Eleanor and Franklin (145 page)

I find that we have not only made all normal issues, but we have at the minute two and one-half million pairs of light woolen sox in warehouses. Naturally, I cannot guarantee that every individual soldier has his full allotment, since it is entirely possible that some have been lost and replacement not yet made. However, I have already started the various commanders on a check-up to see that no man needs to march without proper footgear.

She journeyed to Chequers, the prime minister's country house. “After lunch we saw Randolph Churchill's little boy, Winston, who is a sweet baby and exactly like the Prime Minister. They sat on the floor and played a game and the resemblance was ridiculous.” At Chequers she finished a letter to the president that she had begun at Buckingham Palace:

Dearest Franklin,

The Prime Minister is pleased with the ham & honey.

Our stay at the Palace is over but I am to see them again before leaving.

Saw a lot of boys at the Red + Washington Club this a.m. The woman in the dispensary even said they came in with terrible blisters because their socks are too tight. All coming here should be issued
wool
socks. No heat is allowed till Nov. & most of them have colds. The boys are very upset over the mail situation, some have been here two months & not a line from home. Also their pay in many cases is very late—& they buy bonds & don't get them. Someone ought to get on top of this situation & while they are about it they might look into the question of how promptly the families are getting allotments.

The spirit seems good but of course I've only seen a few.

The spirit of the English people is something to bow down to. Bevin & Woolton? dined with us at the Palace last night.

We came to Chequers to-day. Gen. & Mrs. Portal are here & Sir Anthony Eden & his wife. Tell Harry Robert was here looking well. Elliott too came to lunch & he spends tomorrow night in London with me. Winant insists on giving me his flat & moving upstairs, which is hard on him but grand for us. To-morrow will be a long day, so good night.

Tommy bears up well & now finds staying with Kings quite ordinary!

Love

ER
¹⁵

The next day, accompanied by Mrs. Churchill, she inspected units of the Auxiliary Territorial Airforce. Chalmers Roberts of the London Office of War Information reported to his chief, Wallace Carroll:

In a pouring rain she walked the length of the parade ground between two rows of girls who had been standing at attention for some time, water trickling down their necks. Mrs. Roosevelt could have driven past but she told the commanding officer, “I would much rather walk, if that's all right.” It was.
¹⁶

It was “stupid” of her, she commented in her diary, to have sent her raincoat and rubbers back to London with her big bag. She spoke to the
girls, who were gathered together in one of the hangars. There were cheers for her and Mrs. Churchill. They had tea, and then proceeded to the Auxiliary Territorial Service induction and training center at Guildford. She was especially interested in the cooking classes:

The women are trained for two weeks at cooking small meals which they are obliged to eat themselves, then two weeks in making things out of left-overs and two weeks cooking out of doors on stoves which they built themselves out of old used tin cans, rubble like broken brick or stone, all held together by mud.

At a third camp, she slogged through the mud, fascinated by the way the girls were being trained to make repairs on heavy trucks.

Although there was every sign that she was doing very well indeed as unofficial ambassadress, she was still worried. On Tuesday Mrs. Churchill again accompanied her on an inspection of clothing-distribution centers of the Women's Voluntary Services. Halfway through Mrs. Churchill sat down on a marble staircase—Mrs. Roosevelt's pace was too much for her, she said; she would wait there. From this strenuous tour Eleanor proceeded to a luncheon given in her honor by the London County Council. It was an occasion saturated with centuries-old ceremonials, attendants in red coats, and a toastmaster who in measured voice called for order before each speaker in time-hallowed phrases: “I pray you silence, My Lords, Your Worships, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Honorable Mr. Chairman. The health of the king was proposed and that of the president. Eden offered the toast to her, saying that she was welcomed “first, as the first lady of the United States; second, as the wife of a great President of a mighty nation; and, third, and above all, for herself.”
¹⁷

“The horrible moment came for me to respond,” she wrote later. She thought of Elliott's change of attitude toward the British, and that gave her a theme. She predicted that as the months went by many of America's young people

will know more about Great Britain than they have ever known before. The growing understanding between us will perhaps mean more in the future not only to us but to the world than we can know. . . .

I look to your young people and to our young people to be the kind of people most of us would like to be and really achieve some
of the things we hoped to achieve—at the end of the war. And then I hope we will win the peace.

It seemed to go pretty well, she thought. That was an underestimation; that afternoon Admiral Stark sent her a note in his own hand: “We were all proud of you today.”
¹⁸

After luncheon she went to Fighter Command, where the WAAFs filled every job from cook and waitress to control of the planes in the air. She went to dinner that night at the Winston Churchill's, escorted by Henry Morgenthau, who was in London. She and the prime minister had, as she put it in her diary, “a slight difference of opinion” over Loyalist Spain. She had had a few talks with Churchill when he had flown to Washington immediately after Pearl Harbor and stayed at the White House. “He's very human & I like him the' I don't want him to control the peace!” she had written then.
*
¹⁹

The subject of Spain came up when Churchill asked Morgenthau whether the United States was sending food to Spain in sufficient quantities. The secretary said yes, but Eleanor impulsively exclaimed that it was a little too late, that the Loyalists should have been helped. Churchill said he had been for Franco until Germany and Italy came to his aid. Why couldn't the existing government have been helped, Eleanor asked, reviving an argument she had so often had with her husband. Churchill gave a reason Franklin had never suggested: if the Loyalists had won the two of them would have been the first to lose their heads. That argument did not impress Eleanor—it was of no importance whether she lost her head. “I don't want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine,” Churchill growled. Here Mrs. Churchill intervened: “I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.” That did not help matters, and Churchill's annoyance was obvious. “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I am not going to change now,” he replied, almost angrily. At this point Mrs. Churchill got up and walked away from the table as a signal that dinner was over.
²⁰

Eleanor wondered about Mrs. Churchill, whom she found attractive, remarkably young looking, and full of charm. “One feels that she has had to assume a role because of being in public life and that the role is now part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.” The prime minister's wife worked hard on Russian and Chinese relief, but “is very careful not to voice any opinions publicly or to associate with any political organizations. This I felt was true of the wives of all the public officials whom I met.” How different from herself. Dr. George Gallup was in the midst of taking a poll which showed that Eleanor Roosevelt “probably is the target of more adverse criticism and the object of more praise than any other woman in American history.” For every two persons who thought the First Lady talked too much Gallup's interviewers found three who approved of her courage and ability to speak out. It was a rare respondent who was neutral about her.
²¹

She attended a luncheon with women members of Parliament arranged by Lady Astor, and her feminist heart noted that “these women seem to suffer from the same difficulties that women suffer from in the U.S.A. when they hold public office.” They invited her to be present in the House when they raised questions about the inequalities which British women endured in such matters as income tax and compensation for war injuries, but Eleanor was staying out of political controversy. She was a guest, and though the cause of women's equality was one she felt strongly about, it would not have been seemly for her to get involved in British controversies over this principle. She also regretfully declined several invitations she received from the many groups espousing the cause of Indian self-government, including a request for an interview sent by the head of the India League, V. K. Krishna Menon.

One ardent feminist who wanted to see her but did not quite qualify for Lady Astor's luncheon was George Bernard Shaw. “Bring the First Lady to tea when you come,” he wrote Lady Astor on one of the postcards that was his epistolary trademark. “When she returns home the first question they will ask her is ‘Have you seen Shaw?' If she has to say No, it will cost Franklyn [
sic
] at least half a dozen votes in the next presidential election.” H. G. Wells was more modest: “I don't think Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt's visit to London should include me,” he wrote Winant, “but I think I might have a few words in private with the young man her son.”

Churchill, despite his political set-to with the First Lady, rejoiced in the good that her visit was doing. He cabled the president:

I thought you would like to know that Mrs. Roosevelt's visit here is a great success. She has been very happy about it herself. I hope that the friendly reception by all people here has been reported as enthusiastically at home as it has been in this country. If you have any suggestions I will be glad to follow them—Elliott and Mrs. Roosevelt are well.

In between inspections and official luncheons and dinners, the procession of royalty had begun. Eleanor had just succeeded in getting her coat and hat off when the king of Norway and Crown Prince Olaf arrived: “We had almost an hour's talk and I like the King very much.” When they left the young king of Yugoslavia, Peter, appeared with an aide. His visit was heavier sledding. He stayed three quarters of an hour “and somehow or other we managed to converse for that length of time.” Later that day the president of Poland and Prime Minister Sikorski came:

The conversation centered about getting Polish prisoners out of Russia. They were grateful for what had been done and they felt that Mr. Willkie had put the President's suggestions before Mr. Stalin and this had been a help, but they still have people like their greatest surgeon and greatest philosopher in prison in Russia and do not know how to get the Russian government to liberate them.

The Polish delegation was followed by the Greek king, and he was followed by Belgian Premier Pierlot, “who talked primarily about feeding children and young people in Belgium and was very insistent that this should be done.” Another day she had a long talk with President BeneÅ¡ and Jan Masaryk.

Her most daunting encounter, except for the night she spent with Queen Mother Mary, was her call on Queen Wilhelmina. “She greeted me warmly and allowed me to kiss her,” Eleanor noted, “which gave me a sense of intimacy I had never expected to have but have never since lost.” She spent an hour with the queen, and they talked about the postwar world.

Her night at Badminton with Queen Mary came after a full day with American troops, attending religious services, visiting a hospital, inspecting camp arrangements, chatting with men and officers everywhere, and ending with a visit to the American Red Cross Club run by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., where she beat time with her foot
as the men sang “Home on the Range,” which she told them was her husband's favorite song. It was just before the mid-term congressional elections, and the reporters tried to stir up a little political controversy between the First Lady and the Oyster Bay Eleanor, whose husband, when asked in 1933 his relationship to the incoming president, had quipped, “Fifth cousin—about to be removed.” But both Eleanors were on their guard.

At precisely 6:30
P.M.
General John Lee delivered Eleanor and Tommy to Beaufort Castle. The queen mother met her at the door and took her to her sitting room. After an exchange of pleasantries, Queen Mary showed her her room, which was vast as a barn and cold but “very grand with Chinese Chippendale furniture. She showed where the bathroom and the w.c. were & they were cold as well.”

Dinner was not “a hilarious meal,” but she made “valiant efforts” at conversation. Afterward they went into the drawing room and stood for fifteen minutes. Then the queen asked her and the princess royal to her sitting room. Tommy was left behind, “and soon escaped and went to bed” in order to keep warm. The queen mother and Eleanor talked for an hour, “but I found it hard to forget enough and yet remember enough! Conversation must flow but you must not sit down or leave until you are given the high sign!” The president had particularly wanted her to call on the queen mother because she had been so nice to his mother, and when Eleanor left Queen Mary gave her a photograph to give to the president as a fellow-conservationist. It showed the queen mother, fully dressed in hat, gloves, and veil, sawing a dead limb off a tree with one of her aides at the other end of the saw. The president loved it.
²²

Eleanor's visits to American troops continued. She inspected a parachute battalion which was about to fly to North Africa. As she watched the battalion parade, inspected the men's kits, and saw a few men jump, she sensed “a tension but nothing was said.” She dropped in on a bomber squadron and persuaded two husky pilots to haul her up into the cockpit of the Flying Fortress “Phyllis.” “I found I'm very fat for a pilot's seat,” she said afterward; “it wasn't made to accommodate an old lady well over 50.” She inspected Elliott's photo reconnaissance unit, her chauffeur getting lost on the way and having to telephone the embassy for additional directions, explaining in code words that “Rover has lost her pup.” She inspected a tank corps which “had to stand in the cold and wet while I was shown everything from a tank to a jeep & I felt sorry for them, but they weren't any wetter or colder than
I was!” She saw her first Negro troops and liked it when their officer, white, insisted that his men were the best in the Army.