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Cheers, Mr. Liddle: Building a Better Scottish Churchill
- By WILLIAM JOHN SHEPHERD
- | April 25, 2023
- Category: Books
Andrew Liddle. Cheers, Mr. Churchill!: Winston in Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2022, 272 pages, $29.95, Amazon $24, Kindle, $16.49.
Andrew Liddle: Scotland’s meaning to Churchill
Scottish political consultant and journalist Andrew Liddle offers a first-class study of an often-misunderstood Churchill relationship. Scotland had a profound impact on the young Winston. It provided him not only with a wife, but a 15-year constituency at Dundee. There he launched his cabinet career, adding social reform to his Liberal credentials. He made many lifelong Scottish friends, and was proud to command a Scottish battalion in the First World War.
Scotland’s significance is largely missing from Churchill studies. For example, Tony Patterson’s A Seat for Life (1980) sketched WSC’s life with detailed accounts of Dundee election campaigns without broader commentary on Churchill and Scotland. Andrew Dewar Gibb’s With Winston Churchill at the Front (1924, 2016) and Douglas Russell’s Winston Churchill Soldier (2015) cover Churchill Scottish command in France in 1916. Gerald de Groot’s Liberal Crusader: The Life of Archibald Sinclair (1993) chronicles his Scottish friend and political ally. Several academic articles look at Churchill in Dundee in the political or economic context. But, Liddle argues, a void remains. What did Scotland and Churchill mean to each other?
The carpetbagger syndrome
Liddle offers several explanations for the lack of material on Churchill and Scotland. First, no one would claim his Dundee career (1908-22) was more significant than his role in British and world history. Unfortunately, misinterpretations and myths prevail among historians and the public alike. Many biographers describe him as a “carpetbagger” who opposed devolution and dismissed Scottish national identity. This stems from his 1922 loss of his “seat for life” in Dundee to prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour and Labour pacifist Edmund Dene Morel.
A major myth is that Churchill ordered tanks into Glasgow’s George Square to suppress strikers in 1919. (See Gordon Barclay, “Glasgow, 1919.”) This fable is now so pervasive in Scotland that it exists in school syllabuses! It reflects contemporary Scottish political debates overshadowing Churchill and used by both pro- and anti-independence activists. Scotland’s rejection of Churchill is a metaphor for rejecting Britishness, reflected by Dundee having the strongest pro-independence vote in the 2014 referendum. (However, that is far from unique, as Churchill’s legacy was invoked by both “Leave” and “Remain” campaigners in the 2016 Brexit referendum.)
Winston and his rivals
Liddle has written a narrative history of Churchill in Scotland and his political battles with Scrymgeour in six elections, He describes how Scrymgeour and Morel rose from almost nothing to defeat so prominent a politician. Liddle also covers how women—Churchill’s wife Clementine and the suffragettes—played important roles in elections. He also argues that Churchill’s progressive legislation improved lives, especially by raising wages in Dundee’s dominant jute industry.
Liddle finds a closer relationship between Churchill and Scrymgeour than previously realized. Churchill, he writes, had a grudging respect for his keenest adversary, even lending him a car at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Likewise, contrary to popular belief, Churchill and Morel were on good terms in the early 1900s. Churchill was the first Member of Parliament to contribute to Morel’s West African Mail journal, exposing atrocities in the Belgian Congo.
Churchill’s attitude to Scottish political autonomy is an important part of the story. Liddle shows that he advocated devolution as early as 1901 and remained as open to Home Rule for Scotland, as he was to Ireland. An engaging writer, Liddle does not recast Churchill as a Scottish hero, or criticize Dundee voters. Rather, he demonstrates what Churchill thought of Scotland, and what Scotland thought of him.
A seat not quite for life
Churchill arrived at Westminster in 1901 as Conservative Member of Parliament for Oldham, Lancashire. Becoming disaffected with Tory leadership, he “crossed the aisle” to the Liberal side. In 1908, Prime Minister H.H. Asquith appointed Churchill to his cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. By the rules of the day, a newly appointed cabinet minister had to win a by-election to confirm his seat. Churchill had recently switched from Oldham to Northwest Manchester after changing parties. He duly lost his by-election, prompting gleeful Tory enemies to joke “What’s the use of a WC without a seat?” (11).
Dundee, Scotland’s third city, became available via the intervention of local Liberal Party chair George Ritchie, who helped Churchill win election. If Churchill was a “carpetbagger,” so were nearly a quarter of all Scottish MPs who hailed also from England (22). He won by stressing opposition to the House of Lords, support of Irish Home Rule, and improvement of working conditions. Dundee was a rare two-person constituency, where WSC served most of his time working in tandem with Labour’s Alexander Wilkie.
Ernest Scrymgeour netted only 655 votes in that first election, though he proved persistent. He dogged Churchill in five more elections, finally winning in 1922—the only Prohibitionist ever elected to Parliament. This was a point of amusement to Churchill, although it is not proven that he said Scrymgeour had “all of the virtues I dislike, and none of the vices I admire.” (If he didn’t say it, he should have.)
Also in 1908, Churchill would acquire his greatest Scottish asset, his wife Clementine. In another event of that year, he traveled to Slains Castle to inform his friend and admirer, Violet Asquith, of his engagement (53).
“The Dundee Advertiser”
Churchill’s early years representing a Scottish constituency addressed social, economic, and political questions. His former seat of Manchester was a one-industry city known as “Cottonopolis.” Similarly, Dundee was called “Jutopolis” (70), exporting rope and sacks made from that natural fiber imported from Bengal. The city was encumbered with a high cost of living and low wages. Churchill’s legislation for both Labor Exchanges and Trade Bonds brought local workers higher pay and job search assistance. Churchill and David Lloyd George, “The Terrible Twins” to Tories, passed socially-conscious bills, including progressive taxation and old-age pensions. They faced steadfast opposition from the House of Lords. It required two national elections in 1910 to win their argument, with Churchill constantly harassed by attention-seeking suffragettes.
As Home Secretary in 1910-11, Churchill enacted prison reforms and sponsored additional progressive legislation: the Shops Act and Coal Mines Act. Here Liddle refutes another myth: that Churchill deployed the famed Black Watch against the 1911 carters’ strike. In fact, they came at behest of the city council (96).
Irish Home Rule was also important for Churchill, since nearly a quarter of Dundee’s voters were Irish. Liddle recounts how Churchill came to believe Home Rule would also benefit Scotland, Wales and England. This era provides an anecdote from Anthony Montague Browne, Sir Winston’s last private secretary: “During a debate on the newspaper industry in England, when Winston Churchill was Member for Dundee, a colleague spoke of a whole list of newspapers and said, “I finally come to the Dundee Advertiser. I mean the paper, not the Member.”
Royal Scots Fusiliers
Churchill was in the forefront during the Great War. Even after the Dardanelles and Gallipoli fiascoes he remained popular in Dundee. Removed from the Admiralty, frustrated and depressed—Liddle overplays this, citing “emotional imbalance” (141)—Churchill returned to the army. In early 1916 he took command of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, entrenched near Ploegsteert, Belgium, (“Plug Street” to the Tommies). His friend Archibald Sinclair, future Liberal leader and member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet, was second in command.
Liddle’s account of Churchill’s war service is good, though not superior to Russell’s or Gibb’s. Both noted that while the soldiers were suspicious at first, Churchill won them over with his concern for their welfare, and bravery in leading over 30 night-time raids behind enemy lines. To Clementine, Churchill said he was “a great admirer” of Scotland, which had given him “a wife, a constituency, and now a regiment” (141).
A merger of the Fusiliers’ depleted units eliminated his command position. Rejuvenated, Churchill returned to politics. He was soon cleared of blame for Gallipoli by a Parliamentary committee and appointed Minister of Munitions by Lloyd George, now Prime Minister. This required a special Dundee by-election where he defeated Scyrmgeour yet again.
Churchill won acclaim for his munitions work and, at war’s end, was on the ballot a fifth time as a Coalition Liberal. As before, Clementine campaigned hard before an expanded electorate and Churchill and Wilkie won handily. When he was Minister of War (1919-21), his Irish and Labour support diminished after his opposition to Irish rebels and Russian Bolsheviks. As Colonial Secretary (1921-22), Churchill worked with Michael Collins to reach an Irish settlement. But Dundee’s Irish remained offended, and his election prospects faded with the death of his Dundee manager, Ritchie.
The end of the affair
The fall of Lloyd George’s coalition in October 1922 led to Churchill’s sixth and final Scottish election campaign. Severely ill with appendicitis, he was hardly able to campaign. Clementine did her usual yeoman service on his behalf, against five other candidates. Churchill and David MacDonald stood as National Liberals, Morel for Labour, R.R. Pilkington as an Asquith Liberal, the Communist Willie Gallacher, and Scrymgeour—again.
Previously allied over the Belgian Congo crimes, Morel and Churchill had parted over Morel’s opposition to the First World War. Churchill fought as best he could, but was now also opposed by local news mogul, David Couper Thomson. For example, one scurrilous newspaper ran a photo depicting Clementine with their infant daughter Mary with the caption: “Mrs. Churchill with her as-yet-unbaptized daughter.” (Mary Soames later referred to this as “my introduction to Scottish politics.”) Morel and Scrymgeour emerged triumphant, though the former would not live long and the latter proved a legislative failure.
Churchill’s sudden departure from Dundee prompted yet another myth, which Liddle dispels. Supposedly Churchill predicted Dundee’s “grass would grow green through its cobbled streets, and the vigour of its industry shrink and decay” (218). That was never said, though he did sardonically remark that he was “without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix.”
Liddle ends with the supposed snub Churchill gave Dundee in 1943 when, by a narrow 16-15 vote, the town council offered him a Freedom of the City. Observing the close vote, his Secretary of Scotland, Tom Johnston, a longtime Dundee MP convinced him to pass.
Modern perspectives
Liddle believes today’s Scotland rejects Churchill in part because the hero of 1940 has left little memory of his earlier Liberal phase. Also, Churchill is a victim of the constitutional debate that sees him as representing the union with England now resisted by some Scots.
One last myth Liddle mentions but does not adequately address is the sacrifice of the 51st Highland Division in 1940 to enable the rest of the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) to escape at Dunkirk. Ian Kershaw in Dunkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk (2022), effectively disproves Churchill’s responsibility by showing that British army deployment in France was well established before he became prime minister. The 51st was not part of the main B.E.F., but was on detached service with the French further south. It was not able to get to Dunkirk before being overrun.
Cheers, Mr. Churchill! does much to the fill the lacuna in Churchill-Scotland studies, and is yet another Churchill book with a pithy foreword by Andrew Roberts.
The author
William John Shepherd, archivist and historian, is a long-time contributor to The Churchill Project, several academic journals, and popular history magazines.