BOOKS
On, Churchill, On /.
BY ROY JENKINS THE seventeenth Earl of Derby belonged to an intermediate generation of politicians. Although he entered the House of Commons in 1886, he had nothing of that uninhibited love of controversy which characterised many pre- 1914 figures. He was loth to disagree with his acquaintances, and when he did he often quarrelled with them as well. And although he lived until 1948, he was hardly a contemporary figure. He never held office after 1923, and it is difficult to imagine him in public except in a top hat and frock coat. He was one of those heavy, rather apprehensive men who achieved their greatest prominence when the Lloyd George coalition and the shifting currents of the early post-war years destroyed the tradi- tional pattern of politics.
Randolph Churchill's book on Lord Derby* appears with a chequered pre-publication his- tory behind it. When Messrs. Heinemann decided to strip it of an allegedly libellous footnote, Mr. Churchill decided that he did not want it at all in this expurgated form, and took strenuous legal action to prevent publication. After reading the book (which took me two months of intermittent application) one's first thought is that no one need have worried. General Spears (who thought he was libelled) could have shown a thicker skin. Messrs. Heinemann a stronger nerve, and Mr. Churchill a less frenzied attachment to every de- tail of his own work. They could all have safely depended upon the protective covering of the mountain of words in which Mr. Churchill has chosen to bury Lord Derby. Passages from the inmost recesses of this book are likely to remain as firmly hidden from the public gaze as the con- tents of a long lost (and little sought after) tomb.
There are 618 pages and approximately 300,000 words to the book. There have of course been longer biographies even in recent years. But not many, and not about figures as relatively insignifi- cant as the seventeenth Earl of Derby. Why has Mr. Churchill done it? It is not that he has any illusions about his subject's political importance. At times, indeed, he could hardly be more slight- ing. And his obvious lack of respect for Lord Derby's intellect, power of decision and fixity of purpose is hardly compensated for by occasional ringing passages about the glory of the House of Stanley. 'Lancashire and England and the Stanleys have travelled far from Bosworth and Flotiden to Anzio,' we are told as the book ends with an account of the present earl's Military Cross and of his brother's parliamentary prowess. 'And it must Kaye been a high and rich consolation to Derby in his decrepitude that with victory now in sight the name of Stanley was still honoured on the battlefield. "On, Stanley, on !" ' So it prob- ably was, but it makes it no easier to understand Why Mr. Churchill thought him worth the 618 Pages.
*LORD DERBY. By Randolph Churchill. (Heine- mann, 50s.)
My view is that Mr. Churchill conceived of his task as being the next best thing to writing a royal biography. The territorial influence, the ancient lineage, the princely life and the genial anti-intellectualism of Derby were all sufficient to make the illusion plausible; and, perhaps, to make Mr. Churchill feel that he could transcend the fact that Derby, even with all these advan- tages, never achieved higher political office than that of Secretary of State for War. Certainly Mr. Churchill sets out to give his subject the full royal treatment. The book is replete with family infor- mation, with descriptions of weddings and house parties, with lists of territorial possessions, and with accounts of triumphs on the turf. Even the style often sounds closer to the royal biographical tradition (owing rather more to Sir Theodore Mar- tin than to Sir Harold Nicolson) than to the writ- ings of Mr. Churchill to which we have been accustomed. 'The absence of the bridegroom's parents in Canada,' he says of Derby's wedding, 'though doubtless a disappointment to the young couple, bore biographical fruit as many friends and relations hastened to write long accounts to the absent parents.'
Of course, Mr. Churchill is right in thinking that this aspect of Derby's life deserves some special treatment. Derby began with a great territorial influence, but he added to it a personal popularity which was very much his own. Early in his life he was an excellent Lord Mayor of Liverpool; and from then onwards the making of agreeable little speeches to civic luncheons, church bazaars and Conservative garden fetes remained amongst his favourite occupations. He was always more interested in local matters than in anything else, and as he conceived of his locality as extend- ing at least from Preston to the north of Cheshire and from the east of Manchester to the Liverpool waterfront, this gave him a base which was both strong and wide. At Knowsley (uninfluenced by 'the stink of chemicals,' which Dilke had thought so bad in 1879 as to make the place unliveable in, even if the compensation were '100,000 /. a year clear') he held a sort of feudal court, not often entertaining other magnates—except when the King came for the annual Grand National house party—but receiving frequent visits from his political henchmen and other Lancashire asso- ciates.
All this undoubtedly gives Derby an interest which would not normally be possessed by an ordinary London politician who attained secondary Cabinet rank. Does it not justify Mr. Churchill's many pages? It might, if only Mr. Churchill were interested in these aspects of Derby's life. But the sad,- fact is that he is not. Only once does he make Derby's relations with Lancashire come alive. For the rest of the time he is like a rather too metropolitan wife, con- stantly straining to get her bucolic husband back to the high politics and the London life which she likes and he does not.
Some of Mr. Churchill's straining leads to good result, however. There are three main political parts to the book. The earlier two—the first deal- ing with the pre-1914 years and the second with the war-time coalition and with Derby's first period as Secretary of State for War—are of moderate interest. But the third, starting with Derby's return from the Paris Embassy in 1920 and going through to the fall of the 1924 Labour Government, is quite fascinating. Mr. Churchill, who had previously been staggering a little uncle) the weight of Derby's correspondence, suddenly pulls the narrative together and gives us one of the best accounts yet to be published of the quarrels which rent the Conservative Party between the last days of the Lloyd George Coalition and the formation of the second Baldwin Government. We still have rather too much quotation from Derby's letters (some of them remarkably silly letters), but we nevertheless get a vivid picture of the bitter split which divided Balfour, Austcn Chamberlain and Birkenhead on the one hand from Bonar Law, Curzon and Baldwin on the other, and of the curiously nervous and febrile quality of British politics in the early Twenties. The domestic watershed of the inter-war years was the General Strike. Before that, the Con- servative Party was plagued with uncertainty about the strength of the working-class industrial challenge. After it, particularly when the defec- tion of MacDonald made the political challenge equally ineffective, it abandoned these apprehen- sions and settled down to the complacency of the Thirties.
Derby himself emerges as a most unimpres- sive figure from these pre-General Strike disputes and confusions. His reputation as a wise and moderate statesman, making up for any lack of intellectual agility by a calm, clear judgment and a massive integrity of purpose, fades away under Mr. Churchill's scrutiny. He was moderate only because he constantly changed his mind when he heard the opinions of others and was therefore often buffeted into a more or less central position.
A typical example is provided by his attitude to the formation of the first Labour Government. Although he subsequently persuaded himself that he had been in favour of 'giving Labour its chance' (a view which would indeed have been in accordance with his reputation), his behaviour on hearing the result of the 1923 General Election was quite different. He saw the King's private secretary in order to deprecate any idea of send- ing for MacDonald, to put the blame for defeat on Baldwin and to canvass the idea of another Conservative Prime Minister. Then he wrote a long memorandum for the Cabinet, bitterly attacking any idea of the Government waiting to meet Parliament and thus probably paving the way for MacDonald. 'I repeat therefore,' he wrote, 'that the argument that the Labour Party should have .a chance of governing seems to me the maddest idea that ever was put forward.' Having delivered himself of this weighty piece of advice, Derby began to prepare himself for resig- nation in its support. But he then went to see Balfour, who told him in effect that he had been writing nonsense. The only proper constitutional course was for the Government to wait for the opinion of Parliament and accept it. So Derby fell into line, withdrew his memorandum, and emerged, in the eyes of himself as well as of others, as a man of moderation and foresight.
These and other revelations of Mr. Churchill's make clear the force of Lloyd George's descrip- tion of Derby as 'floundering about like a har- pooned walrus.'‘He was a very generous walrus (he forgave Birkenhead after 1922 with remark- able magnanimity) and sometimes a very magnifi- cent one.j3utoen Mr. Churchill's 618Tages have not been able to rescue him from the harpoon.
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