HEY BULLDOG

Winston Churchill’s complex relationship with Scotland

IN May 1952, the year after he had returned to Downing Street as peacetime prime minister, and a year before he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Winston Churchill, one of the giants of the age, held in his hands an unusual silver casket. It was in the shape of Glasgow’s Tolbooth Steeple. The 15in-high model contained a parchment which testified to the fact he had become only the seventh person to be awarded honorary membership of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. It was presented to him in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street by a delegation from the chamber. The great man thanked them for “presenting me with such an agreeable and charming memento in this casket, which I shall always treasure”.

When you think of Churchill and Scotland it can be hard to see beyond his time as MP for Dundee between 1908 and 1922, during which he served as president of the Board of Trade, home secretary, first lord of the Admiralty, minister of munitions, secretary of state for war and air, and colonial secretary. But a trawl through various books and The Herald archives – prompted by Dundee-born actor Brian Cox portraying Churchill in a film that will be released next week – reveals an interesting array of visits to and speeches in Scotland throughout his remarkable career.

Churchill had already made his name as a war hero, a war correspondent, a Conservative MP for Oldham and a Liberal MP for North-West Manchester (he’d switched parties in May 1904) before he became the Liberal MP for Dundee in 1908. He was re-elected in 1910 and continued to represent the seat until 1922.

Churchill had been taken badly ill with appendicitis prior to the 1922 election and so was unable to campaign vigorously. When Clementine, his wife, spoke on his behalf on the hustings, she was booed and barracked. “She portrayed him as the peacemaker he was at heart,” his granddaughter, Celia Sandys, later wrote, “but the Dundee newspapers and the proletarian voters, recalling his anti-Bolshevik policies, saw him only as a warmonger.”

ON Monday, November 13, a rowdy public meeting took place at the city’s Drill Hall, attended by 10,000 people. Tempers were running high and the police drew their batons before it even began. Churchill was barracked and booed by sections of the crowd but gave as good as he got. At one point he said: “If about 100 young men and women in the town choose to spoil the whole meeting, and if about 100 of those young reptiles choose to deny democracy and the mass of the people the power to conduct great assemblies, the fault is with them, the blame is with them, and the punishment will be administered to them by the electors.”