My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleycase are fortified by long and highly tested experience. I offer them for what they areworth to young speakers.The recurrent theme of the Centre Party soon ended at this stage, so far as I wasconcerned, by reason of a rapidly increasing political divergence from Mr. Churchill.When it was resumed over a decade later, with far more vigorous impulse, LloydGeorge was more in the picture than Churchill. I had by then ceased to be a politicalinfant because I had established my reputation with my speech of resignation from theLabour Government, and in the discussions of that later period had become competentto speak for the younger generation. Although the initiative from the older statesmenin this later stage of our story came mostly from Lloyd George, with the aid of LordRothermere, Mr. Churchill was certainly on occasion present at our discussions, buthe did not attend them all, or in the earlier phase play any leading part. The reasonperhaps was that his relations were none too good in that period with all the youngM.P.s with whom I became associated after my departure from the LabourGovernment, and in particular he had some personal friction with some of the youngerConservatives.My own relations with Mr. Churchill remained reasonably good throughout, and wereonly intermittently interrupted by some spasm of passion at one of my moreoutrageous utterances. Even when he was moved on one occasion to shake his fist atme across the floor of the House, with a muttered 'You damned puppy', a welcominggrin in the lobby would follow a few days of scowling oblivion. He never bore malice.For my part, I always liked him and it was part of the 'tears of things' that deepdifferences in attitude to politics, though not to life, soon parted us and finally severedthreads of fate which for a moment had been entwined.Kaleidoscopic memories of Winston Churchill are reflected from many differentoccasions, happy, sad, passionate, but never mean or ignoble. Our clashes in debatewere numerous and often ended in much gaiety, but never in prolonged ill-feeling. Onone occasion he had wound up the debate after I had made a rather noisy, flashyspeech for the Opposition, which had transmuted a dull and flat occasion into a livelyand enjoyable uproar. He described in rolling periods how stricken and dismayedappeared the Opposition and how lost their cause, 'when forth sprang our youngAstyanax, the hope of Troy'. There were roars of laughter at my expense and I wasleft wondering how he had managed it, for I was tolerably certain that he had neverread a line of Homer. Later in the lobby he came rolling up to me, smiling broadly,and said with a dig in the ribs: 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, my boy, never bewithout them'. A large part of his charm was that he was completely devoid ofhumbug. He detested the goody-goodies, as he used to call them.Churchill, with all his impulsive and emotional character, had a certain solid sensewhich traversed acute party divisions in a very English, no-nonsense manner, andmade him normally and essentially a man of the centre. Typical of this quietcommonsense was his remark—'blood will only come from the nose in England'—said to me with a certain calm content when our Blackshirts were clashing with theirRed challengers at our meetings all over Britain. He was frank in remarkable degreeabout himself and realistic about his prospects. 'What is the use of racing all your lifeif you never win the Derby,' he said to me across the table at the Other Club a fewyears before the war; and on another occasion, 'The trouble is I have been on the89 of 424