"God bears me a grudge"

It records how Churchill claimed God had caused the failure of the 1915 Dardanelles expedition. It also notes how Churchill despaired of Britain achieving victory over the German armies in Europe, and even how he abused his ministerial petrol allowance.

The future Prime Minister’s private thoughts during World War I were recorded in the journal of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a poet and adventurer.

The revelations were made this week by Dr. Richard Toye, a Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, who came across the diaries while researching the relationship between Churchill and World War I Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “Blunt published his diaries for the years up to 1914, but the entries for the Great War period did not see the light of day,” he explained. “They are a wonderful source, and cast significant new light on Churchill’s attitudes and behaviour during this crucial phase of his career.”

Blunt lived from 1840 to 1922, and the diaries form part of the collection of his private papers held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Elizabeth Longford’s 1979 biography of him drew on the diaries, but their full significance for Churchill scholars has not previously been recognised.

Of particular interest is a letter from Churchill, written in April 1917 when he was out of office, which Blunt copied into the diary. It refers to the failed Allied attempt, two years earlier, to force the straits dividing Europe from Asia. This was a project with which Churchill had been closely associated when First Lord of the Admiralty, and which contributed to his political downfall.

“Very much worse times are coming upon us,” he told Blunt, who opposed the war. “God has become a convert to your views and is bent on the destruction of mankind…That is why he would not let me take Constantinople and so unite the Balkan States against our enemies. Indeed he bears me a grudge for having tried to upset his purpose by bringing the war to an untimely and conventional end. Deeper and deeper is Christendom to sink in the abyss of slaughter, ruin and famine, and no one can be sure of survival or of the endurance of any institution.”

Later the same month, Churchill and his wife visited Blunt, who noted: “Winston said I had been right when I told him Providence had punished him for his wickedness and performed a miracle by enabling the Turks to defeat the whole power of the British Empire by sea and land.”

In May 1918, after Churchill’s return to government as Minister of Munitions, the couple visited Blunt again. Churchill admitted the war was not going well: “On the contrary,” the diary records, “He says things are very serious and he does not see any prospect of our beating the German armies by land and so winning the war…‘The Hun has chosen to fight without regard to any rules of war. We shall have to beat him off by whatever weapons we can get hold of – by assassination, poison.’ ”

Blunt also wrote that on less important matters Churchill “was as lightly irresponsible as ever, chuckled over his abuse of Ministerial privilege of using petrol for his motor excursion here and how he had evaded the pressure of the War Agricultural Committee to plough up his land.”

Much as Blunt disapproved of Churchill’s views, he could not help liking him. “There is much of the schoolboy in Winston notwithstanding his crimes … and [I] forgive him as one forgives a boy who has raided one’s orchard.”

Dr. Toye comments “The diaries reveal some less well-known aspects to Churchill’s character. While these revelations do not detract from Churchill’s greatness, they do present us with a more rounded picture than the conventional one.”