The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (152 page)

Otto C. Pickardt was the physician who examined him. Clementine cabled Pickardt’s findings to Randolph: “Temperature 100.6 Pulse normal. Head scalp wound severe.” (It had, in fact, been cut to the bone.) “Two cracked ribs. Simple slight pleural irritation of right side. Generally much bruised. Progress satisfactory.” If the hospital had any doubts about the eminence of its new patient, they were resolved when King George telephoned to inquire about his condition. In the beginning Winston’s recovery was swift. He quickly made friends with Pickardt, and then with Constasino, who appeared during visitors’ hours to apologize again. Churchill cabled Lindemann, asking him to calculate the shock, to a stationary body weighing two hundred pounds, of a car weighing twenty-four hundred pounds and traveling between thirty and thirty-five miles an hour, bearing in mind that he had been “carried forward on the cowcatcher until brakes eventually stopped car, when I dropped off” and that “brakes did not operate till car hit me.” He needed the information as quickly as possible, he said, adding: “Think it must be impressive. Kindly cable weekend letter at my expense.” The Prof replied: “Collision equivalent falling thirty feet on pavement. Equal six thousand foot pounds energy. Equivalent stopping ten-pound brick dropped six hundred feet or two charges buckshot point-blank range. Rate inversely proportional thickness cushion surrounding skeleton and give of frame. If assume average one inch your body transferred during impact at rate eight thousand horsepower. Congratulations on preparing suitable cushion and skill in bump.”
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Churchill wanted the figures for a piece he was scribbling, propped up in bed, on “My New York Adventures.” In it he wrote: “I certainly suffered every pang, physical and mental, that a street accident or, I suppose, a shell wound can produce. None is unendurable. There is neither the time nor the strength for self-pity. There is no room for remorse or fears. If at any moment in the long series of sensations a grey veil deepening into blackness had descended upon the sanctum I should have felt or feared nothing additional. Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come, dread naught; all will be well.” He telegraphed this to the
Daily Mail
three days after Christmas with a note to the editor: “Am now able to crawl around fairly well…. Good wishes for New Year and love to your pets Ramsay and Baldwin.” Harmsworth cabled back £600.
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Pickardt prescribed a rest, and back at the Waldorf, Clementine packed for Nassau. On their return he would need a secretary, and she hired Phyllis Moir, a young Englishwoman who had worked in the British Foreign Office. Thompson met Miss Moir at the door of Apartment 39 A and said softly: “You’ll find him pretty weak and tired. That accident gave him a nasty jolt and he only came out of the hospital a few days ago.” She recalls that her first impression of Churchill was of “a humpty-dumpty sort of figure reading a letter.” He was wearing a brown pin-striped suit, a matching polka-dot bow tie, and “black buttoned boots with odd-looking cloth tops.” She was particularly impressed by “his small, delicate, beautifully shaped hands—the hands of an artist.” He was smoking “a huge cigar,” which he laid aside to say, rather distantly: “I understand you are willing to accompany me in my peregrinations.” Miss Moir confirmed it, and when the Churchills sailed for the Bahamas on New Year’s Eve, she set about converting a maid’s room in the apartment into an office for herself. It had been her impression that he would soon be fit and ready to work. That had been his, too, and his American lecture agent urged him to be back by January 15, 1932, pointing out that every week’s delay meant the loss of engagements and thousands of dollars.
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It proved impossible. In Nassau he suffered from severe aftershock and depression. “Vitality only returning slowly,” he wired the agent on January 3. Five days later a nervous reaction struck. He wrote Pickardt that he had experienced “a great and sudden lack of power of concentration, and a strong sense of being unequal to the task which lay so soon ahead of me.” Clementine and the physician dealt with the agent while Winston, attended by a night nurse, fought insomnia with nightly sedation, and forced himself to exercise a few minutes each day. His easel was there, but did not attract him. He wrote his son: “I have not felt like opening the paint box, although the seas around these islands are luminous with the most lovely tints of blue and green and purple.” Clementine wrote Randolph: “Last night he was very sad & said that he had now in the last 2 years had 3 very heavy blows. First the loss of all that money in the crash, then the loss of his political position in the Conservative Party and now this terrible injury—He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from the three events.”
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On January 15 his spirits began to return. He outlined two lectures: another call for closer ties between Washington and London and an analysis of the Depression’s impact on Europe. But he warned his agent that he was still “astonishingly feeble” and that “you will find me, I am afraid, a much weaker man than the one you welcomed on December 11. I walk about five hundred yards every day and swim perhaps one hundred and fifty. But I tire so quickly and have very little reserve.” A few days later, reporting that he was “steadily improving and gaining strength,” he agreed to a formidable schedule: fourteen lectures, moving to a different city almost every day. Pickardt had rescued him from the hardship of Prohibition with a note on his stationery: “This is to certify that the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters [slightly over eight ounces].”
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Churchill leaving Lenox Hill Hospital

Thus fortified, and accompanied by Miss Moir, to whom he dictated a constant stream of notes and observations—she had yet to master his lisp, and was disconcerted by “his curious habit of whispering each phrase to himself before he said it aloud”—he spoke to two thousand people in the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 28, picking up momentum as the evening progressed. They were enthusiastic, and so was Churchill. He was all business now, granting interviews, writing Boothby to suggest that they both attend the American political conventions in the summer, and visiting Washington for long talks with key senators and a short one with Hoover. In the capital he stayed with the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay. Miss Moir remembers that “these two made the oddest contrast, the immensely dignified diplomat standing ill at ease at the foot of the old-fashioned four-poster and the Peter Pan of British politics sitting up in bed, a cigar in his mouth, his tufts of red hair as yet uncombed scanning the morning newspapers.” Diana used the embassy for a party, inviting all her young American acquaintances. One morning Winston approached his new secretary, grinning mischievously. “I’ve done something really dreadful, Miss Moir. I’ve just asked the Washington exchange operator for a glass of sherry, thinking I was speaking on the house telephone. I’m afraid I gave her rather a shock.”
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His lecture tour was a success; the
Daily Telegraph
called it “a triumphal progress.” He liked Americans, and they sensed it. As a foreign politician he could not support any presidential candidate, but his admiration for Roosevelt was obvious, and that, too, was popular that year. During a radio interview the announcer told his audience that, next to the King, Churchill was “probably the best-liked man under the Union Jack.” Winston solemnly told them: “War, today, is bare—bare of profit and stripped of all its glamour. The old pomp and circumstance are gone. War now is nothing but toil, blood, death, and lying propaganda.” Peace would be assured, he continued, provided France kept a strong army and England and the United States remained masters of the seas. The interviewer asked: “I take it that you haven’t a high opinion of these disarmament conferences?” Churchill said vehemently: “No, I have not! I think that since the Great War they have done more harm than good.”
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Before sailing home on the
Majestic
—he had Bought British after all—Winston conferred with Charles Scribner over future books, planned an investment program with Baruch, and visited the
Collier’s
office to discuss further ideas for magazine pieces. Outwardly he seemed to have recovered from his accident. It was an illusion. His euphoric spells alternated with periods of weakness and gloom. The trip was “drawing wearily” to a close, he wrote Randolph, and he had missed his
Daily Mail
deadlines. “I have been terribly remiss in my articles,” he wrote Harmsworth, “but, although I have got several very good ones in my head, I have not had the margin of life and strength to do them while travelling and speaking so many nights in succession.” To Thornton Butterworth, his British publisher, he wrote: “I am much better, but I feel I need to rest and not to have to drive myself as hard. You have no idea what I have been through.” His friends realized he had suffered an ordeal, however. While he was still in Nassau, Brendan Bracken had approached them, suggesting that they show their affection by buying him a new car. Among the contributors were Harold Macmillan, John Maynard Keynes, Lindemann, Lord Lloyd, Austen Chamberlain, Charlie Chaplin, Beaverbrook, Rothermere, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, the painter Sir John Lavery, and the Prince of Wales, whose romantic involvement would presently become interwoven, and then knotted, with Churchill’s political future. The gift—a £2,000 Daimler—awaited him at Paddington Station. Several of the donors were there, and they sang: “For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Winston tried to smile, then bowed his head and wept.
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A
t Chartwell he toiled on the grounds, roughed out articles, and slowly worked his way back into the Marlborough material with the help of F. W. D. Deakin, a young don from Christ Church, Oxford. Like all Chartwell guests, Bill Deakin was expected to work with his hands from time to time. One day, in the middle of building a wall, Churchill looked up and gloomily asked him: “Do you suppose that in five hundred years these bricks will be excavated as a relic of Stanley Baldwin’s England?”
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H
is life, Virginia Cowles wrote, had “apparently ended in a quagmire from which there seemed to be no rescue.” Reith of the BBC, believing his fangs drawn, at least on fiscal issues, permitted him to discuss monetary policy in his first radio broadcast to the United States. “Believe me,” Winston told the Americans, “no one country, however powerful, can combat this evil alone.” The audience listening at their Philcos and Atwater Kents was estimated at thirty million, but in Britain the event passed almost unnoticed. In Moscow, Stalin was receiving a British delegation led by Lady Astor. He inquired about politicians in England. “Chamberlain,” she said, “is the coming man.” Stalin asked: “What about Churchill?” Her eyes widened.
“Churchill?”
she said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied, “Oh, he’s
finished
.”
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