The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (299 page)

O
n June 21, 1940, the first day of summer, Winston Churchill was the most visible man in England. France accepted Hitler’s surrender terms that day and, with virtually all of Europe now under the swastika, with the Soviet Union a Nazi accomplice, and the United States isolationist, Britain and the Dominions confronted the Third Reich alone. Prime minister for only six weeks, Churchill was defending more than his island home. As first minister of the Crown he was also the central figure of the British Empire, then extant, comprising almost one-quarter of Earth’s landmass and almost a quarter of its population. The gravity of his role was obvious. Yet though all saw him, all did not see him alike. He was a multifarious individual, including within one man a whole troupe of characters, some of them subversive of one another and none feigned.

At No. 10 Downing Street everyone referred to the newly appointed sixty-five-year-old P.M. as “the Old Man.” In many ways he was an alarming master. He worked outrageous hours. He was self-centered and could be shockingly inconsiderate. Because of his lisp, and because he growled so often, his speech was often hard to follow, and aides had to learn what he meant when he referred to “that moon-faced man in the Foreign Office” or “Lord Left-leg-limps.” Although he never actually overruled his military advisers, he refused to delegate any of the prime minister’s powers to his staff. He wanted to make all decisions because, Sir Ian Jacob recalled, “he was determined to be Number One.” Jacob served as military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet during the war, and came to know Churchill’s obstinacy well.
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Not only did Churchill insist on oversight of strategic matters, he mired himself in the details as well. Because the noise of modern warfare was appalling, he decided soldiers would be issued earplugs. It occurred to him that World War One weapons, taken as trophies, could be made fit for action. A survey was launched. And what would be done, he demanded to know, to safeguard the animals at the zoo if German bombs blew open the cages? Some of his musings on the finer points of warfare were prescient. He asked his liaison to the Chiefs of Staff, Major General Hastings (“Pug”) Ismay, to expedite the development of “some projectile which can be fired from a rifle at a tank like a rifle grenade, or from an anti-Tank [
sic
] rifle, like a trench-mortar bomb.”

Yet woe unto the underling who brought to Churchill’s attention details he considered petty. When King George’s minister in Reykjavík suggested
that Icelandic civilians be evacuated before the expected German invasion of that country, Churchill shot back, “Surely this is great nonsense.” The dangers faced by Icelanders were “trifling” and “anyhow they have a large island and plenty of places to run into.” He thoroughly enjoyed his meanderings in the thickets of details. One day that spring, while fiddling with an operational model of a mine intended to be deployed in the Rhine basin, he turned to an aide and said, “This is one of those rare and happy occasions when respectable people like you and me can enjoy pleasures normally reserved to the Irish Republican Army.”
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This small pleasantry exchanged with a subordinate was not a rare behavior, yet neither was it a regular occurrence. Underlings were more likely to experience his wrath. His pale-blue eyes telegraphed his moods, and when his gaze—“as warm as summer sunshine” when he was pleased—turned ice-cold, his staff knew an eruption was forthcoming. Certainly his roar was awesome—he terrorized his admirals, his generals, and, daily, his staff. “God’s teeth, girl, can’t you even do it right the second time, I said ripe, ripe, ripe—P P
P,
” he bellowed to Elizabeth Layton, a new typist at No. 10 who had the misfortune to interpret a mumbled “ripe” as “right.” Yet, as usual after his outbursts, Churchill uttered his version of an apology—he “forgave” Layton—and “was very amiable for the rest of the day.” Actually, his nature was informed by humane sympathy for all troubled men, including those Englishmen (he always preferred English and Englishmen to British and Britons) he held responsible for England’s present plight. Learning that a mob had stoned Stanley Baldwin’s car, he immediately invited the former prime minister to No. 10 for a two-hour lunch (at a time when every minute was precious to him), and when he was told that Neville Chamberlain was dying of cancer—Chamberlain would not survive 1940—Churchill instructed his staff to telephone all good news to the disgraced former prime minister.
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Baldwin later told Harold Nicolson
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of his lunch with Churchill, adding that he left Downing Street “a happy man” while feeling “a patriotic joy that my country at such a time should have found such a leader.” Of Churchill, Baldwin offered, “The furnace of war had smelted out all of the base metals from him.” Not all. In private he relished skewering his fallen enemies. He and his wife, Clementine, once recounted for luncheon guests the rumor emanating from Baldwin’s household that Baldwin was a
“haunted man.” The former P.M. was so disrespected by his family and household staff, so the story went, that when he complained that the wireless was playing too loud, somebody turned it up even
louder.
And when the Baldwin family cupboard went bare, it was Baldwin who was dispatched by his relatives to the grocer to restock the larder. When asked by friends of Baldwin to submit a testimonial for the former prime minister’s eightieth birthday tribute, Churchill, through an intermediary (and thinking his remark private), gave them: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” And in his most famous cut of Baldwin, he said, “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” As for Chamberlain, Churchill told his new private secretary and a junior member of his staff, Jock Colville, that the former prime minister was “the narrowest, the most ignorant, most ungenerous of men.” On one occasion, Churchill managed to denigrate both Chamberlain and Baldwin in one breath, when he offered to his doctor, “Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was greater Birmingham.” His pettiness was as unfeigned as his generosity, his sentimentality, and his love of England.
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Members of the Private Office (private secretaries, orderlies, typists) were expected to be obedient and uncritical; in effect the prime minister said, “Thou shalt have no other god but me.” His temper was fearful. When he lost it, he would turn on whoever happened to be nearby, and, like other men of his class and generation, he never apologized or explained, though later he would go out of his way to mollify the injured party by, say, complimenting him on his handwriting, or by murmuring, “You know, I may seem to be very fierce, but I am fierce with only one man, Hitler.” On June 27, the week of the French surrender, Clementine wrote him the lone truly personal letter that passed between them that year. She directed his attention to a potentially disastrous state of affairs in immediate need of prime ministerial intervention: his behavior toward his staff. “There is a danger,” she wrote, “of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner.” No doubt it was the strain, she wrote. Yet, she too had noted deterioration in his manner: “You are not as kind as you used to be.” She advised him that he would not get the best results from irascibility and rudeness, which would “only breed either dislike or a slave mentality.” She signed the missive, “Please forgive your loving and watchful Clemmie.” Beneath her signature she sketched a cat (Winston had called her “Kat” for almost three decades). There is no record of Churchill’s response. None would have been necessary. That the letter survived, their daughter Mary later wrote, indicates a temperate reaction.
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There would be no long absences from each other in 1940, as there had
been in all the previous years of their marriage, when work or war or holidays took one or the other abroad. Proximity, usually in the dank confines of the subterranean No. 10 Annexe, would be the byword in coming months, during which time his ferocity toward his staff diminished not a whit.

All who were with him then agree that the Old Man had more important matters on his mind than the sensitive feelings of subordinates. In any event, in time they came to adore him. Jock Colville later recalled, “Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.” Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, “a fault,” Colville recalled, Churchill “detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.” For that reason, Churchill “had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,” which in turn despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.
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Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s
Ethics
and
Politics,
Plato’s
Republic,
Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s
Origin of Species.
Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading—from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay—he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study,
The Life of the White Ant.
“Socialism,” Churchill declared, “would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.” Case closed. Almost a decade later, when the Labour Party, then in power, nationalized British industries one by one, and when paper, meat, gasoline, and even wood for furniture were still rationed, Churchill commented: “The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.”
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Late in June, Eric Seal, his senior private secretary, remarked upon how much Churchill had “changed since becoming P.M.,” how he had “sobered down, become less violent, less wild, less impetuous.” That was untrue. It
was Seal’s view of him that had altered. Churchill himself had not changed at all. His character had been fully formed at the turn of the century, as an officer in Victoria’s imperial army, as a war correspondent, and as a young MP under the Old Queen. And he knew it. Listening to recordings of
The Mikado
one evening, he said they brought back his youth and the Victorian era, “eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Age of the Antonines.” Upper-class Englishmen who had come of age then, when the empire stood at flood tide, possessed a certitude, an indomitable faith in England, confidence in their own judgment, and an indubitable conviction that they understood the world and were its masters.
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In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in
English Hours
“persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.” His valet warmed his brandy snifter over a neatly trimmed candle; his typists and secretaries kept more candles at the ready in order to light his cigars (Cuban
Romeo y Julieta
were his favorites). He had never ridden a bus. The only time he availed himself of the London Underground was during the general strike in 1926. Clementine dropped him off at South Kensington but Winston did not know how to navigate the system, with the result that “he went round and round not knowing where to get off, and eventually had to be rescued.” He never carried cash, except to casinos and the occasional derby, where an aide would take care of the business of procuring chips or placing bets on worthy steeds.
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Clementine, ten years Winston’s junior and far more versed in domestic economics, kept the household books; she and the staff did the purchasing. Churchill did not (directly) “bestow his custom” upon local merchants. This man who embodied the English spirit never attended a jumble sale or, readying himself for the day’s labors, tucked a wrapped pasty into the pocket of his cardigan, or queued in a bakery for a bag of warm, fresh scones. In the years before he became prime minister, even his train tickets were bought for him. As befitted a man of his class and stature, he never prepared a meal in his life. Once, having announced his desire to spend a weekend at his country home, Chartwell, rather than in London, Clementine reminded him that the kitchen staff there was not in residence. “I shall cook for myself,” Winston replied. “I can boil an egg. I’ve seen it done.” When he was ready to leave on a trip, he would ask, not whether the chauffeur was behind the wheel but, “Is the coachman on his box?” His bodyguard, Scotland Yard detective inspector Walter Thompson, recalled that on the rare occasions when Churchill drove his own automobile, “he was forever just missing things, or not quite missing them and denting cars, his own and others. People shouldn’t be in his way, was his theory.”
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To drive with Churchill, recalled Thompson, “was to take your life into
your hands.” On one journey Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, turned into a narrow lane in Croydon only to encounter a construction project in the road and a long line of backed-up automobiles. A policeman signaled Churchill to stop, but Churchill ignored the constable and instead drove up onto the sidewalk in order to bypass the scene. Many were the occasions when Thompson, to avert disaster, had to reach over and yank the wheel from Churchill’s hands. When Churchill actually collided with some hapless Londoner’s automobile, he did not believe that any damage could possibly be of his doing, a mind-set he also applied to his frequent collisions with subordinates, parliamentary colleagues, and foreign potentates. Robert Boothby, one of Churchill’s most loyal supporters during the Wilderness Years when he was out of office and without influence, recalled that Churchill simply did not much care for what other people thought, and cared not at all about how they might
feel.
“It was this curious absence of interest or affection that may have helped make him a great leader.” Churchill “was often callous,” Boothby recalled, but then, “he had a war to fight” and little time for social niceties.
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