“Blood, toil, tears and sweat”

On 13 May 1940, Whit Monday, the House of Commons met in special session to hear the new prime minister. Three days earlier Winston Churchill had succeeded Neville Chamberlain and set about forming an all-party government. Now he asked the House for a vote of confidence. The speech was short – it lasted only a few minutes – but one of its sentences passed into history: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The House backed the government without a single vote against. Over the following days Churchill completed his administration and turned to the President of the United States for help.

A sitting on a bank holiday

Whit Monday was a public holiday in Britain, but the new government had cancelled it, because a German offensive had been under way on the Continent since 10 May. The House met outside its normal timetable: the Speaker recalled it at the prime minister’s request, using powers conferred on him by an earlier resolution of the House. Members had last sat on 8 May, when, in the division that closed the Norway Debate, the Chamberlain government’s majority had fallen to 81. Since then everything had changed: the Germans had attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Chamberlain had resigned, and Labour and the Liberals had joined the government.

According to the diaries and memoirs of MPs present, when Chamberlain entered the chamber the Conservative benches rose in a tumultuous ovation, while Churchill was received far more coolly. Most Conservative members were still attached to the former prime minister and mistrustful of his successor, who had spent years criticising his own party. Churchill’s applause came mainly from Labour.

The speech

Churchill rose at 2.54 p.m. and moved the motion: “That this House welcomes the formation of a Government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion.” He then gave an account of what he had done since Friday. In substance, he said:

On Friday evening I was charged by His Majesty with forming a new administration. It was the clear wish and will of Parliament and the nation that it should rest on the broadest possible base and take in all parties, both those that had supported the previous government and those of the Opposition. I have carried out the most important part of that task. A War Cabinet of five members has been formed which, together with the Opposition Liberals, represents the unity of the nation. The leaders of the three parties have agreed to serve either in the War Cabinet or in high executive office. The three service departments have been filled. All this had to be done in a single day, because of the extreme urgency and gravity of events.

He announced that the most important ministries would be filled the next day and the whole government by the time Parliament met again, and proposed that the House adjourn until 21 May. Then he came to the words that would be remembered:

To form a government of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself, but we must remember that we are in the opening phase of one of the greatest battles in history, that we are fighting in many other places, in Norway and in Holland, that we must be ready in the Mediterranean, that the air battle goes on without pause, and that many preparations have to be made here at home. In this crisis I hope I may be forgiven if I do not address the House at length today. I hope that those of my friends and colleagues, present and former, who have been affected by this political reconstruction will fully forgive the lack of ceremony with which I have had to act. I will say to the House what I have said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

An ordeal of the most grievous kind lies before us. Long, long months of struggle and suffering lie ahead. You ask what our policy is. I answer: to make war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us; to make war against a monstrous tyranny never outdone in the dark and lamentable record of human crime. That is our policy. You ask what our aim is. I can answer in one word: victory – victory at any cost, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. Let us be clear about it: the British Empire will not survive, nothing the British Empire has stood for will survive, the age-old urge and impulse of mankind to move forward towards its goal will not survive. But I take up my task in good heart and with hope. I am sure that people will not allow our cause to fail. At this moment I feel entitled to ask for the help of all, and I say: “Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”

In Polish the English phrase “blood, toil, tears and sweat” has been rendered in several ways, most often as “krew, pot i łzy” or “krew, trud, łzy i pot”. Because “toil” means hard, exhausting labour, the closest Polish equivalent is “znój”, giving “krew, znój, łzy i pot”.

Where the words came from

The pairing of blood, sweat and tears was not new. Churchill himself had used it before: in 1931 he wrote of “their sweat, their tears, their blood”, and in 1939 of new structures of national life raised upon blood, sweat and tears. In 1897 Theodore Roosevelt had spoken in a similar vein to an audience at the Naval War College, of the “blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish” through which Americans’ forefathers had passed. Churchill’s words are also often compared with the proclamation of Giuseppe Garibaldi in July 1849, who, as he left a Rome on the point of falling, promised his soldiers hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. As a young man Churchill had thought of writing a biography of Garibaldi and knew the story. Yet the force of his speech lay not in its originality but in the fact that, instead of assurances of certain victory, the prime minister foretold a hard ordeal – while refusing to admit any outcome other than victory.

The vote of confidence

The first to reply was the Labour member Hastings Lees-Smith, who had taken over the duties of Leader of the Opposition after Clement Attlee entered the government. Although the main parties were now in government, someone had to fill that role for the House to function under its rules. Lees-Smith announced that his party would support the motion and brought news from Bournemouth: that morning the Labour Party conference had endorsed the leadership’s decision to join the government by 2,400,000 delegate votes to 170,000 (votes at Labour conferences were counted according to the membership of the organisations represented). As he left for London, Attlee, the new Lord Privy Seal, had been addressing the conference. Lees-Smith said that Britain had achieved unity through discussion and reason, not through the concentration camp, the rubber truncheon and the headsman’s block.

The sharpest speech came from James Maxton of the small Independent Labour Party. He mocked the idea that Churchill’s accession had perhaps been written in the book of destiny as far back as the field of Blenheim, and argued that two politicians changing places would give the country no new strength. He convinced no one. David Lloyd George, Father of the House and prime minister during the previous war, congratulated an old friend with whom, he said, he shared the longest friendship in politics despite many quarrels. He judged that the King had made a wise choice, adding that he was not sure whether Churchill should be congratulated personally, since he was taking on responsibility at a moment graver than any that had confronted a British minister. Among others who spoke was the left-wing politician Sir Stafford Cripps, who had been expelled from the Labour Party in 1939.

At 4.20 p.m. the House divided. The motion was carried by 381 votes, with not a single vote cast against it. There could, in fact, be no votes against, because the only members who came forward to act as tellers for the Noes were Maxton and his party colleague Campbell Stephen, and tellers do not vote. Churchill’s government thus received formally unanimous support, although many Conservatives voted out of duty rather than conviction. Churchill later wrote that he first felt the full support of the House only on 4 July 1940, when he announced the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. The speech of 13 May was not broadcast; the country learned of it from news bulletins and the newspapers. Churchill gave his first radio broadcast as prime minister on 19 May.

The government completed

War chronologies sometimes record under 14 May the publication of the outline of the new coalition of Conservatives, Labour and Liberals. That reflects the position, although the government’s composition was announced in stages. On 11 May the five-member War Cabinet and the service ministers were announced, on 12 and 13 May further names followed, and on 14 and 15 May the remaining senior posts were filled. Lord Beaverbrook became Minister of Aircraft Production, the Labour politician Hugh Dalton Minister of Economic Warfare, the trade union leader Ernest Bevin Minister of Labour, and Herbert Morrison Minister of Supply. By the end of his first week in office Churchill had, apart from a few minor posts, finished building his administration. Labour received more than a dozen ministerial and junior ministerial posts, and the Liberals the Air Ministry for their leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair. Only two women entered the government, both as junior ministers: the Conservative Florence Horsbrugh and the Labour member Ellen Wilkinson.

The appeal to Roosevelt and Canada

It is also often said that on 14 May Churchill asked President Roosevelt and Canada for help. In fact the first message Churchill sent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as prime minister is dated 15 May – the day the Germans broke through on the Meuse and the Netherlands capitulated. Churchill had been corresponding with the President since September 1939 as First Lord of the Admiralty, signing his cables “Naval Person”. Now he signed himself “Former Naval Person” and wrote that, although he had changed office, he was sure the President would not wish their private correspondence to cease.

He warned that the situation had deteriorated sharply and that the small countries were being smashed one after another “like matchwood”. He expected a German attack on Britain itself before long and gave an assurance that, if necessary, Britain would fight on alone. He cautioned that the voice and strength of the United States might count for nothing if withheld too long, and that America might find itself facing a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe. He asked Roosevelt to proclaim “non-belligerency”, meaning help in everything short of committing armed forces to the fighting. He listed specific needs: the loan of 40–50 older American destroyers, several hundred of the latest aircraft, anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, and steel and other raw materials, for which Britain would pay in dollars for as long as it could. He also asked for a squadron of the US Navy to visit Irish ports and for the United States to keep Japan in check in the Pacific.

Roosevelt replied the next day, courteously but cautiously. He wrote that a loan or transfer of destroyers would require the consent of Congress and that he was not certain it would be wise to put such a request forward at that moment. He promised to consider the other requests and pointed out that the American fleet was concentrated at Hawaii. That same day, 16 May, he went before Congress to ask for enormous sums for rearmament and called for the production of 50,000 aircraft a year – but this was an expansion of America’s own forces, not aid to Britain. The President was constrained by the Neutrality Acts, by isolationist feeling and by the approaching election, in which he intended to seek a third term.

The request to Canada came later. On 23 May, with German troops already on the Channel coast, the British government asked for every available Canadian destroyer to be sent to defend the British Isles. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed at once, even though this weakened the defence of Canada’s own coast, and four destroyers of the Royal Canadian Navy soon set out across the Atlantic. The 1st Canadian Division had been stationed in Britain since December 1939. The Canadian ships took part in the June evacuations of troops from France, and one of them, HMCS Fraser, sank on 25 June after colliding with a British cruiser.

Place in the war

The speech of 13 May was the first of Churchill’s three great speeches during the campaign in France. On 4 June, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, he declared in the House of Commons that the British would fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and would never surrender; on 18 June, after the fall of France, he spoke of the British Empire’s “finest hour”. These speeches, delivered in Parliament and in part repeated on the radio, became part of Britain’s resilience in 1940. At the same time Churchill, who in public promised victory, had at the end of May to fend off a proposal in the War Cabinet to explore peace terms through Italian mediation.

The request for destroyers returned over the following weeks, ever more insistently, as the Royal Navy’s losses off Dunkirk and in the Atlantic mounted. On 2 September 1940 the United States agreed to transfer 50 old destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on bases in British territories in the Western Hemisphere (the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement), and in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which opened the way to American supplies on a vast scale. The pledge of 13 May that Britain would fight on to victory whatever the cost was fulfilled five years later. In 2016 the sentence about blood, toil, tears and sweat appeared, together with Churchill’s portrait, on the new five-pound note.