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 , 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 , When Arthur Balfour succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury , as prime minister in May , there was no place in the new government for Churchill. Then in May Joseph Chamberlain raised the banner of tariff reform.
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 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 , 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 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 and 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 his first important ministerial speech went badly wrong. 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 , In autumn 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,. 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 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.
When Asquith succeeded as prime minister in March he took the bold step of bringing Churchill into the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade 16 April At thirty-three, he was the youngest cabinet minister since 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 and remained MP until 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 , he was re-introduced to Clementine Hozier — [ 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. 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. 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. Their first child, Diana , was born in Their only son, Randolph Churchill followed in , and Sarah in Marigold was born in , but died in , and the youngest daughter, Mary [ see Soames, Mary ], was born in 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.
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He was fascinated by a mind more swift and agile than his own … From Lloyd George he was to learn the language of Radicalism. Lloyd George encouraged Churchill to concentrate on social policy.
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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 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. Collected and published in as The People's Rights , his speeches display him at his most radical. Indeed he was ostracized and traduced, as he recalled in old age:.
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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. 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. After the general election of January 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.
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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 and subjected it to a slashing attack in the House of Commons. In November a suffragette rally at Westminster was met by the police with extremely rough tactics in which several women were injured.
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.
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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.
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During the summer of , 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. The impression was deepened by a famous episode in January 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? 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 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. From 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 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. Smith in May co-founded the Other Club, a bipartisan dining club of which the Liberal and Conservative chief whips were both members.
The Agadir crisis of July—August aroused the strategist in Churchill and he composed for the cabinet an important paper entitled 'Military aspects of the continental problem'.