The wilderness years

History does not always turn on the man at the dispatch box. Sometimes it turns on the man the dispatch box has cast out, who sits in a country library with a folder no minister will open, and who has decided that being laughed at is a smaller thing than being silent.

THE MAN IN THE WILDERNESS

Winston Spencer-Churchill, sixty years old in the spring of 1935, was by the measure of his own party finished. He had crossed the floor twice. He had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and put the country back on gold, and the gold standard had broken under him. He had broken with Baldwin and the Conservative front bench over the India Bill in 1931, and the leadership had been content to let him go. He sat for Epping on the back benches. He had no office, no red box, no cipher clerk. He had Chartwell, the house in Kent he had bought in 1922 for five thousand two hundred pounds; he had a manuscript of his ancestor Marlborough: His Life and Times open on the stand-up desk; he had a brick wall in the kitchen garden which he laid himself, course by course, through the summers of the wilderness. I have achieved a great deal, he wrote to Baldwin, by being a bricklayer and a writer of books. The country took him at this estimate. The country was wrong.

THE LIBRARY AT CHARTWELL

It is a Tuesday in March 1935, late afternoon, the Weald of Kent already going blue at the windows. The library smells of cigar smoke and coal and the binding glue of a thousand books. Three secretaries sit within call. A tumbler of whisky-and-soda stands at his right hand, half drunk. The wall outside has reached six feet of brick. On the desk, beside the open chapters of Marlborough, there is a brown card folder with no label on it. Inside are seventeen sheets of typescript from the Air Ministry's own research branch. Two are stamped Top Secret in red. Three are estimates the Ministry has never set before the Cabinet in plain figures. Squadron Leader Charles Anderson put them into his hand at a country dinner three weeks ago. Major Desmond Morton, from the Industrial Intelligence Centre across the valley at Crockham Hill, has been bringing such papers since 1932. Junior men in the Foreign Office have done the same. Every one of them is in breach of the Official Secrets Act. They are in breach because they believe their own departments are deceiving the Cabinet, and because the one man in Parliament who will read the figures aloud is sitting in this room.

THE FIGURES ON THE DESK

The numbers are these. Germany, this March, has eight hundred first-line operational military aircraft. Britain has four hundred and fifty-three. On the German rate of production now estimated, by January 1937 the German first-line will be one thousand five hundred against a British strength of seven hundred and forty, even on the new RAF expansion scheme announced as adequate. He has worked the arithmetic through with Mrs Pearman in the morning, in his own hand, on Chartwell notepaper. On the desk, under the folder, lies the Hansard of that very morning, in which the Lord President of the Council, Mr Baldwin, has assured the House of Commons that the Government is satisfied that German air strength is not, and is unlikely to become, materially greater than that of this country. Baldwin is on the same distribution list. Baldwin has the same papers. The figures have not changed between the Air Ministry's pouch and the dispatch box; the words have.

A SECOND AT THE STAND-UP DESK

He stands at the desk and considers, for the space of a cigar drawn through three times, what is in front of him. He could put the folder in the drawer and keep faith with the men in uniform who brought it. He could send a private letter to Baldwin, friend to friend, and trust the old machinery of clubland to do its work. He could wait for office, which a wiser man, having been wrong on India and being now in his seventh decade, would wait for. None of these courses would cost him anything further. He has been laughed at on India for four years and on Germany for two; the laughter, he knows the shape of by now. To open the folder publicly is to draw the laughter into a fixed beam upon himself, to be called a warmonger in the Times under Geoffrey Dawson's editing, to have the Foreign Office cable Berlin that he does not represent the view of His Majesty's Government, to be the back-bench bore on aeroplanes as he has been the back-bench bore on the Indian princes. It is also, by his arithmetic, to give the country eighteen months on the present trajectory before forty German divisions stand on the Rhine. The figures, he says aloud, to no-one in particular, matter. He rings the bell. Mrs Pearman comes in with her shorthand pad. He begins to dictate an article for the Evening Standard, walking the length of the carpet, hands behind his back. By seven o'clock he has two thousand five hundred words.

THE ARTICLE AND THE SILENCE

The article runs that Friday. It is reprinted in twenty regional papers. It cites no source by name. It gives the figures. Across Whitehall, men who know where the figures came from read it with their morning tea and say nothing. The line of the Government does not move. The Times under Dawson edits him out where it can. The Foreign Office continues to brief Berlin that the Member for Epping is a private adventurer of declining influence. The articles go on, week by week, through 1935, 1936, 1937. The folder on the desk thickens. The brick wall in the kitchen garden grows another course each summer. He paints the pond at Chartwell in oils, the goldfish moving under the surface like slow orange thoughts, and dictates the second and third volumes of Marlborough between courses at dinner. He is sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three.

THE CABINET ROOM HE IS NOT IN

In Downing Street through these years the men who are in office, Baldwin, MacDonald, then Chamberlain, have the same papers and a different calculus. There is the by-election at East Fulham of October 1933, where a pacifist Labour candidate overturned a Conservative majority of fourteen thousand on the disarmament question, and the lesson of which has been read and re-read in the Whips' Office. There is the country, which does not want another Somme. There is the Treasury, which does not want another loan. There is the Dominions Office, which does not want a European entanglement. The figures pass through the Cabinet papers and come out the other side as caution. Chamberlain flies to Munich in September 1938 and returns to Heston with a piece of paper signed by Herr Hitler, and the crowd that meets him is, by Churchill's diary, the loneliest evening of his life. He rises in the Commons the following week and tells the House, we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that the country has been offered the choice between shame and war, and having chosen shame, will have war. He is shouted down by his own side. He is sixty-four years old. He has been wrong on India and wrong on the Abdication, and the benches who shout him down 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 by which any of it will be measured.

WINSTON IS BACK

On the third of September 1939, at eleven in the morning, the country was at war. By the afternoon Chamberlain had offered him the Admiralty he had held in 1914. The signal Winston is back went out fleetwide from the Board of Admiralty that day. He took the office at sixty-four. Eight months later he was Prime Minister. The papers from Anderson, from Morton, from the dozen serving men and women who had broken the Official Secrets Act through the wilderness years, were now, in the most literal sense, the materials of the country's resistance. None of the officials was prosecuted. Several were knighted after the war. Anderson, who had brought the seventeen sheets to the country-house dinner in February 1935, lived to see the figures he had risked his commission for vindicated by the Battle of Britain.

THE WALL IN THE KITCHEN GARDEN

There are moments in the life of a nation when its early-warning system is not in any ministry, but in the unfashionable conviction of one man who has been put out of office and refuses to go quiet. The decisive hour does not always strike in a Cabinet Room; sometimes it strikes at a stand-up desk in a country library, with a folder on the blotter and a cigar burning down, while a wall outside grows another course of brick in the long dusk. The wall at Chartwell stands today where he laid it, six feet then, taller now, the mortar set by the same hands that wrote the speeches of 1940. It is the plainest monument in England to the years when the country did not listen, and to the man who, being laughed at, went on counting aeroplanes.