Battalion Commander and Opposition Spokesman

Abstract

The few days after his resignation speech Churchill spent largely in preparing for his departure for France to join his regiment. He was pleased by the reactions to his speech: The Times described it as ‘an undoubted Parliamentary triumph’ and the Manchester Guardian lamented his resignation as ‘a grave public misfortune’. C. P. Scott, the Guardian editor, had visited him a few days previously and had been shown some of the confidential papers about the Dardanelles operation.¹ The Churchill family was now living at 41 Cromwell Road, which they shared with Jack Churchill’s family. There were two nurses and two nurserymaids to look after the children, and so it was a large household.² On the 16th there was a farewell luncheon party, at which Violet Asquith and her step-mother Margot were present: they arrived to find ‘baggage and other military impedimenta’ in the hall and on the landings. Churchill was excited at the prospect of going to the front but, as Violet said, ‘for most of us it was a kind of a wake’.³