Winston S. Churchill by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII Never Despair 1945-1965 (1988)
Part Three: Second Premiership
41
Towards Seventy-Eight, and Beyond
...On November 2 there was a huge explosion on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific; two weeks later, it was announced in Washington that the United States had successfully tested ‘thermo-nuclear weapons’. No further details were made public. Not even Churchill was informed that this was in fact a hydrogen bomb.
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‘For your private ear,’ Churchill told Colville about Eisenhower’s success, ‘I am greatly disturbed. I think this makes war much more probable.’ Such fears gave Churchill a new sense of mission: to stay on as Prime Minister until he could bring about, by his own exertions, a reconciliation of the two Great Powers. This aim, more than any other consideration, was the underlying motive of his remaining years of power.
...Of the efforts being made by Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, for ‘their remarkable wisdom and their courage’ in reconciliation, and in linking their two countries with the deterrent strength of NATO, Churchill declared, echoing the sentiments of his Zurich speech of six years earlier: ‘There can be no effective defence of European culture and freedom unless a new Germany, resolved to set itself free from the ghastly crimes of Hitlerism, plays a strong and effective part in our system.’ Any man in Germany or France or Britain ‘who tries to hamper or delay that healing process is guilty of undermining the foundations upon which the salvation of all mankind from war and tyranny depends’. Time alone, Churchill added, could prove ‘whether final success will reward these earnest, faithful efforts. Terrible would be the accountability of those in any country who, for petty, narrow, or selfish ends, weakened the common cause by stirring bygone passions, hates and tragedies.’
...Among those listening to Churchill’s speech was James de Rothschild, a Zionist and a personal friend. In 1921 his wife Dorothy had been Churchill’s host in Jerusalem.
...At the Cabinet meeting on November 20 it was the question of a possible return to corporal punishment that drew Churchill’s comments. He had already, at the end of October, drawn the Cabinet’s attention to the strength of the views expressed in the debate in the House of Lords on the previous day in favour of restoring corporal punishment as a penalty for crimes of violence. He thought it would be ‘unwise’, Churchill had told his colleagues then, for the Government ‘to close their minds to the possibility of restoring this penalty if the case for doing so were fully established and public opinion hardened in favour of it. There had been a great increase in crime and the prisons were overcrowded: the problem of prison administration would be eased if, through having discretion to impose corporal punishment, the courts sentenced fewer offenders to long terms of imprisonment.’2131
Corporal punishment had been abolished by the Labour Government in 1948. The suggestion before the Cabinet on November 20 was that a Royal Commission, or possibly a Departmental Committee, should be appointed to make a further enquiry into the question. Churchill was ‘not attracted’, he said, by that suggestion, telling his colleagues that he would prefer that the Government ‘should hold themselves free to introduce legislation restoring corporal punishment if at any time it became clear that there was a sufficient body of public support for this course to make it possible to pass the necessary legislation through Parliament’. Corporal punishment, if it were reintroduced, said Churchill, ‘should be available as a penalty for all crimes of violence or brutality; and he did not exclude the possibility that this penalty might be reintroduced on an experimental basis, for a period of not more than five years, at the end of which it could be seen whether there had been an appreciable decrease in the crimes for which it was made available’.
If a plebiscite could be held on this question, Churchill added, the majority of the people of this country might, he thought, be found ‘to be in favour of reintroducing this penalty’.
...At a final Cabinet that month, on November 25, the issue on which Churchill spoke was that of the American forces in Britain. The Secretary of State for Air, Lord De L’Isle and Dudley, was afraid, he said, that the creation of ‘American communities in Britain’ with their higher standard of living ‘might cause criticism and discontent among the English communities in the neighbourhood’.
...For those who had worked with Churchill in the Second World War, and now saw him again after some lapse of time, the inexorable effects of the passing of time were clear. Sir Ian Jacob, Military Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet from 1940 to 1945 and now Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, later recalled:
I remember one occasion in 1952 when I was having lunch with Churchill in the flat in which he then lived on an upper floor of No. 10. As we sat down he heard a noise outside the window. He got up and looked out over the courtyard behind the old Treasury building in Whitehall. In the corner of this yard was a large heap of coke, and the noise was caused by a man who was taking coke in a wheelbarrow from a lorry which was standing outside the arched entrance to the courtyard and adding it to the pile. The Prime Minister looked at this, and remarked that it would have been more sensible to have brought the lorry into the courtyard and to have emptied it directly on to the heap.
Ten years before he would have summoned a stenographer then and there and would have sent a Minute on the subject to the Minister of Fuel and Power (who quite probably was not the right person): ‘Pray tell me why…’ The fact that he sat down again and went on with his lunch without doing anything showed me that he was no longer the same man as he had been.
…Several Ministers opposed Churchill’s argument, the Service Ministers, supported by some others, expressing ‘the firm conviction that an amnesty for deserters would be taken as implying that desertion in war was no longer regarded as the most serious of military crimes, and would lead to increased desertion from the Armed Forces at a time when very large numbers of men were serving overseas in circumstances which imposed the most disagreeable duties upon them’. The small number of deserters involved, not more than 2,000, did not ‘justify the risk to the genuine discipline of the Forces’.
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Notes
Weizmann had been born in the Grodno Province of Tsarist Russia on 27 November 1874, three days before Churchill. They had first met in Manchester in 1906.