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Articles
Reporting Churchills: Henry Lucy on Winston and Lord Randolph
- By DAVE TURRELL
- | July 31, 2023
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries Understanding Churchill
“Never in the House, but always of it”
Sir Henry Lucy was born in 1842, five years after Queen Victoria’s accession. He was one of the best-known English parliamentary journalists of his day. Starting work as a clerk, he was reporting for the Shrewsbury Chronicle in 1864 and editor of The Daily News by 1873. When Winston Churchill was born in 1874, he’d become parliamentary reporter for prestigious Pall Mall Gazette. By 1880 he was writing for The Observer under the pseudonym of “Toby, MP,” and producing a weekly column for Punch.
Lucy worked in an era which pre-dated anything we think of today as news media. Political speeches were reported at length and read avidly, since newspapers and periodicals were all there was. Lobby correspondents were the go-betweens who fed the public appetite. Over time, each developed a personal style. Across Lucy’s career we can see evolving the tongue-in-cheek but mordant humour which made him famous.
Although never a member of the Commons he so deftly observed, Lucy was a parliamentarian to the core. In his obituary The Times wrote: “Never in the House, but always of it, Lucy seemed to occupy for a long time a position of his own, as a species of familiar spirit or licensed jester, without which no Parliament was complete.”1
The Lucy Diaries
Lucy is best known for three volumes of extracts from his diaries2 published late in his life. These “Journalist” diaries, greatly recommended, are presented in narrative memoir style: a fascinating and easy read. However, of more interest to historians are Lucy’s detailed “Parliament” diaries: six contemporaneous volumes covering the period 1874-1905.3
Those books, tracking day-to-day activity in the House of Commons, are invaluable insights into the workings of the House in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. They mention literally hundreds of lesser-known MPs, reminding us that the politics of the day, as now, involved much more than the prime minister and cabinet officials.
As a Punch contributor, Lucy drew upon the delightful caricatures by Punch cartoonists E.T. Reed, Harry Furniss and Phil May. Also, by a stroke of fortune, his career spanned both the meteoric rise and fall of Lord Randolph Churchill and the coruscating entrance of Winston.
Lord Randolph’s rise…
We first encounter Lord Randolph in Lucy’s The Disraeli Parliament on 7 March 1878. “He does not often speak,” Lucy writes. “But when he does, he says something to attract attention.”
Lord Randolph’s speech that day certainly met this description. It was a scathing attack on George Sclater-Booth, a fellow Conservative. Lucy’s diaries then follow Randolph’s ups and downs: the arrest of the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh, the “Fourth Party” of young Tory rebels, obstructing Gladstone over Home Rule, the India Office, the Exchequer, resignation, illness and death. All are there, all presented not as biography but as living history.
Here also the weaknesses of Lucy’s diaries are revealed: They are diaries of sitting Parliaments—yet much history is lived while Parliaments are not sitting. Lucy omits, for example, the stunning impact of Randolph’s resignation, made, and eagerly accepted, during the 1886 Christmas recess.
It is clear that Lucy had a great respect for and personal friendship with Lord Randolph. This was reciprocated, even though, as Lucy admits, his caustic coverage, especially in Punch, was “untrammelled by private intimacy.” There was only one falling out between them. That was over a critical article Lucy had not written but had published, as editor of The Daily News in 1886.
…and his sad decline
Because of their friendship and his intimate reporting, Lucy conveys the shock among Lord Randolph’s colleagues at his very public breakdown. This he accomplishes better than most biographers:
He spoke frequently, always with result that made his friends miserable for the rest of the sitting. Those present will never forget the scene… when he stood at the table for half an hour vigorously declaiming inarticulate ramblings, whilst by his side sat his old subaltern, Arthur Balfour, with face buried in his hands, shutting out the painful sight.4
Then came Randolph’s final speech in the House of Commons:
His once fine voice has failed him, and the House, after some moments of strained attention, gives up the effort to follow his speech. That this loss of his hold on an assembly he once swayed is due to physical rather than intellectual failure appears from testimony of the highest value…. Mr. Bryce, who sat immediately opposite on the Treasury Bench, tells me he heard every word, and affirms that the speech was a masterly dealing with the subject, equal to anything Lord Randolph had done in earlier days.5
Three days later Lucy was present at a dinner to wish Randolph bon voyage as he set off on what was intended to be a year-long round-the-world trip:
Lord Randolph was in high spirits, full of delight at the prospect of his journey. But the unspoken feeling among the company was that the shadow of an unbidden Guest darkened the festive board, and that on saying “Good-night” to our host as we parted we were truly saying “Good-bye.”6
They were.
Henry Lucy and Winston Churchill
Lord Randolph’s son was not elected for Oldham until 1900. Winston therefore makes no appearance in the “Parliament” diaries until the final volume, The Balfourian Parliament. He leaped squarely into Lucy’s field of vision with a maiden speech assailing St. John Brodrick’s Army Bill.
Given Lucy’s admiration for Lord Randolph, it was only natural for him to pay particular attention to Randolph’s son. What impressed him the most was not necessarily the argument of his maiden speech. It was the self-assurance and the prodigious memory of the young Member for Oldham:
One priceless equipment for a parliamentary career possessed by him is a phenomenal memory. In delivering his speech tonight he was evidently fully supplied with notes, but he did not use his manuscript for the purpose of reading a single sentence.7
It was, indeed, excellent alike in manner and in form, and has established the position of the young member for Oldham as a debater who will have to be reckoned with whatever Government is in office. Probably a ministry composed of his own political friends have most to apprehend.8
The last sentence is telling. It was obvious by the end of the speech that Winston was his father’s son—a political disrupter by nature. By the time The Balfourian Parliament was published in 1906, Lucy had recognized the magnitude of the young man. The chapter covering his speech was aptly titled “Enter Winston Churchill.” The first full length biography of Churchill had been published a year previously.9
Crossing the floor
As the Parliament progressed, Lucy saw little to change his opinion. He documents an occasion when Conservative members walked out rather than stay and listen to Churchill. Still Lucy was impressed by young Winston’s political temerity. Thus in February, 1903:
Thomas Didymus10 Winston Churchill in particular is anxious for opportunity severally to prod six army corps in the ribs. It is quite true, as he modestly said, that he speaks with special authority on the matter. [When the Liberals] denounced the scheme as unsuited to the requirements of the country, Mr. Churchill alone, among Unionists, had the courage of his opinions and voted with them in the division lobby.11
Finally, at the end of May, 1904, came the moment that Lucy had long realised was inevitable:
Winston Churchill this afternoon, abandoning the Unionist camp, seated himself among the radicals below the gangway opposite. The move as affecting his future career is frankly discussed in the smoking room and other social resorts of members. On the whole…it is agreed that he has made a mistake. As Mr. [Joseph] Chamberlain recently demonstrated, a man who has established a weighty position in political life may with personal advantage go over to the ancient enemy. The member for Oldham has not yet reached that position.12
Unwise words
Clearly, Lucy recognised the raw dynamism of young Churchill. But he had seen and admired too much of Lord Randolph to think Winston would outshine him. His most definitive—and inaccurate—prediction on that subject was his summary of Winston’s maiden speech:
No case is known in modern history or, indeed, in earlier Parliamentary records, where a striking personality is revived in the person of his offspring…. Winston Churchill is not likely to eclipse the fame of Randolph, who was a statesman as well as a consummate debater.13
Exemplary and astute observer as he was, Lucy might have done well to bide his time. Particularly he might have heeded a remark by WSC in a speech three months later: “Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time.”
Parliamentary correspondents by definition are not paid to bide their time. Sir Henry Lucy died in 1924. He lived to see Churchill rise through Cabinet ranks, and to lead the Royal Navy into war. He lived to see him fall from grace, and to serve in the trenches. Lucy watched as Churchill struggled slowly back from political eclipse. Unlike Randolph! He did not live to see his words fail the test of time—nor to see Winston’s ultimate vindication.
The author
Dave Turrell is happily retired from a lifetime career in Information Technology. A long-time Churchill bibliophile and collector, he is proud to have been a deputy editor of Finest Hour. His days are spent in arranging his books on his own plan and, on the rare occasions where he cannot be friends with them, he is at least content to make their acquaintance.
Endnotes
1 The Times, London, 22 February 1924.
2 The three volumes of the “Journalist” diaries, all published by John Murray in London are: The Diary of a Journalist (1920), The Diary of a Journalist: Later Entries (1922), and The Diary of a Journalist: Fresh Extracts, (1923).
3 The six volumes of the “Parliament” diaries, all published in London, are: A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Disraeli Parliament 1874-1880 (Cassell, 1885); A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Gladstone Parliament 1880-1885 (Cassell, 1885); A Diary of the Salisbury Parliament 1886-1892 (Cassell, 1892); A Diary of the Home Rule Parliament 1892-1895 (Cassell, 1896); A Diary of the Unionist Parliament 1895-1900 (Arrowsmith, 1901); and The Balfourian Parliament 1900-1905 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1906).
4 Diary of a Journalist, 13.
5 Home Rule Parliament, 382.
6 Ibid., 385.
7 Balfourian Parliament, 63.
8 Ibid., 62.
9 A. MacCallum Scott, Winston Spencer Churchill (London: Methuen, 1905).
10 Thomas Didymus, one of the twelve Apostles, is better known to history as “Doubting Thomas.”
11 Balfourian Parliament, 232.
12 Ibid., 321.
13 Ibid., 62-63,