The Idler

Enemies of Idleness: Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill is portrayed to UK citizens as gentle but firm, a wry, humorous man who boldly prevented the Nazis from trampling over England’s pleasant fields. However, a little research turns up a different picture. Brutal in his treatment of striking workers, he was vehemently opposed to woman’s suffrage, was careerist and snobbish. Here are a few choice moments from Churchill’s CV

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1874: Born
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1893: Writing to Winston’s Grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, Churchill’s father said the boy lacked “cleverness, knowledge and any capacity for settled work. He has a great talent for show off, exaggeration and make-believe.” The criticism (surely a compliment?) stung, and Churchill turned his back on imagination and Idleness, and towards hard work and discipline, or, more specifically, other people’s hard work and discipline.
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1904: He left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals. It was a move motivated by expediency rather than political conviction: the liberals were on the way up.
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1909: As president of the Board of Trade, he nails his colours to the mast with the following statement. “There is no reason at all why people should wander about in a loafing and Idle manner; if they are not earning their living they ought to be put under some sort of control.”
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1910: Churchill’s time as Home Secretary was marred by Industrial unrest. His hard-line response to the strikers is still remembered with bitterness in many working class communities – none more so that the Welsh town of Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley where, it has been said, Churchill used soldiers against striking miners. Contemporary evidence shows that it was the police and not the army who were used at Tonypandy, but the troops were ready. Two miners are reported to have died in the ensuing violence. This year, Churchill also orders the breaking of the suffragettes. “The women’s suffrage movement is only the small end of the wedge,” Churchill proclaimed at the time. “If we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.”
Churchill perhaps inherited these attitudes from his fearsome mother. “Lady Churchill was an ardent opponent of women’s suffrage and appeared at anti-suffrage meetings, “reported the New York Times at the time of Churchill’s death in 1965. “She was often accompanied by her son Winston at meetings where both were heckled and booed by suffragettes.”
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1929: Writes the following letter to his son Randolph. His sentiments weakly echo those voiced by his own father about him forty years earlier. “My dear Randolph, Your Idle and lazy life is v(er)y offensive to me. You appear to be leading a completely useless existence. You do not value or profit by the opportunities wh(ich) Oxford offers for those who care for learning. You are not acquiring any habits of industry or concentration. Even in Idleness you find it trying to pass the day.”
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1930: As foreign secretary, Churchill orders the use of mustard gas against Kurdish Villages, “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using gases against uncivilised tribes.”
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1940: Far from being hero-worshipped by the people of England, the working classes hated him as a lackey of the ruling classes. “Come World War Two most working class people’s feelings were that the Nazis had to be defeated,” writes Frank Henderson, a young soldier during the Second World War. “But that did not mean we lost our hatred of Winston Churchill. The general view was that, while we were stuck with him during the war, we would get him out once it was over.”
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1945: Defeated in the post-war general election.
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1965: Dies
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TOM HODGKINSON