Six Minutes in May Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Dramatis Personae on 7 May 1940

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE: SIX MINUTES IN MAY

  1. Perfect Blackout

  PART TWO: THE CAMPAIGN

  2. ‘NAR-vik’

  3. Operation ‘Wilfred’

  4. The First Crunch

  5. In Great Strength

  6. Flea and Louse

  7. The First Land Battle

  8. Worst of All Experiences

  9. The Winston Impasse

  10. Evacuation

  PART THREE: THE WEEKEND BEFORE

  11. Monsieur J’aimeberlin

  12. The Master of Garrowby

  13. The Wild Man

  14. The Rebels

  PART FOUR: THE DEBATE

  15. Tuesday 7 May

  16. Wednesday 8 May

  17. The Division

  PART FIVE: THE AFTERMATH

  18. A Terrific Buzz

  19. The Obvious Man

  20. The Limpet

  21. A Great Tide Flowing

  22. The Silence

  23. Hinge of Fate

  Epilogues

  Notes and Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  London, early May 1940: Britain is on the brink of war and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking over at the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction.

  The first land battle of the war was fought in the far north, in Norway. It went disastrously for the Allies and many blamed Churchill. Yet weeks later he would rise to the most powerful post in the country, overtaking Chamberlain and the favourite to succeed him, Lord Halifax.

  It took just six minutes for MPs to cast the votes that brought down Chamberlain. Shakespeare shows us both the dramatic action on the battlefield in Norway and the machinations and personal relationships in Westminster that led up to this crucial point. Uncovering fascinating new research and delving deep into the backgrounds of the key players, he has given us a new perspective on this critical moment in our history.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His books have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Secrets of the Sea, Inheritance and Priscilla. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He currently lives in Oxford.

  Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Fiction

  The Vision of Elena Silves

  The High Flyer

  The Dancer Upstairs

  Snowleg

  Secrets of the Sea

  Inheritance

  Stories from Other Places

  Non-Fiction

  Bruce Chatwin

  In Tasmania

  Priscilla

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. “My dearest Baba”, Halifax to Alexandra Metcalfe – author photo

  2. Geoffrey Shakespeare and Lloyd George c. 1921 – private collection

  3. Giles Romilly – Edmund Romilly collection

  4. Altmark in Jøssingfjorden, February 1940 – Geirr Haarr collection

  5. Man on torpedo, Narvik – Narvik War Museum

  6. HMS Hardy, April 1940 – Geirr Haarr collection

  7. Peter Fleming, 1940 – private collection

  8. Fleming and Lindsay landing in Namsos, 14 April 1940 – Municipal Museum, Namsos

  9. Sir Martin Alexander Lindsay of Dowhill, 7 September 1936 – Bassano Ltd © National Portrait Gallery, London

  10. Chamberlain on Andros, c. 1891 – Francis Chamberlain collection

  11. Workman on Andros – Francis Chamberlain collection

  12. One of Chamberlain’s sisal-stuffed birds – author photo

  13. Norman Chamberlain – Francis Chamberlain collection

  14. Halifax haymaking at Garrowby – Alexandra Metcalfe’s photograph album, private collection

  15. Alexandra Metcalfe – AM’s photograph album

  16. Dorchester Hotel brochure – Anne de Courcy collection

  17. Halifax composing speech for Norway Debate at Little Compton, 5 May 1940 – AM’s photograph album

  18. ‘Namsosed’ – Geirr Haarr collection

  19. Admiralty Board, 1939 – private collection

  20. Leo Amery – All Souls College, Oxford

  21. Clement Davies – Liberal Democratic News/Liberal Party archives

  22. Lindsay Memorandum, April 1940 – author photo

  23. Speaker Edward FitzRoy – Parliamentary Archives

  24. Leo Amery [?] speaking on 7 May 1940 – John Moore-Brabazon © RAF Museum

  25. David Margesson’s order for three-line whip – author photo

  26. Sandglass for the division – author photo

  27. Division vote in the Clerk’s minutes book – author photo

  28. Lord Halifax – All Souls College, Oxford

  29. Halifax & WSC at the British Embassy in Washington, 1941 – AM’s photograph album

  30. Charles Peake’s diary account of 9 May 1940 – author photo

  31. Chamberlain diary entry for 10 May 1940 – author photo

  32. Tom Fowler and Torlaug Werstad at Krogs Farm, 2010 – Paul Kiddell

  33. Steinkjer memorial – Paul Kiddell

  34. Chamberlain tribute, November 1940 – author photo

  35. WSC outside 10 Downing Street, 10 May 1940 – © IWM (HU 83283)

  The Norway Campaign

  April–May 1940

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE ON 7 MAY 1940

  War Cabinet

  Neville Chamberlain – Prime Minister

  Edward Wood, Lord Halifax – Foreign Secretary

  Sir John Simon (Liberal National) – Chancellor of the Exchequer

  Winston Churchill – First Lord of the Admiralty

  Sir Samuel Hoare – Secretary of State for Air

  Oliver Stanley – Secretary of State for War

  Sir Kingsley Wood – Lord Privy Seal

  Maurice Hankey, 1st Baron Hankey – Minister without Portfolio

  Sir Edward Bridges – Secretary to the War Cabinet

  Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob – Military Assistant to the War Cabinet

  Chiefs of Staff

  General Sir Edmund Ironside – Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS)

  Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound – First Sea Lord

  Air Marshal Sir Cyril Newall – Chief of the Air Staff

  Major General Hastings Ismay – Churchill’s Chief of Staff (since 1 May)

  Ministers

  Sir Anthony Eden – Secretary of State for Dominions

  Sir John Reith (Independent) – Secretary of State for Information

  Euan Wallace – Secretary of State for Transport

  Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton – Secretary of State for Food

  Harry Crookshank – Financial Secretary to the Treasury

  Robert Bernays (National Liberal) – Parliamentary Secretary, Transport

  Geoffrey Shakespeare (National Liberal) – Parliamentary Secretary, Dominions (since 2 April)

  House of Commons

  Captain Edward FitzRoy – Spe
aker

  Sir Dennis Herbert – Deputy Speaker

  No. 10

  Sir Horace Wilson – Permanent Secretary to the Treasury

  Captain David Margesson – Government Chief Whip

  Sir Arthur Rucker – Principal Private Secretary to Chamberlain

  John Colville – Junior Private Secretary to Chamberlain

  Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass – Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chamberlain

  Sir Joseph Ball – political adviser to Chamberlain

  Foreign Office

  Sir Alexander Cadogan – Permanent Under-Secretary

  Richard (‘Rab’) Butler – Parliamentary Under-Secretary

  Henry (‘Chips’) Channon – Parliamentary Private Secretary to Butler

  Valentine Lawford – Private Secretary to Halifax (until December 1940)

  Charles Peake – Head of News Department (and Private Secretary to Halifax from 1941)

  Buckingham Palace

  Sir Alexander Hardinge – Private Secretary to George VI

  Rebel Conservative MPs

  Leo Amery

  Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor

  Brendan Bracken

  Bob Boothby

  Harold Macmillan

  Sir Alfred Duff Cooper

  Paul Emrys-Evans

  Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes

  Major General Sir Edward Louis Spears

  Ronald Tree

  Other rebel MPs

  Harold Nicolson – National Labour

  Clement Davies – Independent Liberal

  Leslie Hore-Belisha – National Liberal

  Labour Opposition MPs

  Clement Attlee – leader

  Arthur Greenwood – deputy leader

  Hugh Dalton – Shadow Foreign Secretary

  Herbert Morrison – Shadow Home Secretary

  Liberal Opposition MPs

  Sir Archibald Sinclair – leader, Liberal Parliamentary Party

  Sir Percy Harris – Chief Whip, Liberal Parliamentary Party

  Dingle Foot – Liberal Parliamentary Party

  David Lloyd George – Liberal Opposition Party

  Norway Campaign: Namsos

  Captain Peter Fleming – i/c No. 10 Military Mission

  Captain Martin Lindsay – No. 10 Military Mission

  Private Tom Fowler – 146th Infantry Brigade

  Private Frank Lodge – 146th Infantry Brigade, Intelligence

  Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart – Army commander, ‘Maurice Force’

  Storm and Birger Evensen – drivers

  Norway Campaign: Narvik

  Giles Romilly – correspondent, Daily Express

  Major General Pierse Mackesy – Army commander, ‘Rupert Force’

  Admiral of the Fleet William Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery – Naval commander, ‘Rupert Force’

  Miscellaneous

  Ivan Maisky – Soviet Ambassador

  Joseph Kennedy – American Ambassador

  Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook – owner, Daily and Sunday Express

  Geoffrey Dawson – editor, The Times

  William Berry, Viscount Camrose – owner/editor-in-chief, Daily Telegraph

  Albert James Sylvester – Principal Private Secretary to Lloyd George

  Basil Liddell Hart – military correspondent, The Times

  Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe – George Curzon’s youngest daughter

  Irene Curzon, Baroness Ravensdale – George Curzon’s eldest daughter

  Nicholas Mosley – son of Oswald Mosley; nephew of Baba Metcalfe

  Violet Bonham Carter – Liberal activist; daughter of Herbert Asquith

  Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford – widow of Herbert Asquith; stepmother of Violet

  Blanche ‘Baffy’ Dugdale – niece and biographer of Arthur Balfour

  Nancy Dugdale – wife of former Deputy Chief Whip, Sir Thomas Dugdale

  Anne Chamberlain – wife of Prime Minister

  Valerie Cole – niece of Prime Minister

  Dorothy Wood, Countess of Halifax – wife of Foreign Secretary

  Clementine Churchill – wife of First Lord

  Mary Churchill – youngest daughter of First Lord

  Nellie Romilly – sister of Clementine; mother of Giles

  Colonel Bertram Romilly – father of Giles

  TO JOHN HATT

  SIX MINUTES IN MAY

  NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

  How Churchill Unexpectedly

  Became Prime Minister

  ‘Strange that we do not fully realise men’s characters while they are alive.’

  NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 27 February 1918

  PROLOGUE

  On the one and only occasion that he visited Norway, Winston Churchill was received like a great hero. In May 1948, a fortnight before publication of The Gathering Storm, his first volume of memoirs of the Second World War, he flew with his wife Clementine to Oslo to receive an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy. While accepting the award in the University Aula, Churchill spoke with emotion about Hitler’s invasion of neutral Norway eight years earlier, that ‘foul and treacherous outrage’ which ranked with the Sicilian Vespers and the massacre of Glencoe ‘as one of the black deeds of history’.1, 2 He told the hall into which more than 1,500 students had once been packed for transportation to concentration camps in Germany: ‘We have emerged from the most terrible of wars which has yet been fought in the world.’

  Yet many in his audience felt that Churchill – ‘known all over the globe as “the Architect of Victory”’ – had omitted something of immense significance.3 It fell to the governor of the Bank of Norway, Gunnar Jahn, to point this out. At a banquet in Churchill’s honour, after tens of thousands of Norwegians had waved him through the streets as he passed in an open motor-car, Jahn spoke of an argument he had had in 1942 with a depressed countryman who believed that the Germans would win the war. Jahn had said to him: ‘Oh no, the Germans lost the war when they invaded Norway.’

  He then explained. ‘It had this effect, that Winston Churchill took over the leadership of Great Britain.’4

  PART ONE

  SIX MINUTES IN MAY

  1

  PERFECT BLACKOUT

  ‘Is there any MP who doesn’t want to be Prime Minister?’1

  LESLIE HORE-BELISHA MP, 4 January 1940

  A year to the day after Churchill became Prime Minister, the House of Commons was ‘blown to pieces’ by a Luftwaffe bomb.2 On 10 May 1941, the Speaker’s Chair and the front and opposition benches were crushed beneath a steep hill of smoking rubble. The MP Vernon Bartlett met Churchill clambering over it, ‘his face covered with dust, through which the tears that ran down his cheeks had made two miniature river beds’.3 All that remained of Churchill’s cherished Chamber – which, he was to tell the Norwegian Storting, ‘we pride ourselves is the cradle and also the citadel of parliamentary government throughout the nations’ – was a mass of broken masonry, ashes, and the tangled remains of metal railings.4 An historic stage stood obliterated. Reliable records of the dramas and rituals enacted upon it seemed, at that moment, irretrievable.

  Then, in the 1960s, a tin of photographic negatives was discovered which were to give a tantalising glimpse into a vanished past. The twenty-nine images are the only known record of the old House of Commons during a sitting.5 More than that, they captured a seismic moment: what A. J. P. Taylor called the ‘splendid upheaval’ of the Chamberlain government.6

  These unique photographs were taken illegally on two of the hottest afternoons of the unbelievably warm spring of 1940, during the Norway Debate of 7 and 8 May. It was a breach of privilege to take pictures inside Parliament. If discovered by the Serjeant at Arms or one of his Doorkeepers, Conservative backbencher John Moore-Brabazon risked confiscation of his negatives, and suspension. Not in the eighty-eight years of Sir Charles Barry’s Chamber had a Member violated this rule.

  Moore-Brabazon had pioneered the art of snapping photographs from behind enemy lines. He
was the first Englishman to fly. In 1914, he established a photographic unit for the Royal Flying Corps, and following the first gas attack at Ypres made a map of the German trenches, diving low enough to identify the uniforms. At that time, he knew more about aerial photography than anyone in the world. Twenty-five years on, startling developments in a new world war compelled him to pick up his camera again. He used a special Minox as issued to Intelligence staffs. Purchased from Latvia and nicknamed ‘the spy camera’, this was small, light, easy to hide.

  What became known as the Norway Debate, and was to be so significant to the fortunes of the British government and the Second World War, began with a routine adjournment motion on Tuesday 7 May. The Prime Minister appeared in the Commons to defend the conduct of Britain’s armed forces in Narvik, Namsos and Åndalsnes, and to answer some far-reaching questions about a calamitous military campaign that had been obscured by rumour, secrecy and hopelessly optimistic press reports.

  After an ominous respite lasting seven months, following Germany’s annexation of Poland, the British army in its first land battle of the war had engaged the Nazi enemy – and been routed. The navy, which had been fighting unrelentingly at sea from September 1939, had had to evacuate 11,300 troops from central Norway, with the eventual loss of 4,396 men.

  This stunning news had been delivered to Parliament by Chamberlain on 2 May. In the fearful words of Vernon Bartlett, the German invasion of Britain seemed at this point ‘almost inevitable’, with foreign troops predicted to land in large numbers on British soil for the first time since the Norman Conquest.7

  It is important to emphasise that there was no expectation of a vote. The Conservative leader enjoyed a huge majority of 213 for his National government, and the opposition Labour Party under Clement Attlee was reluctant to divide the House at this precarious moment. Even though less popular with an increasingly anxious public, Chamberlain still appeared unassailable within Parliament. On 7 May, the reality for the majority of Conservative MPs was that there was no clear alternative to Chamberlain as Prime Minister; neither was there any formal procedure whereby the party could dispense with its leader.