Churchill and the King Read online

  Each man followed the practice of careful arrangement in the name of perfection. They sought these absolutes. Several people have noted the king’s “eagle eye,” for example. This was known as a Windsor family trait; his father had it as well, often commenting upon the slightest sartorial slippage as if it were a capital offense. The practice, whether intentional or not, had the effect of cowing others and making the king appear cold and critical. It offset his otherwise consistent efforts to foster a sense of camaraderie. One day, for instance, the king noticed that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder “was not wearing the Africa Star. Tedder replied that he did not know if he was entitled to it, but he was not interested unless all his chaps received it. Went on to say that the decision had been taken.”

  “‘Yes,’ said the King rather testily: ‘one more dammed [sic] 2 a.m. decision taken by Winston and a very silly one too.’” Here again he took after his father. George V’s biographer Kenneth Rose has written:

  Perhaps he did attach too much importance to what he wore; but then he grew up in an age that cared for such things. Endowed with neither inches nor a commanding presence, [George V] made the most of his modest attributes. His hair was always brushed with care, his beard neatly trimmed and anointed with lavender water, his manicured hands protected by gloves when shooting. Almost at death’s door in 1928, he insisted on sending for a looking glass. He liked to have his family round him as he completed the ritual of dressing for dinner: the winding of the watch, the touch of scent on the handkerchief, the last adjustment to white tie and Garter Star. It was as if the centuries had rolled away and the Sun King reigned once more at Versailles.

  George V went to great lengths to dictate matters related to uniforms and comportment, such as ordering his grown son to take his hat off before kissing his mother at the railroad station. His son would retain the habit, at one point insisting, in the case of plans that were being drawn up for the postwar army, that he see and approve all matters pertaining to military dress.

  Churchill’s eye was also keen, but it tended to notice things behind the scenes or between the lines, as it were, rather than oversights per se. His attention to detail expressed itself more obliquely. He was known, for example, to pass judgment after asking just a single question. John Peck, an assistant, has recalled going to work for him.

  It was the first time I had seen Winston Churchill at close range. He was sitting up in bed with a large cigar in his mouth, studying some maps. He took no notice of me, but at intervals he reached forward to stroke a fine black cat sleeping at the foot of the bed.

  “Poor Pussy,” he said, “poor Pussy.” I stood in silence for what seemed an age, while he comforted the cat. He then said “Poor Pussy. He’s just had a painful operation. His name is Nelson. So you’ve come to work for me.”

  “Yes please, Sir.”

  “Good, what have you got there?”

  I told him. He looked through the papers. A gentle, almost paternal smile.

  “Thank you very much.” I was in.

  The king was slower with his judgment but also struggled with a bad temper and a terrible propensity to worry, forcing calmness upon himself—often with cigarettes. Churchill’s own sleeping, smoking, drinking, and eating habits—often seen to be excessive—were, with the partial exception of the final one, also like what today is popularly called self-medication.

  Even in repose, Churchill’s pregnant mind and restless constitution remained active. So odd were his working and meal hours, which he called “stomach” or “tummy” time, that he kept going by a fondness, acquired in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, for taking afternoon naps—absent which he could be in the foulest of moods—usually followed by a second daily bath.

  Knowing this fact about his physiology helps to explain other well-known habits. Churchill has been celebrated as a great champion of the glass, and this was true, but it should be said that he rarely abused alcohol; he was a “sipper not a guzzler.” He preferred champagne, brandy, and whiskey, and drank little else; and though he took it at all hours, his whiskey almost always came heavily diluted with water. Only on rare occasions did he vary, for example, during the First World War when he drank hock and received a rebuke. His riposte: “I am interning it.”

  A similar tendency governed his enthusiasm for tobacco. Accounts vary but most say that he rarely actually smoked; he simply kept the cigars in his mouth, or in his hand after having lit them. He certainly was neither a drunkard—as Hitler had once called him—nor a chain smoker. What he abused, if this is the correct word, was an appetite for food. He generally liked a simple English diet—especially roast beef—at any time of the day, but very little bread, as, he said, “it is nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach.” He was not averse to more elaborate cuisines but was usually disinclined to impose limits on his diet.

  More than drink, cigars, or roast beef, his greatest tonic was the rhythm of life itself, in spite of the above-mentioned belief in constancy. Change, he said, is “[a]ll that the human structure requires.” He loved to change plans and change them again, which drove his military commanders mad. Rest, especially sleep, were necessities to master, not to obey. While Churchill rarely heeded anyone’s advice to take a rest, he would also suggest that he had no choice in the matter, as if he were in a race to achieve as much as possible in the limited time provided to him, albeit on his own schedule, which also included long hours working in bed, generally in his favorite silk Chinese dragon dressing gown alongside his favorite cat (Nelson or “Cat, darling”).

  —

  Like the king, Churchill had few permanent enemies or hatreds, although this was not true in reverse, as many people were said to hate him at given moments. He once said that “he hated nobody and didn’t feel he had any enemies—except the Huns, and that was professional!” This did not mean that he was never angry. Colville observed that his temper “was like lightning and sometimes terrifying to see, but it lasted for a short time.”

  He could be violently offensive to those who worked for him and although he would never say he was sorry, he would equally never let the sun go down without in some way making amends or showing that he had not meant to be unkind. His sarcasm could be biting, but it was often accompanied by an engaging smile which seemed to say that no harm was really intended.

  He had to be careful. The “dignity of a Prime Minister,” he said, “like a lady’s virtue, is not susceptible of partial diminution.” Again, like the king, he spoke with the voice of the nation, or as he once put it, in reaction to Ismay’s having given him credit for inspiring the British people: “Not at all. It was given to me to express what was in the[ir] hearts. . . . If I had said anything else, they would have hurled me from office.” Churchill repeated the idea several times, as those who recall his line—“It was the nation and the race living all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called on to give the roar”—will know.

  He liked credit but only certain kinds: medals he craved; titles he abjured. He repeatedly turned down the Order of the Garter until finally persuaded to accept it in 1953, which allowed him to say “with his schoolboy’s grin, ‘Now Clemmie will have to be a lady at last.’” Otherwise, “I don’t see why I should not have the Garter and continue to be known as Mr. Churchill,” he wondered. “After all, my father was known as Lord Randolph Churchill, but he was not a Lord. That was only a courtesy title. Why should I not continue to be called Mr. Churchill as a discourtesy title?”

  He nevertheless did accept the Order of Merit and the title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1941, which allowed him to stay at Walmer Castle, Wellington’s final residence, although living so close to the Channel had by then become too dangerous.

  There were these occasional attempts to appear humble. They were also exaggerated, perhaps. The point is that both Churchill and the king depicted their public role as being indistinguishable f
rom their service as symbols of the people and the nation. Both understood the value of perceptions and impressions and the significance these had on public opinion, their first audience.

  Both men therefore shared the tendency to draw connections between moods, habits, dispositions, tendencies, and personality, with varying degrees of self-awareness. This was connected to their need for companionship. Churchill, especially, found it hard to be alone for too long. Ultimately, both shared the tension between the internally and the externally driven parts of their character, possibly, in extremes—because who they were (and who they knew they were) and what was, and was seen to be, expected of them came to exist in relation and in reference to each other. When they felt alone, they both had a “tendency to morbidness and introspection and self-pity.” The king’s only began to dissolve following his marriage. Churchill’s never really did.

  The king’s favorite principles were the simplest: they were consistent, he said, with his lifelong service as a freemason: “hierarchic discipline . . . dignity and simplicity of [the] ceremonial . . . [and] the simplicity and vitality of [the] three great tenets—brotherly love, relief and truth.” These were the sources of his concentration, regulation, and moderation. Relaxation and stimulation for their own sake were another matter. The king’s enjoyment of motoring, for example—being a “demon driver”—probably served no other purpose. Churchill’s pleasures were had in five-pack bezique, the Corinthian bagatelle, and the occasional film, as well as singing. He also had a special fondness for water—of any kind. He loved to partake in exuberant baths: to “fling himself under the water, and then surface again, blowing like a whale. When he emerged from the bath Sawyers would be standing with an enormous towel, and, draped in this, the prime minister would pace to and fro, followed by [a secretary] with notebook and pencil.” Unlike the king, he adored the sea. There are frequent references to his porpoise-like qualities, his bathing “like a hippopotamus in a swamp.” Rarely was he bothered by any aquatic subject. Sawyers once observed him resting on top of his hot water bottle.

  “That isn’t at all a good idea.”

  “Idea? It isn’t an idea, it’s a coincidence.”

  Churchill’s most celebrated hobby, finally, was painting. It may have been the only activity about which he was consistently modest: “I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.” The challenge was to avoid the tendency to “turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon” it. He continued:

  We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. . . . Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette—clean no longer—and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken . . . I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berzerk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.

  It was with painting and in tending the house, walls, and fields at Chartwell that Churchill appeared most at peace. For all that he thrived upon action, he was not immune to the need for rest and relaxation, although here, too, he was as obsessive over minute matters as in any other field—for example, taking considerable time to lay bricks or to inspect the butterflies, golden orfe, and other fauna and flora in Chartwell’s gardens, small waterfalls, pools and streams, many of which he designed, dug, or built himself.

  “Nobody is more lovable than he when he is in this frame of mind,” Colville said, “communicative and benign.” How else may one regard a wartime prime minister “snuggled down beneath the bedclothes,” given his copy of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and then “smiling sweetly” before saying good night?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Horror

  In the fall of 1939, after the declaration of war, Churchill rejoined the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. His “fortunes . . . underwent the most dramatic reversal of any politician of modern times.” Chamberlain “showed me his War Cabinet,” the king recorded in his diary. “Winston Churchill as 1st Lord was a surprise though I knew he would be in the War Cabinet.” The next day they met. Churchill was “[v]ery pleased to be back in harness again. Wanted more destroyers.”

  Churchill had returned. At the Admiralty he sat at the same desk as the one he had used from 1911 until 1915. “He rushed up the steps and flung open the panelling. There were the charts. The ships were still there.” In the House of Commons, he sat listening to Chamberlain and was incensed at the situation in which the country now found itself. “Once again defence of the rights of a weak State, outraged and invaded by unprovoked aggression, forced us to draw the sword. Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined and ruthless German race. Once again! So be it.”

  When, after the war, Churchill began his six-volume history of it where his earlier history The World Crisis had left off, he noted that the two wars were essentially one thirty-year-long conflict. So there he was, following the same practices: twice-daily reports of ship movements, weather reports—he would affix a small cardboard dolphin to indicate a gale on the map—even inquiring as to size and substance of ship cargoes, the lists of recent arrestees kept by the Home Office, the rationale for personnel decisions, and any number of other statistics, at whatever hour he pleased.

  Nearly everything was in its place; “normal” life had resumed. “Winston is back” was the signal flashed to the fleet. The signal “could be read both ways: the navy’s memories of him were mixed, and he knew it.” No matter. He set about doing what he knew best: dictating correspondence and memoranda that began “Pray inform me”; filling and emptying boxes with memoranda marked “Action this day”; exhorting bureaucrats and politicians to give him the resources he demanded; immersing himself in the details of the navy and making his presence felt with officers; planning and planning again for every conceivable contingency; touring ships and bases, meeting sailors; and arguing with his fellow members of the War Cabinet, “rather an old team,” as he put it.

  Whatever the continuities or resemblances, however, this war became something altogether different. Britain and much of the world had never seen anything so ruinous. Never before, even during the blackest hours on the western front in the last war, had anyone felt so intimately the prospect of total destruction. Never before in modern memory were so many of Europe’s large cities bombed and burned to the ground; never had such power amassed on a global scale against the empire and all the assumptions of so many generations. But this all lay ahead.

  In April, Churchill took over as chairman of the Military Co-ordination Committee, an unwieldy position with Chamberlain still prime minister, not only because it divided authority at the top but also because it blended oversight with operations in an ambiguous and increasingly rancorous fashion. It was otherwise known as the “Winston problem.” Churchill was effectively “Deputy Prime Minister” for defense but without all the levers of power at his disposal, an arrangement that seemed designed merely to appease him and his supporters. At the same time, it suited Churchill: although he was nominally under Chamberlain, he could keep clean, or at least sufficiently undamaged, for he must have felt that he was all the country had left.

  This need to avoid divisions of authority was behind Churchill’s determination when he became prime minister in May 1940 to concentrate all important authority in himself by serving also as head of the Ministry of Defence and as chairman of the Conservative Party. It was significant that this was done with the king’s formal support. Churchill now sought to control all the levers of national power, military as well as political, so as to ensure against, he would have said, the heavy liability of the last war. Yet he was not, nor could he ever be, the head of state.

  However great his reputati
on, however deep his commitment to winning the war, or however complete his mastery of its details had become, Churchill was always a formal step beneath Roosevelt and Stalin, the leaders of his nation’s two allies. (There was also an official head of state in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin, but he was really a nominal figure, in every sense.) Britain had been in the weakest, or at least the most vulnerable, position of the three. However much Churchill was regarded as their equal or even—in many instances, by age and experience—their superior, he would always be a minister. Etiquette, especially toasts at the conferences of the Big Three, had to take this fact into account. It was occasionally curious, and at other times awkward, that the heads of two nominally revolutionary states were obliged to toast an absent British king.