Winston Churchill makes a fine movie star. If only we
had a leader to match him in real life today
The
Observer
Britain’s
wartime leader is played by Gary Oldman in the film Darkest Hour, following
portrayals by John Lithgow and Brian Cox. His enduring legend is a rebuke to
current world politicians, says the Observer’s chief political columnist
Andrew
Rawnsley
Sun 7 Jan
2018 08.00 GMT
‘He
mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’: Winston Churchill
rallies the nation in May 1940.
In an early
scene in Darkest Hour, Clementine Churchill tells another character that her
husband is “just a man, like any other”. This is a knowing opening joke in Joe
Wright’s new film about May 1940 and the first three weeks of Winston
Churchill’s premiership. It is a joke that just about everyone is guaranteed to
get. Even those of its citizens with the slenderest grasp of this country’s
past will know that Churchill was not a man like any other. During its long and
rich history, Britain has had good, bad and mediocre leaders. Churchill
occupies an elevated plinth all to himself as the prime minister who led his
country through a struggle for national survival, the like of which it had
never before endured and has never since experienced. The stakes were
vertiginous when he replaced the discredited Neville Chamberlain at Number 10.
The choices made in the early weeks of Churchill’s premiership were a hinge
point in history. In play was not just the freedom of Britain but the future of
an entire continent.
This makes
the Churchill legend one deserving of his country’s pride and at the same time
it presents us with several linked problems. He is a challenge for actors who
try to embody him and for the politicians who have followed him. There is also
a Churchill conundrum for the country that remembers – and misremembers – his
role in its history.
Let’s start
with the actors. Their portrayals of Churchill matter. As the wartime
generation fades away, more and more of us will only know him – or think we do
– from the versions we see on screen. Some of our finest actors have given it a
go in recent years. There was a cameo Churchill from Timothy Spall in The
King’s Speech, which was rightly chastised for taking some liberties with the
history of his relationship with the monarchy. John Lithgow offered an
empathetic Churchill in his second, peacetime, period as prime minister for the
Netflix series The Crown. Michael Gambon gave us an affecting portrayal of the
great man in decline in ITV’s Churchill’s Secret. He was never seen on screen
during Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but a Churchillian spirit infused that
immersive account of the British army’s narrow escape from France in 1940.
Brian Cox was a jowl-quivering Churchill in last year’s film of the same name,
which presented him not as the imperturbable war leader but as a man tortured
with agonies about the risks of attempting the 1944 Normandy landings.
Darkest
Hour also has an ambition to peel back myth and find the complex character
within. Wearing a fat suit and a lot of prosthetics, Gary Oldman’s
impersonation is sufficiently spirited to shine even through layers of latex.
This film doesn’t avoid all the Churchill cliches. There is a lot of cigar-chomping
and whisky-swilling. Despite that, Oldman succeeds in creating a Churchill who
is more interesting than the “bulldog” of simple legend. We see him courageous,
martial and inspirational, but also beleaguered and uncertain, playful and
earthy, fearsome and maudlin, cunning and loving, bad-tempered, sentimental and
tearful. We are reminded that the superman was, just as his wife said, a man.
He was a genius not because he was without faults but because he transcended
his flaws. This is what makes him such a remarkable example of the human
species.
And such an
intimidating challenge to each politician who has followed him in Number 10. At
some level, every prime minister since has known that they will never match his
place in history. In today’s rather baleful political scene, he is more than a
challenge –he is a rebuke.
We pine for politicians who aspire to do more
with language than marshal banalities, incite division and rouse nastiness
The recent
burst of film-making about the 1940s may be mainly because the period provides
such strong material. I suspect something else is going on: a feeling that
there is no one like Churchill – or anywhere close to being like him – among
contemporary political leaders on either side of the Atlantic. It is our misfortune
to be passing through a period when the worst sort of leader uses passion in
the service of malevolence while the better types struggle to articulate much
by way of uplifting conviction. Do we have a yearning for leadership that
combines principle, vision and humanity with the capacity to mobilise and unify
people behind a collective and heroic endeavour? I rather suspect we do.
We surely
also pine for politicians who aspire to do more with language than marshal
banalities, incite division and rouse nastiness. Darkest Hour pivots around
three of Churchill’s finest speeches: his debut to parliament as prime
minister, his first radio address to a frightened nation and another speech to
MPs following the Dunkirk evacuation. In that short span of just three weeks,
Churchill produced a triptych of some of the most influential feats of
20th-century oratory when, in the words of Edward R Murrow, “he mobilised the
English language and sent it into battle”.
It would be
unreasonable to expect today’s politicians to match the Churchillian style. His
lavish orotundities and bombastic circumlocutions are stirring in a historical
drama but they wouldn’t suit our period when television and social media are
the principal environments in which contemporary politicians must operate. That
said, his most memorable phrases resonate down the decades because they are
timeless in their potency and so much better than anything to be heard from
politicians of this age.
“I would
say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the government: I have
nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
“You ask,
what is our aim? I can answer in one word. Victory. Victory at all costs.
Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be,
for without victory there is no survival.”
“We shall
fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and
growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may
be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we
shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we
shall never surrender…”
Never in
the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to one man’s brilliance
with words.
Compare and
mournfully contrast the power of his oratorical poetry with a Donald Trump
tweet or Theresa May coughing her way through a conference speech or Jeremy
Corbyn having a bit of a rant or Jean-Claude Juncker on a verbal ramble at a
Brussels news conference. Inasmuch as contemporary political players pay homage
to Churchill, it is the dismal tribute of offering bastardised versions of his
wartime rhetoric in self-serving support of their own causes. Mrs May does this
with her awful “red, white and blue Brexit”.Boris Johnson does this when he
claims that Britain will become “a vassal state” if it doesn’t have a
relationship with the European Union that he approves of.
How painful
it is to contrast what was at stake in 1940, when there was a genuine danger of
Britain becoming “a vassal state” of Nazism, with the phoney and petty furies
that foam around many of the arguments related to Brexit. The current cabinet
bickers about whether Britain should aspire to be Canada plus or Norway minus.
What wretchedly pathetic wrangling compared with the awesome choice facing
Britain when Churchill became prime minister.
Hitler had
swallowed Austria and consumed Czechoslovakia. Poland had been devoured by
Nazism in diabolical compact with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Denmark and Norway had
been gobbled up too. Belgium, Holland and France were overrun within a month of
Churchill’s arrival at Number 10. The military situation facing Britain looked
catastrophic. Consideration was given to evacuating George VI and the royal family
to Canada. The Americans were sitting on their hands. In an excellent scene in
Darkest Hour, Churchill is on a bad transatlantic phone line to Washington to
beg help from Franklin Roosevelt. The American president is all sympathy and no
assistance. He can give only excuses for inaction. The Americans are even
reluctant to release planes that Britain has already paid for.
To fight on
– or to take up an offer from Mussolini to mediate a peace with Hitler? That is
the grave question around which revolves the political drama of Darkest Hour.
The film reminds us that the choice made by Churchill was not at all obviously
the correct one to many of his colleagues. He began his wartime premiership as
a much distrusted figure within the Tory party. Though it later suited everyone
to pretend that he was the inevitable choice as prime minister, a significant
number of his colleagues thought it should be anyone but him. George VI, who
has been treated kindly by recent film and television productions, was among
the Churchill sceptics.
Chamberlain
(Ronald Pickup) and Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) are accurately portrayed
agitating for Britain to take up Mussolini’s offer. One of the things to like
about Darkest Hour is that it does not depict them as cartoon appeasers of
fascism, but as men sincerely convinced that fighting on will be national
suicide. To them, Churchill’s fine rhetoric is beside the point compared with
the power of Hitler’s weapons of destruction. “Words and words and only more
words,” sneers Halifax. He was wrong, but he was wrong for reasons that seemed
compelling to many people in May 1940. Much of the British military thought
invasion highly likely and defeat unavoidable. This context makes Churchill’s
determination to fight on all the braver.
Here the
story of his leadership folds into our national legend to create a collective
memory that has always set apart Britain from its neighbours. For most
Europeans, 1940 will always be a darkest hour. The majority of the continent
was either celebrating Hitler or allied to Germany or conquered by the Third
Reich or would be soon occupied. For Britons, 1940 became a finest hour. It was
retrospectively bathed with a fierce patriotic glow as the year when this
country stood splendidly defiant – “very well, alone”, as the great man put it.
This has made a major contribution over the decades since to a strong strand of
British exceptionalism that has inevitably infected the argument whenever we
have debated our relationship with the rest of Europe.
Yet 1940
has never represented a case for Britain to be detached from its continent.
Churchill understood that. It is central to his historical importance that he
saw this much more clearly than Chamberlain and Halifax. He argued for fighting
on because he grasped that Britain’s fate was entwined with that of its
continent. Making peace with Hitler would mean surrendering Europe to the
barbarity of Nazism. On 18 June 1940, in the wake of the capitulation of
France, he told the Commons: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in
this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free
and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if
we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made
more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted
science.”
He took
this stance in the face of considerable public terror about the consequences of
fighting on. The most irritating scene in Darkest Hour is one that is entirely
made up. At the height of the war cabinet’s debate about whether to sue for
peace, the film-makers put Churchill in a London underground carriage where he
asks a selection of salt-of-the-earth Brits whether he should open negotiations
with Hitler. To a man and woman, adult and child, they all respond “never”.
This invented scene is seriously misrepresentative of public opinion in May
1940. Many Britons were very fearful, and understandably so, of carrying on the
war. It had not been that long ago that crowds thronged to cheer Chamberlain
when he returned from Munich with his bogus “peace for our time”.
Britons
were still scarred by the meat-grinder carnage of the trenches of the first
world war. The advent of airpower – “the bomber will always get through” –
added to the horror of a conflict of indefinite duration that the country could
not be at all confident of surviving. It was really only after the unexpected
deliverance at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain that followed that the
nation solidified behind Churchill’s view that there could be no compromising
with the menace of Nazism.
This is one
of the many aspects of Churchill to admire. When he started to deliver his
fighting speeches, he couldn’t be sure that he would carry Britain with him. He
did not tell the public what they all wanted to hear; he used his powers of
advocacy and inspiration to rally parliament and the people behind him. He did
not follow public opinion. He led it. That is at the heart of his magnificence.
It is also another reason to mourn the lack of contemporary politicians who
aspire to emulate his example.
 |
Lord Halifax tried to negotiate peace with the Nazis
Lord
Halifax, Britain's Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of the Second World War,
secretly met with an Old Etonian who tried to broker a peace deal with the
Nazis, according to newly-declassified security files.
By Chris
Hastings, Public Affairs Editor 2:09PM BST 30 Aug 2008
The files
reveal that shortly after the outbreak of war Halifax helped with the travel
arrangements of John Lonsdale Bryans, who believed he could bring down Hitler
by making contact with prominent anti-Nazi Germans including Ulrich von
Hassell, the former German ambassador in Rome.
Initially
Lonsdale Bryans thought he could drum up support for an anti-Nazi coup in
Germany. But he subsequently changed tactic and tried to contact Adolf Hitler
in a bid to negotiate a peace.
The
disclosure that the Foreign Secretary had such close links with someone trying
to contact Hitler during wartime will reignite the debate about his own
beliefs.
Halifax,
who met Hitler in 1937, was criticised for being too close to the cause of
appeasement. Shortly after Churchill took over as Prime Minister in 1940 he was
moved from the Foreign Office to the British Embassy in Washington.
The
documents reveal that Halifax met Lonsdale Bryans, personally helped with his
travel arrangements and even accepted intelligence reports from him.
A letter in
the files from the passport office to Captain WS Mars, dated January 9, 1940,
states: "The permit granted on the 8th was given at the request of Mr CGS
Stevenson, the Private Secretary to Lord Halifax, who telephoned to say that
the Secretary of State wished that all possible facilities should be granted to
Mr Bryans."
More
details of Lord Halifax's involvement are contained in a internal note for the
Ministry of Information dated October 19, 1945.
Its states:
"Lonsdale Bryans met Lord Halifax on 25 August 1939. That he should travel
to Europe to make contact with enemy groups opposed to Hitler. Lord Halifax is
reputed to have said that Britain would not fight for Danzig and the [Polish]
corridor and later to have minuted that he was impressed by the proposal."
Security
officials stumbled upon the mission by accident when they arrested an associate
of Lonsdale Bryans called Anderson who had letters from the old Etonian on his
person.
A note
connected with an interrogation of Anderson states: "The main point which
seemed to emerge from the interrogation was that according to Anderson,
Lonsdale Bryans was a personal friend of Lord Brocket and also claimed to be
something in the nature of an unofficial envoy of Lord Halifax. He wished to
see Hitler and with this in view had asked Anderson to get in touch with a
certain Stahmer that Bryans would be vouched by a number of persons including
those on the list."
On December
13, 1940, MI5 contacted Sir Alexander Codogan, the Permanent Under Secretary of
State at the Foreign Office, to provide further details of the arrest and to
disclose what the service had learned about Lonsdale Bryans from his associate.
The MI5
note states: "With reference to our conversation yesterday afternoon with
regard to the case of John Lonsdale Bryans, I attach a copy of a letter which
this individual wrote to the Director of the Schwartzhaupter Verlay, Leipzig,
evidently offering to make a trip to Germany for the purpose of an audience
with the Fuhrer.
"In
writing this letter Bryans has of course been guilty of an offence under the
Defence Regulations (DR4A) in the he has attempted to communicate with the
enemy, but I certainly agree with your view that in the circumstances of the
case the suggestion that we should request the Admiralty to intercept the
Portuguese vessel on which Bryans is now travelling from Funchal to Lisbon is
not practical."
Sir
Alexander agrees that given the Foreign Office's involvement the idea of an
arrest is out of the question. On 7th April 1941 he wrote: "Although there
seems to be a good deal to be said for locking him up to prevent him airing his
views to all and sundry, I understand that if this is done it will inevitably
involve him bringing up the question of his contacts with the Foreign Office
and the facilities offered to him to get into Italy.
"In
the circumstances we feel that he might be left at large though of course be
strictly watched."
The Foreign
Office seems to have spent the rest of the war worried that Lonsdale Bryans
will reveal the mission to the outside world.
One Foreign
Office note from the period states: "Bryans is becoming desperately short
of money and although no mischief has been done so far, I anticipate the
possibility that he might try to sell his story the press. It occurs to me that
it might be a good idea to warn Lonsdale Bryans as seriously and solemly as
possible that he should not go on telling people of how he contacted the
Germans."
An MI5
official notes on 1 March 1944: "Bryans story would make sensational
reading in the Daily Mirror."
The Foreign
Office provided its clearest explanation of events in a letter sent seven years
after the end of the war, when the security services found out about plans by
Lonsdale Bryans to write about his adventures.
In a letter
dated 15 August, 1952, an official wrote: "The truth of the matter seems
to be that Bryans managed, by importuning a number of influential people in the
country, to get himself an interview with Lord Halifax and, by virtue of his
Italian contacts, to arrange a meeting with von Hassell in Switzerland to
discuss a possible revolution in Germany and peace terms. He brought back a
paper which he gave to Sir Alexander Cadogan purporting to be set out von
Hassell's views. His did this off his own bat and was never set on any mission
by Lord Halifax or employed by HMG in any capacity whatsoever, though Lord
Halifax did see him and though his journeys to Switzerland and Italy were
facilitated on two occasions, but solely to the extent then necessary to enable
anyone to travel."
 |
Charles
Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry
He was
appointed to the new Air Council at Westminster in 1919 by the postwar
coalition government. Promoted to Under-Secretary of State for Air in 1920,
Londonderry was nevertheless frustrated and took advantage of his Ulster
connections to join the first Government of Northern Ireland in June 1921, as
Leader of the Senate and Minister for Education. At Belfast he acted as a check
on the increasingly partisan and survivalist government of Prime Minister Sir
James Craig. Nevertheless, Londonderry's Education Act of 1923 received little
in the way of good will from either Protestant or Catholic educational
interests, and was amended to the point that its purpose, to secularise
schooling in Northern Ireland, was lost.
In 1926, he
resigned from the Northern Ireland Parliament and involved himself in the
General Strike of that year, playing the role of a moderate mine owner, a
stance made easier for him by the relative success of the Londonderry mines in
County Durham. His performance earned him high praise, and along with the
Londonderrys' role as leading political hosts, he was rewarded by Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin with a seat in the Cabinet in 1928 as First
Commissioner of Works. Londonderry was also invited to join the emergency
National Government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Lord President
Baldwin in 1931. This was the cause of some scandal as MacDonald's many critics
accused the erstwhile Labour leader of being too friendly with Edith, Lady
Londonderry.
When the
National Government won the 1931 General Election he returned to the Cabinet as
Secretary of State for Air (Londonderry also held a pilot's licence). This
position became increasingly important during his tenure, not least due to the
deliberations of the League of Nations Disarmament Conference at Geneva.
Londonderry toed the British government's equivocal line on disarmament, but
opposed in Cabinet any moves that would risk the deterrent value of the Royal
Air Force. For this he was attacked by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, and
thus became a liability to the National Government. In the spring of 1935 he
was removed from the Air Ministry but retained in the Cabinet as Lord Privy
Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. Combined with his role as a leading
member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, he attracted the popular nickname of
"Londonderry Herr".
The sense
of hurt Lord Londonderry felt at this, and of accusations that he had misled
Baldwin about the strength of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe, led him to seek to
clear his reputation as a 'warmonger', by engaging in diplomacy. This involved
visits to meet Hitler, Hess, Goering, Himmler, von Papen, and other senior
members of the German Government and the much-discussed two stays, of several
days each, in 1936, of Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador to the Court
of St. James, later the German foreign minister, at the principal ancestral
homes of the Marquess in Northern Ireland and England. They came to Mount
Stewart on 29 May – 2 June, and were at Wynyard Hall on 13–17 November, and for
subsequent briefings with government officials in London.
Between
January 1936 and September 1938 Lord Londonderry made six visits to Nazi
Germany, the first lasting for three weeks, but a seventh invitation previously
accepted for March 1939 was abruptly declined by Londonderry following the Nazi
occupation of Prague.
During the
first two visits, prior to the abdication of Edward VIII (who the Nazis
assessed as a supporter of their party), Londonderry was considered an
aristocrat of real influence by Hitler. The friendly regard in which the
Marquess was held in Berlin was reflected in Hitler indiscreetly informing his
guest, in October 1936, of his intended moves both on Czechoslovakia and Poland
years in advance of these two invasions being actioned.
Although
Londonderry immediately passed this information regarding Hitler's indicated
future direction of German policy on to a member of the British Government, via
a letter to Lord Halifax on 24 December 1936 rearmament was not notably
accelerated in Britain at this point. In the end, Londonderry's high-profile
promotion of Anglo-German friendship marked him with a far greater slur than
that which had led him to engage in appeasement in the first place.
Under
attack from anti-Nazis inside and outside Westminster, Lord Londonderry
attempted to explain his position by publishing Ourselves and Germany in March
1938. Then, after the Munich agreement, in October 1938, Londonderry wrote in a
letter that he was aware that Hitler was "gradually getting back to the
theories which he evolved in prison", when working on Mein Kampf.
After
playing a marginal role in the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as Prime
Minister in 1940, he failed to win any favour from the new Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill (his second cousin), who thought little of his talents. Out
of office during the war, he produced his memoirs, Wings of Destiny (1943), a
relatively short book that was considerably censured by some of his former
colleagues.
Ian Kershaw’s
biography of Adolf Hitler is widely regarded as the definitive work on the
subject, as well as one of the most brilliant biographies of our time. In
Making Friends with Hitler, the great scholar shines remarkable new light on
decisions that led to war by tracing the extraordinary story of Lord
Londonderry—one of Britain’s wealthiest aristocrats, cousin of Winston
Churchill, confidant of the king, and the only British cabinet member to
outwardly support the Nazi party. Through Londonderry’s tragic tale, Kershaw
shows us that behind the accepted dogma of English appeasement and German
bullying is a much more complicated and interesting reality—full of
miscalculations on both sides that proved to be among the most fateful in
history.
The lord who courted the Nazis
Alan Judd
reviews Making Friends with Hitler by Ian Kershaw.
Alan
Judd12:01AM BST 24 Oct 2004
Ian
Kershaw's attention was drawn to Lord Londonderry's relationship with the Nazis
by an 18in Meissen porcelain statuette of an SS stormtrooper adorning the
mantelpiece of the Londonderry family home in Northern Ireland. It was a
present from Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to London and later
Hitler's foreign minister, who had been a weekend guest in 1936. Making Friends
with Hitler is a window into the almost-forgotten world of 1930s appeasement,
showing why it appealed to so many and why it was doomed from the start.
It is hard
now to appreciate the social and political eminence of people such as Lord and
Lady Londonderry, owners of coal mines, vast tracts of land and, among other
properties, a Park Lane mansion with 44 servants. They entertained royalty –
Londonderry was called "Charley" by the King – and were on first-name
terms with leading political figures. It is harder still to appreciate how they
saw themselves: their rights were birthrights, their pre-eminence pre-ordained.
They were the cream of a society which it was not only their pleasure but their
duty to lead and serve.
To Lady
Londonderry, society hostess and high Tory, it was perfectly natural that she
should have Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, at her
fingertips. (The gossip of the time suggested it was rather more than that,
although Kershaw thinks their flirtation didn't amount to an affair.)
In 1931
Londonderry was made secretary of state for air by MacDonald's National
Government – an appointment which, according to Lloyd George, can be attributed
to his wife's influence. Londonderry's political tastes were pro-German and
anti-French, which brought him into early conflict with British policy, but his
overwhelming motive was to avoid repeating the First World War. In this he was
at one not only with his colleagues but with most of his countrymen. Yet he
recognised that, if we were to have an air force (there was pressure for the
RAF to be scrapped), it ought to be modern, and he pressed for expansion.
Like nearly
everyone – apart from Churchill and Sir Horace Rumbold, British ambassador to
Berlin – he underestimated Hitler and thought the Germans could be persuaded to
disarm, especially if we strengthened our air force. When, in 1935, the true
scale of German rearmament was at last accepted and the political tide turned
overnight, Londonderry was pilloried, then sacked.
He spent
the rest of his life trying to justify a career that had been characterised by
political misjudgments, moderate competence, an overestimation of his own
abilities and a degree of bad luck. But his activities during the next few
years made everything worse. Convinced that the Foreign Office (now waking up
to Hitler) was wrong in its estimation of the German threat, and that critics
such as Churchill were more likely to bring about the war everyone feared, he
courted the Nazi leadership, visiting Hitler, going shooting with Goering and
entertaining von Ribbentrop.
He
applauded Nazi anti-communism and was unworried by its anti-Semitism, but he
was no Nazi. Rather, as Kershaw says, he was "idealistic enough to presume
that politics… were determined by goodwill, moral objectives, the gentleman's
code of honour, the preservation of legal order". Above all he wanted to
avert another war. He was not alone: Attlee, convinced that Hitler's
dictatorship was "gradually falling down", was still opposing
rearmament in 1939. Privately, both the Londonderrys and the Nazis made similar
miscalculations – on the one hand that German aggression could be ameliorated
by friendship, on the other that social position was sufficient to influence
British national policy. It wasn't like that any more – if it ever had been.
During the
war Londonderry proved a staunch patriot, albeit dominated by his desire for
vindication. "I was the only person who was right during the 1930s,"
he claimed. Of his cousin Churchill he wrote: "I wanted to achieve by what
I thought was statesmanship what he wanted to achieve by war." Denying
that he was an appeaser, he couldn't see that what he had tried to do was, in
fact, to appease; but that is perhaps the nature of appeasement.
This is an
erudite, wise and instructive account of what might, with hindsight, seem one
of history's sideshows. Yet it was for years the conventional political wisdom,
the most favoured illusion, and Kershaw helps us to understand it better.
The other man who tried to appease Hitler
Rich, well
connected and with a fascination for politics, Lord Londonderry was that most
useful of men - a perfect scapegoat. Ian Kershaw tells his story in Making
Friends with Hitler
Neal
Ascherson
Sun 21 Nov
2004 00.50 GMT First published on Sun 21 Nov 2004 00.50 GMT
'Very
agreeable... a kindly man, with a receding chin and an impressive face'. So
reported Lord Londonderry after his first meeting with Hitler in 1936. Lady
Londonderry, the great society hostess and fixer, saw 'a man with wonderful,
far-seeing eyes... simple, dignified, humble'. Later, she wrote to him: 'You
and Germany remind me of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.'
At this
point, you may wonder why a good scholar like Ian Kershaw has bothered to write
about such a twit as Londonderry, the sort of solemnly self-important ass my
parents used to refer to as a 'stiff'. But Londonderry, if he did not achieve
anything much, certainly stood for something. In the first place, he came to
stand for the archetypal pro-Nazi appeaser. This was unjust, because he was
never anything like a fascist. Londonderry regarded the Nazi regime as foul and
suitable only for foreigners, but he did believe that Hitler had genuine
grievances and should be reasoned with, not excluded.
However,
during and after the war, the British needed an aristocratic scapegoat, someone
who was at once appeaser and coalfield owner to symbolise the rotten old system
which had brought the Depression and war.
Second,
Londonderry stood for a policy which did make a sort of sense. Once Hitler came
to power in 1933, there were three possible British policies. These were: to
negotiate with Hitler and to disarm in order to reassure him; to give him not
an inch and to rearm at full speed (Churchill's line); or to open a dialogue
with Germany while steadily rearming. Londonderry pursued the third option. He
did so very badly, but given that his cousin Churchill's 'war policy' had
almost no support at the time, it was the least worst path to take.
The
Londonderrys were immensely rich, owning more than 50,000 acres, a colliery
empire in the north-east of England, Mount Stewart in County Down and four
other country houses, and Londonderry House on London's Park Lane.
Charles
Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was raised to expect
responsibility and office. 'Charley', as King George V called him, became a
Tory MP in 1907 and fought on the Somme in 1916. His mother and wife wangled
him a transfer home, but he was denied the junior ministry he expected. This
was because he had failed to get Lord Curzon's footman exempted from active
service.
In 1931, he
was made Secretary of State for Air in the National Government. This was
because Ramsay MacDonald was obsessed with Lady Londonderry, calling himself
'your attendant ghillie'. At the Disarmament Conference, Londonderry made
himself unpopular by resisting pressure to reduce Britain's bomber force. At
home, he was denounced as a warmonger. He made it all worse by arguing that
bombers were needed to deal with rebellious wogs in Iraq or the North-West
Frontier.
When
Germany walked out of the conference in 1935, Londonderry asked for an increase
in the RAF. The government at first refused, then suddenly changed its mind.
Chamberlain (then Chancellor) took the credit for almost doubling aircraft
strength. Londonderry, once blamed for loving bombers, was now blamed for
failing to rearm fast enough. In March 1935, Hitler announced that he had
already achieved air parity with Britain. Londonderry responded hopelessly
badly in Parliament, querulously defending his own record instead of promising
more aircraft. Stanley Baldwin, the new Prime Minister, sacked him. It was all
very unfair.
Now began
his long, fatal flirtation with Nazi Germany. He would show those middle-class
second-raters what a freelance grandee could achieve. The 1936 visit to Hitler
and Goering was the first of a series in which he offered himself as a
mediator, as an influential friend who could convey German wishes to the
highest circles in Britain.
At first,
the Nazi leaders took his self-importance at face value. It was several years
before they realised that nobody in Whitehall listened to Londonderry any more.
The Foreign Office, which comes out of this book very well, had always known
that Hitler's promises were worthless. The politicians, although they dithered,
were too afraid of public opinion to follow Londonderry's calls for a
'rapprochement'.
The
high-point of all these contacts was the weekend when Joachim von Ribbentrop,
soon to be Nazi ambassador to London, flew in his own Junkers to Mount Stewart
and joined Londonderry's house party. The diplomatic results were zero and the
visit damaged Londonderry's name almost as badly as his attempt to invite
Goering to the Coronation in 1937.
Kershaw,
who shows genuine pity - if not quite sympathy - for his subject, points out
why his campaign for friendship with Germany failed. First, Londonderry kept
asking the Nazi leaders what they wanted and what the limits of their claims
were. This was a non-question, because they wanted all they could get,
preferably by war rather than by some international treaty.
Second,
although a conventional anti-semite, he never grasped that murderous violence
against Jews was central to the Nazi project, not a mere excess. Third, he
could not conceive that British opinion might come to prefer an alliance with
'Bolshevik Russia' against Nazi Germany, rather than the reverse.
For a
moment in 1938, Munich persuaded him that Britain had seen the light at last.
Chamberlain's calculation was that Britain must negotiate with Hitler because
our forces were still too weak to win a Czechoslovak war against him. But his
mistake was also Londonderry's: that Hitler must prefer gains by treaty to
gains by war. Within weeks, the 'Crystal Night' pogrom and then the occupation
of Bohemia in March 1939 ended all Londonderry's hopes.
'Charley'
was tall, thin and courteous and had a charming smile. It was not the fact of
being an aristocrat in 20th-century politics which sank him; it was the fact
that he was a stupid aristocrat, unable to grasp how the world had changed. The
fabulous receptions at Londonderry House earned him no respect from the
bourgeois politicians who thronged them.
And he did
not respect them, either. Privately, he thought they were all tradesmen except
for cousin Winston, of course. 'I now see why I failed to understand the very
second-class people I had to deal with and how glad they must have been to get
me out of the way,' he reflected. But that was the only failure he ever
admitted.
‘The Londonderry Herr’: Lord Londonderry and the
appeasement of Nazi Germany
Published
in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Features, Issue 1 (Jan/Feb 2005),
Volume 13
The term
‘appeasement’ remains as much a slur today as it was in the 1940s. Yet
appeasement is far from unusual in politics, although owing to the negativity
surrounding ‘appeasement’ we now prefer to use words like ‘compromise’ and
‘accommodation’. Our detailed knowledge of Nazi Germany (1933–45), in
particular its project to exterminate European Jews, has only emphasised the
folly of appeasement and those who advocated it in the 1930s. Yet for those who
lived through that decade, with memories of the Great War of 1914–18 and deep
fears of a new war involving the use of aerial bombing, the issues were not as
clear-cut as they would appear to us today.
The
reputation of the British aristocracy in particular was damaged by the
involvement of many aristocrats in the appeasement campaign. One such nobleman,
with substantial connections to Ireland, was the seventh marquess of
Londonderry (1878–1949). Up until very recently Lord Londonderry has received
almost no scholarly attention, an omission signally rectified by two new books,
Sir Ian Kershaw’s Making friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s
road to war, and this writer’s The marquess of Londonderry: aristocracy, power
and politics in Britain and Ireland. The Londonderry family owned an estate
near Newtownards, Co. Down, as well as wealthy coalfields in County Durham,
England. The seventh marquess had been the first Northern Ireland minister for
education (1921–6), and from 1931 to 1935 he sat in the British cabinet as
secretary of state for air.
Aristocratic
appeasers
Why should
the aristocracy be remembered in particular? Most people in the UK and France
feared another war with Germany. Nevertheless, many found the fascist regimes
of Europe distasteful, and governments had to balance their wish to avoid
another war with a foreign policy that did not appear too friendly towards
Mussolini and Hitler. This situation heightened the sense of confusion
surrounding foreign affairs in the 1930s. With governments trying to steer a
careful course, interest groups for and against appeasement were developed to
agitate ministers. One such group was the Anglo-German Fellowship.
Members of
what might be called ‘the establishment’ dominated the Fellowship. Their wealth
and influence were considerable, and they had the economic and social means to
visit senior Nazis in Germany. But far from being overly powerful, the
Fellowship was only one of many pressure groups and interests that the UK
government had to consider when formulating foreign policy. And although all
wanted to avoid war, there was a significant difference of opinion, in the
cabinet, parliament and the intelligence services, on how this was to be
achieved.
As the
appeasement lobby appeared to be dominated by titled grandees, that class
became associated with being pro-Nazi, a presumption reinforced by the odd
maverick like Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
However, even before the mid-1930s, aristocrats were being marginalised.
Compared to their dominance in the nineteenth century, it was increasingly
difficult for them to occupy posts in the cabinet without criticism, and they
had to jostle for influence with other wealthy and powerful groups such as the
press, businessmen, trade unions and, most importantly, the electorate.
It is
unsurprising, then, that for their detractors the aristocracy’s role in
appeasement confirmed long-term criticisms. But such condemnation tends to
ignore the almost universal support given to appeasement before the Second
World War, and that the hero of that war, Winston Churchill, was the grandson
of a duke and a cousin of Londonderry.
Aristocratic
appeasement is also easier to understand when we consider how the Nazis viewed
the aristocracy. For Hitler the nobility was ‘the scum produced by societal
mutation gone haywire from having had its blood and thinking infected by
cosmopolitanism’. But for Hitler’s Nazi adviser on foreign affairs, Joachim von
Ribbentrop, the British aristocracy was the key to power and influence in the
UK. Realising that Britain could be the main opponent to Nazi territorial
expansion, Ribbentrop, with Hitler’s approval, set about forging better
relations with Britain’s nobility, a task made simpler by his appointment as
ambassador to London in October 1936.
Londonderry
and appeasement
Lord
Londonderry’s relations with Nazi Germany cannot be taken as typical, although
his motivations were far from unusual. With enormous wealth at his disposal,
Londonderry could have retired quietly from politics in 1935. But it was his
political career and outlook, alongside other widely held reasons for
appeasement, that determined Londonderry’s decision to take up the cause.
As an
approach to politics, appeasement was a crucial component of Londonderry’s
political character. From the period when he represented the Ulster Unionists
at the Irish Convention of 1917–18, Londonderry was determined not only to buck
the trend of aristocratic decline and have a career in politics but also to
adopt what he felt to be a conciliatory approach, most notably in Ireland: he
had advocated cooperation with nationalists at the Convention, and as Northern
Ireland’s first education minister he attempted (unsuccessfully) to build a
non-denominational primary-school system (HI Spring 2001).
However, it
was Londonderry’s period as air secretary that led him to engage in the
appeasement of Germany outside government. His dismissal from the cabinet in
November 1935 was the conclusion to a troubled period of representing the
interests of the Royal Air Force. Londonderry’s overly careful attitude had led
him to be blamed for both the retention of air forces (and thereby aerial
bombing) and not rearming the RAF fast enough in the wake of claims about
German rearmament. With the Labour Party branding him a warmonger, Londonderry
was determined to restore his reputation. As a former cabinet minister, he
believed that he could do this and also play a useful role in promoting better
understanding between the UK and Germany. Like many Conservatives, Londonderry
had long regarded the Versailles Treaty as too harsh on Germany, and in May
1932 he warned that Hitler would assume power unless German grievances were
addressed.
Visiting
the Nazis
Londonderry
initiated his new political role with a private visit to Germany at the end of
January 1936. Ribbentrop ensured that Londonderry was treated well and that he
met with leading Nazis like Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Hitler himself. All
the Nazis made sure that their guest understood that Germany only wanted
friendship with the UK, but that it also expected certain grievances to be
addressed, such as the return of African colonies and a revision of its
European borders. The Nazis suggested an anti-communist alliance as the basis
for UK–German relations. Like many British appeasers, the fear of Soviet expansion
was central to Londonderry’s advocacy of better relations with Berlin. But the
British government, although sympathetic to such a view, was not yet prepared
to formalise a pact with dictators.
Unwilling
to encourage amateur diplomats like Londonderry, only one cabinet minister was
prepared to meet with him upon his return from Germany, and Oliver Stanley was
Londonderry’s son-in-law. Londonderry despaired at the attitude of his former
colleagues. But if the government acted indifferently, the high society circles
in which the Londonderrys had moved did not approve. However, both Londonderry
and his formidable wife, Edith, were determined to struggle through such
criticism, although it became increasingly difficult when the press began to
label them pro-Nazi.
Londonderry
was an easy target for such accusations. His pleas for better UK–German
relations were matched by the Londonderrys’ legendary hospitality towards
Ribbentrop. The ambassador visited their County Down estate, Mount Stewart, in
May 1936. He described Edith’s gardens as ‘paradise’, and created quite a stir
in the locality with his SS guard. Indeed, Ribbentrop’s association with the
Irish peer became so infamous that he was nicknamed ‘the Londonderry Herr’.
Action and
reaction
In the
months and years that followed his first visit to Germany in early 1936,
Londonderry made himself one of the most prominent advocates of appeasement.
Owing to his ability to contact senior ministers in both London and Berlin, he
became increasingly useful in circumventing the lack of full and frank
diplomacy between the two states.
In March
1936 Londonderry was criticised for a letter to The Times in which he not only
defended Hitler’s recent occupation of the Rhineland but also called for an
agreement to be made with Berlin. The British government began to take an
increasing interest in what their former colleague was discussing with the
Nazis. And although Londonderry had never forgiven Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin for dismissing him in 1935, the latter attempted to mend the fence by
having his close associate Lord Halifax meet with Londonderry to discuss his
findings. However, discussions soon broke down when Halifax refused to
countenance Londonderry’s request for an anti-communist pact.
Following
the utter failure of his attempt to influence foreign policy, Londonderry
dropped his advocacy of a direct deal between London and Berlin in favour of a
conference of the great powers, to include Britain, France, Germany and Italy,
but not Russia. Londonderry argued that this conference should resemble the
Congress of Vienna, the great diplomatic achievement of his ancestor Viscount
Castlereagh (later second marquess of Londonderry). Such comparisons with his
forebear heightened Londonderry’s sense of personal mission. But he also felt
that just as Vienna had created peace after the fall of Napoleon without
crushing France, so a similar congress was necessary to revise the
controversial Versailles Treaty. Such an agreement would, he hoped, ‘pin Hitler
down to peace under all circumstances for a period of time if necessary’.
A second
meeting between Hitler and Londonderry in October 1936 reawakened the interest
of Halifax. Londonderry informed Halifax that, among the usual list of German
complaints and aspirations, Hitler alluded to the eastward expansion of the
Reich.
Drift ends,
deception begins
On the face
of it, 1937 should have been a good year for UK–German relations. In May
Neville Chamberlain replaced Baldwin as prime minister. Chamberlain was
determined to end the policy of drift and actively engage in improving
diplomatic channels with the Nazi leadership. But it was during that year that
it became increasingly obvious to Ribbentrop that power in Britain did not lie
with the aristocracy. He was weary of his unpopularity among London socialites
and disappointed at the lack of openly amicable relations between his country
and the UK. Under pressure from Hitler, Ribbentrop concluded that Britain would
not be an ally to Nazi ambitions. In fact, he argued that if war should break
out the UK would be the Reich’s main enemy.
Although
the Nazis switched their focus to forming anti-communist alliances with Italy
and Japan, they continued to cultivate supporters of appeasement in Britain.
That way, it did not appear that Germany rejected British overtures for peace,
especially when it came to revising the Versailles Treaty, but it meant that
appeasers like Londonderry were unwittingly engaged in promoting a sham. When
Londonderry visited Göring in September 1937 he was disappointed by his host’s
‘less conciliatory’ attitude. He complained about this to Ribbentrop, blamed it
on Mussolini’s recent visit to Germany, and protested that he had barely any
influence over his former colleagues in the government.
Heightening
confusion
Just as the
Nazis were downgrading Londonderry’s value as a man of influence, the British
were becoming increasingly interested in his recent findings. Ironically,
worsening relations between London and Berlin made informal contacts more
valuable. Following his visit to Göring, Londonderry met with Chamberlain.
Subsequently, Londonderry was kept informed of a secret plan to send Halifax
over to Germany for a meeting with Hitler in November 1937. It is uncertain how
much of an influence Londonderry was at this point, but it is notable that part
of Halifax’s mission was to propose a pact between the powers of Western
Europe.
Prior to
the visit, Londonderry paid another trip to Germany and informed Halifax of his
findings. Halifax has been criticised for mentioning revisions to Germany’s
eastern border before Hitler raised the subject. However, it is worth noting
that Hitler had communicated this aspiration through Londonderry a year in
advance.
Londonderry
was deeply disappointed that that meeting did not produce an agreement. He
recognised that the Nazis no longer seemed responsive to British concerns, but
failed to register why. For Londonderry, the cloud of suspicion that
complicated relations between the two states had to be cleared. In his letters
to Ribbentrop, he became markedly more critical of the damage that certain Nazi
policies were doing to British public opinion, but continued to advocate a
Vienna-style congress.
Ourselves
and Germany
To his
lasting misfortune, the cooling of UK–German relations led Londonderry to
conclude that more efforts to promote them were necessary. From this endeavour
came Ourselves and Germany, published and reprinted throughout 1938. The small
book was intended to promote an understanding of Nazi grievances. It contained
frank reports of Londonderry’s relations with leading Nazis, some of which dealt
with the persecution of Jews. Given that he hoped to generate mutual
understanding, Londonderry printed a letter in which he informed Ribbentrop
that although Germany had a legitimate grievance with the Jews, it was not
applicable to every Jew, and such policies were harmful to public opinion in
the UK.
The letter
attracted adverse publicity, although the context is often ignored. It does
reveal, however, that the Nazis could rely on the widespread popularity of
anti-Jewish prejudices. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Nazi
brutality towards the Jews made comparatively mild prejudices seem harmless.
Londonderry certainly did not regard himself as anti-Semitic; one of his
sons-in-law, Lord Jessel, was Jewish, and he apologised for publishing the letter
to his friend Anthony de Rothschild. Fearing for his reputation and the
prospects of worsening relations, Londonderry became increasingly critical of
Nazi policy towards religious minorities, and mentioned it to Hitler when he
wrote to the indifferent leader of Germany in April 1938.
Ourselves
and Germany was published against the background of worsening relations. In
March 1938 Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty by incorporating Austria into the
Reich. In private, Londonderry wrote to a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship
condemning Hitler’s sudden and unilateral methods. But this only encouraged him
to believe that an agreement would pin Hitler down. In his April 1938 letter to
Hitler, Londonderry defended some of his more critical comments about German
policy in Ourselves and Germany. But he reminded Hitler that Britain and
Germany could still reach an agreement that would allow both to be leading
powers. Hitler sent a curt reply to thank Londonderry for his copy of Ourselves
and Germany. The book was subsequently refused publication in Germany until
Londonderry leant on Göring.
Londonderry
paid another visit to Germany in June 1938. He met with Göring and noted how
his host appeared less truculent than before. Göring informed Londonderry that
Germany’s final demands would be satisfied by the settlement of the Sudeten
question in favour of the Reich. Londonderry afterwards reported this to
Halifax, although the latter did not appreciate Londonderry’s negative views on
Czechoslovakia.
Munich
As the crisis
intensified, Chamberlain flew to Germany for a meeting with Hitler at
Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938. Londonderry’s informal contacts were no
longer useful now that the prime minister was meeting Hitler face to face.
However, Londonderry was pleased that his hoped-for summit between the two
leaders was finally happening. After some initial difficulties, a conference
between the four powers convened at Munich on 29 September. Londonderry was in
Munich at the time but played no part in the proceedings. The resulting
agreement gave Hitler the Sudeten territories and guaranteed the remainder of
Czechoslovakia through an agreement with France and Italy. The following day
Chamberlain had Hitler sign the infamous letter declaring their intention never
to go to war. As Churchill informed Londonderry, ‘Your policy is certainly
being tried’.
But unlike
Chamberlain, Londonderry did not enjoy any short-lived public adulation. His
presence at Munich attracted the hostility of the left-wing press. Not only did
he rush to his own defence, but he also added his name to a letter to The Times
from the pro-Nazi ‘Link’ group of politicians, praising the Munich agreement.
He was not the only non-member to add his name, but as an ex-cabinet minister
it was a scandalous act, considering the Link’s reputed connections to Berlin.
As he subsequently informed Lord Powerscourt, he thereafter became the victim
of a ‘conspiracy of silence’.
Worsening
relations
The
apparent triumph of ‘Munich’ quickly turned sour by 10 November 1938 following
reports of Crystal Night, a violent anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany. Londonderry
halted his communications with Nazi leaders and publicly condemned what had
happened, but, in contrast to many other appeasers, the worsening situation led
him to call for a new agreement between the two states. The Londonderrys were
in Sweden as guests of the royal family when, on 15 March 1939, the Germans
divided Czechoslovakia between themselves, Poland and Hungary. This ended
Londonderry’s public calls for a deal with Germany; instead he argued that
Hitler was untrustworthy. But it did not end his private advocacy of an
agreement in correspondence with Halifax.
In the
months that followed, Londonderry continued to involve himself in a situation
that was heading towards war. Reopening communications with Göring, he said
that he could do little other than support Chamberlain’s guarantee of Poland;
he felt that Hitler had ‘destroyed’ all his efforts at promoting peace. He sent
a similar complaint to the former chancellor of Germany and fellow aristocrat
Franz von Papen. Londonderry also wrote to the German ambassador to London,
demanding that he save UK–German relations by denying press reports about Nazi
brutality. The ambassador failed to rise to the challenge, yet Londonderry
issued a renewed call for a peace settlement in a letter to The Times on 22
June 1939.
It would
seem that Londonderry had begun to separate his views on the Nazis from those
on Germany. In early July 1939 he arranged with Philip Conwell-Evans—an
ex-appeaser who had forged links with German opposition groups—a meeting with
the ‘moderate’ Colonel Schwerin of the German general staff. Schwerin was one
of a number of aristocratic senior officers who regarded Hitler’s military
plans as disastrous. Londonderry informed Halifax of the meeting although he
was sceptical of Schwerin’s request for British military force. Halifax
appreciated the information. But this gratitude only led Londonderry to believe
that he could perform a useful role again and he began to plan another visit to
Hitler.
As soon as
Halifax was informed of Londonderry’s proposed mission he stopped it. The
former air minister had over-inflated his own usefulness, and the government
had its own special envoy. Londonderry argued defensively that he had unique
contacts with the German leadership that would allow him to declare that he had
been betrayed by their assurances and that he ‘represented the spirit of the
British government and people in being determined to resist any further aggression’.
It was Hitler’s style to leave his guests with the impression that they
mattered. Halifax, also a victim of this, remained steadfastly opposed to the
visit.
With this,
Londonderry’s political career and reputation lay in ruins. When the Nazis concluded
a pact with Stalin on 23 August, Londonderry blamed not himself for being
deluded but the way that the British government had allowed this development to
happen by not acting earlier. In the weeks leading to the declaration of war on
3 September 1939, the Londonderrys moved to Mount Stewart and were subject to
press rumours about being interned.
Peace
party?
It has been
suggested that during the war Londonderry was part of a mysterious ‘peace
party’ that wanted to negotiate with Hitler. It is true that Londonderry
remained concerned about Soviet expansion and broadly sympathetic with German
grievances. But his inclusion on a list of names carried by Hess on his flight
to Scotland in September 1940 reveals more about Nazi delusions than political
power in Britain. In contrast to some aristocratic appeasers, Londonderry was
not openly hostile to the war, and far from being a member of a peace party he
had advocated Chamberlain’s replacement with Churchill. For the remainder of
the war Londonderry helped with army recruitment in Northern Ireland and
struggled with the government to publish his memoirs. He died at Mount Stewart
in 1949 and was buried in the family graveyard there, flanked by statues of
four Irish saints.
For
Londonderry and many other aristocrats the promotion of appeasement had given
them a renewed sense of political input after decades of steady decline. Their
participation was intensified by the lack of a clear British foreign policy,
Nazi encouragement and the universal fear of another war, with its concomitant
danger of Soviet expansion and further imperial decline. We now know how deeply
mistaken they were to rely on Hitler. But they were far from unique in this
regard. As John F. Kennedy noted while a student in London in the 1930s,
British public opinion dictated the need for disarmament and appeasement, for
almost no one wanted to provoke another war.
Neil
Fleming is Lecturer in Modern History, Queen’s University, Belfast.
Further
reading:
N.J.
Crowson, Facing fascism (London, 1997).
N.C.
Fleming, The marquess of Londonderry (London, 2005).
H.M. Hyde,
The Londonderrys (London, 1979).
I. Kershaw,
Making friends with Hitler (London, 2004).
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