GREAT BRITAIN: Scrappy Birthday

In its enthusiasm and gratitude, Britain seemed ready last week to deify Sir Winston Churchill on the spot as he made his stately progress toward his 80th birthday. Birthday gifts poured into 10 Downing Street; his birthday fund passed $300,000 and was still rising. Debrett’s editor rummaged through Churchill’s female ancestry and announced happily that Churchill was of blood royal, through Henry VII, and therefore a descendant of Charlemagne, Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror. Parliament itself bustled over preparations for the unprecedented ceremony this week in the great hall which King William Rufus began in 1097. There Churchill will be presented with an ornate memorial volume containing the signatures of all members of the House of Commons (except those of about ten sulky Socialists). Just when national emotions were reaching the sentimental pitch Britons normally reserve for royalty and animals, the irrepressible old man brought them back with a thump to acrimonious reality.

Blunt & Plain. Addressing his own constituents at Woodford, Essex, Sir Winston was in the midst of a routine speech defending German rearmament and reminding them that he was the first to warn that the West needed Germany on its side against Russian aggression. “Even before the war had ended,” he went on, “and while the Germans were surrendering by hundreds of thousands, I telegraphed to Lord Montgomery, directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.”

A couple of voices cried “shame,” but Churchill insisted: “I am giving you the story quite straightly and bluntly.” In Manhattan, reporters pounced on Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, who looked astonished but admitted: “It’s true, it’s true.” Laborites set up a howl of indignation. Bevanite Barbara Castle, though she had signed the presentation book, announced that she had canceled her contribution to Churchill’s birth day fund, since “I do not desire to pay tribute to a man who now reveals he was prepared to … create a pact with Nazi forces more infamous and less justified than the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.”

“Unrealistic & Unwise.” “He should go before he further embarrasses his chosen successor, Sir Anthony Eden,” snapped the pro-Labor Daily Mirror. Even the Times, which used to be hard to shock, was aghast. “What on earth made him say it? The idea was unrealistic at the time; it is unwise to come out with it now.” Moscow happily noted that the statement “unmasks the true aims of the policy of reviving the German Wehrmacht”

But the old man seemed to relish the excitement. Accepting a silver salver from Bristol University, Sir Winston beamed at the students and declared: “I thank you for giving it to me on a day which, as you will see by looking at your papers, I am supposed to be in a bit of a scrape.”

The Labor Party, too, was in a bit of a scrape. The Attlee moderates had solidly outvoted the Bevanite dissidents to approve German rearmament in the party caucus, but in the House of Commons, Labor’s leaders had ordered their members to abstain on the issue rather than divide the party over it (TIME, Nov. 29). Seven Laborites defied the order, six to vote against the Paris agreements, one to vote defiantly for them (he quickly became known as the only member of the Labor Party “who had the courage of Mr. Attlee’s convictions”). Nervously, the Attlee leadership decided not to expel the seven but merely to suspend them for breaking discipline.