The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (503 page)

H
is last charge in defense of the Empire came in November 1958, in Paris, when Charles de Gaulle (French premier at the time and elected President of the Fifth Republic in December) awarded him the Croix de la Libération. Churchill made a brief speech, telling the assembled in English that he would not “subject you to the ordeals of darker days” by making his remarks in French. He anointed de Gaulle “the symbol of the soul of France and of the unbreakable integrity of her spirit in adversity.” He closed with: “The future is uncertain, but we can be sure that if Britain and France, who for so long have been the vanguard of the Western civilization, stand together, with our Empires, our American friends… then we
have grounds for sober confidence and high hope. I thank you all for the honour you have done me.
Vive la France!
”
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His mention of “our Empires” was ironic. By 1958, the French had lost Indochina: Cambodia had gained independence in 1953; in South Vietnam the corrupt premier, Ngo Dinh Diem, was desperately trying to prop up his regime with the help of newly arrived American military advisers. Algeria, too, was violently departing the French fold. There, diverse revolutionary armies—united only by their desire to drive out the French—fought the French army from 1954 until final victory in 1962, a war that claimed the lives of at least three hundred thousand Algerians and sent at least one million descendants of French settlers into exile.

The British, meanwhile, were losing lesser jewels in their crown: in July, Iraqi army officers overthrew and murdered King Faisal II, the Hashemite king whose father the British had put on the throne in 1932. The new regime, backed by Nasser and manifesting a pro-Moscow bent, ordered the RAF out of its airbase near Baghdad. The Gold Coast had bolted the empire in 1957, and it became the independent nation of Ghana. Kenya did likewise in 1963, after the decade-long Mau Mau uprising that had claimed at least 20,000 Kenyan lives, and the lives of scores of white European settlers. Among the Mau Mau victims were thirty-two British settlers, including small children, whose deaths at the hands of the Mau Mau had inflamed Britain, and Churchill. The British response was brutal. At one point Churchill wanted to read the Mau Mau initiation oath—he called it “incredibly filthy”—in the House. It called for eating the flesh of disinterred bodies and the eyeballs of enemies, fornicating with sheep, and drinking the “Kaberichia cocktail,” a mixture of semen and menstrual blood. He settled for giving MPs a printed version. In Kenya, the British made administering the oath a capital offense; more than one thousand suspected Mau Maus were hanged.
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Churchill remained an unrepentant champion of the British Empire to the end. Months before he retired, President Eisenhower suggested—with some nerve—that “a fitting climax” to Churchill’s career would be to deliver a valedictory speech proclaiming that colonialism was “on the way out as a relationship between peoples.” Churchill’s reply was immediate and caustic: “I read with great interest all you have written me about what is called colonialism; namely, bringing forth backward races and opening up the jungles.” He declared that in India, “with all its history, religion, and ancient forms of despotic rule, Britain has a story to tell which will look quite well against the background of the coming hundred years.” He added that the sentiments and policies Eisenhower advocated “are in full accord with the policy now being pursued in all the Colonies of the British Empire.” Yet: “In this I must say that I am a laggard. I am a bit skeptical
about universal suffrage for the Hottentots even if refined by proportional representation.”

T
he final few years of retirement formed “a desultory tale,” wrote Montague Browne, speaking as much for himself as for Churchill. By the early 1960s, Montague Browne found that he needed only an hour or two each day to address his official, diplomatic duties in service to Churchill. As the months and years passed by, Montague Browne—and sometimes his wife and daughter, or the Colvilles—drifted with Churchill, from one Riviera villa to the next, from one port of call to the next aboard
Christina.
Onassis invited luminous muses aboard for Churchill’s entertainment, including Onassis’s mistress Maria Callas, Gracie Fields, and Greta Garbo. “There is no doubt,” recalled Churchill’s grandson and namesake, “that my grandfather enjoyed the company of beautiful women.” Near the end of the previous century, Churchill had written his mother after his first Atlantic crossing: “I do not contemplate ever taking a sea voyage for pleasure.” He had been especially put off on that voyage by the complete lack of any “nice people” on board. Now nearing the end of his life, he found great pleasure roaming the high seas on
Christina
in the company of his merry companions. On one voyage, Churchill proposed that all the men grow mustaches; they did. Montague Browne thought Churchill’s “did not become him.” On another, Montague Browne overheard Churchill address a dolphin that was swimming alongside the ship: “I do wish I could communicate with you.” It was a good life.
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The 1961 voyage to the Caribbean on
Christina
marked Churchill’s sixteenth—and last—journey to the United States. A wild storm blew off Cape Hatteras as
Christina
made for New York along the Carolina coast. Churchill, now eighty-six, insisted on sitting atop a piano in the lounge in order to witness the fury outside. He did so supported by four strong Greek seamen. He was Churchill; it could not be otherwise. When high seas struck on these voyages and made dining at a table impossible, Churchill took his meals in bed, propped up by numerous pillows, his bottle of Pol Roger held firmly between his thighs. Onassis and Montague Browne would join him, sitting cross-legged on the floor, with their bottles of Pol Roger held between their thighs. On board
Christina
Churchill could indulge in his love of long games of bezique, cigars, and postprandial brandies. Yet by 1961, Churchill’s fire had dimmed enough that Montague Browne, upon
Christina’s
docking in New York City, had to politely decline when President John F. Kennedy telephoned with an
invitation for Churchill to spend a few days at the White House. It was time to go home.
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When, in early November 1895, twenty-year-old subaltern Winston Churchill disembarked the Cunard steamship
Etruria
at a Hudson River pier and set foot for the first time in his mother’s native land, horse-drawn omnibuses plied the dusty macadam roads of New York City. The Ninth Avenue and Third Avenue elevated railroads ran up the island (and spewed glowing embers upon hapless pedestrians below), but the first New York subway would not be operating for almost a decade. London was then ushering in its third decade of underground rail service between Paddington and King’s Cross, but young Churchill had not availed himself of this form of public transport and would do so only once during the remainder of his life.

When Churchill first came to American shores, Henry Ford had yet to successfully propel his quadricycle by means of a gasoline engine, and the Dodge brothers were still building bicycles in Ontario, Canada. So, too, in Sheffield, England, was Thomas Humber, whose armored motorcars Churchill relied on during the Blitz, though he would rarely actually operate one in his lifetime—not because he was an aging Victorian man who did not understand the mechanics of automobiles but because he was a Victorian man who believed it only proper that liveried drivers drove carriages, including motorized carriages. Churchill was approaching early middle age when Orville Wright, at Kitty Hawk, took aloft the spruce-and-wire flying machine that he and his brother Wilbur had built. By then the earliest infernal contraptions built by Thomas Humber and Henry Ford were petrifying cows and horses and old women on both sides of the Atlantic. In the motorcar Churchill saw the genesis of the tank; in the airplane, the fighter plane and the bomber. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he mused in magazine articles on the nature of rockets, atomic power, and television. He analyzed the moral and political implications of every new technology brought forth in the first half of the twentieth century. The
Etruria
had carried sail on the 1895 voyage lest its steam engines fail during the ten-day Atlantic crossing. Churchill departed his other country for the final time on April 14, 1961, on board a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 that, pushed along by the jet stream seven miles high, carried him home across the Atlantic at more than five hundred miles per hour.

Moran’s memoir is correct in one regard; after Churchill suffered a serious bout of pneumonia in 1958, his ailments became more frequent and more serious—the 1959 strokes followed in 1960 by a hairline spinal fracture
from a fall in his bedroom. Moran ordered bed rest on that occasion. Churchill refused. Caring for Churchill resulted in “open warfare” between the nurses and the patient, nurse Roy Howells recalled. A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not—Churchill’s state funeral—in motion. On the flight to London, Churchill, heavily sedated, awoke, and muttered to Montague Browne: “I don’t think I’ll go back to that place, it’s unlucky. First Toby, and then this.” Montague Browne had forgotten Toby, the budgerigar, but Churchill had not. The body was frail, but not the wit. On his arrival in London, he flashed the “V” sign from his stretcher. He underwent surgery to insert a pin in his hip. After three weeks in the hospital, he left for 28 Hyde Park Gate, where within three months he could stroll unaided to the little gardens behind the house.
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He told Moran he felt he was “lingering,” and by 1962 he was. Prof—Lord Cherwell—had died in 1957, at seventy-one. He had served Churchill as science adviser and loyal friend since 1920. Brendan Bracken, fifty-seven, followed Cherwell in 1958 after suffering the horrific effects of throat cancer and botched cobalt radiation therapy. During his 1959 trip to America, Churchill visited Foster Dulles and George Marshall in the hospital, the former dying of cancer, the latter of the effects of two strokes and kidney failure. Two weeks later, Dulles—whom Churchill once described as “the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet with him”—was dead. Marshall went in October. Alanbrooke went in 1963, but not before publishing his wartime diaries, which hurt Churchill deeply. Another, though lesser, link to the past was broken in 1964 when Montague Phippen Porch, three years Churchill’s junior, died. Porch had been Jennie Churchill’s third and last husband, and therefore Sir Winston’s stepfather. The hardest blow—after Diana’s death—came on June 9, 1964, when his friend of nearly six decades, Max Beaverbrook, died of cancer, at eighty-five. Montague Browne began his narrative of these final years: “This is a story of decline.” The decline came in 1963 and 1964 in fits and starts, relapses and recoveries, but it came, relentless and unyielding.
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Churchill would much prefer to have someone put an old dance hall tune or martial march on the gramophone than turn on the television. He did enjoy an occasional episode of
Sea Hunt,
starring Lloyd Bridges, but otherwise
believed, as he told Moran, that “this bloody invention will do harm to the society and to the race.” But on April 9, 1963, he watched with satisfaction as a live satellite feed from the Rose Garden of the White House brought him images of President Kennedy bestowing upon him, by Act of Congress, honorary U.S. citizenship. Churchill became the first person to be accorded the honor. The Old Man, too ill to attend the ceremony, was represented by Randolph and young Winston. Seven weeks later, he embarked on his eighth and final voyage aboard
Christina,
a tour of the Aegean. On July 4 he left Athens for London by air;
Christina
was then made ready for its next guest, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who sought a peaceful autumn interlude after the death that summer of her infant son, Patrick. She also sought rest and relaxation in order to prepare herself for the fall campaign season in the United States, which would include a trip to Texas in November. And so it came to pass that Churchill’s television again saw use late in the evening of Friday, November 22. That night Churchill sat in silence for a long time before the fire. Yet, as with Diana’s death a month earlier, the full impact of the president’s murder was dulled by Churchill’s advanced age.
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