Compiled by Ron Spiers - September 2004
Winston Leonard Spencer
Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. He was a statesman of world
renown, an historical author of note, an amateur painter and a soldier. He
exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy in London. During the Boer War in
Africa he was a war correspondent, and he served as an officer in Europe during
the first World War. His ancestor was the Duke of Marlborough. In 1963 he was
conferred with an honorary citizenship of the United States of America. His
mother was an American.
In
the year 2001 Roy Jenkins wrote, and Macmillan published, a book, Churchill, which has been highly regarded.
Jenkins is a former British Home Secretary, former Chancellor of the Exchequer
and former President of the European Commission. He was Chancellor of Oxford
University and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
In
his book Jenkins makes a number of references to the association between Edward
Louis Spiers, he was generally known as Louis, and Churchill. Extracts from the
book follow. Many of the words are those of Jenkins. It is well worth reading
the book, which has 1002 pages. The following comments and extracts from it
provide a little of the flavour, it includes episodes concerning Spiers’ part in
Churchill’s life. Also worth reading are books by Spiers himself, a superb war
historian.
It is 1914, World
War 1, and Churchill, a politician, is anxious to resign as First Lord of the
Admiralty and take over as commander of Antwerp with the necessary military
rank, a Lieutenant General no less. This did not go down well with his
political masters, because the highest Army rank he had previously held had
been a Lieutenant in the Hussars, how could they allow him to outrank Major
Generals, Brigadiers etc,. He did not get it. In November 1915 he sailed to
France as a Major to join his old regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars. When he
got to Boulogne he was not treated as an ordinary Mayor, he was met and taken
to the Commander-in Chief’s Headquarters in St Omer. He stayed in the army only
five and a half months. On his second day he met the Earl of Cavan, who was
commanding the Guards Division, and was attached to the 2nd
Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. Churchill, forever ambitious, was now
expecting to be given a Brigade to command and he wrote home to his wife
Clementine, … ‘I hope to get Spiers as Brigade Major & Archie (Sinclair) as
Staff Captain… Please order another khaki tunic for me as a Brigadier General.
Let the pockets be less baggy than the other 2 & let the material be
stouter.’ It did not happen.
Spiers
was completely bilingual, having been brought up in France, but he was much
more than an interpreter. He was almost as good a talker as Churchill himself.
On 8 December 1915 Churchill wrote (somewhat self-regardingly but probably also
accurately): ‘I like him very much and he is entirely captivated.’ The
captivation was both ways, for it led to Churchill, when the brigade was
beckoning, as we have seen, to want Spiers as brigade major, and, when he had
to lower his sights, as second-in-command. To both of these posts Spiers, a
quintessential headquarters and liaison officer if ever there was one, would
have been totally unsuited.
That
December Spiers’ more practical role was to take Churchill on two visits to the
French armies, an experience curiously alien to most British officers, even
those senior to Churchill. The first visit, to General Fayolle and the Tenth
Army in front of Arras on 5 December 1915, was the more visually memorable.
They gave him (Churchill) a bluish French steel helmet, the shape of which much
suited his martial scowl… He wore it when subsequently in the trenches (and
quite often out of them)…. It became in a minor way…. a symbol.
The
second visit to the French sector, again with Spiers, was to Vimy Ridge and the
view down over the plain of Douai. Spiers recalled… many years later, after
Churchill’s death (before which his relations with him had considerably
cooled), that the French commanders were polite to Churchill but, at that
stage, did not take him seriously.
In
1916 the Cromer Commission was investigating papers concerning the Dardanelles.
Churchill wrote to Spiers on 27 October: ‘I am slowly triumphing in this
Dardannelles Commission, and bit by bit am carrying the whole case. I am really
hopeful that they will free me from the burden which cripples my action.’
In
October 1922 Churchill was ill and it removed him from political campaigning in
the Dundee constituency in Scotland, but his writings did not stop. General Spears
(he had in 1919 changed the spelling of his name) arrived in Dundee to
campaign, subsequently saying, ‘I knew nothing about politics, Jack Wodehouse
knew nothing about politics. There we both were – rivals only in ignorance.’
Spears had, however, just been
elected, unapposed, as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Loughborough division
of Leicestershire, and Wodhouse had been a Liberal MP for four years from 1906.
Wodehouse retired hurt from the stricken field (although returning later to
it), but Spears provided an admiring if not altogether optimistic escort for
Clementine. ‘Clemmie appeared with a string of pearls’, the General recorded on
7 November. ‘The women spat on her.’ However he added, ‘Clemmie’s bearing was
magnificent – like an aristocrat going to the guillotine in a tumbril.’ The
outcome was that Churchill lost the seat.
In
1931 Churchill was in New York staying at the Waldorf Astoria preparing for a
forty-lecture tour of America, which would have earned him a considerable
amount of money. He had been out in a taxi which had got lost, so he got out of
it and walked across Fifth Avenue. On the way he was knocked down by a car
travelling at more than thirty miles an hour. After lying conscious, in the
roadway, he had been taken to Lennox Hill Hospital where he stayed for eight
days. He assured the New York police that it was his fault that he had been run
down and not that of the assaulting driver. When he returned to England he was
presented with a new car, a Daimler, by his friends, a strange gift in the
circumstance. The donors were reported to number 140, and included Beaverbrook,
Camrose, Esmond Harmsworth, Edward Grey, Charlie Chaplin, Ian Hamilton, Samuel
Hoare, Robert Horne, Maynard Keynes, Harold Macmillan, the Prince of Wales,
Lord Moyne, Louis Spears, Duff Cooper, Lord Riddell and the Duke of
Westminster.
In
September 1935 Churchill was on a painting holiday at Maxine Elliott’s Château
de l’Horizon. She had made her money as an American actress in the early years
of the twentieth century. She was then a spirited grande dame of late-Edwardian
and inter-war international society. Already by 1915 Louis Spiers, who
encounted her in Picardy where she was looking after Belgian refugees on a
canal boat, described her as a ‘nice clever woman, must have been very
beautiful.’
By
1936 Churchill had moved towards the centre of British politics helped by
amongst others, the so-called Focus Group. This began as a luncheon club and
met at the Hotel Victoria on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and only a few
yards from the Hotel Metropole, his office as Minister of Munitions twenty
years earlier. There was some early doubt about who was to pay the bills for
the repasts. This was quickly and satisfactorily resolved, mainly through the
generosity of Eugen Spier (no relation to Spiers), a rich German Jew, who was
not exactly a refugee, for he had migrated to Britain as early as 1922. He had
been interred as an enemy alien and deported to Canada in 1940. Spier returned
to Britain in 1945.
In
the summer of 1938 Churchill started to write his A History of the English- Speaking Peoples. In the next four
or five weeks, despite the distraction of the developing Czech crisis, he had
got 70, 000 words, taking him from the ancient Britons to the Norman Conquest, written
and set up in print. In mid-September he went by air to Paris, France for
twenty four hours taking Louis Spears with him to see the two most resolutely
anti-Nazi figures in the current French government, Paul Reynaud and Georges
Mandel. This visit was disapproved by both Sir Eric Phillips in Paris and in
London by Sir Maurice Hankey… what, Hankey asked, would we think if some French
politician came over and tried to stir up the ‘anti-peace’ members of Cabinet?
On
4 April 1940 Churchill with the blessing of Chamberlain, went to Paris. He was
accompanied by his old francophile and francophone friend General Spears, who
recorded some fascinating vignettes, sour and sweet, of this visit…. Spears
recorded that on the outward journey: ‘We were shaken in our old de Havilland
as if we were a salad in a colander manipulated by a particularly energetic
cook.’ But he also recorded as the high spot of the visit a luncheon at
Lapérouse, the Jacobean-fronted restaurant on the Quai Grands-Augustins to
which Proust’s Swann was drawn because its name was the same as the street in
which Odette de Crécy lived, and for which General Georges deserted his field
GHQ in order to entertain Churchill (and Spears).’That lunch ã trois’, Spears
wrote, ‘remains in my mind as one of the few pleasant occasions I experienced
in the war. We were three old friends enjoying each other’s company and
remarkable food and wine. Georges was tranquil, gay and confident.’….
The
other interesting residue of this Paris visit was that Spears recorded some
general advice which he had received from Clementine Churchill about how to
deal with her husband. ‘Put what you have to say in writing.’ Spears recorded
her as advising, ‘He often does not listen or does not hear if he is thinking
of something else. But he will always consider a paper carefully and take in
all its implications. He never forgets what he sees in writing.’
In
the spring of 1940… every significant port in Norway from Olso to Narvik had
been smoothly occupied by the Germans… their tactical deployments of the spring
of 1940, both in Scandinavia and in France, were carried out with a sureness of
planning and of execution which made the Allies look bungling amateurs…..
Even his
(Churchill’s) gift for spirit-lifting oratory seemed to desert him during that
dismal April ….. Those who left written comments were struck by how tired
Churchill looked and seemed. Harold Nicholson went further and wrote; ‘he
indulges in vague oratory coupled with tired gibes I have seldom seen him to
less advantage… Others (General Spears and the Solicitor General, Terence
O’Connor) were more charitable and thought he had done well in difficult
circumstances.
In
June 1940 Churchill had wanted to go to France again, but found that a French
government preoccupied with packing up, burning archives and finding a
destination for evacuation did not want to receive him. On 11 June, however
they gave him a rendezvous at Briare, near Orléans, seventy miles south of
Paris, to where GQG (Grand Quartier Général) had moved. General Spears,
accompanying together with Eden, Dill, Ismay and other more junior staff, gave
a somewhat superior but nonetheless amusing account of their late-afternoon
arrival at an airfield which seemed to be locked in a perpetual siesta:…
The Supreme War
Council (a singularly inapprropriate title in the circumstances of the Allies’
total lack of supremancy) met at 7.00 p.m…. Eden recorded: ‘When the moment
came for Mr Churchill to tell the French that we would go on with the struggle,
if necessary alone, I watched the expressions opposite. Reynaud was inscrutible
and Weygand polite, conceding with difficulty his scepticism. Marshal Pétain
was mockingly incredulous, Weygand could not have been more blunt or more
defeatist. ‘I am helpless, I cannot intervene for I have no reserves, there are
no reserves. C’est la dislocation, ‘ he said (according to Spears’s notes of
the meeting)…. The talks did not achieve much, and continued the following day.
By then Pétain had gone off in one direction and de Gaulle (a forty-nine year
old brigadier-general just appointed under-secretary for war) had gone off in
another direction. The Prime Minister and his party flew back to London for a
War Cabinet at 5.00 p.m…..He flew over to France the following day, Thursday,
13 June, for an afternoon meeting in the Prefecture at Tours, the French
Government now moving ever westwards. They went for luncheon, Spears was as
habitually of the party. The meeting resulted in some confusion because of
Churchill’s poor French language skills. Whereas de Gaulle, in his own
language, used ambiguity to achieve his own ends.
When Churchill took
off from the battered Tours airfield later that day it was his last contact
with French soil for four years less a day – until 12 June 1944 when, a week after
D-day, he was allowed ashore in Normandy to visit Montgomery.
An appeal for
decisive intervention by Roosevelt had predictably failed. The last British
throw to keep France in the war (or at least the French navy, French North
Africa – and maybe a redoubt in Brittany) was one of the most extraordinary
and, it might be said, benevolently half-baked plans ever to go through the
British government decision-making machinery, which although often negative and
unimaginative was mostly fine-combed and realistic. At a luncheon at the
Carlton Club on 15 June the idea of amalgamating the British and French states
in an indissoluble union had first effectively surfaced. In the next twenty
four hours it gathered momentum out of desperation. A 300 word proposal was
drawn up between French and British representatives and it was de Gaulle who
telephoned the proposal through to Reynaud as soon as it had been agreed in
London on the Sunday afternoon, and then for carrying the written document with
him when he returned to Bordeaux that evening. He was to remain there for
barely eighteen hours before making a last minute decision to board General
Spears’s plane and (metaphorically) take the Cross of Loraine to London, where
he remained to organise the Free French.
Churchill, Roy
Jenkins, Macmillan, 2001, ISBN 0 333 78290 9
He wrote numerous books, amongst
them –
The Story of the
Malakand Field Force (1898)
The River War, 2 vols (1899)
Savrola (1900)
The People’s
Rights (1909)
The World Crisis, 5 vols (1923
– 31)
The Eastern Front (1931)
Great
Contemporaries (1937)
Painting as a
Pastime (1948)
The Second World
War, 6 vols (1948 – 54)
A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols (1956 – 58)
Lessons of the
Russo-Japanese War. Translated as E. L. Spiers, from
the original French by General F. O. de Négrier (1906)
Cavalry Tactical
Schemes. Translated as E. L. Spiers, from the original French of
Colonel Monsenergue (1914)
Liaison 1914, as Edward
Spears (1930)
Assignment to
Catastrophe, 2 vols (1954)
Two Men Who Saved
France (1966)
The Picnic Basket (1967)
Fulfilment of a
Mission (1977)
Under Two Flags,
The Life of Major General Sir Edward Spears, Max Egremont
(1997)
The Spears Mission
in the Levant, 1941 – 44, Aviel Roshwald, Historical Journal No. 29, December 1986
Churchill’s Generals, Edited by John