The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (300 page)

Churchill refused to accept changes in geographical names; Istanbul remained Constantinople (“though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it”). Ankara remained Angora (he told the Foreign Office he would refuse to call Angora cats by any other name). Peking remained Peiping, Sebastopol, Sevastopol, and Iran, Persia. Likewise, he preferred traditional military terms to the modern—“cannon” for artillery, “muskets” for rifles, and “frigates” for destroyers. When he drafted a cable to Franklin Roosevelt requesting a gift or loan of fifty old frigates, Jock Colville suggested he substitute “destroyers,” since the president might not know what the prime minister was referring to. It was in youth and early manhood, especially in the company of the officers of the 4th Hussars, resplendent in their blue and gold, impeccable in manners at the table, that he had acquired his lifelong love of tradition, ceremony, color, gaiety, pageantry, and formality. Protocol was important to him. He told his cabinet: “Gentlemen, we are engaged in a very serious business. We must conduct it in a serious way.” In correspondence he expected them to address him as “Dear Prime Minister,” and his replies opened “Dear Foreign Secretary,” “Dear Chancellor of the Exchequer,” “Dear Minister of Aircraft Production,” etc. Letters for his signature were not to end with “sincerely” unless he determined that he was, indeed, sincere.
¹²

The romantic glow of Victorian militarism, when casualties were few and victories enormous, accounted for his ambivalent view of warfare. He said, “War, which was cruel and glorious, has become cruel and squalid.”
But the glory was still there for him. No other British prime minister, not even Wellington, had donned a uniform while in office. Churchill wore the light blue livery of an (honorary) RAF commodore and regretted that British soldiers no longer wore red coats.
¹³

Afterward everyone who had been around him in 1940 remembered the Old Man’s astonishing, unflagging energy. He was overweight and fifteen years older than Hitler; he never exercised, yet “he was working,” Kathleen Hill, one of Churchill’s typists, recalled, “all the time, every waking moment.” His old friend from the First World War, Edward Spears, who had not seen him in many years before that spring, felt “an astonishment such as I had never felt before at his strength and vitality. I had known he possessed these qualities in lavish measure, but now he exuded power and confidence, radiating them as if he were their very fountain-head.” Young Jock Colville marveled at “Winston’s ceaseless industry,” and wrote that it was “refreshing to work with somebody who refuses to be depressed even by the most formidable danger that has ever threatened this country… he seems to be the man for the occasion. His spirit is indomitable and even if France and England should be lost, I feel he would carry on the crusade himself with a band of privateers.”
¹⁴

To the British public he had become the ultimate Englishman, an embodiment of the bulldog breed, with the pugnacious set of his jaw, the challenging tilt of his cigar, his stovepipe hat, his pronouncement that “foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names” (he always sounded the final “s” in Calais), and his fondness for red meat. In a letter to his Minister of Food he wrote, “Almost all the food faddists I have ever known, nut eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay. The British soldier is far more likely to be right than the scientists. All he cares about is beef…. The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc., washed down, on gala occasions, with a little lime juice.”
¹⁵

He himself had always ignored dietary rules and rarely paid a penalty for it, and he drank whatever he wanted, usually alcohol, whenever he wanted it, which was often. Harry Hopkins (Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser and go-to man) entered Churchill’s bedroom one morning to find the prime minister in bed, wrapped in his pink robe, “and having of all things a bottle of wine for breakfast.” When Hopkins commented on his breakfast beverage, Churchill replied that he despised canned milk, but had no “deep rooted prejudice about wine, and that he had resolved the conflict in favor of the latter.” Furthermore, the Old Man told Hopkins, he ignored the advice of doctors because they were usually wrong, that he had lived almost seven decades and was in perfect health, and that “he had no intention of giving up alcoholic drink, mild or strong, now or later.”
¹⁶

His normal wartime regimen included a glass of white wine at breakfast (taken as a substitute for tea during the war, when only canned milk was available). Then, a weak scotch and soda, refreshed with soda throughout the morning. At lunch, perhaps a port, always Pol Roger champagne, a brandy or two (likely Hine, and bottled in the previous century), sometimes a beer. After his nap and before dinner he’d nurse another whisky
^*
(Johnnie Walker Red Label was his favorite brand). At dinner, more champagne during the meal, followed often by “several doses of brandy” in the latter stages. He loved his meals as much as the libations that accompanied them. As recalled by his grandson, Winston S. Churchill, his favorite dinner began with
madrilène
(chilled, almost jellied consommé), followed by
goujons
(small filets of North Sea sole), then roast beef, thin-sliced, with Yorkshire pudding and roasted potatoes, followed by his favorite sweet,
bombe glacée
(puffs of ice cream cocooned within ice cream). Before retiring for the evening, his valet (Frank Sawyers, during the war) would pour another port or two, perhaps a final weak whisky while Churchill worked in his study. Another such drinker would recoil from food, but Churchill’s appetite was unaffected, and he rarely lost possession of his remarkable faculties.
¹⁷

Clearly he was blessed with a remarkable constitution, one which disposed of alcohol with exceptional efficiency. His detractors and enemies either implied he was a drunk or, in the case of Hitler and Goebbels, denounced him outright as a “twaddler and a drunkard.” Yet Robert E. Sherwood, Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter and biographer, wrote that although Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol… continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours,” it did so “without visible effect on his health or mental processes. Anyone who suggested he became befuddled with drink obviously never had to become involved in an argument with him on some factual problem late at night….” Churchill’s drinking habits, Sherwood wrote, were “unique” and his capacity “Olympian.”
¹⁸

Despite his prolonged, consistent, and prodigious consumption of alcohol, Churchill was not a drunk. But neither was he a moderate social drinker, as some of the memoirs and protestations of his close friends and private secretaries maintain. His former staff spin a consistent tale, that Churchill nursed a lone weak whisky and soda all day, replenished and diluted by splashes of soda, which is true but overlooks the daylong augmentation with other spirits. On occasion he would go too far, such as described in Jock Colville’s account of taking the Old Man up to bed at around 3:00
A.M.
after a brandy-fueled evening. Both Colville and Churchill thought it hilarious when Churchill, attempting to settle into an
armchair in order to remove his shoes, missed the chair entirely and fell onto the floor in a jumble of legs and arms. “A regular Charlie Chaplin,” Churchill offered as he struggled to regain his footing. Later in the war, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was summoned by Churchill in the middle of the day. Brooke, who often noted Churchill’s prodigious intake of alcohol, that night told his diary, “I found him very much worse for wear for evidently having consumed several glasses of brandy at lunch.” Such slides into outright drunkenness were exceedingly rare for Churchill, but they occurred.
¹⁹

He went nowhere without his supply of whisky close at hand, kept at the ready by his bodyguard or his valet. When he visited the United States during Prohibition, he secreted his whisky (and his Webley service revolver) past U.S. Customs, making him a violator of the Volstead Act, indeed, given his thirst, a habitual violator. When he was struck and severely injured by a car in New York City, he finagled a prescription for alcohol from his attending physician, Otto C. Pickardt. The injury, Pickardt wrote, “necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at meal times.” The quantity was “indefinite” but at a minimum was to be about eight fluid ounces. The British essayist C. P. Snow encapsulated the paradox of Churchill’s drinking when he remarked, “Churchill cannot be an alcoholic because no alcoholic could drink that much.” It could of course be argued that had he exemplified the ideal of moderation—more exercise, less drink, less reckless behavior, fewer cigars—he might well have lived a full and rich life for many years beyond the ninety he was granted.
²⁰

Churchill once summed up his relationship with drink thus: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
²¹

He kept hours that would stagger a young man. Late each evening, at midnight or shortly thereafter, a courier arrived in Downing Street with the first editions of the morning newspapers, eight or nine in all. The Old Man skimmed them before retiring, and sometimes, Kathleen Hill later recalled, he would telephone the
Daily Mail
to inquire about new developments in a running story. On June 18 Colville noted: “Winston was furious because the morning papers, which he likes to see before going to bed, had not arrived. In his emotion he upset his whisky and soda over all his papers.”
²²

The prime minister’s day began at eight o’clock in the morning, when he woke after five or six hours’ sleep and rang a bell summoning his usual breakfast: an egg, bacon or ham or chipped beef (when meat was available), sometimes a piece of sole, all washed down by his glass of white wine, or a pot of tea, a black Indian blend. Then a typewriter arrived, accompanied by a stenographer—usually Mrs. Hill or Miss Watson—to
whom he would dictate a stream of memos as she rapidly hammered them out and he worked his way through a large black dispatch box. The typewriters were advertised as “silent.” They were not. The Great Man resented every click of the keys, and made his displeasure known to the typists. He hated any noise (including ticking clocks, which he banned from his room) that intruded upon his equilibrium, and his business with the box.
²³

The box, which he had organized, was the absolute center of Britain’s war against the Third Reich. Inside were numbered folders containing papers approximately 16″ x 13.″ The first one, the “top of the box,” as it was called, dealt with matters considered “really urgent” by his secretaries, according to one of them, John Peck, “not only by objective standards of importance, deadlines, and so on, but in part subjectively by the degree of the Prime Minister’s personal interest at the time. So we had to see and understand what was in his mind, and he relied on us to do this.” Below the top were folders containing military and foreign office telegrams, reports from the Chiefs of Staff (after screening by Churchill’s military liaison Pug Ismay), answers to questions he had raised concerning every aspect of British life—food supplies, crop yields, railroad capacity, coal production. Nothing escaped his attention.
²⁴

Churchill’s private secretaries, John Peck, Eric Seal, John Colville, and John Martin, carried keys to this box. There was another, buff-colored box. Only Churchill had the key to that one. Inside were German military orders—at first from the Luftwaffe, later from the Wehrmacht and the SS, and much later from Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats—all decoded and translated for him. In the first days of the war, Polish intelligence officers had captured a German electromagnetic cipher machine; Polish mathematicians subsequently examined the machine and smuggled a replica to the British. The British cryptographers, stationed at Bletchley Park, a Victorian redbrick, white-trimmed, and copper-roofed complex north of London, called the machine “Enigma.” Each day the enemy reset the code and each day the men at Bletchley tried to break it, often without complete success. But the Bletchley crowd decrypted enough messages often enough to give Churchill an over-the-shoulder look at German plans (except U-boat plans, for which a slightly different and more complex encoding machine was used). The Bletchley wizards tended to be young and bearded, with long hair, dirty fingernails, and disheveled clothing. When the prime minister first saw them, he remarked to their chief, “Menzies, when I told you to leave no stone unturned, I didn’t mean you to take me quite so literally.”
²⁵

At the outset, he told the War Cabinet secretary that “all directions emanating from me are made in writing, or should be immediately afterwards
confirmed in writing.” Any instruction not in writing was invalid. The edict seems petty at first glance, but it precluded any subordinate from mucking up the works by misinterpreting and passing on down the line a prime ministerial command. The sheer volume of paperwork confirmed the wisdom of Churchill’s edict that nothing submitted to him, not even a technical account of changes in the manufacture of tanks, could be longer than a single sheet of paper. During a meeting at Admiralty House, he lifted one that wasn’t, and said: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against scrutiny.” But Churchill, in turn, contributed to the lengthening paper trail with his river of memos marked “Action This Day” and “Report in 3 Days.” Many began, “Pray tell me…,” or “Pray explain…,” which earned his memos the moniker “Winston’s prayers.”
²⁶

When reading and signing his missives at his desk, he often wore special sleeves over the cuffs of his jacket in order to protect them from any graphite or ink that might conspire to besmirch his outerwear. The sleeves, together with the occasional green eyeshade, lent to him the air of a plump typesetter. A perusal of the objects on his desk and side table, however—paperweights fashioned from gold medals, crystal inkstands with sterling lids, numerous bottles of pills and powders, and cut-crystal decanters of whisky—identified the owner as a Victorian gentleman of no small means.
²⁷