The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (334 page)

Randolph, not yet thirty, displayed neither his sister’s reticence nor her sly humor. He was, recalled Colville, “a most unattractive combination of the bombastic, the cantankerous and the unwise; and yet at times he makes shrewd and penetrating comments and at times can be pleasant. He has
none of Winston’s reasonableness.” He drank heavily, Colville noted, and was not a drinker of good cheer. Randolph, during one dinner, opined at length on how Baldwin had destroyed the fire in politics and deprived the empire of its greatness. World domination, said Randolph, was the greatest ideal and he admired the Germans for desiring it. Randolph’s arguments, Colville noted in his diary, “make one shudder.” Colville found him to be one of the most “objectionable” people he’d ever met: “Noisy, self-asserting, whining and frankly unpleasant”… and “at dinner anything but kind to Winston, who adores him.” Randolph’s treatment of his father so vexed Clementine that she threatened to ban him from No. 10 lest he give his father a heart attack. Yet Winston’s love for Randolph was infinite. At Chequers, Churchill was at his ease with his cronies and his family nearby. And, of course, he loved the food and liquor, spirits of a quality not found in the canteen beneath Storey’s Gate. He knew the joys of family life at Chequers might easily be short-lived; the games of croquet on the lawns (he watched), the family strolls and footraces (he avoided all exercise), brandy and reminiscences before the great fireplaces, even Randolph’s pathetic tirades. Of Chequers and the Germans, he said: “Probably they don’t think I am so foolish as to come here. I stand to lose a lot. Three generations at a swoop.”
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His family, though in close physical proximity that autumn, was coming apart. Sarah’s marriage to the actor and comedian Vic Oliver had dissolved. His music man act had enjoyed a long run of playing the Palladium, the house always packed. But as an Austrian of Jewish ancestry, he had been warned to flee England before it was too late. America seemed the safer place now for an Austrian expatriate and comic actor on the rise. Sarah, if Vic left for the United States, would accompany him out of matrimonial duty, but she harbored no desire to leave England, her parents, and her nascent theatrical career. Vic stayed on in London into 1941, a gesture Sarah found noble given “the sorrow he would have caused me if he asked me to leave Britain at that time.” By the following summer the marriage was finished, and Sarah had been commissioned as an RAF section officer. Clementine thoroughly endorsed Sarah’s remaining in England because she felt no “Churchill child” should leave the country in its hour of distress. When she learned that one of her nieces was to depart for Canada, she had the child’s passport revoked. Churchill disapproved of the entire emigration scheme, calling it a “stampede from the country.”
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In any case, the program to evacuate children overseas had effectively ended on September 17. That night, the steamship
City of Benares,
bound for Canada, was making poor headway in a gale when it was torpedoed. Seventy-three of ninety children on board perished, as well as more than two hundred of their adult escorts. Many initially made it into the lifeboats.
The children began singing
Roll out the Barrel,
but by the time they got to “We’ll have a barrel of fun,” the ship was gone. The seas then took over, smashing the lifeboats. Four days later Churchill told the Defence Committee that in view of the sinking, the evacuation of children overseas must cease.
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S
ince the days almost two decades earlier when he topped the Irish Republican Army assassination list, Churchill liked to sleep with a gun within reach. He had carried a Colt revolver on his person since the fall of France, but tended to lay it down and forget where, forcing Inspector Thompson to loan him one of his revolvers. Churchill was given to drawing his gun and waving it about while exclaiming, “You see Thompson, they’ll never take me alive.” In fact, he was a good shot with a rifle and absolutely deadly with his Colt .45. He and Thompson repaired on a regular basis to the outdoor shooting range at Chequers, where Churchill would fire a hundred or so rounds each from his Mannlicher rifle, his .32 Webley & Scott revolver, and his favorite Colt. He was, recalled Thompson, so deadly a shot that anyone who came within range of his gun would stand no chance. Colville recorded one such session: “[Churchill] fired his Mannlicher rifle at targets 100, 200, and 300 yards away. He also fired his revolver, still smoking a cigar, with commendable accuracy. Despite his age, size, and lack of practice, he acquitted himself well…. He always seems to visualize the possibility of having to defend himself against German troops!”
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The idea of the prime minister of Great Britain blazing away at the enemy was, with all Britons expecting an invasion, anything but preposterous. Churchill lived daily with the very real possibility of a last stand, a shoot-out between himself and the invaders. Recalled Lord Geoffrey-Lloyd,
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“Winston was like an animal in the jungle, his senses attuned to any kind of danger. He had this primitive desire for survival, which was an immense inspiration to the country and the world.”
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During the ordnance exercise, Churchill opined, “The best way to kill Huns was with snub-nosed bullets.” He was referring to hollow-point slugs called dumdums, which pancake upon hitting flesh, crash through internal organs, and leave an exit wound as big as a teapot. They were named after the Dum Dum arsenal near Calcutta, where they were first
produced in order to give the British an advantage over mutinous locals. Such bullets, Randolph protested to his father, were illegal in warfare. Indeed they were. Churchill in 1906 had declared his opposition to using the slugs against any “civilized foe.” The Nazis had forfeited any claims in that regard. To Randolph, Churchill rumbled that since the Germans would “make short shrift” of him if captured, he saw no reason at all why he should have “any mercy on them.”
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Goebbels tried to parlay Churchill’s shooting sessions into a propaganda coup. He procured a photo of Churchill that had run in British newspapers which displayed the prime minister attired in dark pinstripes, immense cigar firmly set in his mouth, a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun outfitted with a circular magazine (favored by Chicago mobsters) cradled in his arms. The Germans produced a leaflet from the photo with these words: “WANTED,
FOR INCITEMENT TO
MURDER. T
HIS GANGSTER, WHO YOU SEE IN HIS ELEMENT IN THE PICTURE, INCITES YOU BY HIS EXAMPLE TO PARTICIPATE IN A FORM OF WARFARE IN WHICH WOMEN, CHILDREN AND ORDINARY CITIZENS SHALL TAKE LEADING PARTS
.” Goebbels had thousands of the leaflets dropped over Britain. He ceased the program within two weeks, when he realized the image was only boosting Churchill’s popularity among Britons.
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Plinking with small arms might conceivably address some practical need for self-protection, but whether he was at No. 10, the Annexe, or Chequers, Churchill’s behavior during air raids was another matter entirely. With the swagger of Victorian men, he scorned personal danger. Courage, he believed, was the greatest virtue. In October he was sitting in the Cabinet Room when aides told him that an unexploded two-ton bomb in St. James’s Park threatened everyone in Downing Street. Churchill glanced up from his papers and said he hoped none of the park’s ducks would be hurt. During one raid he summoned Colville to escort him from No. 10 to the Annexe. Colville recalled: “As we emerged from the India Office arch into King Charles Street, we heard the loud whistles of two descending bombs. I dived back under the arch for shelter, and the bomb exploded in Whitehall. Churchill, meanwhile, was striding along the middle of King George Street, his chin stuck out and propelling himself rapidly with his gold-headed walking stick. I had to run to catch him up…. I am sure that in a shipwreck he would have been the last to step into the lifeboat.”
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He liked to watch the enemy bombers come in, and thoroughly enjoyed the crash and
crump
of the bombs, and the
crack
of the anti-aircraft guns. He relished the entire spectacle. Four decades earlier he had quipped that nothing in life quite so exhilarates as “being shot at without result.” When the sirens sounded, Churchill chose between sitting underground watching dust shake out of the rafters and going forth into the raids. Out he went.
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His outings sent Clementine, his cabinet, and his bodyguards into fits of angst. Inspector Thompson believed that Churchill’s insistence on putting himself in danger was the Marlborough in him. At the first wail of the sirens Churchill donned his tin hat—he called it his “battle bowler”—and, attired in his mauve siren suit or one of his vivid dressing gowns, sometimes both, would depart the underground Annexe for the roof or, if he was at Chequers, for the gardens, there to watch and wait while the enemy approached, or, as he put it, “to walk in the moonlight and watch the fireworks.” He did not at all like the fit of the helmet; when it regularly slipped down over his eyes as he gazed skyward, he’d fling it into the bushes for an aide to later retrieve. He might chew on an unlighted cigar, or light one up, in defiance of all rules against smoking during air raids. He ignored any rule he chose to ignore. His Royal Marine valet, in an attempt to impede his mobility, hid his shoes. Churchill demanded they be returned. “I’ll have you know,” he proclaimed, “that as a child my nurse maid would never prevent me from taking a walk in the park if I wanted to do so. And as a man, Adolf Hitler certainly won’t.”
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His favorite position from which to take in the fireworks was the flat roof of the Annexe. Sited as it was across from St. James’s Park, it afforded a splendid view of London, a foolishly dangerous prospect even with an overhanging roof to guard against stray shell fragments. There, gas mask at his side, armed with a glowing cigar and binoculars, he watched for bomb flashes. He counted the seconds until the crunch of the bomb reached him. Five seconds, one mile. Persuading him to leave the roof proved difficult at best.
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If he did depart, it was likely because he demanded that his aides locate the exact area bombed, and that they bring the motorcar around in order that he should tour the scene. On one such outing, the blast from a nearby German bomb lifted Churchill’s car up off all four tires. The vehicle returned to the ground and rolled along for several yards on two wheels, before finally righting itself. It regained its stability, said Churchill, due to “my beef.” On another evening, Churchill, Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin, Pug Ismay, and Jock Colville packed themselves into the armored car. All were well plied with brandy. Their destination was Raynes Park, where they hoped to watch the anti-aircraft guns in action. On the way, a policeman tried to arrest them for driving with too-bright lights. The dutiful bobby was dismissed with a loud, “Go to Hell, man.” The phrasing of the outburst excludes Bevin as a suspect in uttering it. Born in a remote West England village and educated in secondary (public) schools, he dropped his “h’s” and “g’s” in the west country fashion. Bevin would have said
“G’ ta ’ell man.”
Thus, someone other than Bevin must have told the constable where to go. Colville was too junior, Pug Ismay too polite. Only one suspect remained.
In any event, the group motored onward to the park, where they found the big guns silent. It was raining, and, with no German aircraft overhead, Churchill stopped by the officers’ mess, where he sipped a whisky and soda and awaited the fireworks.
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Inspector Thompson could do little during air raids to protect the prime minister from the potential folly of his own reckless behavior. On two occasions Thompson had to heave his charge bodily out of exposed doorways in Whitehall as bombs fell nearby. The blast from one wounded some of Thompson’s men. Churchill, infuriated at having been shoved, took no notice of the wounded men. Instead he “swore, shook, and stomped about.” He bellowed, “Don’t
do
that.” Thompson could not quite decipher the rest of the “whole gush of ugly sounds” emanating from Churchill. The curses strung together by a perturbed Churchill, Thompson wrote, were “a sin against the language.” Such eruptions were well known to everyone who worked for him, from the Chiefs of Staff to his secretaries. But Thompson gave as good as he got, telling Churchill that his behavior was “selfishly stupid.” After the tantrum, Churchill voiced a non-apology, after his fashion, for leading Thompson into danger: “I would not do it, only I know how much
you
like it.” Yet he could never quite leave it at that. Invariably a glare of long duration followed such scenes, a signal that he considered the entire affair finished, but only on his terms. As for taking to heart Thompson’s professional advice, Churchill, with the next keening of the sirens, flew out the door, rooftop bound. His explanation: “When my time is due, it will come.”
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One early October evening after a late dinner at No. 10, and knowing that on the following day he would be addressing the Commons as well as sponsoring Randolph’s entry into Parliament, Churchill, rather than retire, as would most sixty-five-year-old men burdened with great responsibilities, made straightaway for the action. As recalled by anti-aircraft commander Sir Frederick Pile, they first drove to Richmond, where the big guns were banging away and bombs were falling. As usual, Churchill refused his helmet. At about eleven he was told that a demonstration of the new radar-controlled searchlights had been prepared for him at Biggin Hill. He didn’t want to leave. “This exhilarates me,” he told Pile. “The sound of these cannon gives me a tremendous feeling.” Finally, persuaded to move on, they went off in Pile’s car, and immediately became lost. Two hours later, after navigating blocked streets in total darkness, the bombs still falling, they found their intended rendezvous point—“the worst two hours of the war for me,” Pile wrote. The night was wet and cold. Churchill asked for a whisky and soda. The commander of the searchlight unit replied that there was as much chance of getting a whisky there as in the Sahara, but that he’d send to his mess, ten miles distant. The radar failed
to operate, but the whisky was produced, without the dilution of a splash of soda, which was the Old Man’s custom. He took one sip, spluttered, and said, “Good God, I have been poisoned. It is neat whisky.”
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