The Churchill Series – Feb. 13, 2007

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

Churchill on May 13, 1940 in his first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister.
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In October, 1940, with the Blitz at its full fury, Churchill asked Herbert Morrison, a Labour Party leader, to accept the office of Home Secretary. In Their Finest Hour, the second of his six volume history of WW II, Churchill tells us with supreme understatement it “was no bed of roses which I offered Herbert Morrison:"

These pages certainly cannot attempt to describe the problems of London government, when often night after night ten or twenty thousand people were made homeless, and when nothing but the ceaseless vigil of the citizens as fire guards on the roofs prevented uncontrollable conflagrations; when hospitals filled with mutilated man and women were themselves struck by the enemy’s bombs; when hundreds of thousands of weary people crowded together in unsafe and unsanitary shelters; when communications by road and rail were ceaselessly broken down; when drains were smashed and light, power, and gas paralysed; and when, nevertheless, the whole fighting, toiling life of London had to go forward, and nearly a million people be moved in and out for their work every night and morning.

We did not know how long it would last. We had no reason to suppose that it would not go on getting worse.

When I made the proposal to Mr. Morrison, he knew too much about it to treat it lightly. He asked for a few hours’ consideration, but in a short time he returned and said he would be proud to shoulder the job.

Morrison was a native Londoner, the son of a police constable. He held the Home Secretaryship throughout the war and is today seen as having done a very credible job as Home Secretary under the most difficult circumstances.

Morrison later served in the Labour Government, first as Leader of the House and then as Foreign Secretary. He left the Commons in 1959 and was made a life peer. He chose as his title Baron Morrison of Lambeth, for the section of London in which he’d been born and in which his father had served as a constable.