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During his career Churchill held three of the four Great Offices of State, starting with his time as Home Secretary in 1910-11. This is still a wide ranging job, and in 1910-11 it was even larger. Churchill was responsible for law and order – the courts, prisons and police and providing support for local authorities, for border controls and for a wide range of fragments left over when other departments were carved out of the original role of Secretary of State. This book largely focuses on Churchill’s actions as a prison reformer and with the wider justice system.
The main focus here is on his views and actions on prison reform. Here we see Churchill the liberal reformer at his most liberal, concerned that too many people were in prison, for too long, and in too harsh conditions. He was particularly opposed to sending people to prison for debt without first giving them a fair chance to pay their debts (in particular small fines), and for those cases where poorer members of society were jailed for the sort of minor offenses that members of his own class wouldn’t even have been arrested for. In both cases he had a good point, and does appear to have done something about it. Prison conditions were also slowly improved during his time. On a darker note Churchill also had to confirm all death sentences, and at this date death was the only possible sentence for anyone convicted of murder, regardless of the circumstances. The worst of these cases involved young single mothers killing their newborn children, in a world where having a child out of wedlock was the source of a great deal of shame and actual discrimination. In all of these cases the death penalty was almost immediately cancelled, but not before a great deal of stress had been caused. In other cases Churchill had a similar pardon rate to other Home Secretaries of the time, and he was on record repeatedly as saying he hated the role and it made Home Secretary his least favourite senior role.
Several chapters look at the main controversies that surrounded Churchill’s time at the Home Office. The most notorious of these was his actions during the Tonypandy riots, where as Home Secretary it was his role to approve the local authorites requests for military support. The myth has grown that Churchill ‘sent the army’ and that several minors (often eleven) were gunned down by the troops. In reality Churchill resisted sending the troops for as long as possible, preferring to send contigents of the Met Police instead. When he did eventually have to give in and send the army in the soldiers behaved with more restraint than the police, and shot nobody.
Many features of Churchill’s character familiar from his time as Prime Minister are already present here. Most notable is his ability to come up with radical and often impractical ideas, pester his staff with them, and slowly be convinced to keep the radical but eliminate the impractical. Moments of sentimentality also appear, especially when it comes to pardons. We also see the odd occasion where the creation of a good turn of phrase appeared to have changed his views on a policy!
We end with the first glimpse of Churchill the war leader, as a crisis in 1911 made it look as if a European war was imminent. We see Churchill start to look at war plans, and act as if he had a more direct role in any possible war planning than was actually the case. It was this crisis that saw him move to the Admirality, where he helped Fisher reform the Navy, and was in place at the outbreak of the First World War.
Although this book isn’t directly relevant to military history, it shines a fascinating life on the character and opinions of Churchill just before he gained his first senior military role as First Lord of the Admiralty, and shows how he coped with his first senior Cabinet role.
Chapters
1 – Arrival
2 – Prison at the Theatre
3 – Minister’s Mercy
4 – ‘A Very Curious Morning’
5 – ‘The Noblest Utterance’
6 – Braclets and Hangmen
7 – Curing Criminals?
8 – Churchill and Eugenics
9 – Infamy 1: Tonypandy
10 – Infamy 2: Black Friday
11 – Identity
12 – The Significant Spectator
13 – Sentiment and Doubt
14 – Aliens
15 – The Dartmoor Shepherd
16 – A Day in Court
17 – Peasant and Pheasants
18 – Reforming the Reformatories
19 – Never to be Prime Minister?
20 – Saving Mr Polly?
21 – ‘Exactly Like Daisy Lord’
22 – The Cad and the King
23 – ‘Brilliant Lions’
24 – Lorna Doone and a Cup of Tea
25 – The Panther and the Mansion House
26 – ‘The Modern Nero’
27 – ‘The Brink of Civil War’
28 – Saving the Jews
29 – A Walk with Violet
30 – Civilization?
Author: Duncan Marlor
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Year: 2024