Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

ENDPAPER PICTURE CREDITS
(numbered clockwise from top left)

1. and 6.
Menu for FDR’s dinner for WSC
9 August ’41, Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park.

2. and 4.
Claridges bill and guest list re India Bill
Reproduced with kind permission of Claridges, London and of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

3.
Churchill dinner at Potsdam
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

5.
“With best wishes” menu card sketched by WSC
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

7.
Letter to Savoy re overcharging
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

8.
Labels for game from the King to Downing Street
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

I
NTRODUCTION

O
n 27 October 1953 a Labour MP asked Winston Churchill during Prime Minister’s Questions whether he would “indicate if he will take the precaution of
consulting
the consuming public before he decides to abolish the Food Ministry?” Churchill replied, to gales of laughter, “On the whole, I have always found myself on the side of the
consumer
.” It was true; Churchill always was a great consumer when it came to food, but also when it came to drink and cigars. As this well written, meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book shows, Churchill’s appetites were enormous, and not least his appetite for life.

Nobody could be better qualified to have written this book than Cita Stelzer, an assured political and society
hostess
around whose own dinner tables on both sides of the Atlantic well-informed conversation sparkles, but it is nonetheless astonishing that the subject of Churchill’s dinner diplomacy has not been written about before. For as the author
authoritatively
proves in her first chapter, Churchill used mealtimes – and primarily dinners – almost as political weapons.

Dinner parties provided the ideal opportunity for Churchill to establish a personal dominance that allowed him to get his way so often that Stelzer’s scholarship counts as
ground-breaking
in identifying the phenomenon. His great gifts of conviviality, intelligence, humour, memory, anecdotal ability, wit, hospitality and – not least – alcoholic hard-
headheadness
, all helped him to charm and ultimately to persuade all but his most intellectually prosaic of guests. The fact that his daily afternoon nap meant that he rarely flagged even into the early hours of morning helped a good deal too,
especially
when surrounded in wartime by busy men who could not indulge in the same luxury.

Yet as Stelzer acutely observes, the social etiquette of
dinner
parties also provided an opportunity to discuss great matters of state with powerful decision-makers in an
environment
where there were no agendas, civil servants,
stenographers
or private secretaries to formalise things. Conversation could be directed towards the most important issues of the day without the impedimenta of official records,
committee
minutes or any of the other barriers to open
expression
that so often tend to inhibit free exchanges of view.

When Churchill went to war he fought with every weapon in his formidable personal arsenal, and Stelzer brilliantly shows how one of these was undoubtedly the dinner party.
During the course of a life devoted to persuasion,
Churchill
employed argument, eloquence, anger (both real and feigned), occasional threats, charm and even sometimes tears, but here we also see his deployment of the dinner party as a means of getting his way. How much better his methods than those of Hitler and Stalin …

Now that we already have biographies of Churchill’s grandmother, his bodyguard and his (wholly obscure)
constituency
association chairman, it is high time that we have one of his stomach. It helps that good food and drink and
cigars
mattered to Churchill, and that he had a late-Victorian aristocrat’s taste for the best in all three. Stelzer’s
meticulous
research proves conclusively that if he had not been the greatest world statesman of the twentieth century – perhaps of any century – he would have made a very fine sommelier or maitre d’hôtel at the Savoy or the Ritz hotels.

However, this book is not simply a paean to all things Churchillian: Stelzer also acknowledges the great man’s chronic unpunctuality at mealtimes, the fact that he would practise his seemingly impromptu aperçus, and of course the way that he was able to supplement the rationing rules that made life difficult for so many of his countrymen for six long years of war (and several more of peace too). Yet if, as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach, Winston Churchill certainly marched to victory in the Second World War on
his
stomach, and no one in their right mind would begrudge him a mouthful of Beef Wellington or a drop of 1870 brandy as he did so.

One area in which Stelzer’s scholarship makes an
invaluable
contribution to the protection of Churchill’s reputation lies in her demolition of the arguments of those who accuse him of chronic alcoholism. Adolf Hitler was obsessed by
Churchill’s drinking, describing him on various occasions as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard” and as “whisky-happy”. Similar accusations were regularly made by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machine, and have since been made by the revisionist historians John Charmley and Clive Ponting and the former historian David Irving. In a sense, Churchill helped his enemies enormously in this, because of the great number of jokes he made himself about his own drinking, never for a moment considering it something which he needed to apologise for or explain. Stelzer’s
explosion
of the myth, and her careful estimation of the true level of Churchill’s drinking, is wholly convincing, and will
hopefully
set the record straight for good. Churchill enjoyed his drink, but had a constitution that could easily take it.

Stelzer’s discovery and publishing of many never-before-seen photographs of people
*
and places connected with Churchill and his dinners is another useful contribution to our understanding of the period, the result of her diligent research in private and public archives and her
acquaintanceship
with so many people – now sadly a dwindling band – who knew and worked with the great man. At breakfasts, luncheons, picnics and dinners Churchill never conformed to the Regency rules regarding the banning of politics as a proper conversational topic over meals. Instead, he would turn mealtimes into information-exchange seminars,
international
summits, intelligence-gathering operations,
gossip-fests
, speech-practice sessions and even semi-theatrical
performances
. It must have been thrilling to have been present.

The visitors’ book at Chartwell is testament to the way
in which Churchill would invite top experts in their fields to brief him during his “wilderness years” of the 1930s, almost always during mealtimes. His questing mind is just as evident in Stelzer’s wartime and post-war pages. When Churchill travelled – which he did an astonishing amount during the Second World War, despite the obvious and terrifying
dangers
involved – he defeated the ravages of jet-lag by obeying the dictates of his hunger, and living not on Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time or the date-line time where he was, but instead on what he dubbed his “tummy-time”,
eating
and sleeping when his stomach told him to. It was part of his special genius that he was able to harness even his intestines to the service of his country, and to ally his own alimentary canal to the cause of victory over barbarism.

On reading this delightful and fascinating book, we are reminded that an evening dining with Winston Churchill must have been one of the most memorable and enjoyable occasions one could have hoped for, almost whatever mood he was in. (Even the black ones rarely lasted that long.) In recapturing so many of them so acutely, and placing them all in their proper historical context – complete with scores of menus – Cita Stelzer has rendered Churchillian scholarship a signal service. Bon appetit!

Andrew Roberts