The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (153 page)

David (now Sir David) Pitblado introduced me to Winston Churchill (himself still unknighted) in the Verandah Grill of the
Queen Mary,
that greatest of Cunarders, on January 24, 1953. The prime minister, or “P.M.,” as his entourage called him, was returning home with his family after a holiday and a series of meetings in Washington. As a young foreign correspondent on my way to the Middle East and India, I was delighted to discover that my cabin, M 101, was adjacent to Churchill’s suite. Even better, Pitblado, then the prime minister’s principal private secretary, had read the British edition of my first book and thought it commendable. He graciously arranged for me to see the P.M. from time to time during our five-day voyage to Southampton. It would be inaccurate to say that Churchill and I conversed. Alone with him I was mute, having, in fact, nothing to say. He had everything to say, and like Gladstone speaking to Victoria, he addressed me as though I were a one-man House of Commons. It was superb. I was enthralled, and eagerly accepted an invitation to tour the rooms of No. 10 Downing Street, with a Scotland Yard inspector as my guide, during my layover in London.

Thus began my accumulating debt to British hospitality. It is now immense. While researching this work I took a flat in Mayfair, but I seldom dined there alone. The “Churchillians,” as Sir John Colville calls them, entertained me in their homes, answered all my questions, suggested other sources, and provided me with valuable introductions. Lady Soames, DBE (Mary Churchill), packed a picnic lunch and drove me to Chartwell, where we spent the day wandering through the mansion and its grounds and examining scores of her father’s canvases. It was in the flat of Jane Williams, who is triply qualified as an observer of the English patriciate—she worked with Churchill and is the niece of both Lord Butler (“Rab”) and Lord Portal of the RAF—that I first found myself at a table with “Jock” Colville, Churchill’s assistant private secretary during most of World War II and joint principal private secretary during the P.M.’s second premiership in the early 1950s. Butler himself received me in his country home shortly before his death. So did Lord Head at Throope Manor; General Sir Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet from 1939 to 1945, at Woodridge; and Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove House in Sussex. It was typical of Macmillan’s gallantry that although he felt too ill to eat, he had laid out a champagne lunch for me.

Such graciousness can lead to pleasant embarrassment. When my London hack drew up outside the Oxford studio of Oscar Nemon, sculptor of Churchill, Nemon raced out of the house, his smock flying behind him, and insisted, to the point of physical pummeling, on paying the cabby. At No. 1 Eaton Square, Lord Boothby broke out a shining bottle of prime bourbon although it was only 2:00
P.M.
Sir John Martin in Watlingham, Martin Gilbert on Oxford’s Harcourt Hill, and R. L. James on Oxford’s Blenheim Drive clearly assumed that I would arrive with an enormous appetite. Sir William Hawthorne, Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, expected me to be both omnivorous and omnibibulous; when we rose from his high table and left the room I felt sheathed in an alcoholic mist. But as it cleared, I met two meticulous Churchill scholars: Captain Stephen Roskill, RN, and Correlli Barnett, keeper of the Churchill Archives. Remarkable shortcuts were disclosed in social situations. Over biscuits in Twisden Road, for instance, A. J. P. Taylor guided me toward Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Beaverbrook papers. Churchill himself was never a clubman, but in exploring the web of his friendships I found those last bastions of male chauvinism invaluable. Holding honorary membership in three London clubs, I could entertain and then interview, sotto voce, men who would have been reticent in other surroundings. But here, once again, I was guest more often than host—of Sir David Hunt at the Athenaeum, for example, and Sir William Deakin at the Oxford and Cambridge, and George Malcolm Thompson at the Garrick. It was from the Reform Club that Graham Norton and I sallied forth one glistening evening for a nightlong exploration of Victorian London’s architectural relics, winding up near Covent Garden.

Others who welcomed me or visited me for taped sessions were Cecily “Chips” Gemmell, Lord Soames, Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Selkirk, Lord Hailsham, John Griggs, Malcolm MacDonald (son of Ramsay and himself an MP), Lord Strauss, Sir Fitzroy MacLean, Mark Bonham Carter, Mrs. Kathleen Hill, Grace Hamlin, A. A. Montague Browne, Richard Hill, Velma Salmon, Lady Avon, Noel Mander, Lord Geoffrey Lloyd, Julian Amery, Denis Kelly, Sir Charles Martin, Lord Southborough, and, in his delightful Sussex cottage outside Robertsbridge, Malcolm Muggeridge. Not all my respondents were British. Virginia Cowles is undeniably American, though in her Belgravia home she evokes the presence of Mrs. Miniver. Averell Harriman is a triumph of the English-Speaking Union; he seems at home in either London or New York, provided the background is expensive and in exquisite taste. His wife, Pamela, though active in U.S. politics, will never pass as American. She was born a Digby in Dorset, Thomas Hardy country, and you know it from her every gesture. Her first husband was Randolph Churchill; their son, born during the Battle of Britain, is the second Winston Spencer Churchill, MP, who was my thoughtful host at lunch in the House of Commons.

Documents of contemporary history are less accessible in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Britain has no Freedom of Information Act. All Churchill papers in the Royal Archives are reserved for the official biography. The seal cannot be broken on other sensitive government documents—cabinet, War Office, Foreign Office, Admiralty, Colonial Office, and Air Ministry—until fifty years after the event. Moreover, the papers of prominent public men are more scattered than those in U.S. presidential libraries. By far the largest single source of evidence for this volume is in the Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge University, the repository of 215 collections of private papers, including those of McKenna, Bridgeman, P. J. Grigg, Bevin, Bracken, Carson, de Robeck, Fisher, Crewe, Keyes, Rawlinson, Shane Leslie, E. L. Spears (partial), Beatty (partial), and Hankey (partial).

Documents left by other public men are frequently found beneath different roofs. Balfour’s papers are in Scotland’s National Register of Archives, the Public Record Office, the Reference Division of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library), and in the private collection of Lord Rayleigh. Asquith’s are in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (“Bodley”), in the Smuts Archive, and in the collection of Mark Bonham Carter. Halifax’s are filed in the India Office Library, the Public Record Office, and the estate of his heir. Some of Lord Esher’s are in the Bodleian and some at Churchill College. Northcliffe’s are dispersed among the
Times
Archive, the British Library, and the Bodleian. T. E. Lawrence’s may be found in the Bodleian, the British Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the University of Texas Library. One would expect all of Beaverbrook’s to be in the Beaverbrook Library, but no; some are there and some in the House of Lords Record Office. Because Lloyd George decided to take a peerage in the last weeks of World War II, some of his papers are in the House of Lords. (At about the same time he married his mistress, who became the Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor;
her
extraordinary diaries, covering the years 1912 to 1949, are in the Beaverbrook Library.) Other valuable Lloyd George material is on the shelves of the Lloyd George Archive in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire; the National Library of Wales; and the Beaverbrook Library. Bonar Law’s papers are in the Bodleian, the Beaverbrook Library, and the Lords. Hankey’s war diary (1912–1938) is in the Public Record Office, the diaries of Prince Louis of Battenberg in the Milford Haven Collection. Samuel’s papers are in the Lords, as are Churchill documents on the founding of Iraq and his anti-Bolshevik years after Versailles. The Cecil, Jellicoe, and C. P. Scott papers are in the British Library. Milner’s and H. A. L. Fisher’s are housed in the Bodleian; Haldane’s, Rosebery’s, Haig’s, and Margot Asquith’s in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Hamilton’s and Robertson’s at King’s College, London; Cockran’s and some of Marsh’s in the New York Public Library; Joseph and Austen Chamberlain’s in the Birmingham University Library; most of Sir Henry Wilson’s, including his microfilmed diaries, in the Imperial War Museum; those of Mottistone and Cherwell (“the Prof”) in the Library of Nuffield College, Oxford; Curzon’s in the India Office Library; Derby’s at Liverpool University; and Baldwin’s in the Cambridge University Library. Amery’s, some of Spears’s, Philip Sassoon’s, some of Marsh’s, Ponsonby’s, and Asquith’s letters to Venetia Stanley Montagu—probably the most valuable single source for the government’s prosecution of the war between 1914 and 1916—remain in private possession. The cabinet and War Council minutes, the Dardanelles Commission evidence, and imperial conference minutes are filed in the Public Record Office. Verbatim accounts of all proceedings in the House of Commons and the House of Lords between 1881 and 1932 may be found in the
Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).

Tracing all these would have been impossible without the original research, generosity, and encouragement of Martin Gilbert. As he wrote me, “our work goes in tandem.” My gratitude toward him is profound.

On my own behalf and that of my archival research assistant in England, Deborah Baker, whose task it was to sift and sort out documents, I should like to thank D. G. Vaisey (Department of Western Manuscripts, the Bodleian Library), Diana Grimwood Jones and Gillian Grant (Middle East Centre, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford), Mrs. P. Piper and N. A. M. Rodger (Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey), G. J. Slater (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland), Marion Stewart (Churchill College, Cambridge), H. S. Cobb and F. Johnson (Record Office, House of Lords), A.N.E.D. Schofield and D. H. Bourke (British Library), D. M. Smith and C. C. Webb (Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York), Wing Commander R. Martin Sparkes (Annexe), Wayne Furman (New York Public Library), A. E. Cormack and R. F. Barker (Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon), Gordon Phillips (
Times
Archive), Patricia Methven (Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, University of London), D. A. Clarke and G. E. A. Raspin (British Library of Political and Economic Science), R. A. W. Suddaby (Imperial War Museum), B. C. Bloomfield (India Office Library and Records), J. K. Bates (National Register of Archives, Scotland), Dr. B. S. Benedikz (Special Collections, University of Birmingham), Henry James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn (Dundee Archives), E. P. Scott (Hove Area Library, East Sussex), Kay Chapman and R. J. B. Knight (National Maritime Museum), Christine Kennedy (Nuffield College Library, Oxford), Peter McNiven (University of Manchester), Ralph Malbon and W. Wilcox (City Library of Liverpool), D. M. Griffiths and R. Geraint Gruffydd (National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Dyfed), L. R. Day (Science Museum Library, South Kensington), V. E. Knight (Library of the University of Liverpool), E. C. Blayney (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), A. D. Maclean, Mrs. Diane Nuting, the second Viscount Trenchard, and John Spencer-Churchill, eleventh Duke of Marlborough, who gave me the freedom of Blenheim Palace.

Once again I express my deep appreciation to the staff of Wesleyan University’s Olin Library, in particular to J. Robert Adams, Caleb T. Winchester Librarian; and to Joan Jurale, head reference librarian; Edmund A. Rubacha and Susanne Javorski, reference librarians; Margaret Halstead, reference secretary; Erhard F. Konerding, documents librarian; Steven Lebergott, chief of interlibrary loans; and Alice Henry, circulation assistant. Other members of the staff who were especially helpful were Suzanne Fall; Ann Frances Wakefield; Dale Lee; and Alan Nathanson, bibliographer.

I am immensely indebted to Dr. Robert Byck, professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School, for his observations on depression, Carl Jung, and Dr. Anthony Storr’s analysis of Churchill’s “Black Dog”; and to my friend and colleague Jeffrey Butler, professor of history at Wesleyan, for his meticulous review of the completed manuscript in the interests of historical accuracy, a vital service which was also provided—and provided superbly—by two British readers, Peter Day and Nigel Viney.

I am most appreciative of assistance furnished by Adoreen M. McCormick and Marilyn Dekker of the Library of Congress, who were helpful in verifying the lyrics of popular songs quoted in the text; Perry Knowlton, Adam Deixel, and Iam Gonzalez at the Curtis Brown literary agency, who provided access to Churchill’s American royalty statements; and Mrs. J. A. Openshaw of North Kingston, R.I., for generously sharing the recollections and memorabilia of her father, William J. Harvest, who, as a lance corporal in the Fourth Hussars, served under Lieutenant Winston Churchill in Bangalore between 1896 and 1899.

My inestimable assistant, Margaret Kennedy Rider, has, as always, proved to be understanding, perceptive, loyal, and tireless. Deborah Baker was as reliable as the sturdiest English oak. Virginia Creeden and Diana Scott were invaluable in securing permission to quote from letters, diaries, documents, and published works, as was Ellen Panarese in the matter of photo research. Finally, I once more offer deepest thanks to Don Congdon, my literary agent; Roger Donald, my editor; and Melissa Clemence, my tireless, gifted copy editor—three dedicated professionals without whose patience and counsel the publication of this work would have been literally impossible.

W.M.

Wesleyan University
February 1983