The day war broke out - and Alec Douglas-Home got arrested.
How the pursuit of Chalkhill Blue butterflies got Alec Douglas-Home into a spot of bother with the law - on the day war broke out with Germany.
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Image: Alec Douglas-Home (left) and Neville Chamberlain (right) in 1938.
The day war broke out - and Alec Douglas-Home got arrested.
by Lee David Evans
‘Your name, sir?’
‘I’m Lord Dunglass, the Prime Minister’s PPS.’
‘Oh, yes sir, and I'm the Queen of Sheba!’
That extraordinary exchange, between Alec Douglas-Home (then known by the courtesy title Lord Dunglass) and a Special Constable, took place on 3rd September 1939. It’s one of the most consequential days in British history - and an unforgettable one for Douglas-Home.
Earlier that day, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, had addressed the nation from the Cabinet Room in Number 10 Downing Street and announced that:
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
The declaration of war was a ‘bitter blow’ to Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler in pursuit of peace. It was also a defeat for Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who had been by the prime minister’s side throughout the negotiations with Hitler. After their infamous meeting in Munich, Chamberlain said to his young parliamentary assistant that Hitler ‘was without question the most detestable and bigoted man’ he had dealt with. But recognising that Britain was negotiating from a position of weakness, not strength, the prime minister did what he could to delay war. By September 1939 he concluded it could be delayed no longer.
Depressed that Chamberlain’s efforts had failed, Douglas-Home got out of London. He called his younger brother, Henry, and suggested they drive to the South Downs to look for Chalkhill Blue butterflies. Anything to take his mind off events in Westminster. Once there, the brothers pursued the small yet beautiful butterflies only to arouse the suspicions of a local Special Constable. With the declaration of war ringing in his ears, he worried that the men might be part of the fifth column.
Douglas-Home protested, saying their activities in the woods were wholly innocent and sought to reassure him that he was a very senior politician - the prime minister’s PPS, no less. It might have done him better to plead almost anything else. So absurd did it sound that Chamberlain’s right hand man would be butterfly hunting on such a dramatic and consequential day, the Special Constable replied: ‘Oh, yes sir, and I'm the Queen of Sheba!’ Tensions continued to rise as the pair were taken to the police station, until a call was made to Downing Street and their identity confirmed. The brothers were released.
Later that day, Douglas-Home returned to Number 10. When leaving around midnight, he stood briefly on the steps with fellow MP Chips Channon and the heavens opened. Rain poured down and thunder cracked over their heads. The gloomy PPS later wrote:
I remember that almost simultaneously the words came to us that this was the gods weeping for the folly of man.
With war underway, Douglas-Home attempted to sign up for the army only to be deemed unfit. At first it was thought that the tribulations of the pre-war government had shredded his nerves. Having been told that ‘every nerve in his body was jangling,’ Douglas-Home was ordered to rest for three months. He took the advice but, three months later, was similarly deemed unable to serve on health grounds. His doctors realised the cause was much more troubling than jangling nerves: he had tuberculosis of the spine.
The treatment in the 1940s was nothing short of gruesome. Doctors flaked his shin bones and grafted them onto the affected vertebrae in his spine; worse, his recovery necessitated staying totally immobile for two years. ‘I often felt that I would be better dead', Douglas-Home later wrote. He went to convalesce at the family estate in Scotland, set in a plaster cast. 'It was not possible to move any parts of my body other than my forearms, so that I could do nothing but talk and read.'
Those years of recovery proved a formative time in Douglas-Home’s life. He ‘read the lives of all the famous politicians of the nineteenth century - Melbourne, Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, and found study of their differing characters fascinating.’ Alongside Victorian politics, he devoured all the books he could find on Communism, including the entirety of Das Kapital. (Douglas-Home is perhaps the only British leader to have ever read Marx’s great tome from cover to cover. Harold Wilson, the socialist politician who would succeed him as prime minister in 1964, said: ‘I only got as far as page two - that's where the footnote is nearly a page long.') Rather more cheerily, Douglas-Home learned embroidery and stitched a set of dining chair seats.
The paradox of this period for Douglas-Home was that he had sought to sign up for a grim fate - fighting in the war - and, via surgery and recovery, found himself in a position more miserable than combat. But having learned great patience and made himself one of the most well-read politicians in the country, and with Britain having triumphed over Hitler, Douglas-Home was fortified to lead one of the most consequential political lives of the post-war era, as Commonwealth Secretary, Foreign Secretary (twice) and prime minister.
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