Excerpt
July 1945: Preparing for the Count
Herbert Morrison puts his teacup down and, looking across the table, asks the middle-aged diminutive red-haired woman sitting opposite him, ‘What should we do about Attlee, Ellen?’.
Ellen Wilkinson looks out of the window of her ninth floor flat, in a new development in Pimlico’s Dolphin Square, and, for a moment, stares at the view of Vauxhall Bridge, the glistening water of the Thames running beneath it and, looking to her like ants, the hundreds of commuters rushing to work.
Ellen and Herbert have been close for some time now. His marriage to Margaret is a charade. Physical intimacy ended after the birth of their daughter in 1921 and, since then, they have drifted apart. She went to live in the West Country in 1940 and Herbert sees very little of her. Since Churchill appointed him as Home Secretary, he has lived the life of a nomad, sleeping in the basement of the Home Office or at the Howard Hotel in Norfolk Street. More recently, he has spent most nights at Ellen’s flat. Ellen rents the flat under an assumed name so that she can keep her business secret. It is doubtful if this clandestine behaviour has had the desired effect since Ellen’s affair with Herbert is common knowledge within the party. It is obvious to anyone who cared to observe them dancing the last waltz at the mayor’s ball after the May party conference in Blackpool that they are more than friends.
She turns back towards Herbert and coughs. She doesn’t look too well. Her long-standing respiratory ailments – not helped by overwork, too many cigarettes, too much coffee and too little sleep – have made her frail.
‘You Know, Ellen, you need to take more care of your health otherwise you’ll be back in hospital’.
‘Don’t go on Herbert’, she says looking up at him. ‘You wanted to talk about Clem. Well, you have got to win in Lewisham first. I’ll keep lobbying in the party for you but I fear we haven’t done enough to publicise your claim to the leadership. Dalton and Bevin are against you and Clem had a good campaign didn’t he? We’ll see. You could write to him letting him know that the PLP must have a say on the leadership. It will happen anyway if we lose’.
Morrison, a short, broad man with wild, untameable dark brown hair, adjusts his thick, black-rimmed glasses, the right lens opaque to cover an eye that hasn’t worked since childhood. He has long courted the leadership of the Labour Party. With the results of the General Election to be announced in two days’ time this may well be his final chance to get rid of Clement Attlee.
‘That’s not a bad idea’, he responds, ‘but I ran the campaign like the leader of the party. Even the Express has declared that I am the leader in waiting. Attlee was nowhere. You know what I think of him’.
Ellen does, of course, and Herbert knows Ellen knows what he thinks – that Attlee’s far too small a man to be leader, that he’s just the best mayor that Stepney ever had, that he got the leadership of the party by sheer luck being one of the few Labour MPs still in Parliament when old Lansbury resigned, that he would have beaten Attlee in the contest in the 1935 leadership contest but some of the bastards on the left didn’t support him and even those who were sympathetic were concerned that his work at the London County Council would interfere with the party leadership role.
She will do what it takes to get Herbert the leadership as she has in the past. This is not just because of her love for him but also because she genuinely believes he is a much more talented politician than Attlee who may be a safe pair of hands but lacks charisma and has allowed himself to be overshadowed by Churchill. She also admires Herbert’s insistence that Labour needs to focus on political, as much as industrial, action and extend its electoral appeal beyond the organised working class.
Ellen is well-aware that she is more left wing than Herbert. Before the war, she was associated with the Communist Party, actively supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War as well as helping to organise, as the town’s MP, the march of the unemployed from Jarrow to London in 1936. Since then, though – partly no doubt because of her participation, as a junior minister under Morrison at the Home Office and partly because she disagrees with the British Communist Party’s slavish adherence to the Soviet Union even after Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler – her political stance has become more moderate.
‘We really must act decisively now. We are in a good position. I made sure there is no mention of Attlee in our manifesto and he didn’t dominate the campaign. He only got one wireless broadcast, the same as me.’
‘Write to him Herbert and see where that takes us.’
Following breakfast, Herbert takes Ellen’s advice and writes to Attlee telling him that given that Labour’s ‘Parliamentary Party is bound to include many new members, they should have an opportunity of deciding as to the type of leadership they want’. Attlee therefore should submit himself for re-election alongside any others who want to be considered as leader, and if Labour wins this should be done before the leaders goes to the Palace. In order to rebut criticisms of disloyalty, Morrison concludes by saying that he is ‘animated solely by considerations of the interests of the party, and regard for their democratic rights, and not by any personal unfriendliness towards yourself.’
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A young twenty-eight-year-old woman with wavy dark hair and dressed smartly in a black suit dress closes the door to her room and walks briskly down the corridor of the sub-basement of the Cabinet War Rooms. This lower floor, known as the ‘Dock’, contains small bedrooms for the administrative and clerical staff should they need to stay overnight. Elizabeth Layton stayed last night because she knew Winston would be back from Potsdam this morning and would expect her to be available. Elizabeth has worked for Churchill as one of his secretaries since late May 1941. She has got used to his working habits by now. Early starts and late finishes was the usual order of business. The first time she encountered him, he berated her for typing in single, rather than double, spacing (Churchill liked to edit drafts of a text). She burst into tears when he described her as an idiot. On realising that he had upset her, Churchill apologised saying: ‘Good heavens, you mustn’t mind me. We’re all toads beneath the harrow. We must go on like gun horses, “till we drop”’.
Elizabeth proceeds carefully down the barely lit corridor to avoid treading in rodent droppings before taking the stairs to the floor above. Once there, she says good morning to the staff on duty as she passes the Cabinet room, the Map Room, cypher officers, the canteen, the telephone switchboard and rooms for the Prime Minister, his ministers, and the Chiefs of Staff. What had previously been a basement underneath the Office of Works – on Storey’s Gate in Westminster, about a ten-minute walk from Downing Street – had been converted into The Cabinet War Rooms as the prospects of war intensified in 1939. It is truly a fortress with steel doors and a concrete roof fifteen feet thick. Since the rooms, ten feet below ground level, are lower than the nearby River Thames, pumping equipment has been installed in case of flooding.
Reaching road level, Elizabeth enters the Office of Works building and heads to Churchill’s apartment.
A few hours earlier, just before dawn, the old man wakes up with a start. He is convinced, in that moment, that he has lost. His eyes and mind gradually focus, and he remembers where he is, in one of the bedrooms of the so-called Number 10 Annexe. Overlooking St. James’s Park, the Annexe is a hastily constructed ground floor flat in a modern block of government offices – the Office of Works – directly above the Cabinet War Rooms. Clemmie has done her best to impose her own tastes on the unprepossessing rooms, decorating the walls in pale colours and hanging well-lit pictures. Much of their furniture from 10 Downing Street has been moved there.
After a high-explosive bomb fell close to Number 10 at the beginning of October 1940, causing extensive damage to the building, Churchill was finally persuaded, against his better judgement, to move to the Annexe. Even then, throughout the war, he still insisted, for reasons of public morale, on being seen entering and leaving the door of Number 10. During the war, he still liked to use the Cabinet Room as his main office and occasionally, too, the Prime Minister dined in the basement of Downing Street. King George VI joined him there fourteen times during the war. On at least one occasion, the King – together with Winston, other Government ministers and the Downing Street administrative staff – crowded into the small shelter under the building until the air raid ended.
It was common, during the five years of conflict, for Churchill to return to Downing Street from the Annexe before daylight even when there was an air raid still going on. In the evening, he would often wait until the anti-aircraft guns had started firing before making his way back from Downing Street, through the Foreign Office yard, down the Clive Steps and left along Storey’s Gate. Even then, much to the frustration of his private detective Walter (Tommy) Thompson, Churchill would insist upon climbing on to the roof of the Annex during air raids to see what was going on. In the end, Thompson had given up persuading him not to act so recklessly and had built an improvised air raid shelter on the roof made of sandbags. Initially, Churchill had refused to use the shelter so Thompson enlisted Clemmie to persuade him.
The seventy-year-old went to bed, unusually early for him, at one fifteen this morning. It has been a hectic few days. The ‘Big Three’ summit at Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin, had been a frustrating experience. Churchill had battled, largely unsuccessfully, against Stalin and Truman to protect Britain’s influence in Europe and prevent its domination in the post-war world by what were rapidly becoming the world’s two superpowers. He had interrupted his stay at the summit – it was not due to end until August 2nd – and flown back to Britain on the Douglas C-54 Skymaster, an aircraft donated by the American Government. With him were his youngest daughter Mary, aged twenty-two, and the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. At two forty-five on the afternoon of Wednesday 25th July, they arrived back at RAF Northolt in London for the count the following day.
In the evening, Churchill dined with Clemmie, his son Randolph, and two of his daughters – Mary, and Sarah. There too was his younger brother John, a permanent fixture at the Annexe since his wife had died and his house had been a victim of the Luftwaffe.
After retiring to his bed, Churchill remained awake for a little while, running through his head the steps that had led to this point. There was an acrid smell of cigar smoke in the room. He invariably smokes ten or so a day, although consumed might be a better word because he often chews half-smoked cigars to the point where they can’t be lit again. It is fortunate that a ready supply is provided courtesy of the Cuban Embassy. The woody smell of good scotch is added evidence of a restless night. He has been through so much. Tears well up in his eyes, as they habitually did, as he reminds himself that without Clemmie by his side, as she has been since their marriage in 1908, it would all have been impossible. He would need her even more if his premonition reflects the reality of what was about to happen.
Polling day had been on the 5th July, followed by an interminable wait of three weeks before the vote was counted to allow the service vote to be collected and collated. In the run up to polling day, the RAF had flown ballot papers and election addresses from various airports across Britain to service personnel who could choose to vote personally or allocate a proxy (usually wives) to vote on their behalf. Yesterday, the proxy votes had been extracted from the ballot boxes and checked against the service votes to make sure no-one had, inadvertently or otherwise, voted more than once. In the event of duplication, the proxy vote was rejected.
Churchill thinks the campaign has gone reasonably well. For the most part, he has been met by large cheering crowds. His advisors have predicted that he will end up with a majority of around sixty, and at six the previous evening, on his way back from the airport, he had told George VI that he expected to win. He wishes he can be so sure. His mind wanders back a few days ago when he attended, with Attlee, a victory parade in Berlin. As they drove in separate jeeps along a line of cheering British troops, he had instinctively raised his hand in recognition but quickly lowered it again when he realised that the cheers were for Attlee.
As he begins to drift off to sleep again, his mind focuses on an image of his debut House of Commons speech as Prime Minister in the Spring of 1940.
‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is 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’.
Churchill sleeps restlessly until around eight thirty when he is woken up by the arrival of his breakfast on a tray. Soon after, Elizabeth Layton arrives. She peers through the smoke-filled gloom and identifies a corpulent figure propped up on his bed surrounded by papers and red dispatch boxes. ‘Darling’, Elizabeth hears him say with some alarm before realising he is addressing Nelson, the ginger cat curled up at his feet. Noticing that Elizabeth has entered the room, Churchill greets her. ‘Ah, Miss Layton’, he says trying to sound as cheerful as possible. For the next hour, he dictates various letters and telegrams including one to President Truman suggesting he meets the King in Plymouth on his way back to the United States after the Potsdam Summit. Elizabeth is, after four years in his service, used to the old man’s working habits, expertly converting his verbal ramblings into coherent typed pages.
After Elizabeth Layton has left, Winston is visited by his doctor Lord Moran (Charles Wilson before being granted a peerage in 1943). Moran has looked after Winston’s health for many years. And there is a lot of looking after to do. Churchill hadn’t been a young man when he became Prime Minister and the gruelling workload and responsibility of leading the war effort has already had a significant impact. In particular, he had a minor heart attack in 1941 and two years later he almost died after contracting pneumonia.
‘Just checking up on you Winston’, Moran says, ‘it’s going to be a very stressful day’.
‘You know Charles, I had a worrying dream last night. I dreamt that my life was over. I saw, it was very vivid, my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognised my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very lifelike. Perhaps this is the end’.
‘Well, losing the election is not the end, you know that. And I don’t think you are going to lose’.
Winston grunts. After Moran left, he rises, puts on his favourite red, green and gold dragon dressing gown, before taking a bath.
Robert Garner 