Foreign News: Pathos at Blenheim

At Blenheim Palace the Tories last week held their biggest rally since the 1945 Labor victory. The palace, a huge pile of yellowed brown and grey stone given by a grateful Parliament to the first Duke of Marlborough, loomed impressively amid the green of flawlessly kept lawns, woods, pastures and ponds. The afternoon was perfect, with just a touch of cloud, wind and rain to make it true to England. Into the green expanse spilled some 60,000 Britons (at 50¢ for the general public, 30¢ for Conservative Party members). For their entertainment there were bowling greens, tea tents, puppet shows, acrobats, bicycle races and, of course, cricket. For their inspiration there was Winston Churchill. Before the day was done, the 60,000 had heard the best the Tories had to offer; for many that was obviously not good enough.

It was Winnie’s day, on Winnie’s home ground. He came of Marlboroughs. He recalled that he had been born in that house and played on those grounds. He said it with a lifting of the head and a wistful ranging of his old eyes across the peopled loveliness. Here he had proposed to his wife, he added, turning with a graceful bow to white-haired Clementine, swathed in silvery pink.

My Lord Duke. As if in a nostalgic effort to recapture the glorious days of imperial and Tory Britain, when life was ordered and largely predictable, his listeners were neatly sorted on hierarchical lines. With Churchill on the speaker’s platform was the tenth in the line of the victor of Blenheim (“My Lord Duke” Churchill called him), cool, calm and ruddy. Beside him sat his Duchess, magnificently hatted with two feathers sweeping from under a black brim.

Also on the speaker’s platform sat about 50 of Oxfordshire’s leading Tories—solid, well-fixed businessmen, country gentlemen and their ladies. Fifty or so of the lesser elect were allowed to sit on two rows of steps around the portico. Facing the platform, on the cricket green, was a roped enclosure with some 200 chairs. There sat the remainder of the party committeemen, their families, and others of the locally privileged.

These, who might have come straight from the vicar’s garden party or a charity bazaar, wore the rapt expression of idolaters as their hero spoke. Behind them and around them stood the thousands of the crowd—the voting public. They wore the garb and they had the faces of the working class; they came from the motorcar factories of Cowley, near Oxford, from the shops of Banbury, from the farms of Oxfordshire.

Winnie himself was in fine form. He looked better than he had looked in months. His hands, gently clasping and unclasping as he stood before the crowd, had about them the same pink and cherished look that made his face glow with majestic infancy.

The Guilty Men. His speech was a party speech, for party members. Those nearest the lectern laughed and applauded and worshiped as the master inveighed against “the follies and indecision of the Socialist , Government.” He thundered: “Two disasters have come upon us—the second world war and the first Socialist Government with a majority. By supreme exertions we surmounted the first disaster, and the question which glares upon us today is: How shall we free ourselves from the second?” And he supplied the answer, obvious to his seated listeners: “There will be no recovery from our present misfortune until the guilty men whose crazy theories and personal incompetence have brought us down have been driven from power by the vote of the nation.” There could be, he said, no Tory coalition with the Socialists.

The Silent Men. To all this, the party elite listened with sustained rapture. But when the crowd’s hands flew up to wave handkerchiefs or make the V-sign, there were noticeable gaps. When, at the end, somebody started up For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, many standees just stared, in eloquent silence. Perhaps they resented Churchill’s crack at the coal miners, when he said scornfully that “they are even compared [by Socialist Ministers] to the air pilots who won the Battle of Britain.” Perhaps they looked with proletarian and hostile eyes at Blenheim Palace, the Duke and his Duchess, the Rolls-Royces with the party placards, the inescapable identity of Churchill and all that Blenheim symbolized. Perhaps they were aware that Churchill had offered them no program to save Britain.

Nobody could deny that Winston Churchill had scored another oratorical triumph, or doubt that he still evoked a homage rarely given men. But had he wooed votes away from the Labor Party? Those who stonily failed to cheer Churchill were becoming disillusioned about Attlee; they had long been disillusioned about Blenheim.