and again pressed the first lord to mount a naval demonstration. Churchill now dispatched a telegram to Admiral Carden, the commander of the Mediterranean squadron, seeking his opinion on whether it would be possible to force the Dardanelles with the aid of obsolete battleships surplus to requirements in home waters. Carden replied that he thought the Dardanelles might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships. Churchill became captivated by the vision of a fleet sailing through the Dardanelles, bombarding and destroying the Turkish forts and gun batteries on both sides of the straits, and provoking by their appearance in front of Constantinople a revolution and the withdrawal of Turkey from the war. The supply lines to and from Russia through the straits would be opened up, and the Balkan states rallied to the cause of the allies: at a stroke the military balance would be transformed.

Such was the vision. The outcome was a disaster. Both Kitchener and Churchill wavered between the concept of an operation carried out by ships alone, with troops landing subsequently as an occupation force, and a combined naval and military operation. A naval attack was finally launched on 18 March 1915 under the command of Admiral De Robeck. Whether it could ever have succeeded against the dual threat of minefield defences and gunfire from the Turkish forts remains a subject for debate. After the loss of three battleships De Robeck halted the attack and in spite of Churchill's pleas and injunctions refused to renew it. The war council now came down definitely in favour of a combined operation and the purely Churchillian phase of the action was over. After many delays and hesitations, a combined British, Australian, and New Zealand expeditionary force under the command of Churchill's friend Sir Ian Hamilton landed on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April. Within a few days it was clear that the troops were pinned down on a narrow stretch of beach with the Turks shelling them from the commanding heights above. The war council authorized further reinforcements, but there was no disguising the fact that the news was bad.

Fortune now deserted Churchill. From the start, Fisher had blown hot and cold about the Dardanelles. Increasingly overwrought and unstable, and fearful of losses, he suddenly cracked when Churchill, without consulting him, added two submarines from home waters to a list of reinforcements for the Mediterranean. On 15 May Fisher resigned and fled into hiding. Churchill might have weathered the storm but for the fact that Asquith, beset by a crisis over munitions, chose this moment to invite the Conservatives into a coalition. Eager to pay off old scores against Churchill, and fearful of his exploits as an amateur strategist, they insisted on his removal from the Admiralty and the war council. Asquith appointed him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, a post that was largely honorific, together with a place on the new Dardanelles committee.

The Gallipoli affair dragged on through the summer and autumn. Though casualties mounted and there was little sign of progress, Churchill continued to champion the operation with unquenchable enthusiasm. By October the majority of the Dardanelles committee had come to the conclusion that the operation should be abandoned and when at last the cabinet decided in favour of withdrawal, Churchill was left with no alternative but to resign from the government. One of the few redeeming features of the Gallipoli affair was the brilliant evacuation with which it was brought to a close in January 1916. By that time, however, some 46,000 allied troops, including 8700 Australians and 2700 New Zealanders, had been killed.

Churchill was, to a great extent, the scapegoat. It was Kitchener who first pressed for a naval operation and Asquith, as prime minister, who authorized it. Fisher concealed his early doubts and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm. Nor did Churchill's responsibility extend much beyond the naval attack on 18 March. The land campaign which began on 25 April was primarily the responsibility of the War Office. Nevertheless Churchill's own egotism and impetuosity were factors in his downfall. He was over-confident of success, trumpeting victory in advance and passionately supporting the operation long after most people had written it off. Gallipoli was a cross to which he nailed himself.

Churchill was devastated by his fall from grace in May 1915. ‘Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths’, he wrote, ‘or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure’ (Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, 307). Nothing could wholly fill the void, but his family proved a great source of strength. Clemmie was a loyal supporter in time of trouble as was Churchill's brother Jack, currently serving at Gallipoli, and his sister-in-law Gwendeline (Goonie). When the Winston Churchills had to leave Admiralty House, they went to live with Goonie and her two children, John and Peregrine, at 41 Cromwell Road. At the weekends the two families would gather at a weekend retreat: Hoe Farm, near Godalming. Here Churchill discovered a powerful antidote to depression. He took up oil-painting and was shown by Hazel Lavery, the wife of Sir John Lavery, how to daub the canvas with bold strokes and bright colours. Soon he was haunting Lavery's studio and painting alongside him. Churchill never claimed to be a professional artist, let alone a great one, but in the course of a lifetime he greatly enjoyed himself painting hundreds of pictures. Whenever he went on holiday abroad he took his easel and paints with him, and even managed to paint one picture during the Second World War—a view of Marrakesh, which he presented to President Roosevelt.
Out of office: the western front and Westminster
After his resignation in November 1915 Churchill sought active service and obtained from Sir John French a promise of the command of a brigade. In the interim he joined the 2nd battalion of the Grenadier Guards at Laventie for training. To Churchill's dismay, Asquith then vetoed his promotion to brigadier-general and ordered that he be given the command of a battalion instead. On 4 January 1916 Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill was placed in command of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He arranged for his friend Archibald (Archie) Sinclair, a highland laird and aspiring Liberal politician, to join him as second in command. Towards the end of January the battalion moved up to the front line, close to the village of Ploegsteert, near Messines on the Franco-Belgian frontier.

Churchill's arrival, and his unorthodox methods of command, caused much astonishment, and some resentment at first among the junior officers. But he proved a good commanding officer, combining leadership and inspiration with a great solicitude for the welfare of the ordinary soldier. He waged a successful campaign against lice, reduced punishments, and organized entertainments. The sector of the front on which he was served was relatively quiet and the battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) took place after he had returned home. But Churchill was frequently under fire and had a number of narrow escapes from death.

Much as Churchill enjoyed soldiering, his military ambitions were thwarted by his modest rank, and he feared that a prolonged absence from Westminster would deny him the chance to restore his fortunes. In March 1916 he returned home on leave to speak in the house but destroyed the effect of an otherwise powerful attack upon Balfour's conduct of the Admiralty with an ill-judged appeal for the return of Fisher as first sea lord. In May 1916 the amalgamation of his battalion with another led to the extinction of his command and gave him a presentable excuse for resigning his commission and coming home. Churchill had spent only 100 days at the front, but the experience had served to confirm his critical estimate of the British high command. To replenish his income, while keeping his name in the public eye, he began to write war commentaries for the press. He also made a number of speeches, critical of the conduct of the war, in the House of Commons. Eagerly awaiting the downfall of Asquith, he planned to ally himself with a victorious combination of Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Curzon, and Carson. They, however, were less eager to ally with him. In the political crisis of December 1916, Asquith was replaced by Lloyd George, but the Unionists under Bonar Law insisted that Churchill should be excluded from the new government.

Churchill's main achievement during this first period in the political wilderness was the partial rehabilitation of his reputation. In June 1916 Asquith agreed to the appointment of a commission to inquire into the responsibility for the Gallipoli operation. Though handicapped by Asquith's refusal to allow him access to the official records, Churchill devoted much of his time to preparing a very eloquent and plausible defence. The first report of the Dardanelles commission, published in March 1917, made it clear that Churchill was not solely or even principally responsible.

After the battle of the Somme, Churchill had come to the conclusion that great offensives on the western front were far more costly to the allies than to the enemy, and ought to be avoided until new methods of attack were invented or overwhelming numerical superiority achieved. In a secret session of the House of Commons on 10 May 1917, Churchill argued the case in a powerful speech. Here was one of the perennial sources of his survival in British politics. No one else could match his ability, on a good day, to sway the House of Commons by the force of his argument. Churchill for his part felt a deep and genuine respect for a body that could make or break him, but also something more: a romantic faith in the providential character of an institution at the heart of British history. One evening in March 1917 he was at the house in the company of Alexander MacCullum Scott, a backbench Liberal MP, who recorded the following scene in his diary:
As we were leaving the House late tonight, he called me into the Chamber to take a last look round. All was darkness except a ring of faint light all around under the gallery. We could dimly see the table, but walls and roof were invisible. ‘Look at it’, he said. ‘This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany's brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world's liberties.’ (MacCullum Scott diary, 5 March 1917, Glasgow University Library, MacCullum Scott MSS)
Minister of munitions
Fearful, perhaps, that Churchill would emerge as the new leader of the opposition, Lloyd George promised to restore him to office. In July 1917, with great difficulty, he obtained Bonar Law's consent to the appointment of Churchill as minister of munitions. Since his new post was outside the war cabinet, this appeared to meet Bonar Law's demand for the exclusion of Churchill from any part in the conduct of the war. Nevertheless 100 Conservative MPs signed a motion deploring his appointment, and the Conservative press complained loudly.

Accompanied by his bust of Napoleon, Churchill moved into the ministry's quarters in the former premises of the Metropole Hotel in Northumberland Avenue. Created by Lloyd George in 1915, it was already in full swing with a staff of 12,000 officials, two and a half million workers employed in its factories, and the output of guns and shells running at record levels. Churchill's brief was to ensure a continuous and increasing flow of production. He began by reorganizing the ministry itself, compressing fifty separate divisions into ten, and creating a munitions council which met daily to co-ordinate and determine policy. The next priority was industrial unrest. Production was threatened by strikes and Churchill took action to redress some of the most prominent grievances. He abolished the ‘leaving certificate’ which prevented workers in the munitions trades from moving from one employer to anoth

HeroInBlack · #7 11-05-2007, 03:18 PM

OH NOES!! THEY BE STEALIN' MY QFT'S!!

johnnydrama · #8 11-05-2007, 03:20 PM

Glad we all agree!

OK, tilt has gone now. Thanks for the vent!

Dan87 · #9 11-05-2007, 03:20 PM

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Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965), prime minister, was born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the family home of the dukes of Marlborough, on 30 November 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill (1849–1895), was the third son of the seventh duke and a descendant of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, Queen Anne's commander-in-chief during the War of the Spanish Succession. His mother, Jeanette (Jennie) Churchill (1854–1921), was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York financier whose ancestors had fought against the British in the American War of Independence. According to a Jerome family tradition accepted by Churchill himself, Jennie's mother, Clara, was of Iroquois descent, but proof is lacking.
Childhood
Jennie and Lord Randolph were married at the British embassy in Paris on 15 April 1874. Winston Churchill's date of birth has given rise to speculation that he was conceived before the wedding, but the only certainty is that he was born prematurely. Preparations were made for the birth to take place in London, but after slipping and falling during a visit to Blenheim Jennie went into labour, the local doctor was summoned, and the baby was delivered at 1.30 a.m. on 30 November.

When the seventh duke was appointed viceroy of Ireland in January 1877, the Churchills moved to Dublin. Winston was accompanied by his nanny, Mrs Elizabeth Everest, who took him for walks in Phoenix Park and warned him against a group of evil men known as Fenians. Shortly after the birth of his brother John Strange Spencer (Jack) Churchill (1880–1947) in February 1880, the family returned to London, where Winston began to build up an impressive collection of toy soldiers in the nursery. At eight he was sent to a boarding-school at Ascot where the headmaster took a pleasure in flogging the boys until their bottoms ran with blood. Winston performed well in some subjects but his reports often referred to his unruly behaviour. According to one authority, he was birched for stealing sugar from the pantry and retaliated by kicking the headmaster's straw hat to pieces (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.53). When he fell ill his parents transferred him to a school at Brighton where he was much happier but came bottom of the class for conduct.

Neither of Churchill's parents lacked affection for Winston, but they gave him little attention and he felt profoundly neglected. Lord Randolph's short and troubled life was devoted mainly to politics: Winston could recall only two or three long and intimate conversations with him. Lady Randolph, meanwhile, revelled in high society. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star’, Churchill wrote. ‘I loved her dearly—but at a distance’ (Churchill, Early Life, 19). Unlike his brother, Winston developed a powerful ego. His letters home from boarding-school were full of demands for attention, and protests against his parents' failure to meet his wishes. He was fortunate to discover in Mrs Everest a surrogate parent who gave him the love and admiration he craved. He responded with remarkably open displays of affection for his ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’. Inviting her to Harrow, he showed her around the school and walked arm in arm with her up the High Street while other boys jeered at him. During her final illness in July 1895 Churchill, by this time a Sandhurst cadet, rushed to her bedside, afterwards arranging the funeral and the erection of a headstone on her grave. In his novel Savrola (1900) he brought her to life again as the hero's faithful housekeeper, Bettine.
Harrow and Sandhurst
Churchill entered Harrow in April 1888. Convinced that his son was not clever enough for university, Lord Randolph was impressed by the enthusiasm with which he manoeuvred his army of toy soldiers; he arranged for him to enter the army class, which prepared boys for Sandhurst. Legend has it that Winston was academically a bit of a dunce, but he demonstrated great ability in English, history, and chemistry, subjects that captured his imagination. Mathematics, however, baffled him and in spite of personal tuition from the headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon, he detested Latin. Like Richmal Crompton's fictional hero William, whom in many ways he resembled, the schoolboy Winston was a courageous individualist who flouted the rules and got into scrapes. He lacked self-discipline and his teachers often complained of slovenly or unruly behaviour, but censure or punishment served only to provoke him into a long and indignant defence of his actions. Inevitably, perhaps, team sports held little appeal for him, but in spite of frequent bouts of ill health he was a strong swimmer, excelled at rifle shooting, and won the public schools fencing championship in 1892. None of this could appease his father's wrath when he twice failed the entrance exams for Sandhurst, passing in at the third attempt with marks too low to qualify him for the infantry. Lord Randolph's response was a remarkably cruel letter in which he threatened to break off all contact with his son and warned: ‘if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 1.197).

At Sandhurst, which he entered as an infantry cadet in September 1893, Churchill enjoyed himself. Military topics such as tactics or fortifications were far more appealing to him than mathematics, and horsemanship the greatest of pleasures. In high spirits and working hard, he eventually passed out twentieth out of 130. During his final term he also plunged, for the first time, into public controversy. When the eminent moral reformer Mrs Ormiston Chant organized a campaign to exclude prostitutes from the bar of the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, Churchill incited some of his fellow cadets to riot and pull down the screens which had been put up to separate prostitutes from theatregoers. ‘Ladies of the Empire’, Churchill declared in an impromptu speech, ‘I stand for Liberty!’ (Gilbert, Life, 46–7).

Churchill's late adolescence was overshadowed by the physical and mental decline of Lord Randolph, who had risen to be chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Salisbury's government of 1886, but overplayed his hand, resigned, and never held office again. As a gentleman cadet Churchill had begun to win his father's respect, but just as the relationship between father and son was about to ripen it was cut short by Lord Randolph's death, at the age of forty-five, on 24 January 1895. His neurologist, Dr Buzzard, diagnosed his illness as syphilis, though it has recently been argued that his symptoms could have been caused by a tumour on the brain (Mather, 23–8).
Cavalry officer and war correspondent: Cuba, India, and Omdurman
Although unaware of Buzzard's diagnosis, Churchill believed that Lord Randolph's death, like that of his brother the eighth duke of Marlborough, ‘was yet further proof that the Churchills died young’ (Gilbert, Life, 49). Driven by the need to appease his father's ghost and vindicate his reputation, he was desperate to make his mark before it was too late. But he was also free at last of Lord Randolph's restraining hand and ready to embark on adventures of his own. After passing out from Sandhurst he obtained his commission (20 February 1895) as a cavalry officer in the Queen's Own hussars. Here he acquired a passion for polo, a game he was to enjoy playing for the next three decades. But much as he enjoyed soldiering he regarded it as a means to an end: the making of a reputation that would propel him into the House of Commons. In October 1895 he travelled with his friend Reggie Barnes to Cuba to report on the rebellion against Spanish rule for the Daily Graphic. Visiting New York en route he was entertained by the Irish-American politician Bourke Cockran, an old flame of Lady Randolph, whose eloquence and oratory made a lasting impression on him. Churchill's twenty-first birthday (30 November 1895) found him in the company of Spanish forces suppressing a rebellion in Cuba. Here he saw shots fired in anger for the first time, and acquired two lifelong habits: Havana cigars, and siestas.

In October 1896 Churchill sailed with his regiment to India. Comfortably quartered in the British military compound at Bangalore, he displayed little interest in the subcontinent around him, but followed the political news from home with the eagerness and frustration of an exile. With his thoughts fixed firmly on a parliamentary career, he was worried by the fact that unlike so many other ambitious young men he lacked a university education. Enlisting the aid of Lady Randolph, he pursued a remarkable programme of self-education. During the long afternoons while the regiment rested, he devoured the works of Plato, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Macaulay, Hallam, Lecky, Darwin, and Winwood Reade, supplemented by volumes of the Annual Register, in which he annotated the summaries of old parliamentary debates with imaginary contributions of his own. Churchill's reading affected both his prose style, which he modelled on Gibbon and Macaulay, and his view of the world. Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, a classic of Victorian atheism, completed his loss of faith in orthodox Christianity and left him with a sombre vision of a godless universe in which humanity was destined, nevertheless, to progress through the conflict between the more advanced and the more backward races. He passed for a time through an aggressively anti-religious phase, but this eventually gave way to a more tolerant belief in the workings of some kind of divine providence.

Churchill's belief that he was destined to accomplish great things was accompanied by a daring scheme of self-advertisement. He told Lady Randolph,
A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the Company's star. Thence hot-foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box. (Churchill and Gilbert, Companion, vol. 1, pt 2, p. 676)
Between 1897 and 1900, with the aid of assiduous lobbying by his mother, he managed to fight in three of Queen Victoria's wars while doubling as a war correspondent and turning all three of his experiences into books.

When the attacks of Afghan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India led to the formation of a punitive expeditionary force, under the command of Sir Bindon Blood, Churchill obtained an attachment to the force and a contract as a war correspondent with the Daily Telegraph. He took part in several skirmishes in which he came under fire and witnessed acts of barbarism by both sides. On his return to Bangalore he expanded his reports into his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), which combined an incisive narrative of the fighting with vivid accounts of the landscape and its inhabitants. By this time he was also writing a novel, Savrola (1900), a melodramatic tale of a liberal revolution in an autocratic Mediterranean state: the hero, Savrola, was a compound of himself and Lord Randolph. His work on the book was interrupted, in the summer of 1898, by the final stages of the campaign for the reconquest of the Sudan.

This time it was the Morning Post which commissioned Churchill to report the war. Overcoming the objections of Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force, Churchill obtained a temporary posting with the 21st lancers, and arrived in the Sudan in time to take part in the celebrated cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898), in which the regiment galloped by accident into a hidden ravine crammed with armed men. Churchill, who shot and killed at least three of the enemy with his Mauser pistol, was cool and courageous but lucky to survive a bout of hand-to-hand fighting in which 22 British officers and men were killed. Nevertheless he was eager to renew the charge at once. ‘Another fifty or sixty casualties would have made our performance historic’, he explained to Lady Randolph, ‘and made us proud of our race and our blood’ (Russell, 225). The charge of the lancers, however, was only a sideshow with no significance for the main battle, which ended in the defeat and mass slaughter of the Dervishes. Over 30,000 were killed, compared with 28 British officers and men—lancers included.

For a second time Churchill now expanded his war correspondence into a book: The River War (1899), a two-volume work in which the story of the campaign was firmly embedded in a remarkably sympathetic history of the Sudanese revolt against Egyptian rule. Churchill wrote:
Those whose practice it is to regard their own nation as possessing a monopoly of virtue and common sense are wont to ascribe every military enterprise of savage people to fanaticism. They calmly ignore obvious and legitimate motives … upon the whole there exists no better case for rebellion than presented itself to the Soudanese. (Churchill, River War, 1973, 22)
Churchill was also critical of aspects of British imperialism. He censured Kitchener for his part in the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb and the slaughter of wounded dervish soldiers. For all that, he never doubted the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British in Asia and Africa.
The South African War
In the spring of 1899 Churchill completed his tour of duty in India, returned home, and resigned his commission. By the time of the outbreak of the South African War, Churchill had negotiated a contract with the Morning Post which made him the highest-paid war correspondent of the day, with a salary of £250 per month and all expenses paid. The journalist J. B. Atkins, who sailed to South Africa on the same ship, recalled:
He was slim, slightly reddish-haired, pale, lively, frequently plunging along the deck ‘with neck out-thrust’ as Browning fancied Napoleon … when the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shone from him that he was almost transfigured. I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy. (Atkins, 122)
Hastening to the battle front, Churchill was accompanying an armoured train on a reconnaissance mission in Natal when the train was ambushed (15 November 1899). Revealing again an ice-cool nerve, he seized command of the situation and organized a successful attempt to free the engine, but was captured and interned with other British captives in the States Model School in Pretoria. Later it was sometimes alleged that Churchill gave his word to his captors that if released he would not take up arms against them, and subsequently broke his parole. As no promise to release him was ever made, this was untrue. But he did persuade Captain Aylmer Haldane and Sergeant-Major Brockie to include him in their escape plan, on the understanding that all three would leave together. In the event Churchill climbed out first and, finding that his fellow escapees were unable to join him, set off on his own. After a series of adventures worthy of John Buchan's hero Richard Hannay he escaped via Portuguese East Africa and arrived in triumph in Durban.

Standing out in sharp relief from the military disasters of ‘black week’, Churchill's exploits made him the hero of the hour. His new fame enabled him to override the objections of the War Office and assume once more the dual role of officer—lieutenant in the South African light horse—and war correspondent. In April 1900 he joined the column commanded by his friend Sir Ian Hamilton as it advanced through the Orange Free State to the Transvaal. Galloping over the veldt with his cousin and boon companion Charles Richard John Spencer (Sunny) Churchill, the ninth duke of Marlborough (1871–1934), fortified by regular supplies from Fortnum and Mason, and attended by his valet, Thomas Walden, Churchill was often in the thick of the fighting and again proved himself to be a first-class war correspondent. He turned his dispatches, this time with little adaptation, into two books: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), which included the story of his escape, and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). The South African War also left an enduring imprint on Churchill's thinking. It convinced him that war was too dangerous to be left to the generals.
Unionist MP
While on leave from India during the summer of 1897 Churchill had made contact with Conservative Party managers and delivered his first speech, at Claverton Manor outside Bath (26 June 1897). Two years later, when the sudden death of the MP for Oldham created a vacancy in one of the constituency's two seats, he was adopted as the Conservative candidate at the ensuing by-election, but was defeated by his Liberal opponent. In autumn 1900, when Lord Salisbury decided to call a general election, Churchill again stood for Oldham. This time his fame tipped the balance and he was returned with a small majority. As there was no autumn session of parliament he put the time to good use with a lecture tour of the United Kingdom, followed by a similar tour in the United States and Canada. The story of his escape from the Boers, accompanied by a magic-lantern show, netted him the handsome sum of £10,000, which he handed over to the banker Sir Ernest Cassel to invest on his behalf.

Churchill delivered his maiden speech to the House of Commons on 18 February 1901. While strongly supporting the war in South Africa he caused some alarm on the Conservative benches when he declared: ‘If I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field’ (Gilbert, Life, 139). Having acquired a considerable respect for the Boers he wished to see them offered generous peace terms, a theme he was to emphasize repeatedly over the next few years. Nor was this the only issue on which he diverged from the government. He launched a devastating attack on the secretary of state for war, St John Brodrick, whose proposals for army reform he condemned as increasing military expenditure for no strategic purpose. Imitating the parliamentary tactics once employed by his father, he organized with his friend Lord Hugh Cecil a group of young tory MPs who specialized in the harassment of their own leaders and called themselves the Hughligans. Increasingly in sympathy with the opposition, Churchill was closely in touch with Rosebery, Morley, and other leading Liberals.

Churchill was already a perennial subject of gossip and speculation. Physically he was unimpressive. At 5 feet 6½ inches, slenderly built, with a 31 inch chest, rounded shoulders, delicate skin, ginger hair, and a pugnacious baby face with twinkling blue eyes, he was striking but not handsome. Though he was a fluent writer, he spoke with a lisp and his speeches were the result of long and elaborate preparation. His practice at first was to deliver the whole of a speech from memory, but after an alarming experience in April 1904 in which he ‘dried up’ in the House of Commons, he never spoke without copious notes. On those who met him he generally made an instant and powerful impression, though not always a favourable one. Hyperactive and transparently on the make, he was far from the English ideal of a gentleman. To many of his fellow officers he appeared pushy and bumptious. Offspring though he was of the landed aristocracy, he belonged to a plutocratic milieu in which old and new wealth rubbed shoulders. His friends included great financiers like Cassel and Baron de Forest, who invited him aboard their yachts for Mediterranean cruises, or played host in magnificent villas and castles on the continent. Churchill enjoyed fox-hunting and country-house weekends but he was equally at home at the gambling tables of the French Riviera. Meeting him for the first time in July 1903, Beatrice Webb thought him ‘egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character. More of the American speculator than the English aristocrat’ (Diary, 287).
Joins the Liberals: Colonial Office
When Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister in May 1902, there was no place in the new government for Churchill. Then in May 1903 Joseph Chamberlain raised the banner of tariff reform. Churchill announced that he was strongly in favour of free trade and soon became one of the most active of the ‘free fooders’, a group of about sixty Conservative MPs fighting a losing battle for the cause. At the head of a divided party Balfour himself could only procrastinate, a predicament which laid him open to the taunts of Churchill, whose platform speeches combined lucid expositions of political economy with political slapstick. Most Conservative adherents of free trade decided to remain in the party, but Churchill, after some hesitation, crossed the floor of the house and took his seat, next to David Lloyd George, on the Liberal benches (31 May 1904). He had already accepted an invitation from the Liberal Association of North-West Manchester to contest the forthcoming general election as the free-trade candidate. During the next eighteen months, as the Balfour government drifted helplessly towards the rocks, Churchill attacked his former party with a ferocity that gave rise to lasting enmities and the accusation that he was a turncoat.

Churchill shrugged off charges of opportunism. It was the Conservatives, he argued, who had abandoned their principles. For good measure he claimed that he was following in the footsteps of his father, whose life he was then writing. In Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), he presented his father as a tory with increasingly radical sympathies, who would probably have opposed the South African War had he lived. His own Liberalism, therefore, could be construed as a continuation of tory democracy. Reviewers were not wholly persuaded by Churchill's portrait of his father as an earnest Victorian statesman, but they acclaimed the book as a literary tour de force and a well-documented political history in which the reputations of the living were handled with delicacy and tact.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became prime minister in December 1905 Churchill achieved ministerial office for the first time as under-secretary at the Colonial Office. One of his first acts was to appoint the civil servant and scholar Edward Marsh as his private secretary, a role in which he was to serve Churchill in every one of the offices he held between 1905 and 1929. In the ensuing general election the Liberals won a landslide victory and Churchill was elected MP for North-West Manchester.

Since the colonial secretary, Lord Elgin, was a member of the House of Lords, Churchill had the responsibility of handling colonial affairs in the Commons. In March 1906 his first important ministerial speech went badly wrong. While seeking to defend Milner from a motion of censure over the question of ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa he unwittingly gave the impression of gloating over his downfall, thus rubbing salt into Conservative wounds. Remembered against him for years to come, the episode was an early example of a flaw in his oratorical style: an overbearing manner that seemed intended to humiliate his opponents, of whose injured feelings he was largely unaware. In July he recovered with a statesmanlike speech announcing the restoration of self-government in the Transvaal, a policy to which he had made a significant contribution.

Delighted by his new responsibilities, Churchill ranged inquisitively over the affairs of scores of British colonies, annotating documents with a red fountain pen. As one historian has written: ‘He had a generous and sensitive, if highly paternalistic, sympathy for subject peoples, and a determination to see that justice was done to humble individuals throughout the empire’ (Hyam, 503). In autumn 1907 he set out on a tour of east Africa which began as a hunting expedition but turned into a semi-official inquiry into colonial affairs. In Kenya he went big-game hunting and investigated the conditions of African contract workers. In Uganda he visited Christian missions, took tea with Daudi Chewa, the eleven-year-old kabaka of Buganda, and took up with great enthusiasm the project for a dam across the Ripon Falls. It would, he concluded,
be hard to find a country where the conditions were more favourable than in Uganda to a practical experiment in State Socialism … A class of rulers is provided by an outside power as remote from, and in all that constitutes fitness to direct, as superior to the Baganda as Mr Wells's Martians would have been to us. (Churchill, African Journey, 70–71)
In the interludes Churchill dictated memoranda for the Colonial Office, and a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, later published as My African Journey (1908). Even in Africa he gave much thought to the future of politics at home and the prospects for the ‘new Liberalism’ of social reform, which had begun to attract him. On his return home he published an article, ‘The untrodden field in politics’, advocating a more active role for the state in the economy and the establishment of a national minimum standard to mitigate poverty.
Cabinet minister and marriage
When Asquith succeeded as prime minister in March 1908 he took the bold step of bringing Churchill into the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade (16 April 1908). At thirty-three, he was the youngest cabinet minister since 1866. Since constitutional convention required that a minister entering the cabinet must resign his seat, Churchill was compelled to contest Manchester North-West for a second time in a by-election, which he lost. He at once accepted an invitation to stand for the safe Liberal seat of Dundee, where he was returned at a by-election in May 1908 and remained MP until 1922.

A great admirer of beautiful women, but self-centred and gauche in their company, Churchill had already proposed to Pamela Plowden and Ethel Barrymore, only to be rejected by both. Then, at a dinner party early in 1908, he was re-introduced to Clementine Hozier (1885–1977) [see Churchill, Clementine Ogilvy Spencer], whom he had met briefly once before. Bowled over, he began an ardent courtship. In August he proposed, and was accepted, as they took shelter from the rain in the Temple of Diana overlooking the lake at Blenheim Palace. With Hugh Cecil as best man, and the bishop of St Asaph conducting the ceremony, Winston and Clementine were married at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 12 September 1908.

Churchill expected his wife to be a loyal follower, and it was a role she was content to play. The unhappy child of a disastrous marriage and a financially precarious home, Clementine found in Winston a faithful husband who loved her, sustained her in material comfort, and placed her in the front row of a great historical drama. He could never be accused of marrying for money or running after other women. She, for her part, was never uncritical of her husband or afraid to express her opinions. A lifelong Liberal, with a puritan streak, she never approved of his more louche tory companions such as F. E. Smith, a close friend from 1907 onwards, or Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, introduced to Churchill by ‘F. E.’ in 1911. Winston, nevertheless, discussed all his political affairs with her and she often gave him sound advice, which he seldom took. Given the dissimilarities between them, it was not surprising that Winston and Clementine sometimes quarrelled furiously. She once threw a dish of spinach at him, and missed. Nevertheless they were quick to make up after a row, and their marriage was sustained by a lifelong mutual affection expressed in their pet names for each other. Winston was always ‘Pug’ or ‘Pig’, Clementine ‘Kat’, and the children ‘the Kittens’. Their first child, Diana, was born in 1909. Their only son, Randolph Churchill followed in 1911, and Sarah in 1914. Marigold was born in 1918, but died in 1921, and the youngest daughter, Mary, was born in 1922.
Social policy at the Board of Trade
By the time of his marriage Churchill was working in close alliance with the ‘Welsh wizard’ David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer. As Asquith's daughter Violet observed, Lloyd George was undoubtedly the dominant partner:
His was the only personal leadership I have ever known Winston to accept unquestioningly in the whole of his career. He was fascinated by a mind more swift and agile than his own … From Lloyd George he was to learn the language of Radicalism. It was Lloyd George's native tongue, but it was not his own, and despite his efforts he spoke it ‘with a difference’. (Bonham-Carter, Churchill, 161)
Lloyd George encouraged Churchill to concentrate on social policy. Drawing on the advice of his officials he promoted three major reforms: the Trade Boards Act of 1909 which introduced statutory minimum wages into the ‘sweated trades’; state-run labour exchanges, planned by the young William Beveridge, whom Churchill recruited as a civil servant specifically for the purpose; and compulsory unemployment insurance, which later became a part of Lloyd George's National Insurance Act of 1911. Though none of these measures was especially controversial in itself, they were part of a wider radical strategy which Lloyd George and Churchill urged on the cabinet, and for which they campaigned at great public meetings. In order to pay for welfare reforms they demanded reductions in the defence budget, precipitating a cabinet crisis over the naval estimates of 1909. Proclaiming something very like their own foreign policy of peace with Germany, they denounced the prophets of a great European war as alarmists. The greatest threat to Britain's imperial might, Churchill declared, was from the internal decay of its people. But Liberalism, in his view, was the antithesis of socialism. ‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth’, he declared in May 1908. ‘Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty … Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference’ (Addison, 66).

When in April 1909 the House of Lords took the unprecedented step of rejecting the proposals of the ‘people's budget’ for increased taxes on the wealthy, Churchill as president of the budget league toured the country denouncing the peers and the Conservative Party. Collected and published in 1909 as The People's Rights, his speeches display him at his most radical. Conservatives, of course, detested both Lloyd George and Churchill, but Churchill was the more despised for ‘betraying’ both his party and his class. Indeed he was ostracized and traduced, as he recalled in old age:
They said that I beat Clemmie and that you could hear her crying as you passed our house. They said that I drugged, and if you rolled up my sleeve, my arm was a mass of piqures. We were cut by people we had known well and had looked on as friends. (Montague Brown, 147)
The Liberals meanwhile, though grateful for the loan of Churchill's talents, could never forget that he was an aristocrat who had begun his career as a soldier and a tory.
Home secretary
After the general election of January 1910 Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office, where his many responsibilities ranged from the supervision of the Metropolitan Police to the regulation of prisons, borstals, factories, coalmines, and shops. Churchill was eager to pursue an agenda of social reform. Persuaded by the arguments of eugenicists, who maintained that the ‘quality of the race’ was degenerating due to the multiplication of the ‘unfit’, he was briefly an enthusiastic supporter of the compulsory sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded’. Nothing came of this, but he did secure the passage of a bill to regulate the hours and conditions of shop assistants. In penal policy he made very active use of the home secretary's right to intervene, frequently mitigating the harsh sentences awarded by magistrates for petty crime. A firm believer in capital punishment, he nevertheless agonized over the fate of prisoners under sentence of death and reprieved many of them. His ambitious plans for reducing the number of petty criminals sent to prison were, however, thwarted by the brevity of his tenure of the Home Office.

Churchill's more constructive endeavours as home secretary were overshadowed by controversial problems of law and order. Although he was on record as favouring votes for women in principle, he detested the suffragettes for interrupting his meetings. Warning that he would not be ‘henpecked’ on the issue, he found reasons to object to the suffrage bill of 1910 and subjected it to a slashing attack in the House of Commons. In November 1910 a suffragette rally at Westminster was met by the police with extremely rough tactics in which several women were injured. Churchill was not personally responsible for ‘black Friday’, but he rejected all allegations against the police and refused to institute an inquiry.

Within a few days of black Friday a dispute in the south Wales coalfield led to a strike by miners employed by the Cambrian Colliery. Riots and looting broke out in the town of Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley and one of the rioters was fatally injured in a struggle with the Glamorganshire police. The local magistrates pleaded with the Home Office to authorize the dispatch of troops. Recognizing that any direct clash between troops and strikers might result in bloodshed, Churchill at first refused the request of the local authorities, and sent instead a contingent of the Metropolitan Police. But twenty-four hours later, when it was clear that the riots were continuing unabated, Churchill authorized the dispatch of troops. In a bold and imaginative stroke, which may have been unconstitutional, he appointed General Nevil Macready to command both troops and police, with instructions to ensure that the police acted as a buffer between the strikers and the troops. He thereby took control out of the hands of the local authorities, who might well have been tempted to employ both police and troops as strike-breakers.

Churchill's conduct of the Tonypandy affair prevented further bloodshed, but he was strongly attacked by Keir Hardie for condoning brutality on the part of the Metropolitan Police. Afterwards the legend grew that Churchill had sent troops to shoot down striking Welsh miners. Although this was a gross distortion, Churchill's response to industrial unrest was not always cool and measured. During the summer of 1911, when strikes in the docks spread to the railways, he was seized by a nightmare vision of a starving community held to ransom by industrial anarchists. Overriding the local authorities, he dispatched troops to many parts of the country and gave army commanders discretion to employ them. When rioters tried to prevent the movement of a train at Llanelli, troops opened fire and two of the rioters were shot dead. Together with Tonypandy, these events marked a turning point in Churchill's relations with the Labour Party and the trade unions. His record as a social reformer was eclipsed by his new reputation as a class warrior with a ‘Prussian’ love of order, maintained if necessary by military force.

The impression was deepened by a famous episode in January 1911. Hunted down by the police, a number of Russian anarchists, led by ‘Peter the Painter’, took refuge in a house in Sidney Street, in the East End of London, and fired at the police. Churchill hastened to the scene, where his conspicuous presence in the danger zone—recorded by a press photographer—led critics to accuse him of seizing operational control from the police. The charge was mistaken. When the house suddenly caught fire, Churchill confirmed the decision of the police to let it burn down, but otherwise he was simply an enthralled spectator whose antics caused much amusement. In the House of Commons Balfour enquired: ‘I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.409). Though he was still at the forefront of domestic politics, the soldier in Churchill was never far below the surface. As he explained to Clementine in May 1909:
I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgment on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations. (Soames, 23)
From 1910 onwards, contact with the intelligence services made Churchill apprehensive about German intentions and he began to think seriously about the implications of a major war. At about the same time, and possibly as a consequence, there were signs that he was moving to the right. In September 1910 Lloyd George told Churchill that he had two alternatives for the future: a coalition in which the Liberals and Conservatives reached a compromise over the issues that divided them, and a Liberal government with an advanced land and social policy. Churchill was all for a coalition and henceforth made various efforts to find common ground with his Conservative opponents. With a view to assuaging the bitterness caused by the House of Lords crisis, Churchill and F. E. Smith in May 1911 co-founded the Other Club, a bipartisan dining club of which the Liberal and Conservative chief whips were both members.
First lord of the Admiralty
The Agadir crisis of July–August 1911 aroused the strategist in Churchill and he composed for the cabinet an important paper entitled ‘Military aspects of the continental problem’. At Asquith's invitation he attended a critical meeting of the committee of imperial defence, which revealed a complete lack of co-ordination between the plans of the Admiralty and the War Office. Much impressed by Churchill's interventions, and by his obvious desire to take charge of the Royal Navy, Asquith appointed him first lord of the Admiralty in October 1911.

Tradition has it that when an admiral spoke reverently to him of naval tradition, Churchill retorted: ‘What are the traditions of the Navy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!’ In later years he explained that he had never said this, but wished that he had. His mission at the Admiralty was to modernize. Many of the reforms he proposed were inspired by the retired first sea lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher, with whom he was in almost daily contact. But Churchill, of course, also had great confidence in his own judgement and was ready to act boldly.

Churchill's first act was to replace three of the four sea lords. Sir Arthur Wilson was succeeded as first sea lord by Sir Francis Bridgeman, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German prince and naturalized British subject, was appointed second sea lord. A dashing young officer, David Beatty, became Churchill's naval secretary. Subsequently, in December 1912, Churchill coerced Bridgeman into retirement, appointing Battenberg in his place. Churchill displayed little respect for many of the senior officers of the Royal Navy, whom he regarded as unimaginative and set in their ways. One of his first actions, in line with Fisher's advice, was to establish a naval war staff of three divisions—operations, intelligence, and mobilization—to prepare and co-ordinate war plans. With the assistance of Herbert Richmond he sought to encourage the interest of naval officers in history and strategy, and helped to launch a new periodical, the Naval Review. Eager to explore almost every aspect of naval affairs, Churchill set out to discover the facts for himself. Making frequent use of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress—where he also entertained his political friends from time to time—he inspected ships, dockyards, and naval installations with a vigilant eye. In defiance of protocol he sometimes bypassed senior naval officers and sought information directly from junior officers or ordinary seamen.

Many of the admirals were unimpressed. According to the second sea lord, Sir John Jellicoe, Churchill's fatal error was ‘his entire inability to realize his own limitations as a civilian … quite ignorant of naval affairs’ (Marder, From the Dreadnought, 255). But the admirals, like so many of the experts Churchill was to encounter, were often blinkered by convention. ‘In matters of technical advance’, writes one historian of Churchill and the navy, ‘the First Lord was always in the van, always supporting the pioneers, always sweeping aside the obstruction of the unimaginative’ (Gretton, 117). With Fisher's encouragement he developed a fast division of battleships, the Queen Elizabeth class, equipped with the new 15 inch gun. He pressed on with converting the fleet from coal-fired to oil-fired engines. In June 1914 he announced that he had negotiated the purchase by the British government of 51 per cent of the shares in the Anglo-Iranian oil company, thus ensuring a guaranteed supply of oil for the fleet. He promoted the development of submarines and air power, wresting full control of the Royal Naval Air Service from the War Office. In 1913, much to Clementine's alarm, he took up flying lessons and took to the air 150 times, after which she persuaded him to give up flying—for the moment.

Churchill was determined that Britain should retain a clear margin of naval supremacy over Germany. In a speech in Glasgow on 8 February 1912 he argued that for Britain a large navy was a necessity whereas for Germany it was a ‘luxury’—a comment which provoked much German anger. When the draft of a new German naval law proposed a further increase in the size of the German fleet, Churchill obtained the cabinet's approval in principle for an expansion of the British naval programme. At the same time he refurbished his Liberal credentials by floating the idea of a ‘naval holiday’, or joint suspension of naval construction by both countries. Following the German rejection of this idea, Churchill sought a naval arrangement with France under which the British Mediterranean Fleet would be withdrawn and concentrated in home waters, leaving the French to patrol the Mediterranean. Since this would involve the British in a pledge to defend the channel and Atlantic coasts of France, it was tantamount to a military alliance. After long and complex arguments the cabinet agreed in July 1912, but Churchill's expansionist naval policy, and the strengthening of the Anglo-French entente, alienated the radical wing of the Liberal Party and confirmed growing speculation that he was ‘moving to the right’ or preparing to rejoin the Conservative Party. During the winter of 1913–14 Churchill's insistence on the construction of another four dreadnoughts, and a further increase in the naval estimates, led to a crisis in which he found himself at loggerheads with Lloyd George, the majority of the cabinet, and most of the Liberal Party. Only the delaying tactics of Asquith, and a last-minute decision by Lloyd George to concede most of Churchill's demands, averted his resignation.
Ulster crisis and federal devolution of the United Kingdom
As first lord, Churchill tended to concentrate on naval matters to the exclusion of everything else. ‘You have become a water creature’, Lloyd George told him in July 1912. ‘You think we all live in the sea, and all your thoughts are devoted to sea life, fishes and other aquatic creatures’ (Riddell, More Pages, 78). Nevertheless Churchill was actively involved in the greatest political issue of the day: Irish home rule. Lord Randolph Churchill had famously declared: ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’. His son took the opposite line, denouncing Bonar Law and the Conservatives for inciting rebellion. In February 1912 he attempted to confront a Unionist audience in Belfast in the very same hall in which his father had spoken in 1886, but so great was the threat to his safety that the meeting had to be moved at the last minute to the Celtic Road football stadium. In private, however, Churchill made persistent efforts to find a compromise. One possibility, which he proposed in the secrecy of the cabinet room in March 1911, was to include Ireland in an all-round scheme of federal devolution, with seven regional parliaments in England alongside parliaments for Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The cabinet, however, decided in favour of a single parliament for the whole of Ireland. In September 1912 he caused something of a sensation by airing the concept of federal devolution in a speech in Dundee. By analogy with the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, it became known as Churchill's plan to revive the ‘heptarchy’. Twice in that same year Churchill urged the cabinet, without success, to offer temporary exclusion from home rule to the predominantly protestant counties. During the winter of 1913–14 he was the principal go-between in a number of secret moves to promote a bipartisan settlement. On the Conservative side his main contact was F. E. Smith, who was both a personal friend and a fervent champion of Ulster. Churchill, it was said, was threatening to quit the cabinet if force were employed against Ulster: ‘You understand that if a shot is fired I shall go out’ (ibid., 194).

As the hour at which the Home Rule Bill would become law approached, the Ulster Unionists rejected out of hand a belated offer by Asquith to allow the protestant counties to opt out for a six-year period. Churchill now changed tack, arguing that, having obtained a compromise, the Ulster Unionists must accept it. He was also eager to restore his standing in the Liberal Party. In a speech at Bradford on 14 March 1914 he issued a stern warning that Ulster Unionists must agree to the government's plan or take the consequences: ‘There are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extended scale’, he declared (Rhodes James, 62).

Meanwhile the cabinet was much alarmed by police reports suggesting that the Ulster Volunteers were planning a military coup. A cabinet committee under Churchill authorized precautionary troop movements and Churchill himself, as first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the 5th battle squadron to steam to Lamlash, menacingly close to Belfast. His actions convinced the Conservatives that the government was planning an ‘Ulster pogrom’—an impression rapidly confirmed by the notorious episode of the ‘Curragh mutiny’, when fifty-seven of the seventy officers of the 3rd cavalry brigade declared that they would rather be dismissed than take part in the coercion of Ulster. Churchill often employed provocative language on the public platform while pursuing relatively conciliatory policies behind the scenes. Contemporaries, however, tended to equate extremism of style with extremism of intent. Churchill was partly to blame for the Conservative belief that he had attempted a pogrom. First World War: early naval engagements and the defence of Antwerp
On the eve of war in July 1914 Churchill wrote to his wife: ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?’ (Churchill and Gilbert, 2.710). When Austria declared war on Serbia two days later, Churchill, acting with Asquith's approval, ordered the fleets to their battle stations. In the critical cabinet discussions over the next few days Churchill, Grey, and Haldane were consistently in favour of British intervention while others, including Lloyd George, wavered.

One historian wrote:
Churchill took a more active part in the day-to-day running of the war than any First Lord in history. His were many of the ideas for action; it was he who drafted many of the signals to the ships. He studied and analysed each operation with great care. (Gretton, 147)
Churchill's interventionism, which he scarcely bothered to conceal, was a double-edged sword. Though he stood to gain the credit from successful actions by the Royal Navy, he was sure to get the blame when things went wrong. During the first few months of the war the Germans achieved a number of naval successes for which Churchill was strongly criticized. In August two German battleships, the Goeben and the Breslau, escaped from the Adriatic through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. On 21 September Churchill boasted that if the German fleet did not come out and fight they would be ‘dug out like rats in a hole’ (Gilbert, Life, 281), but on the following day the Germans sank three British cruisers, with the loss of 1459 officers and men, off the Dogger Bank. Two more British cruisers were sunk at the battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November. On 16 December German battlecruisers shelled Scarborough and other east coast ports, killing or injuring 500 civilians. Criticism of the Admiralty mounted and was only partially offset by successful actions off the Falkland Islands (8 December) and the Dogger Bank (25 January 1915).

Enthralled by all aspects of the fighting, Churchill was eager to play a part in the land war and ingenious in stretching the Admiralty's responsibilities. He converted the naval reserve into the Royal Naval division, an infantry force of 15,000 men, in which many of his friends were commissioned as officers. Although Churchill promised that the division would later be transferred to the control of the War Office, he now had at his disposal something very like a private army. He also established what soon became known as his ‘Dunkirk circus’, three squadrons of aircraft which bombed German defences from airfields in northern France, protected by a force of Rolls-Royce cars with armour-plating. His response to the deadlock on the western front was to sponsor the idea of a ‘land ship’, an armoured troop carrier mounted on caterpillars, that would shield them from the field of fire as they approached the enemy trenches. A prototype was housed in the Admiralty basement.

For three-and-a-half days in October 1914 Churchill found himself in virtual command of a land battle. The Germans, advancing rapidly along the channel coast, were threatening the Belgian city of Antwerp. The cabinet dispatched Churchill to organize reinforcements and stiffen the resistance of the Belgian government. Churchill did a superb job organizing the defences of Antwerp and delaying the German advance. No sooner was he on the spot than his fascination with the conduct of military operations gained the upper hand. He called in as reinforcements the bulk of three battalions of the Royal Naval division and fired off a telegram offering to resign his cabinet post in return for a high-ranking command in the field. When Asquith read out the telegram to his colleagues there was a roar of laughter and Churchill was ordered home. The laughter illustrated the gulf between Churchill and the other politicians. The politicians were ultimately responsible for the conduct of the war, but since very few of them knew anything of military matters they relied heavily on the judgement of the generals and the admirals. Inside Churchill, however, was a generalissimo struggling to get out. As Churchill's critics saw it, his military ambitions were foolish and his melodramatic defence of Antwerp a tragic sequel to the farce of Sidney Street. When the city fell he was strongly attacked in the press for the apparent failure of the expedition. This, perhaps, was the moment at which long-held suspicions in the political world hardened into the conviction that he lacked judgement.
Gallipoli, removal from Admiralty, and resignation
In October 1914 the first sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced by anti-German prejudice to resign, and Churchill decided to recall the 73-year-old Fisher to take his place. ‘Those who knew them both’, wrote E. T. Williams, ‘realized that the arrangement involving such domineering characters, each used to having his own way, fond as they were of each other, would not work’ (DNB). For a time both Churchill and Fisher were excited by the possibility of a naval operation to capture the island of Borkum in the Baltic. But when the Russian government appealed urgently for action to relieve Turkish pressure in the Caucasus, Kitchener, the secretary for war, urged Churchill to undertake a naval demonstration at the Dardanelles. Churchill replied that a naval attack alone would be insufficient: a combined operation would probably be more effective. Kitchener, however, declared that he could not spare any troops, and again pressed the first lord to mount a naval demonstration. Churchill now dispatched a telegram to Admiral Carden, the commander of the Mediterranean squadron, seeking his opinion on whether it would be possible to force the Dardanelles with the aid of obsolete battleships surplus to requirements in home waters. Carden replied that he thought the Dardanelles might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships. Churchill became captivated by the vision of a fleet sailing through the Dardanelles, bombarding and destroying the Turkish forts and gun batteries on both sides of the straits, and provoking by their appearance in front of Constantinople a revolution and the withdrawal of Turkey from the war. The supply lines to and from Russia through the straits would be opened up, and the Balkan states rallied to the cause of the allies: at a stroke the military balance would be transformed.

Such was the vision. The outcome was a disaster. Both Kitchener and Churchill wavered between the concept of an operation carried out by ships alone, with troops landing subsequently as an occupation force, and a combined naval and military operation. A naval attack was finally launched on 18 March 1915 under the command of Admiral De Robeck. Whether it could ever have succeeded against the dual threat of minefield defences and gunfire from the Turkish forts remains a subject for debate. After the loss of three battleships De Robeck halted the attack and in spite of Churchill's pleas and injunctions refused to renew it. The war council now came down definitely in favour of a combined operation and the purely Churchillian phase of the action was over. After many delays and hesitations, a combined British, Australian, and New Zealand expeditionary force under the command of Churchill's friend Sir Ian Hamilton landed on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April. Within a few days it was clear that the troops were pinned down on a narrow stretch of beach with the Turks shelling them from the commanding heights above. The war council authorized further reinforcements, but there was no disguising the fact that the news was bad.

Fortune now deserted Churchill. From the start, Fisher had blown hot and cold about the Dardanelles. Increasingly overwrought and unstable, and fearful of losses, he suddenly cracked when Churchill, without consulting him, added two submarines from home waters to a list of reinforcements for the Mediterranean. On 15 May Fisher resigned and fled into hiding. Churchill might have weathered the storm but for the fact that Asquith, beset by a crisis over munitions, chose this moment to invite the Conservatives into a coalition. Eager to pay off old scores against Churchill, and fearful of his exploits as an amateur strategist, they insisted on his removal from the Admiralty and the war council. Asquith appointed him chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, a post that was largely honorific, together with a place on the new Dardanelles committee.

The Gallipoli affair dragged on through the summer and autumn. Though casualties mounted and there was little sign of progress, Churchill continued to champion the operation with unquenchable enthusiasm. By October the majority of the Dardanelles committee had come to the conclusion that the operation should be abandoned and when at last the cabinet decided in favour of withdrawal, Churchill was left with no alternative but to resign from the government. One of the few redeeming features of the Gallipoli affair was the brilliant evacuation with which it was brought to a close in January 1916. By that time, however, some 46,000 allied troops, including 8700 Australians and 2700 New Zealanders, had been killed.

Churchill was, to a great extent, the scapegoat. It was Kitchener who first pressed for a naval operation and Asquith, as prime minister, who authorized it. Fisher concealed his early doubts and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm. Nor did Churchill's responsibility extend much beyond the naval attack on 18 March. The land campaign which began on 25 April was primarily the responsibility of the War Office. Nevertheless Churchill's own egotism and impetuosity were factors in his downfall. He was over-confident of success, trumpeting victory in advance and passionately supporting the operation long after most people had written it off. Gallipoli was a cross to which he nailed himself.

Churchill was devastated by his fall from grace in May 1915. ‘Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths’, he wrote, ‘or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure’ (Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, 307). Nothing could wholly fill the void, but his family proved a great source of strength. Clemmie was a loyal supporter in time of trouble as was Churchill's brother Jack, currently serving at Gallipoli, and his sister-in-law Gwendeline (Goonie). When the Winston Churchills had to leave Admiralty House, they went to live with Goonie and her two children, John and Peregrine, at 41 Cromwell Road. At the weekends the two families would gather at a weekend retreat: Hoe Farm, near Godalming. Here Churchill discovered a powerful antidote to depression. He took up oil-painting and was shown by Hazel Lavery, the wife of Sir John Lavery, how to daub the canvas with bold strokes and bright colours. Soon he was haunting Lavery's studio and painting alongside him. Churchill never claimed to be a professional artist, let alone a great one, but in the course of a lifetime he greatly enjoyed himself painting hundreds of pictures. Whenever he went on holiday abroad he took his easel and paints with him, and even managed to paint one picture during the Second World War—a view of Marrakesh, which he presented to President Roosevelt.
Out of office: the western front and Westminster
After his resignation in November 1915 Churchill sought active service and obtained from Sir John French a promise of the command of a brigade. In the interim he joined the 2nd battalion of the Grenadier Guards at Laventie for training. To Churchill's dismay, Asquith then vetoed his promotion to brigadier-general and ordered that he be given the command of a battalion instead. On 4 January 1916 Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill was placed in command of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He arranged for his friend Archibald (Archie) Sinclair, a highland laird and aspiring Liberal politician, to join him as second in command. Towards the end of January the battalion moved up to the front line, close to the village of Ploegsteert, near Messines on the Franco-Belgian frontier.

Churchill's arrival, and his unorthodox methods of command, caused much astonishment, and some resentment at first among the junior officers. But he proved a good commanding officer, combining leadership and inspiration with a great solicitude for the welfare of the ordinary soldier. He waged a successful campaign against lice, reduced punishments, and organized entertainments. The sector of the front on which he was served was relatively quiet and the battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) took place after he had returned home. But Churchill was frequently under fire and had a number of narrow escapes from death.

Much as Churchill enjoyed soldiering, his military ambitions were thwarted by his modest rank, and he feared that a prolonged absence from Westminster would deny him the chance to restore his fortunes. In March 1916 he returned home on leave to speak in the house but destroyed the effect of an otherwise powerful attack upon Balfour's conduct of the Admiralty with an ill-judged appeal for the return of Fisher as first sea lord. In May 1916 the amalgamation of his battalion with another led to the extinction of his command and gave him a presentable excuse for resigning his commission and coming home. Churchill had spent only 100 days at the front, but the experience had served to confirm his critical estimate of the British high command. To replenish his income, while keeping his name in the public eye, he began to write war commentaries for the press. He also made a number of speeches, critical of the conduct of the war, in the House of Commons. Eagerly awaiting the downfall of Asquith, he planned to ally himself with a victorious combination of Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Curzon, and Carson. They, however, were less eager to ally with him. In the political crisis of December 1916, Asquith was replaced by Lloyd George, but the Unionists under Bonar Law insisted that Churchill should be excluded from the new government.

Churchill's main achievement during this first period in the political wilderness was the partial rehabilitation of his reputation. In June 1916 Asquith agreed to the appointment of a commission to inquire into the responsibility for the Gallipoli operation. Though handicapped by Asquith's refusal to allow him access to the official records, Churchill devoted much of his time to preparing a very eloquent and plausible defence. The first report of the Dardanelles commission, published in March 1917, made it clear that Churchill was not solely or even principally responsible.

After the battle of the Somme, Churchill had come to the conclusion that great offensives on the western front were far more costly to the allies than to the enemy, and ought to be avoided until new methods of attack were invented or overwhelming numerical superiority achieved. In a secret session of the House of Commons on 10 May 1917, Churchill argued the case in a powerful speech. Here was one of the perennial sources of his survival in British politics. No one else could match his ability, on a good day, to sway the House of Commons by the force of his argument. Churchill for his part felt a deep and genuine respect for a body that could make or break him, but also something more: a romantic faith in the providential character of an institution at the heart of British history. One evening in March 1917 he was at the house in the company of Alexander MacCullum Scott, a backbench Liberal MP, who recorded the following scene in his diary:
As we were leaving the House late tonight, he called me into the Chamber to take a last look round. All was darkness except a ring of faint light all around under the gallery. We could dimly see the table, but walls and roof were invisible. ‘Look at it’, he said. ‘This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany's brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world's liberties.’ (MacCullum Scott diary, 5 March 1917, Glasgow University Library, MacCullum Scott MSS)
Minister of munitions
Fearful, perhaps, that Churchill would emerge as the new leader of the opposition, Lloyd George promised to restore him to office. In July 1917, with great difficulty, he obtained Bonar Law's consent to the appointment of Churchill as minister of munitions. Since his new post was outside the war cabinet, this appeared to meet Bonar Law's demand for the exclusion of Chu

themandude · #10 11-05-2007, 03:24 PM

[X] Beat: for less money then I can find in my couch