Churchill · 1932
The wilderness years
From 1929 to 1939 Winston Churchill held no government office. The Conservative leadership had broken with him over India in 1931 and was content to leave him out. He spent the decade at Chartwell, the house in Kent he had bought in 1922, building dry-stone walls with his own hands, painting, writing the four-volume life of his ancestor Marlborough, and waging, from the back-benches of the Commons, a one-man campaign of speeches and articles warning the country and the world that German rearmament under Hitler would end in war. The country mostly did not listen. The Times under Geoffrey Dawson edited him out where it could. The Foreign Office cabled Berlin assurances that he did not represent the government's view. The intelligence brief that fed his speeches, smuggled to him by junior officials and serving officers in defiance of standing orders, was the most accurate non-official assessment of German air strength in Europe. By the autumn of 1938 it was clear he had been right. He came back into the Admiralty on the third of September 1939, the day the country declared war, with the signal *Winston is back* sent fleetwide.
It is March 1935, in the library at Chartwell, in late afternoon. He is sixty years old. He is out of office for the sixth year. He is at his stand-up desk, a manuscript of Marlborough: His Life and Times open in front of him, three secretaries within call to take dictation, a tumbler of whisky-and-soda half drunk, a cigar. Outside the window, the wall he has been laying with his own hands for the past three summers has reached six feet of brick.
On the desk beside the manuscript there is a folder. The folder is a brown card pasteboard with no label. Inside the folder there are seventeen pages, in the typescript of the Air Ministry's reports on German aviation production. Two of the pages are stamped Top Secret in red. Three of them are estimates that the Air Ministry has never published. A serving officer in the Air Ministry's research branch, Squadron Leader Charles Anderson, has put them in his hand at a country-house dinner three weeks ago. Major Desmond Morton, who runs the Industrial Intelligence Centre, has been feeding him similar material since 1932. Several junior officials in the Foreign Office have been doing the same. Almost all of these men are committing what is technically a breach of the Official Secrets Act. They are doing it because they believe their own departments are misleading the Cabinet, and the only man in Parliament who will use the figures is sitting in this library.
The figures, this March, say that Germany has 800 first-line operational military aircraft, against the British figure of 453. He has worked out, with one of his secretaries, that on the German production rate currently estimated, by January 1937 they will have a first-line strength of 1,500 against a British strength of 740, even on the new RAF expansion plan. This morning Stanley Baldwin, the Lord President of the Council, has said in the House of Commons that the Government is satisfied that German strength is not, and is unlikely to become, materially greater than the British. Churchill has the Hansard report on his desk under the folder.
He thinks: Baldwin has been told these figures. Baldwin is on the Air Ministry's distribution list. Baldwin has the same numbers I have, with the same source.
He thinks: Baldwin is afraid of the by-election in East Fulham. He is afraid of the country.
He thinks: I have eighteen months on the present trajectory before they put forty divisions across the Rhine.
He thinks: I am being laughed at on the back benches by people who, six years ago, would not have laughed at me. I have been laughed at on India for four years now and on this for two. The laughter does not matter. The figures matter.
He calls in the of the secretaries, Mrs Pearman, and dictates an article for the Evening Standard. He has done two thousand five hundred words by seven o'clock. The article runs in the Standard the following Friday and is reprinted in twenty regional papers. It does not change the line of the Government. The line of the Government does not change until the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, four years after the article runs and seven years after the warnings began.
He is sixty when this is happening. He is sixty-four when Munich is signed. The crowd that cheers Chamberlain off the plane at Heston in September 1938 is, by his own diary, the loneliest he has ever felt. He says, in the Commons that week, that they have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat, and that what they have been offered is the choice between dishonour and war, and that having chosen dishonour, they will have war. He is shouted down. He is sixty-four years old. He has been wrong on India, and he was wrong on the abdication, and the back benches who shout him down on Munich have a column of his bad calls to draw on. The thing he has been right about for seven years is, in this autumn, the only thing that any of it will eventually be measured by.
On the third of September 1939, at the announcement of war, Chamberlain offered him the Admiralty. The signal Winston is back went out fleetwide that afternoon. He took the office at sixty-four. The wilderness years closed. The Premiership came to him eight months later. The papers from Anderson, from Morton, from the dozen serving men and women who had broken the Official Secrets Act for him through the 1930s, were, in a literal sense, the materials of the country's resistance from May 1940 onward. None of those officials was prosecuted. Several were knighted. The folder on the desk at Chartwell in March 1935 was the closest thing the country had to an early-warning system, and the only man in public life willing to read it aloud was, by political consensus, finished.