[Churchill was ‘monstrously-unjust’: Lord Elibank and Sir Dudley North exchange complaints.] Seven Signed Letters (six Typed, one in Autograph) from North, telling 'the whole story' of his wartime dismissal, and a signed copy of a reply by Elibank.

A highly-interesting correspondence of some historical significance, in which North tells ‘the whole story’ as he sees it of his controversial wartime dismissal, to one of his leading supporters in the attempt to clear his name. A marked antipathy to Churchill is shown on both sides, with added attacks by Elibank on Earl Mountbatten and Montgomery of Alamein. See North’s entry in the Oxford DNB for an account of the source of his bitterness: his dismissal following his failure in September 1940 to stop a Vichy French squadron passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, on its way to join in the defence of Dakar against a Franco-British force. The eight items are from the Elibank papers, and were placed in a binder by him. Each has damage and tape staining to an upper corner as the result of a punch hole; otherwise the items are all in good condition, lightly aged and with the usual folds for postage. All of North’s letters are addressed to ‘Lord Elibank’ and signed ‘Dudley North’. ONE: North, TLS, 1 August 1954. 2pp, landscape 8vo. Begins: ‘Dear Lord Elibank, / I do not think that I have had the pleasure of knowing you, but I trust you will allow me to thank you for the attempts which you have made to get the Admiralty to clear my name. / It is only during the last few days that I have had the opportunity of studying the Hansard of the House of Lords report of the discussion of the 26th July last. / From reading the report, I can now gather the very great extent to which you have gone into all the details of this very unfair action of the Admiralty.’ He proposes to write his own account for the press before long, ‘and then I think that the Public will realise quite clearly the weakness of the Admiralty case. I know that Lord Salisbury considers that he has closed the case as far as the Government is concerned. But there are such a lot of people who are supporting me that I think there may be some more to be said over the affair.’ He continues: ‘Of course Mr Churchill was infuriated by my letter which I wrote after the French Fleet were bombarded at Oran, and I am told that he wanted to relieve me then, but Admiral Pound thought that I really had not defended sufficiently, and that I could be left there to be carefully watched. And so I was left there. But when the Admiralty failed to take any steps to stop (or perhaps to try to stop would be a better way of putting it) the French Squadron going through the Straits, Mr Churchill said at once, “It is all the Admiral at Gibraltar’s fault, and so heave him out!” / That really is the whole story or all at least that I have time to tell you now.’ He ends by stating that he is sending Elibank ‘the famous letter which seems to have started all these thoughts against me, but it must be remembered that we, out there had been fighting with the French Navy since the War began, and that we had a very fine opinion of them.’ TWO: North, TLS, 4 August 1954. 2pp, 4to. Noted and initialled by Elibank as acknowledged. After a reference to a letter Elibank has written to ‘Willie James, a term-mate of mine in the Britannia of 1896’, he explains that he wrote to Elibank a few weeks before ‘to thank you for speaking so eloquently on my account in the Lords’. He feels that ‘the others who spoke on that day’ were ‘lamentable’. He explains why ‘Lord Salisbury was hopeless’, then states, ‘Lord Fraser is better, but why he should bring the removal of Admiral Callaghan from the Grand Fleet, to compare with my removal from the Active List, I dont quite know. That removal was done by Churchill, and seeing what was done to Jellicoe later on, Callaghan might have done better, if he had been allowed to stay!’ The remarks of ‘Albert Victor, now the Lord Hillsborough’ made him ‘writhe with anger’. ‘He was the First Lord when I was the Director of Operations and I had to go to say good-bye to him when he was hove out. I was very off-hand with him, and all but told him that he was useless, and the sooner he went back to his rotten companions, the better. A good thing I didn’t, as he came back to relieve Churchill, or rather to take orders from him, as long as he could.’ He is ‘thinking of writing to the Press’ himself, ‘to say exactly how I feel about all this correspondence in the Press about me. / It seems that Churchill is determined to keep his position with regard to me, and it seems that it is not possible to make him abandon it.’ He ends with a discussion of the financial implications: he owes £450 to his lawyer in London, ‘All of it used in stirring this affair up [...] I fancy I lost about £30- a year off my pension I believe.’ THREE: North, TLS, 6 August 1954. 1p, 4to. Docketed as One by Elibank. He will certainly keep ‘the copy of Mr Morgan’s comment on my affair’ which Elibank sent him amongst his papers. ‘It will be a pity if it is not possible somehow to force the Admiralty to allow the affair to be investigated, as it does seem that such a large number of people do think that something ought to be done about it.’ The rest of the letter discusses Elibank’s gift of his book ‘An Episode of the Spanish War’, with a ‘most delightful reference to my affairs’. He feels that Elibank has won his argument with Admiral Somerville (not North’s friend the other Admiral Somerville). FOUR: North, TLS, 12 April 1955. It was good of Elibank to write, ‘as Winston departs in a blaze of glory’. ‘I feel that somehow or other, when he thinks over things, that he has done, there must be a lot of things he will feel uneasy about.’ Annotated here in autograph by Elibank: ‘(“Not bloody likely,” as G.B.S. said in Pygmalion - he played true to form throughout. E. 14/4/55)’. North continues: ‘The fact that a very ordinary letter from me reporting that the Admirals, Captains, Officers and men, who had been suddenly ordered to fire on the Fleet which, had been fighting with them all the war, were very upset by these orders, was a perfectly normal fact, and nothing for him to get over excited about. To presume from this report that I was pro-French or generally unreliable was quite ridiculous, and absolutely wrong. / It is interesting to think that if my opinion, and that of Admiral Somerville had been adopted, and if the French Fleet had not been fired on, how much better the war would have gone on. The number of lives saved in Africa would have been enormous, and I think that the war would have been finished much sooner. / Unfortunately the valiant efforts of the five Admirals of the Fleet to get the Admiralty to look in to the show, were stopped by the personal orders of Winston Churchill, and then the efforts of Lord Winster and yourself, and the others to get the matter looked into in the House of Lords, were stopped by him also, not to mention the other gallant efforts in the House of Commons.’ FIVE: North, TLS, 29 June 1955. 2pp, 4to. Elibank has sent North a copy of his ‘very nice tribute to Franklin Roosevelt’, and this allows North to discuss the American president, whom he believes he met ‘in America when I was over with the Prince of Wales in 1919’. A paragraph is spent arguing that Roosevelt’s failing health at Yalta left him ‘a little less capable of judging our attitude to the war, although he was ‘still “the friend of Britain” that he had always been’. ‘To turn to my own case, for which you fought so valiantly, I wrote the other day to congratulate Dickie Mountbatten [Earl Mountbatten, First Sea Lord] on his getting the G.C.B. In my letter to him, I made some brief reference to the Admiralty obedience to Winston’s directions that the matter was not to be raised any more, and that the Admirals of the Fleet were to keep quiet. I have known Master “Dickie” since his youngest days, and his brother was a great friend of mine. When Winston first attacked me, and said in the House, that I was the fellow who was really to blame, [what follows is underlined by Elibank in pencil] the present First Sea Lord, then a Captain of Destroyers in the Mediteranean, [sic] was one of my strongest champions, and wrote very fiercely on the subject. Late on he became 4th Sea Lord, and gradually his championship of me, diminished.’ Beside this, also in pencil is a long autograph note by Elibank, signed ‘Elibank June 30, 1955’: ‘When Mountbatten was Viceroy of India, 1946/46, he did some tiger-hunting in the Nepal Terai, where I have shot tiger. But I should take very good care not to go Tiger-hunting with Mountbatten, lest I found myself - having been toppled off my elephant (as sometimes happens) - facing a wounded, charging tiger on the ground, with Mountbatten streaking away on his tiger to the rear.’ North now quotes Mountbatten’s reply: ‘From feelers I have put out, I dont think that Winston or no Winston makes any difference to your case; the Government are determined not to reopen it.’ He discusses this response in the final paragraph, asserting that ‘it was Winston who told them how they must behave’. SIX: Elibank, copy of TLS (signed ‘Elibank’), 8 September 1955. Addressed to ‘Admiral Sir Dudley North, GCVO. / CB. CSI. CMG. / Netherbury House, nr. Beaminster / Dorset’. 1p, 4to. On grey paper. Headed in Elibank’s autograph: ‘COPY / Churchill & Ad. Sir Dudley North’. Begins: ‘My dear Admiral, / I see that in a speech yesterday F.-M. Lord Montgomery described Winston Churchill as “the greatest Englishman of all time.” / When I think of Churchill’s monstruously-unjust and indescribably mean treatment of you; of his attempted (but thwarted by high-ranking General Officers) treatment of a similar character of my friend General Sir Neil Ritchie; of his grossly unfair treatment of Archibald Wavell - that great Captain of War - and of other soldiers; of the military and naval disasters which were the outcome of his ruthless disregard of the experienced views of his professional advisers and which involved the tragic and unnecessary loss of many thousands of lives; of his arrogance; and of what I once described in a letter from my pen which was published in The Times as his “indescribable impudence”; I have no hesitation in saying that Montgomery - who arrived to the command of the 8th Division in the Middle East after, mercifully, Churchill had been shorn of his powers to control strategy by the Combined Chiefs of Staffs Committee in Washington - has (in his description, as aforesaid, of Churchill) shown himself to be woefully ignorant of history, and has slandered some of the really great Englishmen, the two Pitts and others, who have appeared from time to time on the British political stage, and who “nothing common did, or mean”.’ He ends the letter with brief news of the Scottish summer: ‘I have fished the Tweed since my boyhood but have never known it to be so low.’ SEVEN: North, TLS. 15 September 1955. 2pp, 4to. He begins by explaining that Elibank’s ‘charming letter’ (Item Six) has reached him ‘in a time of some confusion’, as he has just sold his house, and gives details of his new home ‘The Lodge Parnham’. The letter continues: ‘I dont think that I happenned [sic] to see that Lord Montgomery said anything unusual about Sir Winston Churchill. Personally I do not pay very much to [sic] what he does say. I do not think that his opinions on any subject is good enough for it to be paid much attention to by anybody.’ He gives an assessment of Montgomery: ‘I think that he undoubtedly did the job that he had to do, quite well, but there is no doubt that everything was prepared for him, jolly well by a first class lot of fellows. And he, undoubtedly was just the fellow to do the job. On the other hand, I dont think that anyone should look up to his opinion of Winston Churchill.’ He states that he ‘knew Montgomery as a Brigadier, or a Major General at Portsmouth, before the War. He was not thought a great deal of then, which shewed how wrong people were.’ He returns to Churchill, giving his opinion on his own dismissal: ‘But Sir Winston Churchill, is quite a different affair. He made the most terrible mistake quite near the beginning of his reign. When the French, who after all have never been “steady-goers”, in Wars, collapsed, he persuaded the English Cabinet to do in their Fleet. And in spite of my efforts to prevent it, assisted by Admiral Somerville, who had come out from England, and had been completely persuaded by me and all the other people he had met, that they had entirely the wrong idea in England, our orders from England were that the French Fleet were to be fired on, and that started Churchill’s trouble with the French, which he had, to some extent to reduce by getting rid of me. Any detailed investigation was forbidden by Churchill and still is so. And there it is.’ He apologises to Elibank for ‘letting you have all this again but there it is’. He has written ‘a lot of old stuff’, but is ‘in a complete muddle’. As a member of the royal household he will be visiting London the following month, ‘to attend the unveiling of the Statue of the late King’. He has found the summer ‘wonderful’, although he ‘can quite understand the lowness of the Tweed’. EIGHT: North, ALS, 25 May 1957. 1p, 12mo. ‘Every body seems to know the real truth, which I suppose must remain hidden.’