CHAPTER EIGHT
In the General Election of 1922 the Lloyd George government was defeated, and an entirely Conservative administration was formed in which Churchill had no place. He had also lost his parliamentary seat at Dundee, and needed to find a new one if he was to return to the House of Commons, in which he had sat for more than two decades. His first attempt, when he stood for the West Leicester constituency in 1923, was unsuccessful. Whenever he spoke in public during his attempts to return to Parliament he was met by the accusation that during the war he had done the bidding of wealthy Jews for illegal gain. This charge, at a time of considerable anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, especially in Conservative circles, was given widespread publicity.
The accusation arose from a lecture given throughout Britain by Lord Alfred Douglas, the poet and former lover of Oscar Wilde. Douglas alleged that immediately after the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as part of a plot engineered by wealthy British Jews headed by Sir Ernest Cassel, an official communiqué was issued by the Admiralty – then headed by Arthur Balfour – to report that the battle had been a heavy setback for Britain. As a result of the dispiriting tone of this communiqué, British stocks had plummeted on the New York Stock Exchange. The Jewish conspirators then bought these stocks at the knock-down price, whereupon Churchill, in return for money from these same Jews, and in connivance with Balfour, issued a second Jutland communiqué. This stated that the battle had been much more favourable to Britain than had earlier been realised. The stocks rose to new heights. The conspirators then sold, making enormous profits.
According to Douglas, the Jewish financiers had rewarded Churchill with £40,000, the equivalent of more than a million pounds in 2006. Cassel, he added, had also paid for the furnishing of Churchill’s house in London after Jutland. Neither allegation was true, although Cassel had furnished a small library for Churchill ten years before the outbreak of the war.
Such were Douglas’s allegations. When the Morning Post called them ‘vile insults against the Jews’ Douglas sued the newspaper. The trial against the newspaper began on 17 July 1923. During cross-examination, the newspaper’s barrister, Patrick Hastings, asked Douglas: ‘Do you mean to say that Mr Churchill was financially indebted to the Jews?’ ‘Yes certainly,’ replied Douglas. ‘Do you want to persist in that now,’ Hastings continued. ‘Of course I do,’ Douglas replied.
Questioned about the second Jutland communiqué, Churchill was asked: ‘Had it anything to do with any manipulation of stocks in any market of the world.’ Churchill answered: ‘Such an idea never entered my mind.’ He was then asked: ‘Did you make a penny piece of money in any way out of it,’ to which he replied: ‘No.’
The Morning Post was found guilty of having libeled Douglas, but was only fined a farthing – a quarter of a penny – a derisory amount. Douglas was also ordered to pay Churchill’s costs. Furious at this, Douglas published the text of his accusatory lecture as a pamphlet, of which at least 30,000 copies were distributed in London. He sent Churchill a copy with a covering note: ‘I challenge you to show your face in the witness box, and answer the questions I shall put to you.’
It was the British Government that decided to take action, bringing a criminal libel case against Douglas. Being a criminal libel brought by the government, and not a regular libel brought by a private individual, the case for the prosecution was conducted by the Attorney General. Both Churchill and Balfour were called as witnesses. When Churchill was asked directly: ‘Is there a shadow of truth in any of the accusations made against you?’ he replied: ‘Not the slightest. From beginning to end it is a monstrous and malicious invention.’
The jury took only eight minutes to reach their verdict. Douglas was found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison.1 ‘I cannot recall the case of any public man who has suffered such abuse and misrepresentation,’ Churchill’s former Admiralty Secretary wrote to him when the verdict was known. ‘It is not possible to hope that your enemies will cease to deprecate your actions and motives, but at any rate this particular outrageous falsehood cannot be publicly repeated. It is largely due to such unjustifiable attacks that you lost your seat at Dundee and failed at Leicester.’2
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During his almost two-year absence from Parliament, Churchill was asked by a leading member of the Jewish community in Britain, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, to act as an intermediary with the government over the merging of two companies, of which Waley Cohen was managing director, with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the British Government held a majority of the voting shares. It was Churchill who had negotiated the purchase of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company for the government ten years earlier, on the eve of the First World War, to ensure the supply of oil needed for the Royal Navy, which was then changing rapidly from coal-burning to oil-burning ships.
Churchill agreed to represent Waley Cohen’s two companies in the merger plans, which had been rejected by the government the previous year. For his representation he was paid £5,000 – twenty-five times that amount in modern values, and equivalent to the annual salary of a Cabinet Minister. Churchill told his wife that when he asked his former Principal Private Secretary at the Admiralty, Sir James Masterton-Smith, about the propriety of acting as the intermediary, Masterton-Smith was ‘very shy of it on large political grounds.’ But Churchill, who had recently bought a home in the country, Chartwell, in Kent, needed money for an ambitious rebuilding plan. He therefore approached the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, about the merger, seeking his goodwill and, if possible, assistance. This was not something Churchill wished to be known, writing to Clementine: ‘I entered Downing Street by the Treasury entrance to avoid comment. This much amused Baldwin.’
All went well. ‘My interview with the PM was most agreeable,’ Churchill told Clementine. ‘I found him thoroughly in favour of the Oil Settlement on the lines proposed. Indeed he might have been Waley Cohen from the way he talked. I am sure it will come off.’3 In memorandum on his merger activities, Churchill recalled how, at this meeting, Baldwin told him that he was ‘disquieted at the position of the Anglo-Persian company and at the impending decline of the Government holding. He was also on general grounds averse from the continued participation of the British Government in the Oil business. He expressed the opinion that a sum of twenty millions would be a very good price for the Government to obtain for their shares.’
For Churchill, this was a green light. ‘I went further into the matter with all the companies concerned,’ he noted, ‘and at the end of August I had a second interview with the Prime Minister. I told him that I believed that a scheme could be framed which would satisfy the various requirements he had in mind and that subject to his approval I was willing to take part in formulating such a scheme.’
Churchill made it clear to Baldwin that he would have a personal interest in the scheme. ‘The Prime Minister expressed his entire approval, and informed me that he thought it desirable the questions should be re-examined.’ During September, under Churchill’s guidance, an outline scheme was prepared by Waley Cohen’s companies and submitted to the government. ‘This scheme can be published,’ Churchill wrote, ‘and I believe that it will be found to be of advantage both to the State and to the special interests of the Admiralty. That however is a matter of opinion.’
Before the merger scheme could be examined by the government departments concerned, Baldwin made a public declaration in favour of Protection. Churchill, a veteran Free Trader, felt it his duty to re-enter public life to oppose the government and publicly attack this policy, and did not want ‘to be hampered in my full freedom of opposition to the Government by association with any special interests however legitimate;’ for that reason, he informed the companies, before making his first speech attacking the government, ‘I must withdraw from the negotiation and renounce any personal interest.’4
On 14 November Churchill told Waley Cohen that he would have to withdraw from his work on the merger as he wished to ‘re-enter public life.’5 This he did. Although, in March 1924, he lost his attempt to return to Parliament for the Abbey Division of Westminster by a mere forty-three votes, eight months later he was returned as the member for Epping, a constituency just outside London, whereupon Baldwin appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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While Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Cabinet was asked to consider a request from Weizmann for a British Government guarantee towards a loan for Zionist economic development in Palestine. Jewish enterprise was in need of financial support; economic hardship in Palestine had led to a decline in the number of Jewish immigrants, and in the previous year – to a small net emigration for 1928 – the British population statistics showed just under 150,000 Jews and more than 700,000 Arabs. The loan, Weizmann explained, would be ‘for the sole purpose of promoting and expediting close settlement by Jews on the land, as contemplated by the Mandate.’6
Lord Balfour, the architect of the Balfour Declaration, who as Lord President of the Council was a senior member of the Cabinet, supported the loan. Before the Cabinet was to discuss it, he brought Churchill and Weizmann together at his London home. During the Cabinet discussion, Churchill, who understood from his experiences in 1922 the relative precariousness of the Zionist enterprise when faced by parliamentary hostility, warned his colleagues that such a loan could stimulate anti-Semitic feeling in the House of Commons. He nevertheless supported the loan, as did Balfour. The Cabinet as a whole, however, rejected it.7
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In 1929 the Conservatives were defeated by Labour at the General Election and Churchill, while remaining a Member of Parliament, was out of office. That summer he embarked on a three-month journey through Canada and the United States. While he was travelling, there was an upsurge of Arab attacks on Jews throughout Palestine. There were then 156,000 Jews in Palestine – almost twice the number as in 1922 – and 794,000 Arabs. The Arab population had itself grown by 130,000 during those years, as much due to immigration as to natural increase.
During the attacks, by armed Arabs against unarmed Jews, 133 Jews were killed. In Jerusalem four thousand Jews were driven from their homes, many of which were then looted. Reaching San Francisco, Churchill was asked by the journalists who met him, how – as a recent member of the British Government and a former Colonial Secretary – the Arab killing of Jews and destruction of Jewish property in Palestine would affect Britain’s pledge to allow continued Jewish immigration. The Arabs had no reason to be against the Jews, he said at a luncheon on 11 September, and went on to explain: ‘The Jews have developed the country, grown orchards and grain fields out of the desert, built schools and great buildings, constructed irrigation projects and water power houses and have made Palestine a much better place in which to live than it was before they came a few years ago. The Arabs are much better off now than before the Jews came, and it will be a short time only before they realise it.’8 This was indeed the case: Arab villages that were near Jewish villages benefited considerably from the installation of water and electricity, as well as from a greater outlet for their produce.
To ‘Jewish enterprise,’ Churchill stressed, ‘the Arab owes nearly everything he has. Fanaticism and a sort of envy have driven the Arab to violence, and for the present the problem is one of proper policing until harmony has been restored.’9
Churchill made the same points in an article in the New York American magazine. Praising the work of the Zionists in Palestine, he wrote of Rishon le-Zion, the wine-making town he had visited eight years earlier, that out of ‘the blistering desert, patience, industry, and civilised intelligence have created green, smiling fields and vineyards and delicious shady groves, the home of thriving, happy, simple communities who, even if there had been no Balfour Declaration, would deserve the strong protection and the sympathies of free and enlightened people in every quarter of the globe.’
As for the Arabs of Palestine, Churchill wrote, they had been brought, as a result of the Jewish presence there, ‘nothing but good gifts, more wealth, more trade, more civilisation, new sources of revenue, more employment, a higher rate of wages, larger cultivated areas, a better water supply – in a word, the fruits of reason and modern science.’
Churchill’s article ended with a reference to his undiminished fear of Jewish Bolshevism, but on a positive, enthusiastic note: ‘So long as the Zionist leaders keep their ranks vigilantly purged of the vicious type of Russian subversive they will have it in their power to revive the life and fame of their native land. They are entitled to a full and fair chance. All the great victorious Powers are committed in their behalf and Great Britain, which has accepted a common responsibility in a direct and definite form, must not, and will not, weary of its lawful discharge.’10
The British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, was not pleased, writing testily to the Foreign Office: ‘The effect of this article can only be to induce Jews in America who might wish to take a moderate view, to refrain from doing so. They will expect a purely Zionist policy from the Conservatives when they come into office again and will hamper any move towards settlement till then, and then the chickens will come home to roost with Mr Winston Churchill.’11
While still in San Francisco, Churchill telegraphed the text of his article to London, where it was published in the Sunday Times on 22 September 1929. Thus his views on Palestine were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Soon after Churchill returned to Britain, the Labour Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, took what Churchill considered a retrograde step with regard to Palestine. In October 1930, the Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield – the social reformer Sidney Webb – issued a new Palestine White Paper, in which he sought to appease the unremitting Arab hostility to the idea of a Jewish National Home. The Passfield White Paper stated that Britain’s obligation under the Mandate was an equal one with regard to the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine.
Churchill begged to differ. On 2 November 1930, Balfour Day, in an article headed ‘Fair Play to the Jews’, he explained that the Colonial Secretary had ‘overlooked, or ignored, the fact that the obligations are totally different in character.’ Churchill then stressed that the ‘frequent use’ in the new White Paper of the mandatory obligations ‘to the inhabitants of Palestine, both Arabs and Jews’ diverged fundamentally from his 1922 White Paper – which, following upon the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, ‘recognised an obligation not only to the inhabitants of Palestine – Arab or Jew – but to the Zionist Movement all over the world, to whom the original promise was made.’
Churchill was emphatic that the British obligation ‘was to Jews wherever they might live, to have the right to become part of the Jewish National Home,’ and he added, ‘No similar obligation had been made to the Arabs outside Palestine.’ It was the Jews alone to whom Britain was pledged with regard to building a homeland in Palestine by immigration. As to whether the obligations which Great Britain had contracted by the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate were wise or unwise, Churchill wrote: ‘There is no use answering this at this stage. The sole question is whether they are being fulfilled.’
Churchill noted in his article that the British Government, being ‘face to face with the inherent, though not insuperable, difficulties of the problem, have to set limits, both of speed and method, to the practical, year-to-year progress of the Zionist scheme. They have to offer to the Arab population definite and concrete assurances as to the sphere within which their civil and religious rights will be safeguarded.’12 This approach put obligations on the Zionists, but it did not inhibit their ongoing immigration and economic development, including land purchase.
In the new Parliament of 1931, in which he was excluded from government office, Churchill joined an informal but strong committee of members of both Houses who spoke in favour of Zionist enterprise in Palestine. Among its members were a Labour stalwart Josiah Wedgwood, a former Conservative Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, and a recently elected Jewish member of the Liberal Party, James de Rothschild. A young Jewish Labour MP, Barnett Janner, the secretary of the committee, later wrote that its members ‘made Zionism one of their parliamentary duties.’13
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Randolph Churchill, like his father, supported Zionist aspirations. Many years later he recalled a visit by Weizmann to Churchill’s home at Chartwell at the time of the 1929 White Paper discussions, when Randolph was eighteen. His father, he said, had been fascinated by Weizmann’s talk and appearance: ‘Just like an Old Testament prophet,’ he told his son when Weizmann had left.14
Churchill had long been fascinated by Jewish history, by the Jewish involvement with the events of the time, and above all by the Jews’ monotheism and ethics. These seemed to him a central factor in the evolution and maintenance of modern civilisation. He published his thoughts about this on 8 November 1931, in an article in the Sunday Chronicle about Moses.
Noting that the Biblical story had often been portrayed as myth, Churchill declared: ‘We reject, however, with scorn all those learned and laboured myths that Moses was but a legendary figure upon whom the priesthood and the people hung their essential social, moral and religious ordinances. We believe that the most scientific view, the most up-to-date and rationalistic conception, will find its fullest satisfaction in taking the Bible story literally, and in identifying one of the greatest of human beings with the most decisive leap-forward ever discernible in the human story.’
Turning to the central theme of Judaism, that of one God whose code of human conduct Moses had received at Mount Sinai, Churchill wrote: ‘This wandering tribe, in many respects indistinguishable from numberless nomadic communities, grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable.’
Moses himself, Churchill wrote, ‘was the greatest of the prophets, who spoke in person to the God of Israel; he was the national hero who led the Chosen people out of the land of bondage, through the perils of the wilderness, and brought them to the very threshold of the Promised Land; he was the supreme law-giver, who received from God that remarkable code upon which the religious, moral, and social life of the nation was so securely fastened. Tradition lastly ascribed to him the authorship of the whole Pentateuch, and the mystery that surrounded his death added to his prestige.’15
Thirty years later, Churchill gave a copy of this essay to the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.