The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (168 page)

Sir John Colville, who will later serve as private secretary to three prime ministers, including Churchill, may well have been right in arguing that Churchill’s friends are—except for the absence of boors and the garrulous—notable for their variety. They include the witty, the ambitious, the lazy, the dull, the exhibitionists, the talented, the intellectual, and above all the honorable. But the most gifted will appear at dinner. And his guests are all
friends
. In London, even in his pied-à-terre at No. 11 Morpeth Mansions, where he stays while attending Parliament, he is embattled. He needs no snipers here.

But neither are guests confined to lickspittles and sycophants. Himself a celebrity before the turn of the century, before the word had entered common usage, Churchill relishes the company of others in the public eye. His favorite American, the financier Bernard Baruch, visits here whenever in England. T. E. Lawrence, now serving in RAF ranks under an assumed name, roars up on his motorcycle and, knowing that the spectacle will enchant Mary, appears at dinner in his robes as a prince of Arabia. Charlie Chaplin entertains them all with his pantomime and mimicry. Winston asks whether he has chosen his next role. “Yes,” Chaplin replies: “Jesus Christ.” Churchill pauses, then asks, “Have you cleared the rights?”

Among the regulars at the table are two MPs who remain loyal to Winston in these years of his political eclipse: the handsome young Robert J. G. (“Bob”) Boothby and Brendan Bracken, a brash adventurer and self-made millionaire notable for his pug nose, granny glasses, disheveled mop of flaming red hair, and the extraordinary rumors, which he encourages, that he is his host’s illegitimate son. Winston finds this gossip highly amusing. Clementine does not. (She once confronted her husband and demanded to know whether the stories were true. He replied: “I’ve looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”) Clemmie is the only participant who is never intimidated by her husband’s deep frowns and hissing wrath, and her dislike of Bracken, revealed by gesture, glance, and edged voice, is stark. Churchill admires her spirit—“God,” he later confides in a friend, “she dropped down on poor Brendan like a jaguar out of a tree”—but remains silent. Others at the table wonder why. Undeniably Bracken is gifted and able. But his behavior, even in this most tolerant of homes, is atrocious. Recently he went through Clementine’s scrapbook with shears, scissoring out articles of Winston’s career.
²⁰

And Winston, for reasons which reveal more about him than Bracken, enjoys the younger man’s company. Men who have done something with their lives interest him—indeed, they are the only men who do. He is particularly impressed by military men; any winner of the Victoria Cross is embraced, and when he meets Sir Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand war hero, Churchill insists that the embarrassed Freyberg strip so that his host can count his thirty-three battle scars. Similarly, men who have amassed fortunes while he has struggled year after year with creditors, hold enormous appeal for him. That is part of Bracken’s charm.

It also explains, in part, Winston’s fondness for Baruch, though Baruch’s appeal is broader. He is an American, he is Jewish, he recognizes the menace of an aggressive Germany, and Churchill is indebted to him for an extraordinary act of shrewdness and generosity. Winston was badly hurt in the Wall Street Crash three years ago. Had it not been for Baruch, however, it would have been much worse; he could have spent the rest of his life in debt. He is not a born gambler; he is a born
losing
gambler. In New York at the time, he dropped into Baruch’s office and decided to play the market, and as prices tumbled he plunged deeper and deeper, trying to outguess the stock exchange just as he had tried to outguess roulette wheels on the Riviera. In Wall Street, as in Monte Carlo, he failed. At the end of the day he confronted Baruch in tears. He was, he said, a ruined man. Chartwell and everything else he possessed must be sold; he would have to leave the House of Commons and enter business. The financier gently corrected him. Churchill, he said, had lost nothing. Baruch had left instructions to buy every time Churchill sold and sell whenever Churchill bought. Winston had come out exactly even because, he later learned, Baruch even paid the commissions.
²¹

Bracken can’t match that. Being British and in Parliament, however, he can serve his idol in other ways. In the House he is scorned as Winston’s “sheepdog,” his “lapdog,” or—this from Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin—his faithful
chela
, the Hindi word for minion. But uncritical admiration is precisely what Churchill needs. He is in the third of what will be ten years of political exile to the back benches. No other statesman in the country’s political history will have served so long a Siberian sentence, and he would have to have a heart of stone not to be grateful for Bracken’s steadfast, unquestioning allegiance.
²²

Churchill may even be flattered by the stories that he fathered a son on the wrong side of the blanket. Those closest to him agree that he is undersexed; some suggest that the explanation lies in the promiscuity of his beautiful, wanton mother. The historian A. J. P. Taylor will reflect: “She moved from one man to another. And it’s possible, I don’t say this is the only explanation, that Churchill’s really almost extreme chastity was a reaction to his mother’s lack of it. There are other possibilities. He may have been weakly sexed biologically, or the explanation may have been psychological. He once remarked: ‘The reason I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in bed.’ ” Winston didn’t marry until his thirty-fourth year, and there is every reason to believe that he was a virgin bridegroom. Despite frequent separations from Clemmie, who disapproves of the lush Riviera and spends her holidays with the children at spartan resorts on the North Sea, or a hotel near Rugby, he has committed but one act of infidelity, at Golfe-Juan, on the Mediterranean, with a divorced, titled Englishwoman whose seductive skills and sexual experience far exceeded his. To one who cherishes his reputation for mischievousness, whispers that a fellow MP is his bastard may not be altogether unwelcome.
²³

Bracken is one of his two most striking disciples. The other, in many ways Brendan’s opposite, complements him. Born in Germany of an American mother, Frederick A. Lindemann took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1910, continued his scientific studies in Paris and Brussels, confirmed Einstein’s refinement of Planck’s quantum theory, and, as a member of the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the Great War, organized London’s kite balloon barrage. After the Armistice he was appointed professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford and recognized as one of Europe’s leading physicists. Now in 1932 “the Prof,” as everyone in the Churchill family calls him, has just published his
Physical Significance of the Quantum Theory
. His Oxford colleagues now believe that his best work is behind him; Professor Derek Jackson notes that the younger generation regards him “as more of a theoretical physicist devoid of experimental ability.” Churchill disagrees, and so will history.
²⁴

Lindemann’s achievements cannot be impeached, but in his own way he can be trying. Even by Chartwell’s standards he is odd. Indeed, he seems to be everything Winston is not. Tobacco in any form is anathema to him. He lives largely on the whites of eggs and is a vegetarian and teetotaler, except when as a guest here, he bows to his host’s insistence that he consume exactly 32 cubic centimeters of brandy a day. He always wears a bowler, even on a warship or in the cockpit of an RAF fighter. His valet and secretary, Harvey, who drives his huge, unwieldy limousine, is his double, matching his attire of the day shirt by shirt, sock by sock, and bowler by bowler.
²⁵

The Prof will follow Churchill anywhere. Winston’s motives for cultivating him are very different. Lindemann’s many talents include a matchless gift as an interpreter of science for laymen. In the words of Sir John Colville, Lindemann can “simplify the most opaque problem, scientific, mechanical or economic,” translating technical jargon into language which provides “a lucid explanation” and sacrifices “nothing of importance.” Churchill loathes scientific terminology. He never even mastered public school arithmetic. The Prof provides him with the essential facts when he needs them without disrupting his concentration on other matters. Like radar, Lindemann’s “beautiful brain,” as Churchill calls it, will prove worth several divisions in the struggle to save England from Adolf Hitler. Less than ten years from now he will arrive at No. 10 Downing Street with clear, accurate charts which, by replacing statistics, present displays showing England’s stockpiles of vital raw materials, the rate at which ships are being launched on the Clyde, the Tyne, and Barrow, and Britain’s production of tanks, artillery, small arms, and warplanes in terms the prime minister can understand with what Colville calls “infallible skill and punctuality.”
²⁶

It is a measure of Churchill’s own accomplishments that he can inspire a man with whom he shares little except a common affection for Americans. The Prof has little use for others. Like many of his laboratory colleagues, he never applies the scientific method in judging society. He is in fact a snarl of prejudices. So profound is his misogyny that he has not spoken to his only sister for fifteen years. His sole recreation is tennis. He is a champion of Sweden, an achievement all the more remarkable because, to discourage women from regarding him as a sex object, he plays in the hottest weather wearing thick black ribbed socks and a heavy shirt tightly buttoned at the wrists.
²⁷

This is not at all Churchillian, though modern feminists would regard Winston as a stereotype of male chauvinism. He opposed woman suffrage until Clementine converted him, wouldn’t dream of soliciting a woman’s advice on matters of national policy, and dropped the idea of writing an article for
Collier’s
on the prospects of a woman becoming prime minister of England because he thought the idea laughable. Nevertheless, he admires Englishwomen of his class and enjoys their company—provided, of course, that they are attractive and don’t attempt to discuss topics reserved for members of his own sex. As a man who reached his majority in 1895, when Victorian gentlemen never used the words “breast” or “leg” if ladies were present, he assumes that they are innocents who must be shielded from the brutal facts of life and that feminine beauty is unaccompanied by carnal desire.

I
f Chartwell’s guest book is a reliable index, the only ladies who will be invited to lunch in Churchill’s heaven—with the one great exception of his longtime friend Lady Violet Bonham Carter, née Asquith—will be escorted, and even they will be required to confine themselves to smiling when their host makes a clever remark, nodding vigorously when he has expressed an opinion, and expressing no opinion of their own. This is not sexist, however, because it also applies to gentleman guests. Winston means to dominate them and cheerfully acknowledges it; his own idea of a fine meal is to dine well and then discuss a serious topic—“with myself as chief conversationalist.” It isn’t even conversation; unlike Lloyd George he is a poor listener, has little interest in what others have to say, and, if he is not the speaker, withdraws into silent communion with himself while his interior monologue, the flow of private rhetoric, soars on. His daughter Mary will recall that “small talk or social chitchat bored Winston profoundly—but he rarely suffered from it, since he completely ignored it, pursuing his own themes.”
²⁸

In London he will give those who disagree with him a fair hearing; two of his favorite aphorisms are “I would rather be right than consistent” and “In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.” But at Chartwell, with a pony of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, he is inclined to bully those who challenge him. And the fact is that few dare try. Lords Birkenhead and Beaverbrook could. Birkenhead—F. E. Smith before his ennoblement—would cross foils with Churchill and win as often as he lost. It is perhaps significant that F.E. became Winston’s best friend. And the man has not drawn breath who can intimidate Beaverbrook, the great press lord, known to the Churchills as “the Beaver,” who, when he first met Churchill in 1911, was plain Max Aitken, a Canadian upstart. During one visit here he declined wine with his Stilton. “Port is the brother of cheese,” his host said in lordly reproach. “Yes,” Max flashed back, “and the sister of gout.” But Birkenhead has lain in his grave two years, and Beaverbrook, though Churchill’s once and future ally, will seldom be seen at Chartwell in this decade. The feisty Beaver, for all his shrewdness, shares the almost unanimous conviction of England’s ruling classes that Winston—whom he calls a “busted flush”—exaggerates the emerging Nazi menace; like his fellow press lords he believes Hitler’s friendship worth cultivating and assures his readers—he will reassure them every year, even when the sands are running out in 1939—that “there will be no war.”
²⁹