Winston Churchill’s Hand Held Reading Copy of a Great Postwar Speech to Parliament, Advocating a Larger, Stronger Navy, and Extolling the Great Historic Role of the British Navy for Generations in Maintaining Peace, With Some Notations In His Hand

In the “Psalm” format commonly used by Churchill for his reading copies of speeches

“And how ill-timed is this new conversion of the government to what I told them three years ago. They could hardly have hit it off worse. In fact, it is the record of misfits. When the world was safe on the morrow of our victory. The government and the admiralty squandered our money on keeping up a vast strength against nothing. Now that danger revives, they are found in the process of casting away the numbers and strength of our forces…”

 

An extraordinary rarity, being just the second time we have seen a Churchill speech to Parliament reach the marketplace. We also carried that previous one

The ministerial post of First Lord of the Admiralty is the civilian head of the Royal Navy. Winston Churchill was appointed to the coveted post in late 1911 and he took it up with great gusto. Churchill adored Navy life aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress and after taking office he set out to visit every capital ship and every Royal Navy base in the British Isles. He spent eight months of his first twelve in office aboard the yacht. Churchill was instrumental in reshaping the Royal Navy, with larger more powerful ships and modernizing them from coal to oil. His moves proved instrumental in preparing the Royal Navy for the First World War. He was removed from his post in 1915 over the Gallipoli disaster, for which, though not at blame, he was used as a fall guy.

Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924-1929, when the Conservatives lost office at the 1929 General Election. This began his ’wilderness years’, which lasted until 1939, when he held no cabinet office but was a constant and often much-ridiculed voice crying out about the danger from the Nazis and insisting on preparedness. The period of Churchill’s exile ended when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. It was now clear that Churchill had been right all along. On the day that the British declared war, Churchill was brought back into government. This would be the second time he would be appointed to the office of First Lord of the Admiralty. Upon hearing the news, the Royal Navy’s Board of the Admiralty sent out a signal to the fleet, ‘Winston is back!’

Churchill’s identification with the Navy continued. When throughout World War II he corresponded with President Roosevelt, who had been Undersecretary of the Navy for Woodrow Wilson, Churchill always signed himself “Former Naval Person”.

In July 1945 Churchill’s Conservative government was shockingly voted out of office. Now Clement Attlee was prime minister and Churchill was in the opposition. Post-war Britain was in a period of austerity, and the Attlee government sought to cut expenses, particularly those for the military. The war, after all, was over. He cut the Navy budget and also the number of ships in the Royal Navy. For example, there were 801 frigates and destroyers in 1945; in 1950 there were 280. This aroused Churchill’s ire, as he saw the world as unstable and the Soviet Union under Stalin a real threat.

On March 8, 1948, the Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, John Dugdale, spoke to Parliament. He defended the government policy and promised that some ships taken out of commission would be returned to duty. “It is my duty today, and my privilege, to speak on behalf of the officers and men of the Royal Navy. I am particularly glad to do this because the Navy has recently been subjected to a great deal of criticism; some of it well-intentioned, some of it malicious, and some of it merely ill-informed. We are told that the Navy today is being fast reduced to nothing, that it is a decaying force. Words such as these are not pleasant for the officers and men of the Royal Navy to hear—men who know they are carrying out an arduous duty, and who do not like to hear fun being made of it.

“We are asking this year for a sum of no less than £153 million. This is a big reduction on last year’s Estimate. The principle we have acted upon in making this reduction is to see that so far as possible the Navy is kept fit and ready for expansion should the need arise…We hope that by December of this year, however—and this I think will interest in particular the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition [Churchill}—to have put a number of ships once again into commission. By that time, we shall have four battleships, three fleet carriers, five light fleet carriers, 17 cruisers, 34 submarines, 52 destroyers and 43 frigates in commission. These are quite apart from the reserve Fleet, which is large…

“We find that except for battleships of which we certainly have fewer than before the war, we have quite definitely today as many ships of each class as we had in an average prewar year. It is, indeed, a very formidable Fleet, second only in size to that of the United States of America, and a Fleet to which in spite of all criticism leveled against it, every officer and man is proud to belong….

“The recent decision of His Majesty’s Government to scrap five old battleships has given rise to a number of misconceptions. Some people thought that we had lost interest in the Navy by doing this…Some of these which we are now scrapping are very old indeed, dating back to the first world war. It would be ridiculous to keep them on now, using money and manpower, as souvenirs when at the beginning of a new war they would probably be sunk within a few days…”

Shortly after, Churchill rose to speak. He told Parliament: “It is customary on these occasions to compare the strength of the Navy with that of other fleets, built and building. Today that is impossible, because there is no enemy, no enemy at sea. All our former enemy navies are sunk beneath the waves, or distributed among the victors. The Soviet Navy has not yet taken shape, except, perhaps, for submarines, about which there should be serious consideration. But for the rest, the United States and France are in the closest harmony with us, and the German, Italian and Japanese Fleets do not exist. So there is no enemy against which to match the strength of the British fleet…

“But the Navy has a dual function. In war it is our means of safety; in peace it sustains the prestige, repute, and influence of this small island; and it is a major factor in the cohesion of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The tasks which the Navy has performed in peacetime are hardly less magnificent than those they have achieved in war. From Trafalgar onwards, for more than 100 years Britannia ruled the waves. There was a great measure of peace, the freedom of the seas was maintained, the slave trade was extirpated, the Monroe Doctrine of the United States found its sanction in British naval power—and that has been pretty well recognized on the other side of the Atlantic—and in those happy days the cost was about £10 million a year.

‘I wonder, therefore, as there are no enemies, no enemy battle fleets to be taken into consideration, why the Socialist Government should be so anxious to conceal the facts about the Navy and our naval power….The whole of this policy of concealment is silly. It only makes people ask themselves ‘What have the Government got to hide? If there are no enemies it must be their own shortcomings and administrative failures that they wish to hide.’ There is no doubt a lot in this, but when I come to examine these matters more closely I cannot find it an altogether convincing explanation, because the real strength of the Royal Navy is far above what the Government has lately made it out to be. This argument of secrecy is fraudulent, but it arises not from malice, but from stupidity. Nothing that the Government could conceal about the Navy, its strength or its weakness, could be so bad as what they have themselves proclaimed to the world. Nothing they could tell to foreigners would be so disparaging to British interests as what they have already said themselves about the strength of the Fleet…I take the Navy first. On existing plans, allowing for intake, on 31st December, this year, the strength of the Navy would be 665,000 of whom 55,000 are women so that the Navy would even retain 448,000 at the end of June, 1946. I am astounded that such figures should be accepted by His Majesty’s Government…

“But there has been no policy, no control, no guidance, just jotting along, living from hand to mouth and from day today. It has just been drift and mental inertia and this is not only typical but and extremely precise instance which illustrates to this point. It is typical of the degeneration of our affairs and administration throughout our whole country and in every branch of our national life.

“And how ill-timed is this new conversion of the government to what I told them three years ago. They could hardly have hit it off worse. In fact, it is the record of misfits. When the world was safe on the morrow of our victory. The government and the admiralty squandered our money on keeping up a vast strength against nothing. Now that danger revives, they are found in the process of casting away the numbers and strength of our forces…”

This is Churchill’s 38-page speech, the very one given to Parliament, and almost certainly hand-held. In these pages you’ll find many revisions in Churchill’s hand. For example, he thought better about saying, “The Navy is not a philanthropic institution.” This was crossed out. Another time he wrote in “destroyers” to replaced “battleships”. In it he really savages the Labor government, calling it silly, stupid, with “no policy, no control, no guidance.”

This is an extraordinary rarity. It is just the second time we have seen a Churchill speech to Parliament reach the marketplace. We also carried that one as well.