The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (304 page)

Although Shakespeare’s name does not appear in the index of his four-volume
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
Churchill read and memorized Shakespeare his whole life, and imbued his speeches with metrical tributes to the Bard. He embodied the Shakespearean notion that a man’s essence is to be found in his actions, and his words, the authenticity and value of which would be confirmed or debunked by the actions that followed. He did not so much speak to Englishmen (as Franklin Roosevelt did to Americans in his homespun fireside chats), as for them. In doing so he represented their destiny and their role in the current struggle, which could only end in either national survival or national annihilation. Hitler, an opportunist and nihilist romantic, told his people much the same.

Churchill dictated all speeches, memos, and letters to his typists, usually young and female, who typed away while he paced about the room, fetched his thoughts, and put them into words. When he dictated directly to the typewriter, the typists found themselves in peril, for to change flimsies in the middle of a long dictation would produce a “primitive wrath.” “Come on, come
on!
” he’d growl. “What are you waiting for!” “Don’t fidget so with that paper!
Stop it!
” He was personally insulted by any pause necessitated by the mechanics of the infernal machine. He displayed, wrote his bodyguard, an “appalling, almost childish” unwillingness to learn the mechanics of typing or of typewriters. None of his staff recollect ever seeing Churchill put a finger to a typewriter keyboard. Nor did he ever write his own memos. Other than signing them, recalled William Deakin, Churchill “never wrote a line in his life. I have never seen him put pen to paper.” Actually, Churchill had written his early books in longhand, and of course his dispatches from Cuba and the veldt. But once elected to the Commons, and forever after, he indulged his love of dictation.
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He disliked the taking of dictation by shorthand, which would have kept the stenographers in the chase and allowed them to type in peace outside his presence. He believed shorthand only added one more step to the process of setting his thoughts down on paper. He allowed an exception to the ban when he was on the move—in a car, onboard a rolling ship, or strutting through the halls of Chequers or Parliament, conditions which even he understood were not conducive to wielding a typewriter. Not a moment was to be wasted by the typists, as young Patrick Kinna, a lance corporal and trained stenographer who had worked for the Duke of Windsor, learned the first time he entered the prime minister’s room to take a letter. Without looking up or acknowledging Kinna, Churchill, pacing, intoned, “This is a melancholy story….” Kinna, thinking Churchill was about to tell a tale, set down his pencil and notepad, and said, “Oh dear! How unfortunate.”
“Well,”
Churchill grumbled,
“take it down.”
It was a memo to the Admiralty, ruing the paucity of aircraft carriers. Kinna survived the day and served Churchill for the rest of the war as a member of the team.
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Woe unto the typist who had to ask the Great Man to repeat a phrase. His staff knew that to guess at what he said was far preferable to asking him to repeat it. The typists had to engage in a fair amount of guessing (as Elizabeth Layton had learned) because Churchill often mumbled and, to make matters worse, often while pacing about far across the room, his back to the typist. When he didn’t mumble, he rumbled, strings of phrases all but indecipherable to the struggling scribes. When he dictated while in bed, propped up on his pillows, words were lost as newspapers fluttered to the floor, or the telephone rang, or he summoned his valet to refresh his refreshment. As with the collecting of his thoughts in preparation for a speech, he liked to dictate letters and memos while a gramophone played his favorite recordings of old music hall standbys—“After the Ball,” “Goodbye, My Love,” perhaps Harry Lauder belting out “Keep Right On Till the End of the Road.” The typists had to blot out the background noise in order to parse his phrases, a supremely difficult task when Churchill instructed his valet to turn the volume higher. Finally, when the typist finished, and before she could pull the paper from the typewriter, Churchill would thrust out a hand and utter a curt
“Gimme.”
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Typists earned about two pounds per week, about forty dollars a month, less than the wages of a corporal in the U.S. Army. As well, they were expected to remain at their post even as German bombs fell into nearby courtyards.
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Churchill had been a professional writer before he became a statesman; he had supported his family with a tremendous stream of books and articles.
His love of the language was deep and abiding, he had mastered it as few men have, and he was quick to correct anyone who abused it, especially those who tried to camouflage sloppy thinking with the flapdoodle of verbose military jargon or bureaucratese. He believed, with F. G. Fowler, that big words should not be used when small words will do, and that English words were always preferable to foreign words. He said: “Not compressing thought into a reasonable space is sheer laziness.” On his orders “Communal Feeding Centres” were renamed “British Restaurants,” as “Local Defense Volunteers” had become “Home Guard.” And why not “ready-made” rather than “prefabricated”? “Appreciate that” was a red flag for him; he always crossed it out and substituted “recognize that.” Another was “intensive” when “intense” was required. Once John Martin, driving along the Embankment with him, described the winding of the Thames as “extraordinary.” Churchill corrected him: “Not ‘extraordinary.’ All rivers wind. Rather, ‘remarkable.’ ” In the margins of official documents, he often quoted
Fowler’s Modern English Usage,
a copy of which he sent to Buckingham Palace on his first Christmas as prime minister.
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John Martin believed that the P.M.’s “interest in basic English was inspired by politics rather than linguistics: it was a means of promoting ‘the English-speaking club.’ ” Certainly that was one reason. He believed that all countries where English was spoken, including America, should merge. Here lay a profound contrast with the foreign policies of his predecessors at Downing Street. They had focused upon the Continent and the various combinations of the great powers there. Neville Chamberlain had referred to the United States with amusement and contempt, and called Americans “creatures.” But Churchill, though a European patriot, looked westward, and not only because he knew Hitler could not be crushed without American troops. British to the bone, he was nevertheless the son of an American mother, and long before the war, he had envisaged a union of the world’s English-speaking peoples: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the far-flung colonies of the British Empire.
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In his parliamentary speeches, and particularly in his broadcasts to his besieged island, his genius for the language fused with his idealized image of England and Englishmen, or the “British race,” formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—a people endowed with fearlessness, gallantry, nobility, a unique sense of honor, and invincibility. He still exulted in the memory of colonial conquests, when the Enfield rifles and Maxim guns of the Queen’s armies were challenged only by primitive weapons, imperial flags flew proudly, and British casualties, even in the Indian Mutiny, were always light. The slaughter of the 1914–1918 war had
appalled Britons, including Churchill, and had exhausted and disillusioned many, but not Churchill. Now, drawing fire from the terrible red glow across the Channel, he was exhilarated. His first four hundred days in office—from early May 1940 to mid-June 1941, a ghastly time for millions of Europeans—were, for him, the supreme chapter in his life. Later he wrote that it was “the most splendid, as it was the most deadly year in our long British and English story.” He believed that 1940 was a time when “it was equally good to live or die.” Years after the war, John Martin remarked to him that life was not as exciting as it had been. Churchill replied jovially, “You can’t expect to have a war all the time.”
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Based on his reading of Lord Moran’s memoirs, Anthony Storr, the eminent British psychiatrist, believed that the source of Churchill’s strength lay in his “inner world of make-believe,” the sort of fantasies imaginative men call up from time to time when bored or disappointed. For most of the 1930s, Churchill had been both. After June 1940, Storr believed, that world of imagination “coincided with the facts of external reality in a way that rarely happens to any man.” After the fall of France, Churchill became the hero he had always dreamed of being. Storr compares this to passionate love, “when, for a time, the object of a man’s desire seems to coincide exactly with the image of a woman he carries within him.” In that dark time, Storr argues, what England needed was not a shrewd, composed, balanced leader, but a prophet, a heroic visionary, a man who could dream dreams of victory when all seemed lost—a man who could inspire not only Britons but also Americans. “Had Churchill been a stable and equable man,” Storr writes, “he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.”
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And yet, despite the fact that Churchill was prone to sentimentality, was mercurial, and at times lacked strategic military sense, he had, through intuitive leaps and careful analysis during the 1930s, arrived at an astonishingly accurate forecast of the calamity that had since befallen Europe and England. The events of September 1939 had proven him England’s
most
sober statesman, as well as its most prophetic. Other sober and equable men, who lacked his imagination and penetrating vision, had allowed Britain to stumble unprepared into this war.

Storr’s Churchill is complex, which Churchill certainly was, and a lifelong depressive, which he likely was not. The widely held belief that Churchill fought depression throughout his adult life stems in large part from Storr’s musings and Lord Moran’s memoir, in which he recounts his service as Churchill’s personal physician. Moran probed Churchill during
his last decade with leading questions about his “black dog” of depression and painted the octogenarian statesman in hues of decrepitude and despondency. Based on the writings of Moran and Storr, the idea that Churchill was a lifelong depressive and probably bipolar took hold in mental health circles, and it lingers still in the popular imagination (but not in the minds of Churchill’s family, friends, and his official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert). Yet Churchill likely did not suffer from mental illness. The story of the “black dog” begins in 1911, when, in a letter to Clementine, Winston enthused over a German doctor who was said to be able to cure depression: “I think this man might be useful to me—if my black dog returns.” (Samuel Johnson called his bouts with melancholia his “black dog.”) Churchill went on to tell Clementine that when the dog departed, “All the colors came back into the picture.” His letter describes what modern psychiatrists call a moderate adult depressive episode. The “light faded out of the picture,” Churchill wrote. When prompted by Moran in 1944, Churchill recounted the episode, as well as the sensations of vertigo that had long ago troubled him—feeling unease while standing at a ship’s railing or on a railroad platform, where he liked to put a pillar between himself and the approaching train. To this, Churchill added a vital conclusion: “And yet I don’t want to go out of the world at all in such moments.” Despondency or thoughts of self-obliteration never attached to Churchill’s low moods. After 1911 he never again wrote of the black dog.
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Storr’s diagnosis of Churchill has since been supplanted by more exact psychiatric diagnostic protocols. Churchill could indeed be moved to gloom and long silences by events great and small—a crushing naval loss, the death of a much-loved pet, the mention of the name of a long-dead comrade-in-arms. He was easily moved to tears. “I blub an awful lot,” he once told a private secretary, and he never apologized for his blubbing. He became quite irritable over unnecessary delays or secretarial foul-ups or generals who proved unwilling or unable to fight. He just as readily could turn off his temper, and his worries. He did not exhibit what are now considered to be the symptoms of major adult depression: prolonged (two weeks or more) and regular (at least yearly) periods of loss of interest in work and family, lack of interest in socializing, difficulty in making decisions, sleep loss, feelings of low self-esteem, and feelings of being unloved or not worthy of being loved, sometimes accompanied by spells of inconsolability. Nor did he show symptoms associated with the mania end of the manic-depressive spectrum:
decreased
need for sleep, rapid speech, racing thoughts, euphoria or extreme optimism, increased sexual drive, spending sprees, and inability to concentrate.
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It is true that as an adult Churchill took wildly unnecessary risks at the gaming tables and on the battlefield (which London itself was for much of
1940) and drank heavily—symptoms of depression when accompanied by several others—but he never lost his ability to function. He worried, he fretted, he grew weary at times, but he never despaired. In fact, it is part of the contradictory nature of the man that he manifested various symptoms of depression—risk taking, excessive drinking, mood swings—not intermittently, but regularly, even daily, and for his whole life.

Although psychiatrists caution against trying to prove a negative in the case of Churchill’s “black dog,” they also caution against any retroactive diagnosis such as Storr’s. Jock Colville and one of Churchill’s military liaisons, Fitzroy Maclean, recalled rare occasions when Churchill claimed “he had the black dog on his back.” He did not mean that he was depressed in a clinical sense, but only that he was having a bad day. Both Colville and Maclean recalled from their own upbringings that English nannies used the term “black dog” to describe the moods and emotional outbursts of young children. Throughout the war, Churchill, knowing that a dark and defeatist exterior inspired no confidence in those he needed by his side in order to win the war, did not indulge gloom but exorcised it. When visitors to Chequers or the underground No. 10 Annexe marveled at Churchill’s good cheer, he voiced a variation on a theme he had once voiced to Colville: he took his strength from the “splendid
sangfroid
and morale of the British people.” When Pug Ismay, strolling one day with Churchill in the garden at Chequers, offered, “whatever the future held, nothing could rob him of credit for having inspired the country….,” Churchill replied, “It was given to me to express what is in the hearts of the British people. If I had said anything else, they would have hurled me from office.”
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