this issue

“A Time
for Old Men”
THE JOURNAL OF WINSTON CHURCHILL
SPRING 2011 • NUMBER 150
$9.95 / £6.50
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CONTENTS
The Journal of
Winston Churchill
,
Number 150
Spring 2011
COVER
Alkon, 16
Reardon, 20
“The Debate on the Address, House of Commons, 1 November 1960,” by Alfred R. Thomson RA.
Sir Winston Churchill (back cover) is in his usual seat below the gangway. Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan is speaking. Seated behind him (red hair) is Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys.
To Sandys’ right are Henry Brooke and (back cover) Selwyn Lloyd, R.A. Butler and, probably, John
Maclay. Behind Maclay, leaning forward with paper in hand, is the Prime Minister’s son Maurice.
Facing Macmillan, leaning forward with paper in hand, is the Leader of the Opposition, Labour’s
Hugh Gaitskell; behind him, also leaning, is Liberal Leader Jo Grimond. The painting, presented to
Harold Macmillan by the 1922 Committee in 1963, hangs in the Palace of Westminster.
ARTICLES
Theme of the Issue: “A Time for Old Men”
10/ Introduction: Age and Leadership • Richard M. Langworth
11/ May 1940: A Time for Old Men • Don C. Graeter
16/ Churchill on Clemenceau: His Best Student? Part I • Paul Alkon
20/ The Reluctant Retiree: Did Churchill Stay Too Long? • Terry Reardon
25/ Holding Fast: Churchill’s Longevity • John H. Mather M.D.
26/ The Lion in Winter: Encounters with Churchill 1946-1962 • Dana Cook
31/ Confronting Television in Old Age • The Editors
32/ Churchill Defiant: Barbara Leaming’s Brilliant Insights • Richard M. Langworth
kkk
34/ “Anarchism and Fire”: What We Can Learn from Sidney Street • Christopher C. Harmon
36/ “Golden Eggs,” Part II: Intelligence and the Eastern Front • Martin Gilbert
43/ On Russia • Winston S. Churchill
CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGS
58/ Great Contemporaries: Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher • Barry Gough
Leaming, 32
Gough, 58
BOOKS, ARTS & CURIOSITIES
44/ The King’s Speech, by David Seidler • David Freeman
45/ Christian Encounters: Winston Churchill, by John Perry • Ted Hutchinson
46/ The De Valera Deception, by Michael & Patrick McMenamin • David Freeman
47/ The Right Words: The Patriot’s Churchill and Winston • Christopher H. Sterling
48/ In the Dark Streets Shineth, by David McCullough • Michael Richards
48/ Secrets of the Dead: Churchill’s Deadly Decision, a PBS Documentary • Earl Baker
50/ My Years with the Churchills, by Heather White-Smith • Barbara F. Langworth
50/ The Man Who Saved Europe, by Klaus Wiegrefe • Max Edward Hertwig
52/ Churchill in Fiction: Historical Characters in Need of Character • Michael Menamin
54/ Education: How Guilty Were the German Field Marshals? • Rob Granger & the Editor
62/ Moments in Time: Churchill in North Africa, August 1942 • Kevin Morris
DEPARTMENTS
2/ The Churchill Centre • 4/ Despatch Box • 6/ Datelines • 6/ Quotation of the Season
8/ Around & About • 10/ From the Editor • 31/ Riddles, Mysteries, Enigmas
43/ Wit & Wisdom • 56/ Action This Day • 61/ Churchill Quiz
FINESTHOUR150/3
DESPATCH BOX
SOMERVELL AWARD
Number 150 • Spring 2011
ISSN 0882-3715
www.winstonchurchill.org
____________________________
Barbara F. Langworth, Publisher
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Richard M. Langworth, Editor
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Moultonborough, NH 03254 USA
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December-March Tel. (242) 335-0615
__________________________
Editorial Board
Paul H. Courtenay, David Dilks,
David Freeman, Sir Martin Gilbert,
Edward Hutchinson, Warren Kimball,
Richard Langworth, Jon Meacham,
Michael McMenamin, James W. Muller,
John Olsen, Allen Packwood, Terry
Reardon, Suzanne Sigman,
Manfred Weidhorn
Senior Editors:
Paul H. Courtenay
James W. Muller
News Editor:
Michael Richards
Contributors
Alfred James, Australia
Terry Reardon, Canada
Antoine Capet, James Lancaster, France
Paul Addison, Sir Martin Gilbert,
Allen Packwood, United Kingdom
David Freeman, Fred Glueckstein,
Ted Hutchinson, Warren F. Kimball,
Justin Lyons, Michael McMenamin,
Robert Pilpel, Christopher Sterling,
Manfred Weidhorn, United States
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• Address changes: Help us keep your copies coming! Please update your membership office when
you move. All offices for The Churchill Centre
and Allied national organizations are listed on
the inside front cover.
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Finest Hour is made possible in part through the
generous support of members of The Churchill
Centre and Museum, the Number Ten Club,
and an endowment created by the Churchill
Centre Associates (page 2).
___________________________________
Published quarterly by The Churchill Centre,
offering subscriptions from the appropriate
offices on page 2. Permission to mail at nonprofit rates in USA granted by the United
States Postal Service, Concord, NH, permit
no. 1524. Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
Produced by Dragonwyck Publishing Inc.
Issue 149 reminds me again to
express gratitude for the kindness and
support given my article, “Eye-Witness
to Potsdam,” by the Finest Hour
Editorial Board in naming it for the
Somervell Award.
Last week three local newspapers
printed articles about the award, and I
have been asked if I will give a story to
the Liverpool Echo, which covers
Merseyside. Local schools want me to
appear as well so I am preparing to talk
to future generations about what Sir
Winston did for us all.
NEVILLE BULLOCK, ASHTON, LANCS,
STUDENTS’ CHOICE
In discussing Richard Holmes’s In
the Footsteps of Churchill, included in
his “Five Best Recent Churchill
Books,” (FH 148: 40), John P. Rossi
quotes Holmes’s statement that
“Without Churchill, Britain would
have lost the war.” Mr. Holmes also
stated (page 230, Basic Books paperback edition): “In 1940-41 Britain
would not have survived as an independent nation had it not been for the
agricultural, industrial and financial aid
received from Canada.” By the end of
World War II, Britain had received
$3.5 billion in gifts from Canada, and
more in loans.
TERRY REARDON, ETOBICOKE, ONT.
Editor’s response: In an interesting
if depressing column, “Dependence
Day,” in the January 2011 New
Criterion, Mark Steyn writes: “Threesevenths of the G7 economies are
nations of British descent. Two-fifths of
the permanent members of the U.N.
Security Council are—and, by the way,
it should be three-fifths. The rap
against the Security Council is that it’s
the Second World War victory parade
preserved in aspic, but if it were,
Canada would have a greater claim to
be there than either France or China”
(http://xrl.us/biffwx).
THANKS
I must tell you that Finest Hour
seems to be going from success to
success and I find myself engrossed for
a day or two after each arrival. The
FINESTHOUR150/4
current issue is perhaps the best ever.
The information about intelligence is
new, at least to me, and fascinating.
ROY M. PITKIN, LA QUINTA, CALIF.
“GOOGLEWORLD”
Your article on the digital world’s
effects on joining organizations (FH
148: 44) is intriguing. And worrying.
How do any of us find financial
support in Googleworld? I don't have
an answer, but I think you are right.
We cannot resist the tide, and must
find ways of floating on it. Rupert
Murdoch is making a brave attempt to
move his newspapers to the web, but I
think it is far from certain he will
succeed. How long can we rely on the
overly generous contributions of time
and money from people who have sustained so many non-profits for so long?
I don't know. You are entirely right to
raise the issue and have it discussed.
The worst aspect of the “Churchill
industry” is how parts of it refuse to
move with the times, want everything
to stay as it was—to see Churchill
through spectacles so deeply tinted
with rose that they cannot look ahead.
Incidentally, I spoke at the
Imperial War Museum in December,
supporting WSC as the Greatest British
Prime Minister, during a debate for
London History Week. Talking about
him to a diverse audience had them
standing on their feet (and buying
books). Whenever we manage to get
the message across, I find it is always
well received.
LORD DOBBS, WYLYE, WILTS.
SUTHERLAND PORTRAIT
I take exception to the statement
on page 5 (FH 148) that Clementine
Churchill was within her rights to
destroy the 1954 portrait of Sir
Winston by Graham Sutherland. This
was a work of art commissioned by
Parliament. As I see it, civilized people
respect art even if they lack the ability
to appreciate it. It would be more intelligent to publish photographs of the
portrait, as well as Sutherland’s portraits of Somerset Maugham, Helena
Rubinstein and Konrad Adenauer,
together with a commentary from a
qualified critic of modern portraiture.
This would not include anyone in the
employ of Hallmark greeting cards.
National galleries and government
offices are filled with portraits the
subject disliked. Dolley Madison was
willing to risk her life to save a Gilbert
Stuart portrait of George Washington,
whether or not Martha liked it. The
National Trust spends time and money
to preserve buildings, art and memorabilia, and would deplore the wanton
destruction of so-called private property. It is fortuitous that Clementine
did not destroy Chartwell, which she
also disliked.
ROBERT L. HALFYARD, N. QUINCY, MASS.
USS Winston S. Churchill, DDG-81
Editor’s response: Lady Churchill
did not dislike Chartwell. Without her
enthusiasm and support, preparing the
house for exhibit by the National Trust
would have been problematic. What
she disliked, at least in the early years,
was its expense.
The controversy over the
Sutherland painting is bewildering.
Unlike Stuart’s Washington, it was not
the property of the nation. It was
private property, regardless of who presented it. Some believed that it should
have been donated to the National
Trust, even though it never hung at
Chartwell. That has a familiar ring.
Prominent people are forever being
told that they should give their property to society, that to do what they
please with it is, well, tacky. The origin
of this presumption lies in the belief
that private property is literally a gift,
which all right thinkers should pass
along for appreciation by critics (in
this case provided they don’t work for
Hallmark). A more sensitive view of
the matter is in Lady Soames’s book on
her father’s life as a painter, which we
quoted.
WINSTON: “A LONGING
TO GO TO SEA”
I am remiss in sharing a few cherished stories about time spent with Sir
Winston’s late grandson, an experience
which showed a surprising technical
side of him that I didn’t read in the
remembrances in Finest Hour 147.
Soon after I had departed as commanding officer of USS Winston S.
Churchill, Winston wanted to visit the
ship during one of his stays in
Washington. I think he wanted to
verify that the satellite TV he had purchased for the crew was working, that
the ship had maintained its lavish publike chiefs’ mess, and that the books he
so generously donated were not on
display, but rather being read.
We organized a rendezvous south
of DC. The plan was for me to escort
him to the Norfolk Navy Base in his
chauffeured automobile. We had an
intriguing talk during the three-hour
drive. During intermissions, to let our
jaws rest, he broke out his laptop and
immediately began emailing, while
speeding down I-95, his fingers flying
across the keyboard.
Since this preceded 4G networks
and the common use of “hot zones,” I
asked how he managed to get a signal.
That unleashed a torrent of technospeak in reply. Winston went on and
on about how to rig one’s car to maximize reception, the proper phone
network in the central Atlantic states
versus the Miami metropolitan area,
burst transmissions, condensing emails,
and other crucial tips to stay connected
in the 21st century. The conversation
continued into a truck stop (my recommendation—appropriate, I thought,
since we had been discussing The Great
Republic, his book on his grandfather’s
writings of America). Alas we had an
absolutely heinous meal, memorable to
a fault. We laughed about that truck
stop for the next two days.
FINESTHOUR150/5
The ship visit was pleasant for
Winston and a bit emotional for me.
He was most at home with the fire
control and electronics technicians—
the two ratings responsible for much of
what makes a modern destroyer
modern. [His grandfather is erroneously credited with coining the term
“destroyer,” which actually dates to the
1890s. —Ed.]
Our drive home was about radar
signals, wave theory, electro-magnetic
induction, weapons control systems,
and modern navigation techniques (he
favored the old ways of navigation).
For a journalist with a liberal arts education, he found a comfortable niche in
the techno-babble that is today’s Navy.
I thought I saw in his eye a longing to
go to sea.
You may be interested to know
that Sir Winston’s 1897 observations
of the Northwest Frontier, also in
Finest Hour 147, still hold true in the
Punjabi region:
…tribes war with tribes. Every man’s
hand is against the other and all are
against the stranger.…the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of
mind which holds life cheap and
embarks on war with careless levity and
the tribesmen of the Afghan border
afford the spectacle of a people who
fight without passion and kill one
another without loss of temper….A
trifle rouses their animosity. They
make a sudden attack on some frontier
post. They are repulsed. From their
point of view the incident is closed.
There has been a fair fight in which
they have had the worst fortune. What
puzzles them is that the “Sirkar”
should regard so small an affair in a
serious light.
After two and a half years of
dealing with the strategy, policy, and
planning for the Middle East and the
Central and South Asia regions, I find
the young Winston Churchill as right
today as he was in the days of the
Malakand Field Force.
Who knows…but my next posting
may lead to a modern appreciation of
The River War. Maybe even a unique
destination for The Churchill Centre’s
meeting of the board. We shall see.
RADM MICHAEL T. FRANKEN, USN
UNITED STATES CENTRAL COMMAND ,
DAT E L I N E S
1911-2011: THE SIDNEY STREET CENTENARY
LONDON, DECEMBER 18TH—
The Museum of London
Docklands today opened a new
exhibition, “London under Siege:
Churchill and the Anarchists,”
featuring the Astrakhan-collared
greatcoat Churchill wore when he
controversially arrived at the scene
to observe operations against
criminals on 3 January 1911.
(Reported by The Guardian website,
http://xrl.us/bh68rg.)
Mr. Clive
Bettington of
the Jewish
East End
Celebration
Society, cosponsors of the
exhibit, says
Sidney Street “is part of East End and
socialist folklore and the area at the
time was home to radical political
groups, most of whom had come from
Eastern Europe, thus helping exaggerate people’s imaginations about
immigration and other cultures.”
If there’s any exaggeration it’s
the publicity. A legal and warranted
police action does not amount to
“London under Siege.” Whether or
not the “Latvian anarchists” cornered
at Sidney Street were socialists, they
were in the process of robbing a
jewelry shop when the police were
summoned. (See “Anarchism and
Fire,” page 34.)
The jeweler’s shop was at 119
Houndsditch, near Cutler Street and
Goring Street. The besieged house was
at 100 Sidney Street, which runs north
and south from Whitechapel Road to
Commercial Road, near Whitechapel
Underground station. Unfortunately
there is little left to see of the neighborhood as it was in 1911, since it was
rebuilt as the Sidney Street Estate in
the postwar reconstruction of Stepney.
One of the blocks at the end of the
Quotation of the Season
“I
f a man is coming across the sea to
kill you, you do everything in your
power to make sure he dies before fin-
street was named “Siege
ishing his journey. That may be difficult, it
House,” but number 100
may be painful, but at least it is simple. We
was actually on the east
are now entering a world of imponderables,
side, about halfway down,
near Sidney Square.
and at every stage occasions for self-quesChurchill’s presence
tioning arise. Only one link in the chain of
at the scene in 1911
destiny can be handled at a time.”
pursued him a long time.
Speaking in Shepherd’s
—WSC, HOUSE OF COMMONS,
Bush about the departing
18 FEBRUARY 1945
government before the
general election of 3
December 1923, WSC
Vogel and Fritz Svaars; “Svaars” could
remarked: “In the brief period during
be
Latvian, but not “Fritz.”
which they held office they have not
succeeded in handling a single public
THE DREAM IN COLOMBO
question with success.” The crowd
COLOMBO, NOVEMBER 20TH— Sri Lanka,
laughed when a voice said, “They sucthe
country Churchill knew as
ceeded at the battle of Sidney Street,
Ceylon,
not unfamiliar with civil
didn't they?” Churchill shot back: “We
upheaval,
reflected on his littlehave always been wondering where
known
1947
short story, The Dream,
Peter the Painter got to.”
FH
125:
41,
FH 126: 44). Part of
(
Churchill’s account of the “Siege
the
dialogue:
of Sidney Street” is in his Thoughts
Lord Randolph Churchill: “But
and Adventures, pages 63-72 of the
tell
me
about these other wars.”
new ISI Books edition edited by James
Winston:
“They were the wars
W. Muller. Churchill concludes: “Of
of
nations,
caused
by demagogues
‘Peter the Painter’ not a trace was ever
and
tyrants.”
found. He vanished completely.
LRC: “Did we win?”
Rumour has repeatedly claimed him as
WSC: “Yes, we won all our
one of the Bolshevik liberators and
wars.
All
our enemies were beaten
saviours of Russia. Certainly his qualidown.
We
even made them surrender
ties and record would well have fitted
unconditionally.”
him to take an honoured place in that
LRC: “No one should be made
noble band. But of this Rumour is
to
do
that. Great people forget sufferalone the foundation.”*
ings,
but
not humiliations.”
* One of FH’s contributors liked
WSC:
“Well, that was the way
to tweak the editor, who is of partit
happened,
Papa.”
Latvian extraction, by reiterating the
LRC:
“How
did we stand after
claim (revived in current publicity)
it
all?
Are
we
still
at
the summit of
that the Sidney Street gang were
the
world,
as
we
were
under Queen
“Latvian anarchists,” knowing that
Victoria?”
each time, the editor would faithfully
WSC: “No, the world grew
edit this out! This was not to whitemuch
bigger all around us.”
wash Latvians, but because the gang
LRC:
“…Winston, you have
leader, “Peter the Painter” (variously
told
me
a
terrible
tale. I would never
identified as Peter Piatkow, Peter
have
believed
that
such things could
Straume or Jacob Peters) did not
happen.
I
am
glad
I did not live to
possess a Latvian name. Two accomsee
them.”
The
article
continues...
plices who died in the blaze were Jacob
FINESTHOUR150/6
DATELINES
I
n 1947, Sir Winston Churchill wrote
about a dream he had. He had been
seated in his studio trying to paint a
portrait of his father. He felt an odd
sensation and turned around to see his
father, then long dead, seated in the
leather armchair behind him. A long
conversation on a
wide range
of subjects
followed,
an extract
of which is
quoted
opposite.
This
imaginary
conversation
Finest Hour 56
between
father and
son seems appropriate now with the
issue of the horrors of war coming up
in evidence before the Sri Lanka
Commission on Lessons Learnt and
Reconciliation, and in some happenings connected to it.
When Al-Jazeera published what
it stated were still unverified photographs of the Eelam War [against Tamil
separatists, won by the Sri Lanka government in 2009], the government
spokesperson’s immediate reaction was
to claim they were fakes. Recently, it
has been repeated that there were zero
civilian deaths due to offensives by the
security forces. On the contrary, there
have been repeated claims by many
civilians….
These rival claims can only be
verified by an independent inquiry,
either by a specially constituted panel
acceptable to most independent civil
society organizations or by a Truth
Commission on the lines of the Tutu
Commission in South Africa. It is in
the interests of the government to see
that an independent inquiry is done.
—FEDRICA JANZ, SRI LANKA GUARDIAN
HEEERE’S ADOLF!
BERLIN, OCTOBER 29TH— Germany has
opened a Hitler Museum—but cynics
who predicted an “Adolf Hitler Platz”
one day will have to wait. The German
Historical Museum’s exhibit, entitled
“Hitler and the German Nation and
Crime,” is devoted to the citizenry’s
complicity in the Third Reich. This is
new: for decades after the war, German
students were taught that Hitler had
effectively hijacked the nation as it
stood and watched.
“That much of the German
people became enablers, colluders, cocriminals in the Holocaust” is now a
mainstream view, says political analyst
Constanze Stelenmüller. “But it took us
a while to get there.” The exhibit consists largely of everyday objects that
ordinary Germans made to glorify the
Führer, such as a tapestry woven by
church women interspersed with
images of townsfolk, the Lord’s Prayer
and the Swastika.
“WSC DIDN’T SAY THAT”
Ross
Douthat describes The King’s Speech
(reviewed on page 44) as “comfort food
for Anglophiles [with] plummy accents,
faultless sets, master thespians and an
entirely unobjectionable political
message (down with Hitler and snobbery, but God Save the King).” But
Christopher Hitchens in Slate accuses
the film of “gross falsifications of
history” (www.slate.com/id/2282194/).
Hitchens says it whitewashes Churchill
by painting him as an ally of George
VI, who succeeded his brother, the
“Nazi sympathizer” Edward VIII, when
in fact the “bombastic” WSC stuck
with Edward to the last, squandering
his political capital as an anti-appeaser.
Once Edward abdicated, the Royal
Family, a “rather odd little German
dynasty,” was “invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in
‘Britain's finest hour.’”
We were all set to send Slate a
rebuttal, as over Hitchens’ Atlantic rant
in 2002 (FH 114, http://xrl.us/bif47u),
labeling Churchill “incompetent,
boorish, drunk and mostly wrong.” But
Slate readers responding on their
website spared us the task.
The film emphasizes Churchill’s
instinctive support for the monarchy,
which is accurate. Edward VIII was a
regrettable character, not even controllable as governor of the Bahamas,
where several kettles of ripe fish were
WASHINGTON, JANUARY 25TH—
FINESTHOUR150/7
left when he quit
Nassau. But his proNazi ideas (which
Hitchens incorrectly
says “never ceased”)
were as shallow as the
rest of him, probably
stemming from his
Edward VIII
admiration of how
Herr Hitler got his way without the
inconvenience of a Parliament.
King George VI was scarcely
alone in supporting Chamberlain and
appeasement. A whole generation had
been wasted in World War I, as Alistair
Cooke elegantly put it during the 1988
Churchill Conference: “The British
people would do anything to stop
Hitler, except fight him. And if you
had been there, ladies and gentlemen—
if you had been alive and sentient and
British in the mid-Thirties—not one in
ten of you would have supported Mr.
Winston Churchill.”
King George
VI’s deportment in
World War II won
him the lasting
respect of his people,
eclipsing his mistaken beliefs before
1940. Churchill’s
George VI
political reverse after
defending Edward VIII was brief and
insignificant; his comeback as “Prophet
of Truth” was soon back on track as
events proved he’d been right all along.
Gross falsifications of history? All
we have here is the grossly iconoclastic
Chris Hitchens, personification of the
Member of Parliament described by
Arthur Balfour: “The hon. gentleman
has said much that is trite and much
that is true, but what’s true is trite, and
what’s not trite is not true.”
—EDITOR
“WSC WROTE ABOUT IT”
Columnist
Bret Stephens on “America’s Will to
Weakness”: “Beijing provokes clashes
with the navies of Indonesia and Japan
as part of a bid to claim the South
China Sea. Tokyo is in a serious diplomatic row with Russia over the South
Kuril islands, a leftover dispute from
1945. There are credible fears that >>
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 16TH—
DATELINES
Teheran and Damascus will overthrow
the elected Lebanese government.
Managua is attempting to annex a
sliver of Costa Rica, a nation much too
virtuous to have an army of its own.
And speaking of Nicaragua, Daniel
Ortega is setting himself up as another
Hugo Chávez by running, unconstitutionally, for another term. Both men
are friends and allies of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad,.”
All this was written before Egypt
and Libya exploded, Pakistan abducted
a U.S. diplomat, and Argentina, which
the U.S. obliges by calling the Falkland
Islands “Malvinas,” confiscated a U.S.
plane used in a joint training exercise.
Stephens continues: “We are now
at risk of entering a period—perhaps a
decade, perhaps a half-century—of
global disorder, brought about by a
combination of weaker U.S. might and
even weaker U.S. will. The last time we
saw something like it was exactly a
century ago. Winston Churchill wrote
a book about it: The World Crisis.
Worth reading today.” Stephens’
column is at: http://xrl.us/bh7377.
DR. WHO?
FULLERTON, CALIF, DECEMBER 15TH— The
following was submitted to me as an
essay on a final exam taken this week.
(If you don’t know who “The Doctor”
is, skip this note or Google Dr. Who.)
“Churchill is known for as the
British Prime Minister during World
War II. He saw the threat that Hitler
presented, unlike Neville Chamberlain,
who thought, ‘Hitler seems like a right
fine old chap.’ Churchill also coined
the ‘iron curtain’ phrase regarding
Communism. What most people don't
know about Churchill is that he was a
personal friend of The Doctor, or at
least he knew The Doctor well enough
to know his phone number and be able
to call him in the TARDIS.
Churchill summoned The
Doctor during World War II when the
Daleks had infiltrated the underground
war cabinet, masquerading as weapon
designed to defeat Hitler, by a British
scientist who turned out to be an
android created by the Daleks and
given fake human memories.
Churchill, it appears later helped River
AROUND & ABOUT
Manfred Weidhorn sends us an excerpt from the
Diaries of Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda chief,
dated 8 May 1941, a year after Churchill had come to
power. Hitler and Goebbels regularly lambasted Churchill as
an aging, delusional liar, Prof. Weidhorn writes; but in his personal daily
diary, Goebbels reflected on what he really thought:
“I study Churchill's new book Step by Step, Speeches from 1936-39
and essays. This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning. If he had
come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today. And I believe
that he will give us a few more problems yet. But we can and will solve them.
Nevertheless he is not to be taken lightly as we usually take him.”
For more public and private Goebbels opinions, see Randall Bytwerk,
“Churchill in Nazi Cartoon Propaganda,” Finest Hour 143, Summer 2009.
kkkkk
On a pundit panel last November 7th, Mara Liasson of National
Public Radio likened outgoing Speaker of the House of Representatives
Nancy Pelosi, then battling to remain her party’s leader in the House after
her party sustained major losses in the November elections, to Winston
Churchill. This was rebutted by Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume,
who said that unlike Pelosi, Churchill had stayed on after winning a great
victory—World War II. (For the video see http:// xrl.us/bh69x8.)
Liasson and Hume are both right and both wrong. Churchill was dismissed in 1945, despite the approaching complete victory in World War II,
while Pelosi lost the Speakership after a great electoral loss (per Hume).
But Churchill, like Pelosi, declared that he would remain party leader despite
electoral defeat (per Liasson).
The issue is obfuscated because the offices aren’t comparable. In
America, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, third in line for the
presidency and party leader in the House, is far more important than the
Speaker of the House of Commons, who is a party politician but “independent of party” when Speaker. And in America the President is always the
titular leader of his party. Still, a Pelosi comeback in 2012, like Churchill’s in
1951, would be bound to produce more comparisons. Over and above the
contemporary politics, it’s nice to know that Churchill is still the benchmark
by which today’s players are measured. ,
Song get the painting Vincent Van
Gogh made of the TARDIS exploding
to the Doctor to warn him of the
Pandora Opening.”
—DAVID FREEMAN
Editor’s note: Doctor Who
episodes frequently involve historical
figures, though we’re not quite sure
how tongue-in-cheek this submission
was. TARDIS, Doctor Who’s time traveling device, is short for “Time and
Relative Distance in Space,” and the
Daleks are the evil robots bent on
world domination. But it will take a
better Dr. Who fan than we to identify
River Song and the Pandora Opening!
Readers please help....
FINESTHOUR150/8
“KARSH 4” UNEARTHED
VANCOUVER, FEBRUARY 2010— In a master’s
thesis entitled “By the Side of the
‘Roaring Lion,’” University of Calgary
graduate student Rebecca Lesser uncovered a fourth in the series of Churchill
photographs snapped by Yousuf Karsh
after Churchill’s “Some Chicken—
Some Neck” speech to the Canadian
Parliament in Ottawa on 30 December
1941. Referred by Terry Reardon, she
sent us her manuscript, which is available from the editor by email. Ms.
Lesser notes that Karsh snapped several
candid photographs of the two leaders:
“It was Mackenzie King who had
arranged for Karsh’s photographic
encounter with Churchill…“he was as
eager to be photographed with his
British counterpart as Karsh himself
was to photograph Churchill.
The third photo, “Karsh 3,” not
pictured by Lesser, was in Karsh’s
account in FH 94; and Terry Reardon’s
“Winston Churchill and Mackenzie
King” in FH 130.
Rebecca Lesser’s fourth photo,
first published on 10 January 1942 in
Canada’s weekly general-interest magazine Saturday Night, “depicts a
laughing Mackenzie King glancing over
at Churchill, who in turn looks into
the camera with a slight smile. The
photograph was deemed unsuitable by
King, as he felt that their jovial expressions were inappropriate for the serious
nature of their meeting; he had not
been posing for this photograph, and
thus had not been granted the opportunity to constitute himself into the
image he wished to convey. King’s
concern regarding the public reception
of such unposed images assured that
these other photographs from that
most famous sitting would be relegated
to the archives.”
We have always thought that
Karsh’s “afterthought” photos of King
and Churchill together (which, unlike
the more famous pair, were never
retouched) convey a truer picture of
both statesmen. We continue to
wonder exactly how many photos
Karsh actually shot that day in Ottawa.
TRUE AND TRITE
NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1ST— Richard Toye’s
biased and lopsided Churchill’s Empire
WHICH KARSH IS THE TRUEST CHURCHILL?
Below left: “Karsh 1,” the “Roaring Lion,” taken after Karsh plucked the cigar from Churchill’s
mouth, resulting in a world-famous grimace. Below right: “Karsh 2,” the “Smiling Lion,” taken
after WSC laughed and said, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” Bottom left: “Karsh 3,” with Mackenzie King—which we think is yet more
genuine. Bottom right: “Karsh 4,” Rebecca Lesser’s discovery, perhaps the best of the lot.
(let off lightly in FH 147) continues to
cast a trail of misinformation. In The
New Yorker of August 30th, Adam
Gopnik wrote a balanced account
(http://xrl.us/bidbyp) of the continuing
interest in and new books about
Churchill, which drew the following
response from a reader in New Mexico:
“Adam Gopnik’s article on
Winston Churchill glides over the
damning portrait of Churchill’s turn-ofthe-century exploits in Richard Toye’s
Churchill’s Empire: The World That
Made Him and the World He Made. It
is hard to reconcile the Churchill who
believed that ‘imperialism and progressivism were parts of the same package,’
and who lamented the death camps of
the Holocaust, with the Churchill who
dispatched hundreds of thousands of
Kenyan Kikuyu, including President
Obama’s grandfather, to torturous detention camps (‘Britain’s Gulag,’ in the
words of the historian Caroline Elkins);
who spoke of Indians as ‘a beastly people
with a beastly religion,’ and who said that
‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph.’
Churchill’s imperial vision reminds us
that a reconsideration of his political
principles must not be confined to the
era that shaped his finest hour.”
To The New Yorker:
The allegation that the
President’s grandfather was a Mau Mau
rebel tortured by the British stems
from a blogsite and/or Obama’s
“Granny Sarah,” who also claimed that
the President was born in Kenya. The
Mau Mau rebellion didn’t begin until
the end of 1952 (a year after Obama’s
grandfather was proven innocent and
released), and Churchill actually
expressed sympathy for the Kenyan
rebels (http://xrl.us/bhwooo). The parliamentary forms extant in India and
developing in Kenya stem from the
British rule your reader deplores. The
“Aryan stock” quotation does not
appear in Churchill’s canon. For better
information than that provided by
author Toye, he might want to rely on
more balanced accounts, such as
Arthur Herman (Gandhi and
Churchill), who knows what Churchill
really thought and did about India
(http://xrl.us/bic86y). —RML ,
FINESTHOUR150/9
THEME OF THE ISSUE
Tigers and Lions: Age and Leadership
“Great captains must take their chance with the rest.
Caesar was assassinated by his dearest friend. Hannibal
was cut off by poison. Frederick the Great lingered out
years of loneliness in body and soul. Napoleon rotted at
St. Helena. Compared with these, Marlborough
had a good and fair end to his life.”
—WSC, Marlborough, vol. IV, 1938
W
inston Churchill served his last term as
Prime Minister between 1951 and 1955,
leaving at the age of 80. Georges
Clemenceau served his last term as Prime Minister of
France from 1917 to 1920, leaving at the age of 79. Each
entered politics under the age of 30, supporting himself
through writing. Each was a radical in his youth, growing
more conservative as he aged. Far beyond retirement age,
each inspired his countrymen, who knew them respectively as France’s Tiger and Britain’s Lion.
Overt similarities aside, as Paul Alkon suggests
herein, there is powerful evidence that Churchill patterned his own political attitudes after Clemenceau,
whom he deeply admired—and that Clemenceau,
although Churchill was the much younger man,
unproven when they met, also admired him.
Clemenceau died in 1929, too soon to consider any
parallels of his career with Churchill’s. Indeed, a comparison between them would never have arisen, were it not
for 1940 and Churchill’s finest hour. In that signal year,
aged over 65, WSC was brought to office by other old
men—not the “troublesome young men” of one recent
book but troubled older men from three different parties.
Their unity of faith and action made Churchill their
nation’s leader at precisely the right time.
Don Graeter’s “A Time for Old Men” focuses on
those days in 1940, and the aging individuals who made
the difference in Britain’s hour of peril. As such, his piece
is well qualified to lead our features on this theme.
Churchill was thought to be politically finished in
1945, when the country flung him from office on the eve
of complete victory over all Britain’s enemies. But he
thought otherwise. When the editor of The Times had
the effrontery to suggest that Churchill should carry
himself as a national leader and not remain long on the
scene, his replies were characteristic, and illuminating:
“Mr. Editor, I fight for my corner….I leave when the
pub closes.” And he meant it—as we learn from Terry
Reardon’s “Reluctant Retiree,” and Barbara Leaming’s
outstanding new book, Churchill Defiant.
How did Churchill do it? John Mather provides the
physical explanation: how a fast-aging statesman, packing
the baggage, the ups and downs of a record career in politics, somehow defied most medical advice and all
actuarial probabilities from 1940 to his final retirement
four months short of his 90th birthday.
“Great captains must take their chance with the
rest.” Churchill took his chance, and like John Churchill
First Duke Marlborough, he “had a good and fair end to
his life.” It wasn’t all he had hoped for: his goal of permanent world peace remained elusive—as it remains
today. Yet who can gainsay his record?
Churchill thought at the end of his life that he had
“worked very hard and achieved a great deal, only to
achieve nothing in the end.” With our longer perspective, we may disagree. Churchill did not win World War
II: what he did was not lose it. “Only Churchill,”
Charles Krauthammer wrote, “carries that absolutely
required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill
the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.” And Charles de Gaulle remarked: “In
the great drama, he was the greatest.”
W
hat can the world’s Democracies learn from
the long careers, devotion to liberty, and
lifetime defiance of odds by leaders like
Churchill and Clemenceau, who lived their finest hours
well over retirement age? Is something to be said for
electing leaders with thirty or forty years’ political experience? Or is this to be avoided, absent a very special type
of character, like Britain’s Lion or France’s Tiger?
That is the theme and purpose of this issue of
Finest Hour. We take no position at the end. Perhaps
none can be taken, because history never repeats, as
Mark Twain quipped—”though it sometimes rhymes.”
Churchill alone could not save the world. But
we can’t resist wondering if others like him will be there
when we need them—and if we will have the fortitude,
like the Old Men of 1940, to hand them the job. We’ll
see—and probably soon.
FINESTHOUR150/10
RICHARD M. LANGWORTH, EDITOR ,
AGE AND LEADERSHIP
May 1940: A Time for Old Men
This improbable political thriller actually happened. An unlikely group of elderly gentlemen
delivered three dramatic, perfectly timed speeches that set in motion a stream of events
which changed the course of history. It was, truly, a time for old men.
HOUSE OF COMMONS LIBRARY
D O N C. G R A E T E R
“I HAVE FRIENDS”: Extremely rare (because photographs were not then allowed in the Commons) this historic photo was surreptitiously snapped with
a Minox spy camera by Conservative MP John Moore-Brabazon. It shows the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declaiming on the first day of the
Norway debate, 7 May 1940, with John Simon and Churchill on the front bench above the gangway. Three days later, Churchill was Prime Minister.
House of Commons, London
Tuesday, 7 May 1940
3:00 pm
The Alcoholic Barrister had risen from modest Welsh
roots. A successful King’s Counsellor, he was as well a
respected Member of Parliament, though isolated as an
independent. Few were aware of his carefully concealed penchant for binge drinking. Largely forgotten today, he will
play a critical role in our drama.
3:15 pm
At 71, the Prime Minister was a very old man at a
time when life expectancy was 59. He had been patient,
however—had waited his turn to lead the country. He did
things his own way. After all, he knew best.
The Prime Minister hardly bothered to conceal his
contempt for His Majesty’s Opposition: the Labour Party
and a handful of disaffected Liberals. What did they matter
with his huge Conservative majority? He tolerated no disloyalty in his own Tory ranks, where his opponents were
few and of little consequence; and those he would crush. >>
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mr. Graeter is Director of Investments for Central Bank of Louisville, Kentucky. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School
and served as a U.S. Navy officer during the Vietnam War. This article is adapted from his remarks to The Forum Club of Louisville.
FINESTHOUR150/11
A TIME FOR OLD MEN...
He knew who they were—had had them under surveillance
for some time. Impatiently, the PM glanced at his watch,
anxious to adjourn for the Whitsun holiday.
3:30 pm
Heads turned as the Admiral walked down Whitehall.
Rarely did Londoners encounter a naval officer on the street
in the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet.
Much decorated for bravery, the Admiral, now 67,
had retired a hero. Financially secure from the success of his
memoirs, he had entered Parliament for North Portsmouth
in 1934. The Conservative Party had been delighted, since
no one could beat a naval icon in Portsmouth.
After a career of danger and hardship, the Admiral had
anchored in tranquil waters, splitting his time between his
country estate and “the best club in London,” as the House
of Commons was known. Politically unambitious, he had
supported his party; yet he now found himself among a
small group of Tory backbenchers increasingly discontented
with the Prime Minister’s leadership.
The business before the House was procedural—a
motion to adjourn for the holiday. But custom dictated that
Members could speak on any topic. The Admiral had
decided to seize the opportunity. He had had enough. No
orator, he would condemn the Prime Minister’s leadership.
He knew the risk of being run out of the party and
deprived of his seat. Well, let the younger, ambitious ones
worry about such things. He would do what he thought was
right and, if necessary, leave public life forever.
7:09 pm
The Admiral rose to deliver his only major speech. His
voice was weak and he visibly trembled. The benches fell
silent, out of respect for who he was and because of his
dress uniform, worn for just this purpose. Six rows of
medals adorned his chest, glittering gold bands ran from his
cuffs to his elbows. His voice did not match the splendor of
his appearance, but the Admiral commanded rapt attention.
The chamber hung on his every word.
He began by criticizing the current British war campaign as “a shocking story of ineptitude.” He praised the
First Lord of the Admiralty, who, he said, had “the confidence of the Navy, and indeed of the whole country.” But
“proper use” of the First Lord’s “great abilities” could not
be made “under the existing system.”
8:03 pm
Internal turmoil gripped the Scholar, another discontented Tory backbencher. He too was 67. Fluent in nine
languages, he had taken a first at Balliol, and had been
elected a fellow of All Souls at an early age. A prominent
journalist, he had won acclaim as a military and political
historian.
In the 1920s, when the Scholar had served as First
Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for the
Colonies, Time had called him the most talented member
of the cabinet, though criticizing his pugnacious manner.
But his party had been ousted in 1929, and in the national
government that followed he had not been invited back.
His career seemed well behind him.
Aware of his reputation as an indifferent speaker, the
Scholar had toiled mightily on the remarks he hoped to
make. Still he was unsure—both of himself and of how far
he should go. He shared the Admiral’s views, but he owed
his seat to the Prime Minister, and the PM had been his
friend. Given his seniority, the Scholar should have been
recognized early—but the Speaker was a political foe and
ignored him until the chamber of the House had nearly
emptied for dinner.
“I came to the House of Commons today in uniform for the first
time because I wish to speak for some officers and men of the
fighting, sea-going Navy....The enemy have been left in undisputable possession of vulnerable ports and aerodromes for nearly a
month, have been given time to pour in reinforcements by sea and
air, to land tanks, heavy artillery and mechanised transport, and
have been given time to develop the air offensive....It is not the fault
of those for whom I speak....If they had been more courageously and
offensively employed they might have done much to prevent these
unhappy happenings and much to influence unfriendly neutrals.” —The Admiral
FINESTHOUR150/12
“We are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all;
we cannot go on being led as we are. I have quoted certain
words of Oliver Cromwell. I will quote certain other words. I
do it with great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who
are old friends and associates of mine, but they are words
which, I think, are applicable to the present situation. This is
what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it
was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: ‘You have
sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I
say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’" —The Scholar
He had almost decided to forgo
comment when from behind came the
urgent tones of the Alcoholic Barrister:
“Now is the time. You must speak.
Play for time. I’ll get you a crowd.”
Gripped by doubt, the Scholar
rose and began to address a nearly
empty House. But the Alcoholic
Barrister had repaired to the lobbies
The Alcoholic Barrister
and smoking room and, good as his
word, soon produced a crowded Chamber.
Encouraged by the increasing crowd, the Scholar
described the government’s “handling of economic warfare,”
indeed “the whole of our national effort,” as “too little, too
late….We cannot go on as we are. There must be a change.”
The chamber roared its approval. Emboldened, the
Scholar made a fateful decision—to include a quotation he
had accidentally discovered, never thinking the opportunity
would arise to use it:
“This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament
when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs
of the nation: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you
have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with
you. In the name of God, go!’”
Wednesday, 8 May 1940
4:00 pm
The speeches resumed the next day, as the Elder
Statesman brooded in his office. Once a noted orator, he
was now 77, his days of leadership long past. He had not
given a major speech in five years. Disgusted with both
events and the Prime Minister, whom he held in open contempt, he planned to take no part in the debate. Though
several colleagues begged him to intervene, he no longer
had a significant following. What was the point?
In the Chamber the Opposition—which had noted
the violent split in Conservative ranks after last night’s
speeches by the Admiral and the Scholar—opened by
calling for a division: a vote of confidence in the government. Stung by their effrontery, the Prime Minister angrily
interrupted: “I have friends in the House…and I call on my
friends to support us in the Lobby tonight.”
At this the Elder Statesman’s daughter, herself an MP,
left the House to see her father. Breathlessly she told him
what the Prime Minister had just said. The Elder
Statesman, furious, said he could not remain silent.
As he headed to the Chamber, the Elder Statesman
gathered his thoughts—eighteen years since the Coalition
he led had been thrown out in a rebellion of its Tory
members. Revenge, indeed, was a dish best served cold.
5:37 pm
With a slight motion to the Speaker, the Elder
Statesman was promptly recognized. Even at his age, the
Speaker dared not keep him waiting.
He began with a quip which drew laughter, and took
his time as the Speaker called for order and the word spread
to MPs outside the Commons that he was “up.” Members
rushed back into the Chamber, which was soon full. The
Elder Statesman began making his case. He would never
give another memorable speech in the House. Did he have
one last great oration in him?
He told the House he had been reluctant to speak, but
felt obliged to do so because of his experience as Prime
Minister during the previous war; and this was no time to
mince words. The Government's efforts, he continued, had
been done “half-heartedly, ineffectively, without drive and
unintelligently. Will anybody tell me that he is satisfied with
what we have done about aeroplanes, tanks, guns?…Is
anyone here satisfied with the steps we took to train an
Army to use them? Nobody is satisfied.” >>
FINESTHOUR150/13
A TIME FOR OLD MEN...
To the surprise of some who knew their mixed history
as former colleagues, the Elder Statesman tried to exculpate
one member of the government: “I do not think the First
Lord was responsible for all the things that happened.” The
First Lord of the Admiralty immediately interrupted: “I take
full responsibility for everything that has been done by the
Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden.” The
Elder Statesman replied that the First Lord must not allow
himself “to be converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the
splinters from hitting his colleagues.”
Then, like the Scholar, the Elder Statesman reached
his carefully-timed peroration. Turning to the Prime
Minister, he spoke directly and devastatingly: “He has
appealed for sacrifice. The nation is prepared for every sacrifice so long as it has leadership. I say solemnly that the
Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice, because
there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in
this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.”
Monday, 13 May 1940
4:00 pm
As the Commons reconvened, the Pariah rose to
address a now bewildered assembly. Aged 65, he had arrived
here forty years before. After a remarkable career of ups and
downs, including twice changing parties, his career had
foundered. He had spent the last decade on the back
benches, lonely and frustrated. Even though he had rejoined
the government as First Lord of the Admiralty the previous
autumn, Conservatives who shared his views still avoided
him, afraid of being tainted by association.
The Pariah’s detractors were not limited to Tories. The
Labour Party detested him for sins, and imagined sins,
stretching back decades. A reporter had labeled him “a man
without a party.” While his brilliance and industry were
respected, he was also thought to be out of touch and
lacking in judgment. “Rogue elephant,” “aging adventurer”
and—the worst cut of all—“half-breed American” were
among their derogatory descriptions. Just a year before, he
had barely survived “deselection” as the Tory candidate for
his long-held constituency. Some MPs resented even having
to listen to him. They sat on their hands in silence.
A friend later described the Pariah’s speech as
“a very short statement.” A longtime enemy, the editor of
The Times, described it patronizingly as “quite a good little
warlike speech.” But in the House itself, the Pariah soon
had his colleagues on their feet, waving their Order Papers.
He concluded amidst roaring tumult, as William
Manchester wrote, with words now known to millions who
were unborn at the time, who have never seen England, and
do not even speak English:
“I would say to the House, as I have said to those who
have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but
blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ You ask, what is our policy? I will
say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might
and with all the strength God can give us. That is our policy.
“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It
is victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,
victory however long and hard the road may be; for without
victory, there is no survival.”
Dramatis Personae
The Alcoholic Barrister
Clement Edward Davies KC (1884-1962) was called
to the Bar of England and Wales and appointed King’s
Counsellor in 1923. He became a Liberal MP in 1929, and
was Leader of the Liberal Party, 1945-56. Nothing better
became his service to his nation than his urging the Scholar
to intervene in the Norway Debate on 7 May 1940.
“The Prime Minister must remember that he has met this formidable
foe of ours in peace and in war. He has always been worsted. He is
not in a position to appeal on the ground of friendship. He has
appealed for sacrifice. The nation is prepared for every sacrifice so
long as it has leadership, so long as the Government show clearly
what they are aiming at and so long as the nation is confident that
those who are leading it are doing their best. I say solemnly that
the Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice, because
there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war
than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.” —The Elder Statesman
FINESTHOUR150/14
The Prime Minister
Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), became a
Conservative MP in 1918 and Prime Minister in 1937. In
the crisis of May 1940, with the Germans victorious, he
seemed to be thinking in terms of self rather than the broad
interests of the nation, offending many, including Megan
Lloyd George MP, the first female Welsh MP, who convinced her father to speak. Chamberlain died in November
1940, after loyally supporting his successor, who said generously that he had “acted with perfect sincerity according to
his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and
authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the
awful devastating struggle.…”
The Admiral
Sir Roger John Brownlow Keyes Bt GCB KCVO
CMG DSO RN (1872-1945), Admiral of the Fleet, 1930;
Conservative MP, 1934; First Baron Keyes, 1943. His career
stretched from African anti-slavery patrols to touring the
Allied landings in Leyte during World War II. He was
Churchill’s liaison to King Leopold of the Belgians and
director of Combined Operations in 1940-41. His trembling speech had enormous impact due to his personal
stature, military expertise, and the fact that he was speaking
against his own party’s Prime Minister. Harold Nicolson
termed it the most dramatic speech he had ever heard.
The Scholar
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery CH (18731955), known as Leo, met Churchill when the latter pushed
him into “Ducker,” the swimming pool at Harrow School,
in 1889. He became a Conservative MP, 1911; First Lord of
the Admiralty, 1922-24; Colonial Secretary, 1923-29; and
Secretary of State for India and Burma, 1940-45. Seeking a
certain quotation by Oliver Cromwell for his speech, Amery
discovered another. He had thought it too incendiary, but
kept it at the ready. It made for the speech of his life.
The Elder Statesman
David Lloyd George OM PC (1863-1945) Earl Lloyd
George of Dwyfor (1945) was a Liberal MP from1890; he
was President of the Board of Trade, 1905-08; Chancellor of
the Exchequer, 1908-15; and Prime Minister, 1916-22. He
was ousted as prime minister when the Chamberlain wing
of the Tory party broke from the coalition. The old man
had not forgotten. Though his reputation was later clouded
by suspicion that he was a defeatest, and that he favored an
armistice during World War II, his intervention in the May
8th debate was crucial and devastating.
The Pariah
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG OM CH
TD PC FRS etc. (1874-1965), needs no further description
in these pages.
The March of Events
World War II began in September 1939, but the
“phony war,” through spring 1940, saw little military
action, despite grave concerns over the government’s management. These crystallized around the failure to organize
the economy for war, inadequate production of armaments
and training of troops, and a lack of energy and direction.
In World War I, Lloyd George’s small war cabinet of
members without departmental responsibilities was thought
critical to his success. There was growing sentiment that in
order to put the economy on a war footing, the Labour
Party must be brought into a coalition of the type Lloyd
George had headed. Chamberlain resisted at every point.
By Tuesday, 7 May 1940, a British attempt to seize
Norwegian ports recently occupied by the Germans had
gone badly awry. In the House of Commons, the ordinarily
routine motion to adjourn for the Whitsun holiday thus
became known as “the Norway Debate.”
An unlikely combination of backbenchers ignited a
conflagration which ultimately consumed Prime Minister
Chamberlain and elevated Churchill in his place on the
evening of May 10th. On the 13th, Churchill gave his first
address as Prime Minister, which is now graven in history.
Admiral Keyes’s challenge first emboldened
Chamberlain's critics, Leo Amery’s stirring demand for the
PM’s resignation unleashed a torrent of emotion. The reaction of the Tory back benches encouraged Labour to call for
a vote of confidence. Chamberlain’s disastrous response so
angered Lloyd George that he decided to speak—a moment
of high drama which built emotions to fever pitch. The
chaotic division saw Chamberlain’s 200+ majority shrink to
81 because of defections by his supporters. Although a technical victory, this embarrassment forced Chamberlain either
to form a coalition with Labour or resign.
During two days of back room intrigue on May 9th
and 10th, as Hitler began his long-planned blitzkrieg in the
west, Labour refused to serve under Chamberlain; then
Lord Halifax, the Tory favorite to succeed him, declined the
job. Pressured by the urgency of the situation, Chamberlain
resigned and the King, reluctantly, sent for the only choice
available—the Pariah, Winston Churchill.
Churchill became Prime Minister at a time when he
could not have carried a vote, even among his own party.
The complex chain of events played out over four days,
involving many individuals. True, there were “troublesome
young men” on the Tory back benches—Boothby,
Macmillan, Eden and the like. True, the Labour Party was a
decisive influence. True, Chamberlain, Halifax, Hitler and
others played their roles. But without the Old Men, it
wouldn’t have happened as it did.
How much we owe these brave old men: two poor
speakers and one great one, but past his prime. They struck
the sparks that lit the tinder—and changed history. ,
FINESTHOUR150/15
AGE AND LEADERSHIP
Churchill on Clemenceau:
His Best Student? • Part I
France’s “Tiger” at 76 was more than a decade older than Churchill when he reached the
pinnacle; but Churchill was 77 when he reached the pinnacle the second time. There is little
doubt that Churchill patterned his leadership after that of the great Frenchman he admired.
PAUL ALKON
OLD MEN AT THE FRONT: Sharing a taste for battle and on-scene action, Churchill and Clemenceau delighted in visiting the front lines. Left: The
Tiger (in mufti) with his generals and a Breguet biplane, 1917. Right: Brooke, Montgomery and Churchill with U.S. Ninth Army commander General
William H. Simpson during a visit to Monty’s Twenty-first Army Group at Hitler’s Siegfried Line (West Wall), inside Germany, in March 1945.
C
hurchill was an ardent though not uncritical
Francophile. At the heart of his admiration for
France was Georges Clemenceau—as a friend and,
more importantly, as a hero and teacher extraordinaire of
how to conduct politics in war and peace. That Churchill
was the best of all Clemenceau’s students is more than I am
able to argue. But it is beyond question that Churchill was
Clemenceau’s most important Anglo-Saxon pupil.1
Their affinities were apparent to Churchill very soon
after they met during World War I, and are even more
apparent as we look back at their lives now. Both were prolific writers. Both were effective speakers. Both were
interested in painting—Churchill as a gifted amateur artist,
Clemenceau as a connoisseur and champion of Claude
Monet. Both were fearless men of high principles willing to
speak up for them even at great political cost. Both were
skillful politicians persistently involved in trying to shape
events for the better. Both had remarkably long careers in
public life, marked by intervals in high office and intervals
in the political wilderness when history seemed to be
passing them by. Both were elderly men—Clemenceau 76
years old, Churchill 65—when finally called to the summit
of power as prime minister in order to avert defeat by the
Germans. Both rejected calls for a negotiated settlement and
insisted that nothing less than victory was acceptable.
Their previous experiences served them well. After
qualifying as a doctor of medicine, Clemenceau in 1865
went to the United States, where he was a teacher and also a
journalist reporting on the aftermath of America’s Civil War
for a French newspaper before returning home. He entered
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Alkon, a Churchill Centre Academic Adviser, is Leo S. Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of
Southern California. He has published books on Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and science fiction, along with Winston Churchill’s
Imagination (2006). He won the Somervell Award for his Lawrence of Arabia features appearing in Finest Hour 119 in 2003.
FINESTHOUR150/16
politics as Mayor of Montmartre in 1870 during the chaos
following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. His
political career spanned the tumultuous years from that
period to his retirement in 1920, acclaimed by then as le
père la victoire, the father of victory—the man who had
made victory possible for France in 1918.
Churchill was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of
Cavalry upon graduation from Sandhurst in 1895, fought
in several of Britain’s “little wars” from then until he
entered Parliament in 1900, primarily earned his keep as
war correspondent, biographer, historian and essayist, and at
last became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 to preside over
the perilous time that he soon defined as the British
Empire’s finest hour.
C
hurchill’s first lengthy encounter with Clemenceau
was on 30 March 1918, as the allied front line was
bending before the German offensive that had
started the previous week. Lloyd George had dispatched
Churchill to learn what he could about French dispositions
and intentions. Clemenceau—although nicknamed “The
Tiger” for his political ferocity—readily agreed not only to
provide information but to take Churchill along on a tour
of front-line headquarters to find out at first hand. The next
day, in a letter dated 31 March, Churchill described to his
wife the tour and his vivid impressions of Clemenceau:
Yesterday was vy interesting, for I saw with Clemenceau all
the commanders—Haig, Foch, Pétain, Weygand, Rawlinson
etc; & heard from each the position explained. The old man
is vy gracious to me & talks in the most confidential way. He
is younger even than I am! and insisted on being taken into
the outskirts of the action wh was proceeding N of Moreuil.
Seely’s Brigade had just stormed the wood above the village
& were being attacked by the Huns there. Stragglers,
wounded horses, blood & explosives gave a grim picture of
war. I finally persuaded the old tiger to come away from what
he called “un moment délicieux.”
We dined with Pétain in his sumptuous train and I was much
entertained by Clemenceau. He is an extraordinary character,
every word he says—particularly general observations on life
& morals is worth listening to. His spirit & energy
indomitable. 15 hours yesterday over rough roads at high
speed in motor cars. I was tired out—& he is 76!
He makes rather the same impression on me as Fisher: but
much more efficient, & just as ready to turn round & bite! I
shall be vy wary.2
After the war Churchill set down at greater length his
memories of that encounter, in an essay whose final version
was titled “A Day with Clemenceau” and published in 1932
in Churchill’s collection Thoughts and Adventures.
This account opens “early in the morning” of 28
March 1918 as Churchill, summoned by Lloyd George,
finds “him in bed, a grey figure amid a litter of reports and
telegrams” that give no clear picture of the alarming new
battle in France.3
Churchill tells of their dialogue, of his journey to and
across France to Paris in dreary rain, of “the terrible tide of
German advance,” of the desperate scraping together of
every available man to meet it, and at British General
Headquarters where he stopped en route—“how oddly the
calm, almost somnolence, of this supreme nerve-centre of
the Army contrasted with the gigantic struggle shattering
and thundering on a fifty-thousand yard front fifty or sixty
miles away” where “one of the largest and most bloody and
critical battles in the history of the world” was taking place
(T&A, 166). The scene is thus set with a prelude explaining
the high stakes for all concerned as Germany seems on the
brink of victory. Churchill next tells how, at the appointed
hour of 8 am on the morning of March 30th, at the French
Ministry of War, he found waiting “five military motor-cars,
all decorated with the small satin tricolours of the highest
authority.” He continues:
Monsieur Clemenceau, punctual to the second, descended
the broad staircase of the Ministry, accompanied by his personal General and two or three other superior officers. He
greeted me most cordially in his fluent English.
“I am delighted, my dear Mr. Wilson (sic) Churchill, that
you have come. We shall show you everything. We shall go
together everywhere and see everything for ourselves. We
shall see Foch. We shall see Debeney. We shall see the corps
Commanders, and we will also go and see the Illustrious
Haig, and Rawlinson as well. Whatever is known, whatever I
learn, you shall know.” (T&A, 168)
Here Churchill deftly characterizes Clemenceau’s willingness to cooperate fully with his British ally, and also his
jovial affability, made even more endearing by the comic
touch of his mistake about Churchill’s first name—which,
later on, he got right. Churchill added this detail about the
name to the essay’s final version for Thoughts and
Adventures, apparently recollecting it only as he revised the
last draft. Also made clear by the picture of Clemenceau’s
grand entrance toward cars displaying emblems of “the
highest authority” is his easy but firm command of the situation and his sang-froid at what was in fact one of the >>
______________________________________________________
1. Citations to CHAR with various reference numbers refer to
documents, often untitled, in the Chartwell Papers, Churchill Archives
Centre, Cambridge University. For prompt, courteous, and efficient help
at the Archives I am grateful to Katharine Thomson. For enlightenment
on matters of French language and culture I’m much indebted to my
USC colleague Danielle Mihram. My footnotes are for FWK III.
2. Mary Soames, ed., Speaking for Themselves: The Personal
Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Doubleday,
1998), 206. Abbreviations in the passage are Churchill’s.
3. Winston S. Churchill, “A Day with Clemenceau,” Thoughts
and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932), 165.
Subsequent citations to this work are documented parenthetically in my
text with the abbreviation T&A. The text of “A Day with Clemenceau”
is available from the editor by email.
FINESTHOUR150/17
“Very well,” said Clemenceau...our men shall come at once and help you. And now,”
he said, “I claim my reward.” “What is that, sir?” asked Rawlinson.
“I wish to pass the river and see the battle.” The Army commander shook his head.
“It would not be right for you to go across the river,” he said. “Why not?” “Well, we
are not at all sure of the situation beyond the river. It is extremely uncertain.”
“Good,” cried Clemenceau. “We will re-establish it. After coming all this way and
sending you two divisions, I shall not go back without crossing the river. You come
with me, Mr. Winston Churchill (this time he got it right); and you Loucheur. A
few shells will do the General good,” pointing gaily to his military Chef de Cabinet.
So we all got into our cars again and set off towards the river and the cannonade.”
—WSC, Thoughts and Adventures
CHURCHILL ON CLEMENCEAU...
war’s most desperate moments no less for him than for
France and England.
The rest of Churchill’s essay amplifies this portrait of
a lovable happy warrior, raising morale by radiating courage,
confidence, and good cheer while also making command
decisions at the highest level. Churchill provides no account
of those “general observations on life and morals” that had
so impressed him on that day according to his letter to
Clementine. Instead Churchill dwells on what might be
called the less philosophical side of a man who was indeed
often inclined to general observations about life and morals,
as witness among other works Clemenceau’s La Mélée
Sociale (The Social Struggle) and his two-volume philosophical and scientific testament, Au Soir de la Pensée (To
the Evening of Thought). Rather than such fare, Churchill
shows what are in effect a series of verbal snapshots of
Clemenceau in action that day.
At British Fourth Army Headquarters “about twelve
miles south of Amiens,” General Rawlinson “received
Clemenceau with the sincere respect and evident affection
which the personality of the ‘Tiger,’ above all his fellowcountrymen, always extorted from the leading soldiers of
the British Army” (T&A, 171-72). When General
Rawlinson sets out a “substantial” lunch for his guests,
“Clemenceau would not have this until his contribution of
chicken and sandwiches of the most superior type had been
produced from the last of his cars” (T&A, 172).
Here is Clemenceau as generous, well-prepared
gourmet and bon vivant basking in British affection as well
as respect. Here too (characteristically) is Churchill as connoisseur of good dining.
After lunch the most important conference of the
day—and a very important one for the war—takes place off
stage, as Clemenceau retires to a room alone with the commander of all the British armies, Sir Douglas Haig, who has
just arrived. Neither Churchill nor we at second hand are
privy to what was said in that room where, as the essay
earlier makes clear, the British would try to obtain desperately needed French reinforcements. We know from other
sources that many French generals were reluctant to make
such arrangements. Churchill reports only the results and
aftermath: “Very soon Clemenceau returned with Sir
Douglas Haig. Evidently all had gone well. The Tiger was in
the greatest good humour. Sir Douglas, with all his reserve,
seemed contented” (T&A, 173).
Then, in Boswellian mode, Churchill recreates a dialogue between Clemenceau and General Rawlinson,
omitting anything said by General Haig, who vanishes from
the scene without further notice.
“Very well,” said Clemenceau in English to the company,
“then it is all right. I have done what you wish. Never mind
what has been arranged before. If your men are tired and we
have fresh men near at hand, our men shall come at once and
help you. And now,” he said, “I claim my reward.” “What is
that, sir?” asked Rawlinson. “I wish to pass the river and see
the battle.” The Army commander shook his head. “It would
not be right for you to go across the river,” he said. “Why
not?” “Well, we are not at all sure of the situation beyond the
river. It is extremely uncertain.”
“Good,” cried Clemenceau. “We will re-establish it. After
coming all this way and sending you two divisions, I shall not
go back without crossing the river. You come with me, Mr.
Winston Churchill (this time he got it right); and you
FINESTHOUR150/18
Loucheur. A few shells will do the General good,” pointing
gaily to his military Chef de Cabinet. So we all got into our
cars again and set off towards the river and the cannonade.
(T&A, 173-74)
Here, as in other episodes of this day, Churchill shows
Clemenceau wearing a public face of assurance and insouciance, whatever might have been his worries about severe
military setbacks at the front and political battles behind the
lines that were in fact hardly less menacing to victory than
the German assault. In this essay Churchill says nothing
about Clemenceau’s dire political problems with defeatists,
pacifists, and strikes in crucial armaments industries,
although implying by silence on these topics that
Clemenceau had any such difficulties well in hand.
Clemenceau’s courage and grace under pressure are
also highlighted when Churchill quotes two of his remarks
made in French when they had passed into the zone of
artillery fire and arrived within a few hundred yards of the
battle line. After “a shell burst among a group of led horses
at no great distance,” scattering them and wounding some,
Clemenceau—who had among other things once been a
teacher of equitation—adroitly stops one of the injured
animals:
The poor animal was streaming with blood. The Tiger, aged
seventy-four [actually 76], advanced towards it and with
great quickness seized its bridle, bringing it to a standstill.
The blood accumulated in a pool upon the road. The French
General expostulated with him, and he turned reluctantly
toward his car. As he did so, he gave me a sidelong glance and
observed in an undertone, “Quel moment délicieux!” (“How
delicious,” T&A, 176)
As they all head afterwards to General Pétain’s headquarters, Churchill, alone for a moment with Clemenceau,
says: “‘This sort of excursion is all right for a single day: but
you ought not to go under fire too often.” He replied “C’est
mon grand plaisir ’” (“It is my great pleasure,” T&A, 177).
I
n another of the essay’s major episodes, Churchill shows
Clemenceau for once during that day revealing deep
emotions without any attempt at concealment. Here,
rather than disguise what he feels, Clemenceau makes a
point of displaying his feelings with dramatic flair and in a
typical French way that even his British audience is compelled—for once—to approve. This was in Beauvais at the
headquarters of General Foch, where the inspection party
was treated to one of his famous map demonstrations.
Churchill recreates Foch’s demonstration at the map of each
day’s German advance since March 21st to show that the
attack is at last petering out:
And then suddenly in a loud voice, “Stabilization! Sure, certain,
soon. And afterwards. Ah, afterwards. That is my affair.” He
stopped. Everyone was silent.
Then Clemenceau, advancing, “Alors, Général, il faut que je
vous embrasse.” (“So General, I must embrace you.”)
They both clasped each other tightly without even their
English companions being conscious of anything in the
slightest degree incongruous or inappropriate. These two
men had had fierce passages in the weeks immediately preceding these events. They had quarrelled before; they were
destined to quarrel again. But, thank God, at that moment
the two greatest Frenchmen of this awful age were supreme—
and were friends. No more was said. We all trooped down the
stairs, bundled into our cars, and roared and rattled off again
to the north. (T&A, 171)
Although in Thoughts and Adventures the encounter
with Foch is followed by about seven pages recounting the
other stops before returning to Paris, the dramatic embrace
would have made an effective climax.4
“A Day with Clemenceau” certainly draws from that
day as Churchill recounts important lessons in leadership
that must have reinforced, although they hardly created,
Churchill’s own methods: Clemenceau courageously sees for
himself what is happening, inspires affection as well as
respect, talks with his commanders, and displays both the
authority and the will to make important military as well as
other decisions.
The most significant contrast in the essay, implicit
rather than explicitly remarked but nevertheless unmistakable, is that between the “grey” figure of Lloyd George in
bed “amid a litter of reports and telegrams” which so
bewilder him that he sends a subordinate off to gather facts;
and Georges Clemenceau, a prime minister who tours the
front himself to talk with his generals, sees what is happening, and makes important decisions on the spot.
Although Churchill also often read reports before
getting out of bed in the morning, it was of course
Clemenceau’s overall style of leadership, not that of Lloyd
George, that was—far from coincidentally—Churchill’s
method as prime minister. ,
_______________________________________________________
4. The essay did end with departure from Foch’s headquarters in
its first published version, which occupies only one page in the August
1926 issue of Cosmopolitan (vol. 81, no. 2, p. 25), where it is titled “The
Tiger and the Bulldog.” The bulldog of this version is General Foch. The
essay was next published as “The Bulldog and the Tiger: A Day with
Clemenceau amid the Bursting Shrapnel of the French Battlefields,” in
Nash’s Pall Mall (March 1927), pp. 28-29 and 84-88. Both versions have
facing photographs of Foch and Clemenceau. The 1927 version has all
the episodes of the final version for Thoughts and Adventures, differing
in only minor verbal ways except that here Clemenceau gets Churchill’s
first name right every time. After the essay’s 1932 publication in
Thoughts and Adventures, its most noteworthy later appearance, substantially unchanged, was in the 14 January 1940 issue of the Sunday
Dispatch as “My 17 Fateful Hours with Clemenceau.” Surely this revival
was part of Churchill’s long campaign to keep himself—and his potential
virtues as a prime minister—in the public eye.
FINESTHOUR150/19
AGE AND LEADERSHIP
The Reluctant Retiree
Did Churchill Stay Too Long?
TERRY REARDON
“H
e then began to speak quite feelingly to me about
himself at the present time, saying, ‘I have no
ambition beyond getting us through this mess.
There is nothing that anyone could give me or that I could
wish for. They cannot take away what I have done.’ That as
soon as the war was over, he would get out of public life.”1
So wrote Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King of
Churchill in his diary for 23 August 1941. Yet when the
war was won in 1945, the 70-year-old Churchill stayed in
public life, against the wishes of his wife Clementine and
many of his closest colleagues, hoping to “win the peace.”
The landslide victory of the Labour Party in the 1945
election elicited the oft-quoted comment from Clementine
that “It may well be a blessing in disguise,” and Winston’s
rejoinder, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.”2
In spite of the blow, Churchill retained his sense of
humour. “When an acquaintance suggested that he should
tour England so that the thousands of his own countrymen
who had never seen him could have a chance to honour
him he growled: ‘I refuse to be exhibited like a prize bull
whose chief attraction is its past prowess.’”3
Churchill was as frank about the election as his
reasons for staying on after it. Addressing the Conservative
Central Council on 28 November 1945 he thanked them
for welcoming “one who has led you through one of the
greatest political defeats in the history of the Tory Party.”
Then he added that staying on was—“not from any motives
of personal ambition—for what could I possibly want?—
but only because of the strong convictions which I hold
about the future of our country, and my desire to serve you
as long as you may think me of any use, or I feel that I have
anything worthy of your acceptance to give.”4
Even Churchill had his doubts about that. A few
weeks later he wrote to the Duke of Windsor in reflective
mood: “…I increasingly wonder whether the game is worth
_______________________________________________________
Mr. Reardon, of ICS Canada, is a FH contributor whose recent articles
were “Churchill and de Gaulle (FH 138) and “Mice That Roared: The
Thirty-Minute Invasion of St. Pierre and Miquelon” (FH 136). His
“Winston Churchill and Mackenzie King,” in FH 130, Spring 2006, won
the Somervell Award for the best article of of 2005-06.
CUMMINGS IN THE DAILY EXPRESS, 4 MARCH 1953: “What! Eden
and Butler away, and still someone trying on my shoes!” Churchill had
returned from a Jamaica holiday to renewed anxieties for his health,
and suggestions he retire. The portrait is of Gladstone, who was still
Prime Minister, and still vigorous, at 84 (not 82 as in the label).
the candle. It is only from a sense of duty and of not leaving
my friends when they are in the lurch, that I continue to
persevere.”5 Churchill would not of course confess that his
ego was involved, although it was, as it would be for any
major leader who had gone through what he had.
Churchill remained a dominant figure abroad. In
November 1945 he spoke in Paris, and then Brussels. where
he received a tremendous reception. The British
Ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, later recalled
that “people stretched out their hands to touch him....
remarks in the street included one from an old lady who
had placed her camp-stool at a street corner—‘Now I have
seen Mr Churchill, I can die’....people broke through the
police-cordon....one girl threw her arms round his neck and
kissed him fervently.”6
In October 1945 Churchill received an invitation
from President Truman to speak in Truman’s home state of
Missouri, at Westminster College. His resultant “Iron
Curtain” speech in March 1946, warning of Russia’s territorial ambitions, resulted in fierce criticism by the American
media and also in Britain, where ninety-three Labour MPs,
FINESTHOUR150/20
LOW IN THE EVENING STANDARD, 31 JULY 1945: “Two Churchills,”
by the pro-Labour New Zealander David Low, reminds us of the
grudging respect Low held for the old Tory he had supported through his
cartoons during the war; Churchill equally thought well of Low, while
describing him amusingly as a “green-eyed young Antipodean radical.”
including future Prime Minister James Callaghan, tabled a
motion of censure against Churchill. It was not long before
those short-sighted politicians had to eat their words.7
Would Churchill have had the same impact if he had
chosen to retire? Possibly so: Roosevelt was dead, Stalin was
proving to be expansionist in eastern Europe; Churchill’s
reputation as the man who had stood up to Hitler and
given hope to the world was still intact.
As at Fulton, Churchill was trying desperately to
ensure that the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s were not
repeated. On 19 September 1946, at Zurich University, he
spoke of the need for a United Europe: “The first step in
the recreation of the European family must be a partnership
between France and Germany. In this way only can France
recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no
revival of Europe without a spiritually great Germany.”8
Even with the benefit of hindsight, which shows
Churchill to have been right again—and considering that
France had been invaded by Germany in 1870, 1914 and
1940—this was an astonishing statement. In announcing
the Marshall Plan of aid to Europe on 12 June 1947, U.S.
Secretary of State George Marshall said Churchill’s call for a
United Europe had influenced his belief that the European
States could work out their own economic recovery with
financial help from the United States.9
Churchill’s world stature conflicted with his leading
the Opposition, according to Rab Butler, future Chancellor
of the Exchequer and potential prime minister: “The constructive part of his mind always dwelt more naturally on
the international scene than on bread-and-butter politics.”10
But Harold Macmillan, who did become PM, added: “Any
attempt to remove a man whom the whole nation knew to
be the greatest Englishman of this or perhaps of any time
would have been deeply resented by the country….
Moreover, it would certainly have failed. Anyone who knew
Churchill intimately must have realized that he was a man
impossible to frighten and equally difficult to dislodge.”11
In April 1949 Churchill wrote to his old friend, the
financier and adviser to presidents Bernard Baruch, that he
would not continue in politics “but for the fact that I feel it
my duty to help the sane and constructive forces in Britain
to restore our position in the world.”12 Even his first stroke,
on 24 August 1949, while visiting Beaverbrook on the
French Riviera (reported to the press as a “chill”), did not
alter his determination.
In the General Election of 23 February 1950 the
Labour Party lost seventy-eight seats, the Conservatives
gained eighty-five, and the Labour’s overall majority was
reduced to six. Inevitably they went to the nation again on
25 October 1951, and this time the Conservatives won with
an overall majority of twenty, returning Churchill to
Downing Street a month shy of his 77th birthday. Two days
before the election Churchill told an audience in Plymouth
that he would strive to make “an important contribution to
the prevention of a third world war, and to bringing the
peace that every land fervently desired….It is the last prize I
seek to win”13
Mrs. Churchill was of mixed mind, as stated by their
daughter, Mary Soames: Clementine “must have felt—for
his sake alone—some sense of satisfaction after the bitter
defeat of six years before; but of elation she felt none.
Nothing that had happened had changed the conviction she
held in 1945, namely, that Winston should have retired at
the end of the war.”14
Churchill’s wartime private secretary, John Colville,
now re-hired, wrote that WSC told him he intended to >>
_______________________________________________________
1. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Diaries, 23 August 1941
(Library and Archives Canada) http://xrl.us/be9rwt.
2. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, “Never Despair”
1945-1965 (Toronto: Stoddart, 1988), 108.
3. Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill: The Era and the Man
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 356.
4. Winston S. Churchill, The Sinews of Peace (London: Cassell,
1948), 45.
5. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 174.
6. Ibid., 170.
7. Ibid.. 208.
8. Churchill, Sinews of Peace, 201.
9. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 337.
10. Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1971), 133.
11. Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune (London: Macmillan.
1969), 287.
12. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 471.
13. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann,
1991), 897.
14. Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1979), 566.
FINESTHOUR150/21
THE RELUCTANT RETIREE...
remain Prime Minister for just one year. He just wanted to
“re-establish the intimate relationship with the United
States, which had been a keynote of his policy in the war,
and to restore at home the liberties which had been eroded
by wartime restrictions and postwar socialist measures.”15
Churchill broadcast to the nation on 22 December on
the dire economy, and measures being taken to improve it.
Internationally, he said, “we shall stand up with all our
strength in defence of the free world against Communist
tyranny and aggression….It may be that this land will have
the honour of helping civilization climb the hill amid the
toils of peace as we once did in the terrors of war.”16
Churchill spoke in Ottawa and Washington in early
1952, showing he had lost none of his ability to tailor an
address to obtain the desired reaction from his audience.
His oratory was also put to good effect when he returned to
London and spoke in the House of Commons on the death
of King George VI.
As recounted by the socialite MP “Chips” Channon,
a staunch Chamberlain supporter before World War II,
“Winston spoke, and I thought he was sublime, so simple
and eloquent with his Macaulay phrases pouring out. The
attentive House was electrified.”17
On 21 February 1952 Churchill suffered a small arterial spasm; his doctor said, “You’ll have to pull out or
arrange things so the strain is less.” Just five days later
Churchill had to respond to an opposition Vote of Censure,
accusing him of wanting to make war on China in order to
hasten the end of the Korean War. In a powerful response,
Churchill pointed out that his stance was exactly the same
as Labour had agreed to when they had been in power. As
Nigel Nicholson wrote: “There was pandemonium....
[Labour Leader Clement Attlee] was sitting hunched up like
an elf just out of its chrysalis, and stared at Winston,
turning slowly white....Winston sat back beaming.....We
had won.”18
After speaking with John Colville and Lord Salisbury,
Moran put his comments on the arterial spasm to Churchill
in a letter on 12 March, again insisting that he had to
reduce his workload. The next day Clementine telephoned
Moran: “He was not angry when he got your letter; he just
swept it aside….I’m glad you wrote. It may do good.”19
But Churchill was 77, and could not fight time
forever. On May 16th Colville wrote: “the P.M. is low...his
concentration less good...age is beginning to show...tonight
he spoke of coalition. He would retire in order to make it
possible.” Two weeks later he added: “Winston is, I fear,
personally blamed in the country and by his own party in
the House. Mrs. Churchill does not think he will last long
as Prime Minister.” Then in mid-June: “The Prime Minister
is depressed and bewildered. He said to me this evening,
‘The Zest is diminished.’”20 But Churchill remained as
driven as ever. On New Year’s Day 1953 Colville recorded
GABRIEL IN THE DAILY WORKER, 27 APRIL 1953: “Now, now, Sir
Winston, remember the motto of the Knights of the Garter, ‘Evil to those
who evil think’!” The communist paper wondered if Churchill’s new
knighthood would force his resignation—and was disappointed again.
ILLINGWORTH IN PUNCH, 3 FEBRUARY 1954: “Man goeth forth unto
his work and to his labour until the evening." Perhaps the most vicious
of all the pro-retirement cartoons—by an artist who had heretofore
admired Churchill—appeared in Punch during the editorial tenure of
Malcolm Muggeridge, a persistent critic (see quote, page 27). Churchill
was staggered by this unfair and insulting drawing, showing him listless
at his desk, his face registering the unmistakable effects of the partial
paralysis he had suffered the preceding summer. (See “The Cartoon
That Shocked the PM” by Tim Benson, Finest Hour 113.)
FINESTHOUR150/22
WSC’s prophetic statement: “He said that if I lived a
normal span I should assuredly see eastern Europe free of
Communism.”21
In April 1953 pressure on Churchill to step down
eased when Eden was operated on for gallstones. Serious
complications occurred, and eventually Eden went for an
operation in Boston which, while successful, required a
lengthy recuperation.
Eden did not return to his duties until September
1953 and in the intervening period Churchill assumed
Foreign Office duties. Then, without warning, on 23 June
1953, Churchill suffered a stroke. When a press release was
eventually made, it was to the effect that the Prime Minister
needed a complete rest.
“He had not enjoyed his convalescence,” Roy Jenkins
wrote. “He did not welcome old age, and he knew that the
best way to stave off the effects was to postpone the time
when power had gone for the last time….Outweighing all
these other considerations, however, was his conviction that
the world was in danger of nuclear destruction, and his
mounting belief that his last service might be to save it from
such a fate as could no one else.”22
Churchill’s remarkable powers of recovery again saved
him. Though he had previously proposed to retire when
Eden was fit, he now decided that if he could make a successful address at the Conservative Party Conference on 10
October 1953, he would stay on. The fifty-minute speech,
Macmillan said, “was really magnificent.”23
A week later Churchill was thrilled to be told that he
had been awarded the Nobel Prize, but when he was
informed that it was for Literature, not Peace, his pleasure
was diminished. In December he kept a date for talks with
Eisenhower and the French Prime Minister at Bermuda,
which had been postponed by his stroke.
S
talin had died on 5 March and at Bermuda Churchill
spoke of opening relations with his successors. But “Ike
followed with a short, very violent statement, in the
coarsest terms. He said that as regards the P.M.’s belief that
there was a new look in Soviet policy, Russia was a woman
of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old
one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.”24
In spite of the rebuff from Eisenhower, Churchill continued his quest for peace. A four-power foreign ministers’
meeting (USA, USSR, France, Britain) was held in Berlin in
February 1954, and while no specific agreement was signed,
there was progress over the occupation of Austria. In the
subsequent House of Commons debate on 25 February,
Churchill said: “Patience and perseverance must never be
grudged when the peace of the world is at stake. Even if we
have to go through a decade of cold war bickering....that
would be preferable to the catalogue of unspeakable and
unimaginable horrors, which is the alternative.”25
Churchill still would not commit to a firm date to
step down. Rab Butler wrote that his “affectionate admiration for Anthony Eden was beyond doubt, but equally so
was the disservice he did his successor by making him wait
too long. This did not suit Anthony any more than it suited
King Edward VII. The latter took it out in life and licence,
the former in controlled impatience.”26
It is interesting that Eden, in his autobiography covering this period, Full Circle, does not once mention his
frustration at Churchill’s repeated broken promises to
resign. Since the book was published in 1960, with
Churchill still alive, Eden may have felt the need for discretion. Churchill was still adamant for staying on: “Now it’s a
case of a world crisis,” the Prime Minister informed Moran
on 10 June 1954. “I could not leave the Government in an
emergency such as this. It is not that I want to hang on to
the office for a few weeks more. But I have a gift to make to
the country: a duty to perform. It would be cowardly to run
away from such a situation.”27
Pressure to resign nevertheless mounted, and there
were testy exchanges with Eden. On 9 January 1955 Harold
Macmillan told Moran: “Winston ought to resign...since I
became Minister of Defence I have found that he can no
longer handle these complicated matters properly. He can’t
do the job of Prime Minister as it ought to be done.”
Moran conveyed this to Churchill: “When he looked
up his eyes were full of tears….Harold’s intervention had
left a bruise. The P.M. had come to depend on him and
counted on his support....And now he had gone over to the
other camp.”28
Churchill finally decided to resign on 7 April 1955;
however in March he mistakenly construed that a letter
from Eisenhower gave hope for a summit and thus he said
he would put back his resignation again. But when he was
persuaded that his optimism was misplaced, he went back
to the original timetable.
Three days before he stepped down after entertaining
the Queen and Prince Philip at Number Ten, John Colville
found Churchill on the edge of his bed: “…suddenly he
stared at me and said with vehemence: ‘I don’t believe >>
_______________________________________________________
15. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries
1940-1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 632-33.
16. Winston S. Churchill, Stemming the Tide (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin), 213.
17. Sir Henry Channon, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry
Channon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), 464.
18. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 705.
19. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord
Moran (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 407-08.
20. Colville, 647, 649, 651.
21. Ibid., 658.
22. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (New York: Plume, 2002), 868.
23. Macmillan, 526.
24. Colville, 683
25. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 955.
26. Butler, 165.
27. Moran, 590.
28. Ibid., 666-67.
FINESTHOUR150/23
THE RELUCTANT RETIREE...
that Anthony can do it.’”29 Was this another prophetic
statement, or just the frustration of someone who hated to
give up?
Ironically, three months after Churchill resigned, a
summit was held in Geneva, Eisenhower writing to
Churchill that “his courage and wisdom would be
missed.”30 The official reason for Eisenhower’s change was
that the Russians had signed the Austrian State Treaty on 15
May, ending Austria’s occupation, a prior condition for a
summit. But some historians concluded that Eisenhower
feared Churchill would “give the store away.” Certainly
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took that view. In
February 1953, discouraging Churchill’s intended visit to
Washington, Dulles said the U.S. public “thought Churchill
could cast a spell on all American statesmen.”31
Harold Macmillan concluded: “There are some critics
who declare that Churchill’s last decade in politics was a
failure, and added little to his reputation....In some respects
they were as fruitful as any in his life. There was the Fulton
speech in 1946, which led to the aligning of the Western
and democratic countries against the advancing menace of
Russian aggression. There was the foundation of the
European Movement which has led to the recovery of
Europe....No Minister out of office has ever had such an
effect on foreign policy. [And] his conduct of the Opposition
gave new life and impetus to the Conservative Party.”32
Had Churchill won the 1945 election, would he have
been more conciliatory with Stalin at Fulton? And even if
still unsuccessful with Stalin, would he have handed over to
Eden in 1950? There is no doubt that Stalin retained some
respect for Churchill after Fulton, as illustrated by an
exchange recounted by Stalin’s biographer: Nine months
after Fulton, “Churchill sent Stalin a greetings telegram on
21 December 1946—‘All personal good wishes on your
birthday, my war-time comrade’ to which Stalin returned
his ‘warm thanks.’”33
A slightly more conciliatory Fulton speech might have
left Stalin ready to continue the wartime dialogue; but with
the Soviets in control of Eastern Europe, Churchill had no
cards to play, and anything he gained would have been
minor. It was not in Churchill’s nature to have stepped
down in 1950, with Stalin still alive and no hope for a settlement leading to world peace, his overriding goal. If
reelected in 1950, I think he would have stayed on.
When he did return to power in 1951, his original
intention to remain for just a year was generally accepted,
since that would give Anthony Eden the reins in timely
fashion for the next election. Eden’s health was a substantial
reason for delay, but by 1954, with no hope for American
participation in a summit, there was no legitimate reason
for Churchill to stay.
Eden’s span as Premier was short: from 6 April 1955
until he resigned for health reasons on 18 January 1957.
CUMMINGS IN THE DAILY EXPRESS, 29 JANUARY 1954: “Why don’t
you make way for someone who can make a bigger impression on the
political scene?” This cartoon probably spoke for most people.
Certainly Eden’s decision to embark on the disastrous Suez
Canal seizure without prior agreement with the United
States was a major error, with the humiliation of having
Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth, brokering a peace solution. The true humiliation, however, was
that the U.S. government told Britain that the pound sterling would come under attack if Britain failed to back
off—and even Churchill might have found good reason to
stop in that case.
Churchill was depressed by Suez and what it meant
for the Anglo-American relationship. Colville wrote: “…he
thought the whole operation the most ill-conceived and illexecuted imaginable.” When Colville asked if he would
have acted as Eden had over Suez, WSC replied, “I would
never have dared; and if I had dared, I would certainly
never have dared stop.”34 On the other hand, it is difficult
to imagine Churchill not engaging in close conversations
with the Americans before engaging at Suez.
Although it is clear that Churchill was in his final
years as Premier, perhaps the real question is: was a fifty
percent Churchill better than a hundred percent Eden? ,
________________________________________________________
29. Colville, 708.
30. Gilbert, “Never Despair,” 1151.
31 Colville, 661.
32. Macmillan, 558.
33. H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a Dictator
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 554.
34. Colville, 721.
FINESTHOUR150/24
AGE AND LEADERSHIP
Holding Fast: Churchill’s Longevity
There is much to be learned from his tenacious spirit, well into old age.
Yet, as in so many other areas, Churchill was one of a kind.
J O H N H. M A T H E R M. D.
S
peaking of the imperiled British race in World War II,
Churchill said, “We have not journeyed all this way
across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar
candy.” That famous line typifies our abiding image of the
leader who galvanized free peoples with his famous maxims:
never stop, never weary, never give in. He summoned the
call to hold fast and never to despair. But we give little
thought to where he found his strength and energy.
Was Churchill immune from the frailties that accompany advancing age? He was not. Yet, he did seem to
possess innate physical, mental and spiritual strengths which
he was able to call upon at will. His physical resilience and
mental hardiness did not desert him until his eighties.
Churchill’s first quarter century had been marked by
numerous illnesses and accidents, some of them close calls,
none enough to incapacitate him: pneumonia, a concussion,
appendicitis, a near-fatal encounter with a car, a dislocated
shoulder. But the period following his first premiership was
the most significant, medically as well as politically. The
physical and mental stress of World War II, causing several
forced rests from illness, mark important transition periods.
The War Years (Age 65 to 70)
At the request of the Cabinet, Dr. Charles Wilson
(Lord Moran from 1943), devoted himself to looking after
Churchill’s health. Highly dedicated, Moran was willing to
do whatever he could to maintain and restore his patient.
At an age when most men are happily retired,
Churchill seemed to be not only indomitable but indefatigable. He had enthusiastically assumed the greatest job of
his life. He maintained a tremendous work schedule with
verve, relish, and zest which might have exhausted a man of
his age, and indeed wore out some younger colleagues.
During the war he may have suffered a heart attack, and
had several bouts of pneumonia which in earlier days would
surely have disabled or killed him.
With America in the war after Pearl Harbor, Churchill
________________________________________________________
Dr. Mather, a past governor of The Churchill Centre, has spent over two
decades researching Sir Winston’s medical history. This article is adapted
and updated from his paper in Churchill Proceedings 1996-97.
felt the need to consult urgently with Roosevelt, and arrived
in Washington shortly before Christmas 1941. On
December 27th Moran, at his hotel, was summoned to his
patient at the White House. Churchill explained that he
had experienced some shortness of breath with a dull pain
over the left side of his chest and down his left arm, but
that it had passed. Moran examined his patient, finding
little amiss, but was convinced that Churchill had experienced either a heart attack or coronary insufficiency
(angina). The doctor then made what may have been the
most important decision of his professional career.
Charles Wilson was acutely aware of the political and
military arguments against doing what was clinically
orthodox: hospitalizing his patient, confirming his diagnosis
with an electrocardiogram, and calling in a heart specialist.
Impossible! Yet, should Churchill have a second and
perhaps fatal coronary attack he might be held responsible.
But Wilson opted to refrain from conventional
therapy. He simply warned his famous patient to slow
down, to do no more than was absolutely necessary. Such
were Churchill’s recuperative powers that he survived this
apparent first warning signal that his circulatory system was
beginning to fail. Later Churchill was seen in London by a
cardiologist, Sir John Parkinson, who determined that the
PM had possibly had a brief episode of angina, and proposed no special treatment.
An alternative and reasonable medical conclusion is
that Churchill’s pain was no more than a muscle spasm, or
a strain of the bony and cartilaginous chest wall. This is
suggested by the lack of adverse effects—Churchill soon
resumed his very fast pace, with effective speeches in
Washington and Ottawa. It is usual for someone who experiences an episode of angina to have additional attacks when
he resumes stressful activity. Churchill did not, and had no
such attack in later life.
Churchill’s next medical episodes were not so private.
In North Africa in February 1943 he had a mild pneumonia associated with a cold, which he was able to shrug
off quickly. Later that year Churchill flew from London to
North Africa to meet Roosevelt and their military advisers.
In mid-December 1943 at Tunis, he developed a fever.
Wilson, now Lord Moran, suspecting trouble, sent for >>
FINESTHOUR150/25
but each journey had taken its toll, and the frequency of
CHURCHILL’S LONGEVITY...
illness had increased.
nurses, a pathologist and x-ray equipment. Pneumonia was
The effects of alcohol and drugs on Churchill’s mental
diagnosed and treatment was promptly started. One of the
capacity remain a matter for debate. The
sulfa drugs (May and Baker or “M&B”)
image of him as a heavy drinker persists,
was administered. It took a little more than
thanks in part to his frequently expressed
a week for the inflammation of his lungs to
taste for whisky, wine, champagne and
begin subsiding. However, there were
brandy. During World War II his physician
several episodes of cardiac fibrillation,
provided him with various medications
which sometimes accompanies pneumonia.
such as “reds” (barbiturate capsules) for
To combat this and strengthen the heart
insomnia, which were also used for his
action, Moran briefly administered digitalis.
afternoon naps. Several visiting military
This illness seriously debilitated Churchill.
officers told of Churchill, awakened early
Because of his public location and the
into a nap, being wobbly and apparently
need to bring in medical assistance, news of
the worse for alcohol. More likely, what
Churchill’s indisposition could not be supthey observed were the continuing effects
pressed; press bulletins were issued and the
of barbiturates.
nervous Cabinet reassured. But the combiDespite his reputation for indefatiganation of sulfa drugs, his own resilience,
bility,
Churchill was noticeably beginning
and excellent medical and nursing care
CHARLES WILSON, LORD MORAN
to
fail.
After each recovery from his three
enabled Churchill to weather the storm.
1882-1977:
CHURCHILL’S DOCTOR
wartime pneumonias, he pursued a grueling
Fortunately, major decisions on battle plans
schedule with few periods of relaxation,
were already well advanced and his illness
apart from his regular afternoon naps. He used sleeping pills
had no effect on the war’s progress.
frequently, and seemed to have increasing difficulty rememLate in August 1944, a tired Churchill returned from
bering that he was using them.
conferences and inspections in Italy running a high temperaDuring periods of tension Churchill often had transiture. A case of pneumonia was again diagnosed, though
tory elevations of temperature, but these seldom lasted more
described as a “mild one” by Moran. Churchill was confined
than a day. Awakening in the morning, he always took his
to bed for a few days, received newly developed penicillin,
own temperature, indicating his preoccupation with his
and continued to work, preparing for another trip to
health, a mild form of hypochondria. One morning he
Washington and to Quebec for the second conference there.
called Moran after reading his temperature at 106 degrees.
Before Quebec in September, 1944, American
Moran said to double check the reading because if it were
Ambassador to Britain Gilbert Winant informed Roosevelt
accurate he should be dead, and asked if the PM was
adviser Harry Hopkins that Churchill had been ill again.
speaking from the grave. The reading proved to be 96!
His temperature had returned to normal, Winant noted,
The Lion in Winter: Encounters with Churchill 1946-1962
DANA COOK
Mr. Cook ([email protected]) has published collections of
literary, political and show business encounters widely, including
his first installment for Finest Hour in issue 147.
intervals and bring it to his lips to be drained.
—Joseph Alsop, Journalist, “I’ve Seen the Best of It”:
Memoirs, with Adam Platt (New York: Norton, 1992)
London, 1946: Reluctant Owl
New York, 1949: “Prop Him Up”
[A friend] asked me to luncheon with his mother….After
hasty introductions, we went downstairs to the dining room,
where I found myself sitting next to Lady Churchill. Mr. Churchill
was at the far end of the table, looking silent and grumpy, not
unlike, I thought, a great old owl who had been dragged, much
against his will, out into the bright sunlight. [Luncheon guests]
alternately filled Mr. Churchill’s glass in an attempt, I concluded,
to induce artificial respiration with champagne. The old man
remained hunched over and hardly said a word, although a
plump pink hand would reach out for the glass at fairly regular
He came to the Times for dinner and reflected on Yalta,
Stalin, Roosevelt, and the atom bomb.…He looked considerably
more rounded fore and aft than when I had seen him about a
year and a half earlier. There was a curious sort of grayness to
his flesh, which gave me a start when he entered the eleventhfloor dining room. I saw him take a quick look at the scowling
photograph of Mussolini in the gallery of big shots on the wall,
but he made no comment. He asked for a glass of tomato juice,
which I thought was newsworthy, but corrected this impression
when the brandy was passed around, and he complained that
FINESTHOUR150/26
Defying the Odds (Age 70 to 80)
After Churchill left office in July 1945, Moran did his
best to make his patient take a prolonged rest. Churchill
enjoyed a holiday in Italy, painting on the shores of Lake
Como. Though shocked by Labour’s election victory, he
avoided depression through his devotion to painting and
the family that surrounded him.
His physician had good reason for believing Churchill
was exhausted, even unable at times to concentrate. WSC,
he wrote, was little interested in politics, and Churchill
himself speculated on whether his energy would ever return.
On 5 September 1945, Churchill summoned Moran
to look at a swelling in his groin which proved to be a
“rupture.” When he was a schoolboy a surgeon had warned
him about the possibility of a hernia. A truss proved only a
temporary palliative. His surgeon Sir Thomas Dunhill
insisted that operating was necessary, but a reluctant
Churchill put it off until 11 June 1947.
Churchill’s susceptibility to pneumonia, coupled with
Moran’s observation of hardening blood vessels in the
retinal arteries and a “sluggish” circulation, made the
surgery risky, so the operation was not without difficulties.
Normally a 20-minute procedure, it took two hours because
of a large mass of adhesions in the abdominal cavity, the
aftermath of a 1922 appendectomy. Churchill’s convalescence was prolonged. He had begun to write his massive
memoirs of World War II, but he did not work at it continuously. When Britain’s weather began to turn cold,
Churchill went south to the more balmy climate of
Marrakesh, Morocco.
On 24 August 1949, Moran was called from London
to Lord Beaverbrook’s villa in Monte Carlo where a holidaying Churchill needed him. Playing cards at 2 am, he had
noticed a cramp in his right leg and right arm, still present
everybody kept him talking so much that he didn’t have time to
drink. I thought the old man snorted and lisped more than usual,
but this may have been induced by sobriety.…As he left at a
few minutes past eleven, a little shuffly and a little bent, Dr.
Howard Rush, the Times’s favorite doctor, remarked, “Jesus,
prop him up.” I thought his political days were over....
—James Reston, Journalist, Deadline: A Memoir (New
York: Random House, 1991)
when Moran arrived the next morning. Churchill also
seemed to have some difficulty in writing, but no slurring
of speech was noted. As his physician proceeded with his
examination, Churchill asked if he had a stroke. Moran
replied that most think of a stroke as a burst artery but that
Churchill had only had a small blockage of a small artery—
the beginning of his doctor’s downplaying of WSC’s
circulation problems. In fact it was a small stroke, involving
structure of the left side of the brain but no major artery,
since speech was not affected. (See “Churchill’s Dagger,” by
Beaverbrook colleague Michael Wardell, FH 87, Summer
1995, http://xrl.us/bfakav.)
Systematic cover-ups followed after this first in a series
of strokes which ultimately ended Churchill’s life. Despite
apparent recovery, Churchill’s blood vessels had become
“old” and later strokes progressed to the severely debilitating
syndrome known as multi-infarct “vascular” dementia.
In early 1950, just five months later, Churchill had a
sensation of hazy vision and experienced difficulty reading:
a transient episode, but consistent with poor circulation in
the blood vessels that reach the posterior brain. Churchill
later complained of stiffness in his shoulders and neck,
which suggests a partial or total occlusion of these vessels. If
there is truth to the old canard that a man is “as old as his
arteries,” then Winston Churchill was an “old man” as he
began to write his wartime memoirs.
Victory in the General Election of 26 October 1951
meant no respite for Churchill, who was again Prime
Minister with an apparent new lease on life. Yet on 21
February 1952, he told Moran he was having difficulty
remembering words he wanted to express. This aphasia was
transitory but is evidence of a more generalized insufficiency
of the blood supplying a large area of the lateral portion of
the left brain. These episodes were not true strokes but >>
of tea, a tray of highballs was brought in, and as others followed
my senses began to swim. I cannot recall that the subject of the
proof corrections was ever broached, except perhaps very
casually. At one point Churchill took me out into the garden and
showed me his goldfish and water works.
—Malcolm Muggeridge, Journalist, Chronicles of Wasted
Time, vol. 1, The Green Stick (London: Collins, 1972)
Chartwell, 1950: Champagne Revival
Chartwell, 1950: Old Sea Lion
I happened to be briefly in the chair at The Daily
Telegraph, then serialising his War Memoirs, and it was in connection with some dispute arising over his excessive proof
corrections that he had required my presence. His physical condition was....flabby and puffy, and, in some indefinable way,
vaguely obscene. Like an inebriated old sea lion, barking and
thrashing about in shallow water. He was wearing his famous
siren suit, with a zip-fastener up the front; various of his collaborators were there, familiarly sycophantic, as is the way with
such people, especially the service ones. At four o'clock, in lieu
Randolph called me at my hotel and invited me to lunch at
Chartwell the next day. I naturally supposed that there would be
a large number of interesting and important people at the
luncheon, and that I could perform the function of a fly on the
wall. Instead, the lunch party consisted of the old man,
Randolph and myself, and at first it was a most uncomfortable
affair. Mr. Churchill was dressed in a siren suit and looked like
an angry old baby. He responded to my shy greetings with an
angry harrumphing noise. I think Randolph had sprung me on
him at the last moment, and that I was not at all a welcome
addition. [But] the effect of the champagne on Mr. Churchill >>
FINESTHOUR150/27
CHURCHILL’S LONGEVITY...
transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) where the circulation is
briefly reduced and then returns.
In January 1953, just before the inauguration of
Eisenhower as U.S. President, Churchill crossed the Atlantic
to see his old comrade in arms. Another meeting was
planned for the summer in Bermuda, but it did not materialize. On 23 June, following a London dinner for the Prime
Minister of Italy, he had difficulty rising from his chair and
some thought he had had a bit too much alcohol. Moran
was called, but by the time he arrived, Churchill was at
home in bed. He carefully examined his patient, who had
slurred speech and an unsteady gait. It was Churchill’s
second major stroke.
By now the Prime Minister had become increasingly
dependent on drugs. Typically, he named his tablets:
“majors, minors, reds, greens,” and “Lord Morans.” He
sometimes took these medications, especially sedatives and
tranquilizers, with alcohol, which, being a central nervous
system depressant, can accentuate their effects, producing
lapses of memory and confusion.
Though beset with various levels of insomnia,
Churchill had previously fought off depression by intense
exercises such as hunting, polo and swimming, and through
writing, bricklaying and painting. His creative impulses
probably gave him an extended political life. His desire for
bright and sunny climes—highly suggestive of a variety of
depression known as Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD
Syndrome—increased in his later years, when he spent long
months in the South of France. Some of these trips were
taken on very short notice, when London was dreary and
damp. But in later years it was much harder for him to
escape his depressive predisposition, owing to the onset of
an impaired blood supply to his brain.
His driving desire still to make a contribution forced
was like that of the morning sun on an opening flower. He
began to talk, through the champagne, and then through port
and a small bottle of a special cognac, which he consumed
alone, since the champagne and the port were almost too much
for me. He was talking, I suppose, for his own amusement—I
was a thirty-six-year-old American journalist, of whom he had
probably never heard, and there was no good reason to waste
such talk on me. For the talk was good, very good, wise and
witty and malicious by turns.
—Stewart Alsop, Journalist, Stay of Execution: A Sort of
Memoir (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973)
London, 1951: Looking for the Loo
The first time we realized that he was honouring us was at
a great performance of Caesar and Cleopatra. In the interval, I
was hovering about in my dressing-room, wondering what the
great man was thinking of us, when my door opened and that
immortal head with the wonderful blue eyes came round it. I was
too much taken aback to say anything, but he said at once, “Oh,
Churchill to demonstrate a public image of vigor and
robust health. His verbal skills had been honed over a lifetime of oratory. Meticulous preparation, bolstered by
medical stimulants, allowed him to demonstrate a vitality at
Cabinet meetings and Conservative Party conferences, such
as Margate in October 1953. While cerebral arteriosclerosis
was probably the principal cause of Churchill’s progressive
dementia, even the modest use of alcohol and drugs ironically hastened his decline and magnified his problems with
memory and recall.
“Nothing in the End” (Age 80 to 90)
Convinced finally that his long-desired hope for a summit
and “settlement” with the Russians could not happen
during his tenure, Churchill retired as Prime Minister in
April 1955, but continued to work on his final multivolume work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
and to seek the sun in the South of France. In April 1958,
he had an episode of dizziness and fell. He developed pneumonia and pleurisy, and took several weeks to recover.
In May 1959 he made his penultimate trip to the
United States, spending much of the time with Eisenhower,
who lamented, “You should have seen him in his prime.”
He fell asleep on the flight home. Awakening as the aircraft
landed, he noticed a throbbing pain in his right little finger.
Moran referred him to Professor Charles Rob, a cardiovascular surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital and Medical School.
Somehow, Churchill had crushed the blood supply to the
finger, possibly from a ring acting as a tourniquet, and eventually he lost its tip to dry gangrene. Here was further
evidence of the fragility of his vascular system and the generally advanced state of his arteriosclerotic arteries. Shortly
afterward, he stopped painting.
He continued his trips to the South of France and on
28 June 1962 at a hotel close to Lord Beaverbrook’s Monte
I'm sorry, I was looking for a corner.” Realizing his need, I took
him back through the outer office, and indicated to him exactly
where to go and how to get himself down the stairs again, where
there would be someone waiting for him to take him back
through the pass-door and into his seat.…[At the following
reception] we were introduced to the Prime Minister as we came
into the gathering and, during the drinks with sandwiches before
the formalities started, I took the liberty of seeking him out and
imploring him for his help and would he have the generous
patience, so very nervous and anxious as I was not to say the
wrong thing, just to please glance through what I had planned to
say, it wouldn't take him more than two minutes? He turned eyes
so hooded they were almost shut away from me and said, “Oh, I
would suggest a few impromptu words….”
—Sir Laurence Olivier, Actor, Confessions of an Actor
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982)
**Churchill’s account of this meeting was made when he
returned to his seat and his daughter Mary: “I was looking for a
luloo, and who d’you think I ran into? Juloo.” —Ed.
FINESTHOUR150/28
Carlo villa, he slipped on a rug
final years was entirely consisand fell heavily on his right
tent with a continuing
hip. The x-ray taken in his
diminution of mental powers.
hotel room showed a broken
His prescient “Sinews of Peace”
upper femur. He was transspeech, at Fulton in March
ferred to Monaco Hospital,
1946, had galvanized him with
where a large plaster cast was
the conviction that he could,
applied, extending from his
through his own brand of perchest down his right leg, which
sonal diplomacy, achieve his
allowed him to be flown to
final goal of world peace. Alas,
England. He was admitted to
he could not get Eisenhower—
the Middlesex Hospital where
or, despite a few false hopes,
his right hip was pinned by
the Russians—to the conferPhilip Newman, Britain’s
ence table, and the failure
PAINTING AT MIAMI, 1946: With Clementine before the “Iron
leading orthopedic specialist for Curtain”
weighed
deeply: “I have worked
speech in Fulton. One of Churchill’s keys to longevity was
this condition. He was disvery
hard
and achieved a great
certainly the ability to relax and to clear his mind of worry.
charged fifty-five days later
deal,” he said to his private secafter a prolonged recovery period, having given the medical
retary, “only to achieve nothing in the end.”
and nursing staff a difficult time due to his intermittent
From the 1930s, unlike his earlier career, Churchill’s
confusion and irritability.
focus was heavily devoted to international affairs. In later
This hip fracture is not uncommon in the elderly after
life he had little time for difficult and intractable domestic
a fall. But notably, Churchill survived the surgery, the anesand economic issues. His ability to concentrate for extended
thetic and the rehabilitation without any major problems
periods of time, to assimilate data and sift through critical
such a thrombosis in his legs from poor circulation.
background information, was gradually lost. When his colOver the next two and a half years Churchill showed
leagues complained he sometimes regarded them as disloyal,
less and less interest in life, retiring as a Member of
and this led increasingly to episodes of melancholy and
Parliament 28 July 1964 after a phenomenal political career
soul-searching.
that stretched back over sixty years. After another transient
While much of his decline was hidden from the
episode of impaired blood supply to the brain in December,
public, Churchill’s lowering interest in government led to
Churchill had a massive stroke and slipped into a coma. He
pressure to resign. While some saw his continuing prestige
died on 24 January 1965.
as an advantage for the Tory Party, others wanted him
“gracefully” to retire. When he resisted, they backed off but
The Effects of Aging on Performance
remained pessimistic. When it was thought that he was preWhile the progression of dementia was probably
pared to go in the spring of 1953, his heir-apparent,
faintly understood by Churchill, his behavior over these
Anthony Eden, fell seriously ill. This emboldened >>
House of Commons, 1952: Mettle
Ted Heath took me into the smoking-room....“Remember,
Winston hates small talk.” I was already very alarmed by the
forthcoming encounter, but now I panicked. What big talk could I
possibly think up in the thirty seconds that remained? When we
reached him, Churchill was reading the racing results....Heath
introduced me: “This is Nicolson, sir. The new Member for
Bournemouth East.” He did not even look up. Heath then left us.
I spoke my hastily prepared question: “Prime Minister, what do
you consider the most important quality in a man?” At that he
did look up and, over the rim of his spectacles and the rim of
the newspaper, he spoke one word in reply: “Mettle.” He then
resumed his study of how his horse had done.
—Nigel Nicolson, Publisher and Politician, Long Life:
Memoirs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997)
Downing Street, 1954: Drawing Power
I was shown into a large, dimly lit Cabinet Room. Mr.
Churchill rose from his chair and shook my hand. I had not real-
ized what a short man he was; I towered over him. He motioned
with an unlit cigar for me to sit next to him. It would be just the
two of us, apparently. I noticed that three London afternoon
dailies were spread out on a table next to him. “Well, first,” he
said, in the marvelous voice I had heard so many times on the
radio and in the newsreels, “I want to congratulate you for these
huge crowds you've been drawing.” “Oh, well, it's God's doing,
believe me,” I said. “That may be,” he replied, squinting at me,
“but I daresay that if I brought Marilyn Monroe over here, and
she and I together went to Wembley, we couldn't fill it.”
—Billy Graham, Evangelist, Just As I Am: The
Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: HarperCollins, 1997)
Nice, Mid-1950s: Cute, for a Legend
I was strolling with Brigitte [Bardot] through one of the corridors of the Victorine studios when we saw the silhouette of a
man walking toward us and treading heavily with the aid of a
cane. At first I thought it was Orson Welles; but Welles was not
that old, I remembered, changing my impression. When we >>
FINESTHOUR150/29
CHURCHILL’S LONGEVITY...
Churchill for new attempts at detente with Russia, but no
sooner had he begun to pursue them than a major stroke
saw his colleagues quietly assume many of his functions.
(See Terry Reardon’s preceding article.)
Throughout these years of frustration and decline,
Churchill’s family and friends never wavered. His wife,
always anxious for him and their family life, maintained a
strong partnership and attempted, sometimes with spectacular lack of success, to ensure that he ate properly, rested
well, and had convivial company.
A representative conversation occurred at Chartwell
when Sir John Anderson, WSC’s wartime Home Secretary
and deviser of the Anderson Shelter, admitted to Churchill
that he had been “vegetating”—staying in bed late.
Churchill: “What time do you have breakfast, and do
you get up?”
Anderson: “Yes, I always get up to breakfast.”
Churchill: “Are you shaved and booted?”
Anderson: “Yes, I’m shaved and booted and ready to
go out.”
Churchill: “What do you eat for breakfast?”
Anderson: “Twice a week I have bacon—the other
days porridge.”
Ava, Lady Anderson, widow of the late Ralph Wigram,
the foreign office official who had helped Churchill learn of
German rearmament: “Yes, porridge with salt.”
Churchill: “Good God.”
Ava: “What do you have for breakfast, Winston?”
Churchill: “An egg often—sometimes a fried sole—
some cold chicken and cold ham with coffee. I always have
it in bed—never with Clemmie. I tried that once or twice
but no marriage could last if you breakfast together and it
nearly wrecked mine—so never again.”
Aside from a glimpse of the care his wife took of him,
this is an example of Churchill’s continued humor and wit
well into old age. The role of laughter and fun in his life
went a long way towards his overall good health and
longevity. There are many stories which show that he did
not take himself too seriously, and often poked fun at
himself, along with his friends and political enemies.
Winston Churchill stands out among statesmen, yet
despite his towering image, from a medical standpoint he
was as human as any of us. Indeed if he had lived and died
simply as a “mere mortal,” his medical problems would be
of interest to no one except perhaps his doctor. At the
sunset of his life he was medically impaired with vascular
insufficiency; yet there can be little doubt about his essential
physical resilience and mental hardiness. There is much to
be learned—and emulated—from his tenacious spirit well
into old age; yet, as in so many other areas, Winston
Churchill was one of a kind. ,
got closer I recognized Sir Winston Churchill....Brigitte was
always herself, whether in the presence of her wardrobe woman
or the world's great personalities. After the usual exchange of
polite formalities there was silence. Churchill's eyes sparkled as
he looked at the young actress without speaking. He seemed to
be wondering what platitude would come out of this sensual
mouth made for love and the screen….”When I was eight years
old and heard you on the radio, you frightened me,” said
Brigitte. “But now you seem rather cute, considering you're a
legend.” “Cute” was not a word people normally used to
describe Churchill to his face! The great orator remained
speechless.
—Roger Vadim, Film Director, Bardot Deneuve Fonda: My
Life with the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1986)
Monte Carlo, 1960: Dozing Off
Marrakesh, 1959: Moments of His Old Self
Coffee and brandy with Churchill on his last night in
Marrakesh. We sat at his table in the corner of the Mamounia
Hotel dining room….He looked older: his skin is no longer pink
but whitish and blotchy. His eyes are watery and dim. His
hearing is even worse (as usual he wouldn’t wear his hearing
aid), and his voice is very faint. He is now really weak and can’t
get up without massive effort, has to be half-supported when he
walks upstairs. But he wasn’t “ga-ga” as so many people have
said. I think he has difficulty, because of his hearing, in following
things. So he seems to miss part of what’s going on, above all
when he’s tired. But he has moments of his old self.
—C. L. Sulzberger, Journalist. The Last of the Giants
(New York: Macmillan, 1970)
The outer door of the house opened to admit several
manservants, bearing among them the recumbent form of...Sir
Winston Churchill. It was a strange and uncomely way in which
to see for the first time a human being of such renown and consideration....the prostrate figure came emphatically into being,
gesticulating and muttering in a fashion most indicative of life,
and within a few minutes was established in a dining-room chair
and manifestly the man who had come to dinner….I saluted him
with reverence. He was not, I think, aware of this; having been
deposited in his chair the old gentleman was clearly content to
let circumstances take their course, and by and by fell into a
doze. He continued in a light sleep throughout the meal….After
dinner somebody put a cigar into his mouth and lit it; it seemed
a ritual gesture without dignity; the completion of an effigy.
—James Cameron, Journalist, Points of Departure,
(Northumberland: Oriel Press, 1967)
London, 1962: Still Flashing the “V”
Churchill fell and broke his thigh in Monte Carlo....The
next day he was flown back to London and I was outside the
hospital as they brought him out. I leaned close to the ambulance window to see his face and judge how ill he was. Two feet
away from me, the old boy opened his eyes and smiled. He
raised his hand to me in the famous “V” sign of the war years.
Evidently history couldn’t claim him yet. But the incident debilitated him and, [in 1964] he reluctantly resigned from Parliament.
—Robert MacNeil, Broadcast Journalist, The Right Place
at the Right Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982) ,
FINESTHOUR150/30
RIDDLES, MYSTERIES, ENIGMAS
Send your questions to the editor
Confronting Television in Old Age
A year or so ago BBC Newsnight showed a very rare video of Winston
QChurchill
preparing for a broadcast. He forgot his lines and instead, with
a twinkle in his eye, ad libbed a poem directly into the camera. I felt this short
clip told more about the man than anything else I had seen. I believe the
video was going into a collection somewhere. Do you know where this clip is
held, and is it possible to get a copy? —KEITH BRAITHWAITE, ENGLAND
Since we know of no footage of
WSC preparing for a radio broadcast, we think you are referring to the
television screen test released by the
BBC in November 1986. From Finest
Hour 55, Spring 1987:
A
LOST FOR WORDS, AT LAST
Television viewers in Britain,
America and the Commonwealth were
variously amazed and amused to find
Sir Winston on television, in a 1955
screen test released after thirty years by
the BBC. The original was made by the
mother of Humphrey Crum Ewing of
Reading, a member of the TV Unit of
the Conservative Central Office, who
kept a copy.
Mr. Crum Ewing said: “It was
very hush-hush at the time, because he
was considering how he was going to
announce his retirement. It is well
known that all his speeches were very
well prepared….But there was no
autocue on the cameras then and when
it came to reading a poem about ducks
in St. James’s Park he had his head
down, looking at the script. He looked
as if his eyes were shut. He was an old
man then. The techniques he had
learned were not suited to television.”
Viewers [in 1987] were not
shown the poem recitation, but they
did see a nervous WSC ad libbing in a
three-minute sequence. Churchillians
have often said that Sir Winston would
be quickly demolished by the modern
media and their agencies. For many of
us, this excerpt proved how easy the
job would have been.
If the excerpt you saw included
the poetry reading, it must be a longer
version of the one we reported. The
best source to consult would be the
BBC Archives.
GREAT CONTEMPORARIES: The first
edition (above) and 1938 Extended Edition, both very rare in dust jackets. The
latter added four essays, including one on
Roosevelt. (Putnam’s American edition,
1937, never added the extra essays.)
Photos by Mark Weber, Churchill Book
Specialist, www.wscbooks.com.
Q
I plan to buy a copy of Great
Contemporaries, but remain
undecided: is the revised edition with
four new essays the best choice?
—GILBERT MICHAUD, QUEBEC
A
If you’re going to own only one
copy, definitely get the revised
edition, for the sake of completeness: it
adds four essays, on Fisher, Parnell,
Roosevelt and Baden-Powell. Among
FINESTHOUR150/31
first editions, both the 1937
and 1938 volumes are rare
and pricey in fine jacketed
condition, though ordinary
worn copies have remained
reasonably priced. If the 1930s
originals are beyond your means, look
for the very inexpensive postwar editions by Odhams, which contain all the
1938 essays. Avoid wartime editions by
Macmillan or the Reprint Society,
which eliminate Roosevelt, Trotsky and
Savinkov out of political considerations
for Churchill’s wartime allies.
Also, you need to watch for the
new edition due from ISI Books, edited
with a new foreword by James Muller,
and important footnoting by Muller
and Paul Courtenay. This edition will
contain five further essays by WSC:
H.G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin,
Kitchener of Khartoum, King Edward
VIII and Rudyard Kipling.
A few notes on Great
Contemporaries from Langworth, A
Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of
Sir Winston Churchill (1998, 2001):
In Bargaining for Supremacy
(1977), James R. Leutze accused
Churchill of being “oddly unaware of
other people's reactions...not much
interest in others.” That charge has
stuck, and rare is the Churchill critic
who fails to repeat it. The reader of
Great Contemporaries will come away
with the opposite impression. No one
could have written such vivid essays on
the great personages of his time
without comprehension, understanding
and, in some cases, regard.
Take for example the Labour
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip
Snowden, with whom Churchill (the
preceding Chancellor) hotly debated all
the great issues of socialism vs. capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s. After a
lengthy account of their antagonisms,
Churchill adds: “...never have I had
any feelings towards him which
destroyed the impression that he was a
generous, true-hearted man....the
British Democracy should be proud of
Philip Snowden.” A noble tribute—
and typical of Churchill. ,
AGE AND LEADERSHIP
“Where Others Heard Taps,
Churchill Heard Reveille”
Barbara Leaming offers brilliant insight into
Churchill’s last decade of active politics
R I C H A R D M. L A N G W O R T H
Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 19451955, by Barbara Leaming. London:
Harper Press, 394 pages, £20/$26.99.
Member price $21.60.
“At my time of life I have no personal
ambitions, no future to provide for. And
I feel I can truthfully say that I only
wish to do my duty by the whole mass
of the nation and of the British Empire
as long as I am thought to be of
any use for that.”
—Churchill in a London Broadcast,
21 March 1943
A
t first glance, Barbara Leaming’s
book on Churchill’s last ten
yyears of active politics is just
“popular history”: under 400 pages, paraphrases instead of lengthy quotes, no
footnotes (the back pages provide line
references). There is none of the clinical,
chronological approach of Sir Martin
Gilbert, and little that challenges his
findings.
But Leaming adds a unique personal dimension that places her book
well above the long array of potboilers—making it the most important
survey of Churchill’s last active decade
since Anthony Seldon’s Churchill’s
Indian Summer thirty years ago. It will
be particularly valuable to young people,
or others new to Churchill, for its keen
insight into his lifelong defiance of long
odds and formidable adversaries.
In describing his last political
decade, Leaming takes the measure of
Churchill’s earlier experience. For
example, she spots something he wrote
of uniquely gifted people in 1937: “One
may say that sixty, perhaps seventy
percent of all they have to give is
expended on fights which have no other
object but to get to their battlefield.”
That, she observes, nicely
describes “the arc of Churchill’s own
political career. By the time he had realized his supreme ambition of becoming
prime minister, in 1940, he had spent
decades fighting to reach his particular
battlefield. Again, after being hurled
from power in 1945, Churchill dedicated an additional six years to fighting
his way back” (135).
Why did he fight on after 1945?
In two words: world peace. It was, he
said repeatedly, “the last prize I seek.”
Churchill considered himself
uniquely gifted for what he called
“parleys at the summit.” At Fulton, even
as he warned of the Iron Curtain, he
insisted that if only the heads of governFINESTHOUR150/32
ment could sit down together, the
danger of Apocalypse could be eased.
Repeatedly he risked rupturing the
special relationship he valued above all
others, challenging a reluctant
Eisenhower to meet with him and the
Russians. Most notable, Leaming writes,
was his speech of 11 May 1953, which
she regards an equal to his great war
speeches. “Where others heard taps,” she
concludes, “Churchill heard reveille.”
Relying heavily on diaries and
memoirs of the primary players (but circumspect about the non-medical views
of Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran),
Leaming constructs an intensely personal
portrayal not only of Churchill but of
colleagues and adversaries, led by Stalin
and Eisenhower. And make no mistake,
Eisenhower was an adversary. Rosy portraits of their relationship obfuscate
Churchill’s low view of Ike as President;
he deemed him short on vision, stagnant
in thinking. Above all, the President was
subservient to his Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, “whose breath stank
and whose left eye twitched incessantly
and disconcertingly”—whom President
Eisenhower sent at regular intervals “to
try to turn Churchill from his purpose.”
The reader is at Churchill’s
shoulder from page 1, where, in Berlin
in 1945, he descends the stairs to
Hitler’s bunker, hesitates halfway down,
climbs wearily back and—when a
Russian soldier shows him where Hitler’s
body was burned—turns away in revulsion. Or 1946, in Miami, “seated beside
a bed of red poinsettias near the pink
brick seaside house,” his tropical tan suit
“snugly across his stomach,” pondering
what he must tell the world at Fulton.
We read parallel sketches of Stalin
around the same time, holidaying on the
Black Sea, ailing, exhausted, paranoid,
suspicious of plots against him, torturing
a former doctor he believes is a spy.
Leaming’s insight is extraordinary.
Why, for example, did Truman invite
Churchill to Fulton, when the President
was seeking to avoid confrontation with
Moscow? “At a time when Truman had
yet to emerge from Roosevelt’s shadow,”
she suggests, “it might be difficult politically to depart from his predecessor’s
Soviet policy. The Fulton speech, delivered by a private citizen who also
happened to be a master of the spoken >>
Clementine Spencer
Churchill (1885-1977):
“She would gladly
exchange the
splendours and miseries of
a meteor’s train for the
quieter more banal
happiness of being married
to an ordinary man.”
Anthony Eden (18971977): “He worried about
being displaced by Butler
or Macmillan….He was
notorious for bullying
people who could be
bullied and collapsing
before those who couldn’t.”
John Foster Dulles (18881959), “whose breath stank
and whose left eye
twitched incessantly and
disconcertingly.”
Eisenhower sent him at
intervals to turn Churchill
from his purposes.
Harold Macmillan (18941986): Ardent for Churchill
to retire, he pressed others
to deliver his message.
Churchill, well-informed,
said: “I should be glad if he
would come and tell in his
own words what he feels
rather than tell my wife.”
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil,
Fifth Lord Salisbury, known
as “Bobbety” (1893-1972):
“Tall and gaunt with a long
nose and protruding teeth,”
an ugly man “whose great
personal charm caused
many women to find him
immensely attractive.”
Richard Austen “Rab”
Butler (1902-1982): “He
threw in his lot with a
group of Labour members
who, in the hope of saving
their own hides should
Attlee fall, aimed to bring
down the Government for a
coalition headed by Bevin.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1890-1969): “At Bermuda,
he compared Russia to a
woman of the streets…
whether her dress was
new or just the old one
patched she was still the
same whore underneath.”
Josef Stalin (1878-1953):
Enraged at being told to
retire lest he suffer a
severe stroke, he
destroyed his medical
records, tortured a doctor
he conceived was a spy,
and vowed to avoid all
doctors in the future.
word, as well as a figure of exceptional
appeal to Americans, would allow
Truman, at no political cost to himself,
to see if the public was ready to accept a
change” (67).
Clementine Churchill is closely
appreciated. She yearned for Winston to
retire. In their daughter Mary’s words,
she would “gladly exchange the splendours and miseries of a meteor’s train
for the quieter more banal happiness of
being married to an ordinary man.” Yet
she wished him go on his terms, sharply
replying when outsiders urged her to
intervene. Asked in mid-1954 if she
wanted Winston to retire, she replied:
“Yes I do indeed, but I don’t wish to be
told that by Mr. Harold Macmillan.”
Churchill’s Tory colleagues do not
bear well under Leaming’s light. Nearly
to a man, they hoped he would retire,
each of them in profound self-interest.
Salisbury wanted Eden, knowing he
could not as easily control “Rab” Butler;
Butler dangled a coalition before Labour
as a way to supplant Eden as heir
apparent. Macmillan first shunned the
retirement cabal, hoping it would fail,
paving his own way to the top, while
urging Clementine and private secretary
Jock Colville to tell Winston to go.
Eden, ever the prevaricator, flopped this
way and that over demanding Churchill
quit. No wonder the wheels nearly came
off the Cabinet at several junctures—in
ways that remind us of politics today.
We may not have appreciated the
degree of separation between Churchill
and Eden—and for how long. Michael
McMenamin’s “Action This Day” last
issue quoted Churchill’s 1936 remark
when Eden became foreign secretary: “I
think you will now see what a lightweight Eden is.” Churchill Defiant
reminds us of what WSC said the night
before his resignation as Prime Minister
in April 1955: “I don’t believe Anthony
can do it.” Churchill’s judgment was on
the mark. Eden, who resigned soon after
Eisenhower refused to back his march
on Suez in 1956, “could be a prickly
and peevish character,” but was diplomatic with Churchill, Leaming quotes
the historian P.J. Grigg: Eden was notorious for “bullying people who could be
bullied and collapsing before those who
couldn’t” (137).
FINESTHOUR150/33
The book leaves us with poignant
and sorrowful realizations, national and
personal. Nationally, Britain’s place in
the world fell precipitously in the
decade after the war. The “special relationship” proved more special to
London than to Washington, and the
disagreements over a summit were followed by a major rupture over Suez.
On the personal level we witness
the fall of a giant. Yet even in 1943,
Churchill had “no personal ambitions,
no future to provide for.” He never gave
in. He faced down colleagues who
pressed him to resign with all his famed
resolution. He gloried in battles won, as
when turning somersaults in the sea for
actress Merle Oberon after a great
speech in Strasbourg. He despaired
when he hit stone walls, like Eisenhower
at Bermuda, who, when asked about the
next meeting, said: “I don’t know. Mine
is with a whisky and soda.”
“Never give in,” he’d told the boys
at Harrow: “Never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense….”
Who can say if he was right or wrong
about a summit with the Russians? It
was never tried. When honour and good
sense told him it was time, Churchill
went—convinced that a summit was
beyond his declining powers.
Barbara Leaming offers no
summary chapter, no list of the faults or
mistakes of players in the drama. Unlike
some authors, she does not suggest that
her subjects individually changed
history. But her opinions register
throughout, and are nowhere more
apparent than toward the end:
“When Churchill refused to retire
in 1945, his decision had flowed from
everything that was essential to his character; so had his subsequent decisions to
fight on. At the beginning of 1955, the
decision that confronted Churchill was
different, harder. This time, rather than
ride the wave of his obstinacy, he had to
overcome it. He had to crush his lifelong refusal to accept defeat. He had to
conquer the primal survival instinct that
had allowed him to spring back so many
times before. This time, Churchill’s
battle was not really with Salisbury,
Eden, Eisenhower or any antagonist. It
was with himself” (306). ,
• Reviews continue on page 44.
TERRORISM CENTENARY
“Anarchism and Fire”
What We Can Learn from Sidney Street
C H R I S T O P H E R C. H A R M O N
O
n the weekday morning of 3 January 1911, citizens
of London awoke amidst “The Siege of Sidney
Street.” Two weeks earlier, well-armed anarchists
had tried to rob a jeweler, murdered some police who
responded, and then disappeared. They were found holed up
in an apartment building and surrounded by Metropolitan
Police. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, alerted in his
bath, approved a request for support from Scots Guards at
the Tower of London. Characteristically wishing to be where
the action was, Churchill then appeared in person on the
scene (see also Datelines, page 6).
Battle erupted with exchanges of weaponry. Automatic
pistols within the building competed with rifle and pistol fire
from outside for at least two hours. Either from bullets or
breached gas heating pipes, the edifice ignited. The Fire
Brigade waited expectantly to put out the blaze, but onscene, the Home Secretary supported the police decision to
let the building burn.
The unleashing of martial force against terrorists in an
English city can never be a happy event, and Churchill was
among the many to offer evidence at an inquest two weeks
later. Two criminals had died in the blaze; if there were any
others, they escaped. None of the terrorists was British; all
were aliens living in London.
Such anarchists had ignited an earlier outrage in downtown London. A 1909 robbery had turned into a shooting
rampage, block after block, until over twenty innocents were
wounded. By the time the Sidney Street gang erupted, the
city had had enough of anarchists.
By coincidence, the previous February, Prime Minister
Asquith had appointed a “new sheriff”: war veteran Winston
S. Churchill, aged 36. Churchill’s Home Office held
authority over the police and fire brigades alike. The counterterrorist operation, directed in part by the Home Secretary
himself, ended the gang’s reign, but also resulted in a
policeman shot and several firemen, constables and civilians
wounded. The building itself was wrecked, its owner
demanding reconstruction at city expense.
_______________________________________________________
Dr. Harmon, Marine Corps University’s Horner Chair, is author of
Terrorism Today (2007). His work, “How Terrorist Groups End,” was introduced in lectures at the Heritage Foundation and the Institute of World
Politics in 2004. His latest contribution to this study is a chapter in the
2010 McGraw-Hill textbook, Toward a Grand Strategy Against Terrorism.
As the use of force tends to do in democracies, Sidney
Street subjected the decision-makers to close scrutiny. Many
theater-goers hooted derisively as the new-fangled newsreels
pictured Mr. Winston Churchill moving in and out of cover,
consulting with police and their several commanders. In the
House of Commons the Rt. Hon. Arthur Balfour, Member
for the City of London (financial district), pronounced
pointedly: “I understand what the photographer was doing
[in the danger zone], but why the Home Secretary?” Mr.
Churchill said he’d gone because the Home Office lacked
information—and also out of curiosity. Later in his Thoughts
and Adventures, he admitted that he probably would have
done better to go to his desk in the Home Office.
Internationally networked and lethal, idea-driven and
fanatical, anarchism was prominent from the late 1880s
through the early 1920s. In the beginning, many governments reacted by rolling over. Some authorities seemed
immobile; others moved slowly, unwilling to confront a
violent international movement. Before World War I, no
fewer than six heads of state were murdered by anarchist “idealists.” The militants seemed to come and go across national
borders, settling or moving on with near-impunity. On the
principle of free speech, some countries protected their fiery
publications. In established democracies especially, authority
was slow to confine or strike these armed minorities—as was,
say, Japan after the series of incidents leading up to the sarin
gas attack on subways in more recent times.
Churchill’s own Liberal Party had pointedly declined to
support a 1904 bill that would have made it easier to deport
alien radicals. But growing London violence between 1909
and 1911 would begin to shift Churchill’s views on the rights
of non-citizens—and those of many of his fellow MPs.
Many familiar aspects of the Sidney Street siege draw
our eye today: Should citizens inform police of “suspicious”
people, or is this unacceptable in a democracy? Our governments of late have been obscure on this question. In 1911, a
former landlord of one of the robbers had stepped up to talk
to the police about the attempt to burglarize the jewelry
shop. Without his help, law enforcement authorities might
never have located the hideout on Sidney Street.
Should government offer rewards? Britain had offered
£500 sterling for the Sidney Street killers in 1910, but
bureaucracy would triumph over the brave informant. About
five robbers were initially sought; the reward offer identified
only three, and the landlord just one. (As a result, he was
given only a third of the reward money.)
Was the use of force justified? Force displeases, and
always should, since it poses inevitable danger to innocents.
At Sidney Street, force was requisite. Winston Churchill, the
authorizing minister, was unusually reflective on these
matters. Already the author of eight books and experienced
with war on several continents, he was no moral relativist. He
believed profoundly in the rule of law. In a later political and
FINESTHOUR150/34
rendered this idea inappropriate, yet
Churchill remembered it, and incorporated it in World War I, when he
pushed hard for development of the
tank. After the embers of Sidney Street
cooled, he considered the need to arm
police better, and promoted trials of
new weaponry.
How do terrorist groups meet their
end? Sometimes—more often than
social scientists allow—they expire only
after limited use of state force. Two
American west coast groups which
armed and barricaded themselves and
refused to surrender—the Symbionese
Liberation Army and its ideological
opposite, The Order—expired in hails
of SWAT bullets and tear gas in 1975
and 1984 respectively. Actual military
units or semi-militarized gendarmes
have sometimes been needed, as in
Canada for early 1970s terrorism by the
Quebecois separatists, or in France for a
1994 hijacking by Algerians.
Anarchism was damped down by
the Bolshevik Revolution and World
War I, but contemporary histories and
memoirs make it clear that slow, steady,
constructive and often-controversial
measures by governments were the most
important factor in its decline.
Government began to fight back, with
tougher laws on incitement; bans on
immigrants or visitors known to have
anti-democratic and militant views;
more focused law enforcement; fewer
“passes” on grounds of free speech;
bilateral and multilateral intelligence
and extradition; and the creation or
improvement of domestic intelligence
SIDNEY STREET, 3 JANUARY 1911: Indifferent as ever to danger, Churchill (top hat) is a wall
organs
like the United States Federal
away from a hail of bullets. When fire broke out, he supported withholding the fire brigade, lest
Bureau of Investigation. States declined
firemen’s lives be lost. Churchill later admitted that his rush to the scene was a rash move.
to surrender to fanatical minorities.
The anarchist movement and its handling provide
violent event, the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was conlessons for free societies today. Delays in government
fronted by the question: were the strikers terrorists or
response to anarchist violence were classically democratic. So
freedom fighters? He replied: “I decline utterly to be imparwas the difficult decision, in London in 1911, to defend rule
tial as between the fire brigade and the fire.” The metaphor
of law with a brief interruption of civil norms and a deploysuits, when ideological gunmen match force with a nation’s
ment of guns. At Sidney Street, a lawful government proved
security personnel.
itself better armed than anarchism. And, unlike the anarchist
Churchill’s on-scene thoughts at Sidney Street included
leaders, Home Secretary Churchill had campaigned for and
the possible use of a heavy metal shield to protect the constawon election to public office, where his responsibilities
bles as they advanced upstairs. The outbreak of fire later
included the option to use force. ,
FINESTHOUR150/35
GERMANY STRIKES EAST • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
CHURCHILL AND INTELLIGENCE
Golden Eggs: The Secret War, 1940-1945
Part II: Intelligence and the Eastern Front
At Hitler’s greatest expectation of triumph, the fruits of British Signals Intelligence
became a precious metal in Soviet Military resistance. Decrypts also helped Britain support
Balkan allies, by relaying German military dispositions to the Yugoslav and Greek partisans.
MARTIN GILBERT
Aiding the Soviet Union
Throughout the spring of 1941, Enigma decrypts
made it clear that it was against the Soviet Union—
Germany’s partner for the previous twenty months—that
Hitler intended to turn next. On March 30th, Churchill
wrote to Anthony Eden:
I told C [Brigadier Stewart Menzies, Chief of MI6, the
British Secret Intelligence Service] to send you substance of
sure information lately received in this No. JQ/803/T2.1 My
reading is that the bad man2 concentrated very large
armoured forces, &c., to overawe Yugoslavia and Greece, and
hoped to get former or both without fighting. The moment
he was sure Yugoslavia was in the Axis he moved three of the
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Rt. Hon. Sir Martin Gilbert CBE has been the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill since 1968, and has published almost as
many words on his subject as Churchill wrote. Sir Martin is an honorary member of The Churchill Centre and has been a contributor to
Finest Hour for nearly thirty years. For further information see http://www.martingilbert.com. Part I of this article appeared last issue.
FINESTHOUR150/36
five panthers towards the Bear3 believing that what was left
would be enough to finish the Greek affair. However,
Belgrade revolution upset this picture and caused orders for
northward move to be arrested in transit. This can only mean
in my opinion intention to attack Yugoslavia at earliest or
alternatively act against the Turk. It looks as if heavy forces
will be used in Balkan Peninsula and that Bear will be kept
waiting a bit. Furthermore, these orders and counter-orders
in their relation to the Belgrade coup seem to reveal magnitude of design both towards southeast and east. This is the
clearest indication that we have had so far.4
The defeat of the Soviet Union would enable the full
weight of German power to be turned on Britain: with
control of Russian oil supplies, raw materials, steel and
munitions being massively in Germany’s favour. On 3 April
1941, while Hitler’s forces were making their final preparations for the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, Churchill
took a calculated risk in sending Stalin information, based
on Enigma, relating to German intentions against the Soviet
Union. To guard the highly vulnerable source of the information, he pretended that this source was a British
agent—an individual—not Germany’s own top-secret
Signals Intelligence communications system.
The message sent to Stalin was emphatic and urgent:
I have sure information from a trusted agent, that when the
Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net, that is
to say, after March 20 [the day of the signing of the Yugoslav
pact with Germany], they began to move three out of the five
Panzer divisions from Roumania to Southern Poland. The
moment they heard of the Serbian revolution [the Yugoslav
renunciation of the pact with Germany] this movement was
countermanded.
Churchill ended his message to Stalin: “Your Excellency
will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.”5
Stalin was not the only foreign recipient of Churchill’s
Enigma-based information that week. On April 4th, the day
after his telegram to Stalin, Churchill sent a message to
General Dusan Simovitch, the leader of the new Yugoslav
Government:
From every quarter my information shows rapid heavy concentration and advance towards your country by German
ground and air forces. Large movements of air forces are
reported to us from France by our agents there. Bombers
have even been withdrawn from Tripoli according to our
African Army Intelligence.6
Although Churchill could not say so, “my information” was
not from “our agents” or “African Army Intelligence” but
Luftwaffe Enigma messages decrypted at Bletchley Park.7
Enigma could reveal German intentions; but this
knowledge could not forestall those intentions. On Easter
Monday the Germans bombed Belgrade. British troops were
rushed to Greece. Germany, with Italian and Bulgarian military and air support, swiftly overran both Yugoslavia and
Greece, and turned its preparations, as Churchill had forecast, against the Soviet Union.
Stalin made no acknowledgment to Churchill for
sending him on April 3rd the Enigma-based information
that intimated the German intention to attack the Soviet
Union. But Churchill instructed the Foreign Secretary,
Anthony Eden, to pass on to the Soviet Ambassador in
London, Ivan Maisky, several further messages, likewise
derived from Enigma, giving details of German military and
air moves and preparations towards the Soviet frontier. The
most detailed, and important message was transmitted from
Maisky to Moscow on 10 June 1941. It gave the Soviet
General Staff a list of German troops concentrated on the
German-Soviet border, identifying all German units.8
Eleven days later, on 22 June 1941, Germany invaded
the Soviet Union. Churchill made an immediate commitment to do whatever could be done to sustain the Soviet
Union in its struggle. Signals Intelligence was a crucial and
integral part of that commitment. Two days after the
German invasion, Brigadier Menzies asked Churchill if he
should pass on to Stalin—without revealing their source—
the summaries of all Enigma decrypts bearing on the
German intentions, strategy and tactics on the Eastern
Front. Churchill gave his approval, noting on Menzies’
request: “Providing no risks are run.”9
On 27 June 1941, within a week of Hitler’s invasion
of Russia, there was a British cryptographic success at
Bletchley Park in breaking the German Army Enigma key
used on the Eastern Front. Known as “Vulture,” this >>
“Stalin rarely bothered to reply, but his commanders-in-chief took action on the basis of every
Enigma-based communication....There were many occasions when the cryptographers at
Bletchley Park—who did not have to leave their command posts to visit troops at the front
—had already decrypted those messages, and sent them to Moscow, and Moscow had sent
them to the commander-in-chief facing the German troops, even before the German
commander returned to his command post and was given them.”
FINESTHOUR150/37
“I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they had got
Yugoslvaia in the net...they began to move three out of the five Panzer divisions from
Roumania to Southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution [renouncing
the pact with Germany] this movement was countermanded....
Your Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.”
—Churchill’s telegram to Stalin, 3 April 1941
PLAYERS: Eager for an ally, Churchill passed his decrypted intelligence about German plans to invade Russia—carefully disguised
as reports from secret agents—direct to Stalin (left); when Stalin didn’t respond he went to the more receptive Soviet Ambassador in
London, Ivan Maisky (second from left). Churchill instructed “C,” Secret Intelligence Service head Brigadier Stewart Graham Menzies
(pronounced “menkeys,” third from left), to give the Russians any and all secret decrypts, “providing no risks are run.” Enigma also
informed Churchill of German intentions in Yugoslavia, which he passed to General Alexander, ultimately deciding that Josip Broz
(Tito, right) was the most likely force to back in guerrilla warfare against the German occupation. Photos: Wikimedia Commons.
THE SECRET WAR...
key provided British Intelligence with daily readings of
German military orders sent from Berlin to the Eastern
Front. On June 28th, the day after Bletchley’s success,
Churchill gave instructions that Stalin was to be given this
precious Intelligence. From that day, an officer in British
Military Intelligence serving in the British Military Mission
in Moscow was sent—by British radio cypher—regular
warnings of German strategic intentions and tactical orders,
and was instructed to pass them on to Soviet Intelligence.
Thus, at Hitler’s greatest expectation of triumph, the
fruits of British Signals Intelligence also became a precious
metal in Soviet military resistance.
Enigma-based information useful to the Soviet Union
was continuously sent on Churchill’s instructions to the
British Military Mission in Moscow, where a special liaison
officer would take it to the Kremlin for the head of
Soviet Military Intelligence. One of these officers was the
future Sovietologist and historian Edward Crankshaw.
In the first week of July 1941, cryptographers at
Bletchley learned from Enigma that German Intelligence on
the Eastern Front was breaking into two Soviet channels of
communication. The Germans were reading certain Russian
Air Force coded messages in the Leningrad area, and were
decrypting Russian naval signals in the Baltic. This information was passed on to Moscow on 7 July 1941, alerting the
Soviet General Staff to this gap in their security. A week
later, on July 14th, the disposition and order of battle of the
German forces was transmitted to Moscow.
On July 16th, an appreciation of German plans
against Smolensk and Gomel, together with details of
German air force targets behind Russian lines, were transmitted from Bletchley to Moscow. The next day it was a
German order —as a result of heavy German casualties and
problems of adequate air cover—to slow down the advance.
This order gave the Red Army its first sense of success, and
also a chance to regroup, knowing that its forces would not
face a surprise attack.
In mid-July 1941, as German troops drove towards
Leningrad and Moscow, Churchill pressed Brigadier
Menzies to send as much Enigma-based Eastern Front
material as possible to Stalin. The important decrypt
CX/MSS/59/T10, setting out operations that were to take
place on the Eastern Front on July 16th, had been sent at
FINESTHOUR150/38
7:30 pm on 15 July 1941. The summary as submitted to
Churchill read: “Russians threatened by envelopment at
Smolensk. Support of 4th Panzer Army (Armée) with main
battlefront at Smolensk. Russians are to be prevented from
withdrawing. Railways in the rear to be bombed.”10
Menzies replied to Churchill: “I am of the opinion
that the source would definitely be imperilled if this information was passed to Moscow in its present form, as it
would be impossible for any agent to have secured such
information regarding operations for the 16th July. I have,
however, arranged with the War Office for the gist to be
incorporated with other material.”
Menzies went on to point out to Churchill that the
head of the British Military Mission to Moscow, General
Mason-MacFarlane, had been instructed “to inform the
Russians that we possess a well-placed source in Berlin who
has occasional access to operational plans and documents.
This explanation has been accepted by the Russians. I have,
however, refused to furnish them with detailed identifications, which might well arouse their suspicions as to the real
origin of the information, for they would appreciate the
impossibility of being able to furnish us with any identifications on the Western Front.” With his message, Menzies
sent Churchill “a sample of the type of information which
has been passed and which should prove of considerable
assistance to the Russian General Staff.”11
On 9 September 1941, as German forces pressed
towards Moscow, the German orders for the final assault on
Moscow were decrypted at Bletchley Park. These orders
were at once radioed to the British Military Mission in
Moscow, and then taken to the Kremlin, more then three
weeks before the actual assault began.
When it became clear on September 20th, through
Enigma, that the Germans planned to launch an all-out
assault on Moscow in twelve days’ time, Churchill authorized the dispatch of a warning to Stalin, through the British
Military Mission in Moscow. Eight further Enigma-based
warnings were sent to Moscow in the following four days,
giving the Soviet High Command more than a week’s
notice of German intentions, dispositions and movements
on all sectors of the Moscow Front, and the location and
strength of German ground formations assembling in the
Smolensk area.
Reading a decrypt giving details of the German
armoured and motorized divisions about to be committed
to the battle for Moscow, Churchill wrote on 2 October
1941 to Brigadier Menzies: “Are you warning the Russians
of the developing concentrations,” and he added: “Show me
the last five messages you have sent.”12
On 2 January 1942, British cryptographers broke the
Enigma key known to Bletchley as “Kite.” This key contained the German Army’s most secret supply messages
between Berlin and the Eastern Front. In February they
broke “Orange Two,” which carried all top-secret messages
between Berlin and the Waffen SS units fighting on the
Eastern Front.
During the first week of March 1942, Enigma
decrypts revealed the scale, direction and date of the second
German summer offensive against the Soviet Union. These
included German Air Force intentions,13 operational
orders,14 and the fortification of aerodromes in the East.15
Also revealed, through a diplomatic decrypt, was Japan’s
inability, because of a shortage of ships and aircraft, to help
Germany by attacking the Soviet Union in the Far East,
something Hitler was pressing for. Churchill noted on this
latter decrypt that it should be passed to Roosevelt.16
Another vital decrypt that was passed to Stalin was an
Enigma message sent on March 3rd, and decrypted at
Bletchley two days later, ordering the transfer of German
anti-aircraft units in Romania to the Ukraine.17 This was
followed on March 7th by decrypts of heavy German military rail movements from Romania to the Eastern Front,18
the despatch on May 10 of German bomber and dive
bomber units to the Russian Front,19 and a German Air
Force report, also decrypted on March 10, giving details of
Soviet troop concentrations.20
On receipt of this information from Britain, the
Russians were able to make new dispositions, in greater
secrecy. If that secrecy were to be compromised, Enigma
would reveal it.
On March 12th, Churchill assured Stalin that, in
order to help the Soviet Union meet this impending attack,
he had given “express directions” that British supplies to
Russia “shall not in any way be interrupted or delayed.”21
Churchill also gave orders that day that, to draw back
German resources from the Eastern Front during the
German offensive, the British bombing offensive over
Germany would be intensified “both by day and night.” As
Churchill explained two days later, in a message to the head
of the British General Staff Mission in Washington, his
policy was “taking the weight off Russia during the summer
months by the heaviest air offensive against Germany which
can be produced.”22
On 23 May 1942, with Churchill’s approval, the
Soviet High Command were sent details, culled from
Enigma, of precisely where the German summer offensive
against the Soviet Union would be launched, and in what
strength.23 During the second week of July 1942, when a
change of strategy was decided upon in Berlin, with
armoured forces ordered forward towards Stalingrad, the
details of this revised plan were sent from Berlin to the
German military and air commanders-in-chief by Enigma
signals.24 Both the recipients of this order, the German commanders-in-chief on the Eastern Front, and the British
cryptographers at Bletchley Park, decrypted this change of
plan simultaneously.
From Britain, the new orders were sent on July 13 to
Moscow. From Moscow they were transmitted that same >>
FINESTHOUR150/39
“Reading his daily box of Enigma
decrypts, Churchill never relaxed his
Russian vigilance. On 6 December
1942, during the Stalingrad battle, he
wrote to Stewart Menzies, ‘Has any
of this been passed to Joe?’ It had. ”
THE SECRET WAR...
day by secure radio link to the newly appointed commander
of the Stalingrad Front, Marshal Timoshenko. The Germans
never knew that their plan was in the hands of their
enemies. On the following day, 14 July 1942, the three
German armies in southern Russia received from Berlin
their precise objectives, likewise sent through Enigma.
These objectives, decrypted at Bletchley Park, were also sent
at once to Moscow, and on to Timoshenko.
Shortly after Churchill’s return from his first Moscow
visit in August 1942, the seventeenth Arctic convoy, PQ 17,
was attacked by German air and submarine forces. Of the
forty merchant ships in the convoy, nineteen were sunk.
Ironically, the tragedy of PQ 17 had been caused by
Enigma, since the convoy’s escorts had been forced to
scatter once it was revealed through Enigma that Germany’s
three largest warships were about to emerge from their
Norwegian Arctic bases, to attack. There was no way that
the British convoy escort could outmatch these three naval
giants or even stave them off. To avoid a total slaughter, the
convoy was ordered to scatter.
On 30 September 1942, Churchill learned from an
Enigma decrypt of a German plan for naval action on the
Caspian Sea, as soon as German troops had crossed the
Caucasus. He immediately sent a clear summary to Stalin.
“I have got the following information,” he wrote, “from the
same source that I used to warn you of the impending
attack on Russia a year and a half ago. I believe this source
to be absolutely trustworthy. Pray let this be for your own
eye.” The information read:
Germans have already appointed an Admiral to take charge
of naval operations in the Caspian. They have selected
Makhach-Kala as their main naval base. About twenty craft
including Italian submarines, Italian torpedo boats and
mine-sweepers are to be transported by rail from Mariupol to
the Caspian as soon as they have got a line open. On account
of the icing-up of the Sea of Azov the submarines will be
loaded before the completion of the railway line.
“No doubt,” Churchill wrote to Stalin, “you are
already prepared for this kind of attack.” It seemed to
Churchill “to make all the more important” the plan to
reinforce the Soviet Air Force in the Caspian and the
Caucasus theatre by twenty British and American
squadrons. “I have never stopped working at this,”
Churchill added, “since we were together and I hope in a
week or so to have the final approval of the President and to
be able to make you a definite joint offer.”25
Churchill understood that every fragment of information on German military and air preparations and activities
could be of inestimable value to the Soviet High
Command, as daily decrypts showed that the German
forces were facing a fierce opponent in southern Russia, and
that there had been a setback in German plans there. “My
latest information,” Churchill telegraphed to Stalin on
October 8, “shows that the German plans for sending shipping to the Caspian have been suspended.”26
The Soviet Union was to be the beneficiary of
Enigma, and Churchill’s vigilance to Soviet needs, until the
end of the war. Central to this effort was Colonel Tiltman,
one of whose most important achievements came in
September 1942, when he helped to break the German
teleprinter cypher system known at Bletchley as Tunny—
another word for tuna.27
Unlike Enigma, Tunny carried a considerable amount
of strategic Intelligence, while Enigma more often yielded
tactical or operational Intelligence. Between November and
December 1942, at the height of the Battle for Stalingrad,
this resulted in an estimated 870 decrypts yielding 4.5
million letters of text, from four keys. By 1945 the figures
had increased dramatically: between 1 January and 8 May
1945, Bletchley broke 374 keys—by then changing with
increasing frequency—with the help of the Colossus electronic codebreaking machines: 4500 messages in all,
containing 22 million letters were read in that period.28
Churchill ensured that Stalin was apprised of German
intentions on the Eastern Front without fail or delay.
Enigma also enabled Churchill to intervene on Russia’s
behalf in late October and early November 1942, at the
height of the battle of Stalingrad. Because Enigma revealed
the full extent of Germany’s commitment, and entanglement, in the East, Churchill timed a series of military
initiatives in the West in such a way as to force the withdrawal of vital German war material from the East. The first
of these initiatives was Montgomery’s attack on the German
forces inside Egypt, at El Alamein, on October 23rd; then,
two weeks later, on November 8th, Operation Torch, the
Allied amphibious landings in North Africa.
These major African battles forced Hitler to transfer
aircraft from the Eastern Front at a time when they were
most needed in the East. In the immediate aftermath of the
North African landings, 400 of the 500 German warplanes
moved to Tunisia were brought from Russia, as were several
hundred transport aircraft which had been supplying the
German forces surrounded at Stalingrad. As a result of the
precipitate transfer of these transport aircraft, German
bombers had to be pressed into service at Stalingrad in their
stead. Enigma revealed to the British, and through them to
FINESTHOUR150/40
the Russians, just what a setback the fighting in North
Africa was to the German resources on the Eastern Front.
Commenting on the unforeseen, and unfortunate,
switch of aircraft at Stalingrad, Marshal Goering later wrote:
“There died the core of the German bomber fleet.”
On November 7th, the day before the Torch landings,
Churchill learned of German plans to bomb Soviet oil
installations at Baku. He at once passed on this information
to Stalin. “Many thanks for your warnings,” Stalin replied.
“We are taking the necessary measures to combat the
danger.”29 This was one of the very few times when Stalin
bothered to reply, although his commanders-in-chief took
action on the basis of every Enigma-based communication.
On 19 November 1942 the Red Army launched its
counter-offensive north of Stalingrad. Throughout the
battle, Britain sent Russia tactical Intelligence derived from
the minute-by-minute operational orders of the German
Army and Air Force. Sometimes a German commander
could not be at his command post for several hours, as he
had to be with his men at the front. Only on returning to
his command post was he given his latest batch of operational orders.
There were many occasions when the cryptographers
at Bletchley Park—who did not have to leave their
command posts to visit troops at the front—had already
decrypted those messages, and sent them to Moscow, and
Moscow had sent them to the commander-in-chief facing
the German troops, even before the German commander
returned to his command post and was given them.
Reading his daily box of Enigma decrypts, Churchill
never relaxed his Russian vigilance. On 6 December 1942,
during the Stalingrad battle, he wrote to Brigadier Menzies:
“Has any of this been passed to Joe?”30 It had.
On 25 February 1943 there were two further breakthroughs in Allied help for the Soviet Union. First, that day,
there was the breaking at Bletchley Park of the German
“Ermine” key, used by one of the main German Air Force
combat units on the Eastern Front. That same day, the start
began of the first round-the-clock bombing offensive against
Germany, whereby British bombers attacked by night and
American bombers by day. For the Soviet war machine, the
intensification of the Anglo-American bomber offensive was
an important element in the constant pressuring and steady
weakening of Germany’s war-making powers. “I hope,”
Stalin telegraphed to Churchill on 27 March 1943, “that
the air offensive against Germany will go on inexorably
increasing.”31
It did, with German Air Force Enigma messages providing Bletchley Park, and Bomber Command’s
Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Harris, with a daily indication of where the German fighter and anti-aircraft forces
were most stretched, and therefore most vulnerable.
As the Germans prepared their third Eastern offensive,
against the Soviet forces in the Kursk Salient, more and
more of the actual German orders for the planned attack
were decrypted at Bletchley. Once more, the British were
able to alert Soviet Military Intelligence. One of the most
important decrypts to be shown to Churchill was a Tunny
decrypt of 25 April 1943. It contained a detailed German
appreciation of the Soviet order of battle before the German
offensive in the Kursk Salient.32
Churchill made sure that this information was passed
to Moscow, two months before the offensive was to open,
together with detailed estimates, likewise based on the
Germans’ own top secret signals, of the strength and composition of the German divisions deployed around the
Salient or the Kursk and Orel pincer movements. This
information alerted the Soviet High Command to exactly
what the Germans knew of what was facing them, enabling
the Soviet High Command to alter the balance of the facing
forces to Soviet advantage. The Battle of Kursk was the last
and fatal attempt by the German Army to continue its eastward advance.
The Soviet Union also made its contribution to the
task of decryption. In June 1943, Soviet Intelligence captured two elements of the Enigma system, a code used by
the Luftwaffe for air-to-ground signalling, and a naval
Enigma machine. Shortly afterwards, Churchill sent several
British Naval Intelligence experts to Murmansk to discuss
with their Soviet counterparts how best to use the German
air and naval messages thus procured. Later that summer,
the British presented the Soviets with another captured
Enigma machine, and a book of instructions for its use.
Assisting Occupied Yugoslavia
Churchill accepted that Enigma would determine
many aspects of British war policy. In Yugoslavia in 1943,
Enigma revealed a massive concentration of German and
Italian troops encircling and moving in on Mount
Dormitor. It was clear that a large hostile force was surrounding the mountain. Churchill, who was then in Cairo,
agreed with an SOE proposal to parachute in a small
team—two officers and a wireless operator—to the centre of
the German encirclement, to make contact with the force
that was the German target. The three volunteers found
themselves with Josip Broz (Tito) and his partisans, in a
fierce battle, but the partisans escaped the trap, and Britain
began supporting Tito’s forces.
Enigma had helped Britain find, and support, a
Balkan ally. One of the two British officers parachuted in
on that first mission was Churchill’s former literary assistant, Bill Deakin; Churchill followed his activities through
the Enigma decrypts, including his escape, with Tito, from
the German trap.
On July 25th, Enigma decrypts had made it clear that
as many as thirty-three German, Italian, Croat and
Bulgarian Divisions were being held down in Yugoslavia, >>
FINESTHOUR150/41
THE SECRET WAR...
most of them by Tito’s partisans. Churchill therefore
directed that a number of additional aircraft be used in the
dropping of supplies: “This demand,” Churchill had
explained to Ismay on the previous day, “has priority even
over the bombing of Germany.”
The air resources needed to send up to 500 tons a
month of arms and equipment to the Yugoslav partisans
would be “a small price to pay,” Churchill told the Staff
Conference, “for the diversion of Axis forces caused by
resistance in Yugoslavia.” Every effort should be made, he
said, “to increase the rate of delivering supplies. It was
essential to keep this movement going.”33
During July 1943, Enigma decrypts showed the pressure being exerted on German military dispositions by the
partisans in both Yugoslavia and Greece, also the recipient
of a British mission and supplies. On July 7th, Churchill
telegraphed to General Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of
the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean: “I presume you
have read the ‘Boniface’ about the recent heavy fighting in
Yugoslavia and the widespread sabotage and guerrilla beginning in Greece.”34 From Quebec, where he was with
Roosevelt, Churchill telegraphed a week later to Alexander:
I am sending you by an officer a full account which I have had
prepared from “Boniface” and all other sources of the marvelous resistance put up by the so-called Partisan followers of
Tito in Bosnia and the powerful cold-blooded manoeuvres of
Mihailovic in Serbia. Besides this there are the resistances of
the guerrillas in Albania and recently in Greece.
The Germans had not only been reinforcing the Balkan
peninsula with divisions, Churchill noted to General
Alexander, “but they have been continually improving the
quality and mobility of these divisions and have been stiffening up the local Italians.”
Basing his figures upon Enigma, Churchill informed
Alexander that there were in Yugoslavia nine German, seventeen Italian, five Bulgarian and eight Croat divisions. On
the Greek mainland, there were a further six German, eight
Italian and two Bulgarian divisions. “The enemy,” he commented, “cannot spare these forces, and if Italy collapses the
Germans could not bear the weight themselves.”35
While he was staying at Roosevelt’s home at Hyde
Park, on the Hudson River, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt
about Yugoslavia. A series of Enigma decrypts had revealed
the murder by German forces, not only of Tito’s partisans
in combat, but of several thousand Yugoslav civilians as
reprisals.
“I am not sure that you people have quite realized all
that is going on in the Balkans,” Churchill told Roosevelt,
“and the hopes and horrors centred there. You might find it
convenient to keep it by you. Much of it is taken from
Boniface sources, and it certainly makes one’s blood boil, I
must add.”
Churchill also sought to put Roosevelt’s mind at ease.
“I must add,” he wrote, “that I am not in any way making a
case for the employment of an Allied army in the Balkans
but only for aiding them with supplies, agents and
Commandos.”36 ,
Endnotes
1. Decrypt summary JQ/803/T2.
2. Hitler.
3. The Soviet Union.
4. “Most Secret”, 30 March 1941: Churchill papers, 20/49.
5. Telegram of 3 April 1941: Premier papers, 3/170/1.
6. Message dated 4 April 1941: Churchill papers, 20/49.
7. In particular Enigma decrypts CX/JQ803, 808, 821, 822 and
849 (military movements) and 823 and 829 (air preparations), summarized in F. H. Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second
World War, Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, Volume 1,
London, 1979, 371-72.
8. I am grateful to the Russian historian Colonel-General Dmitri
Vokogonov for giving me access to this document in Moscow in the
summer of 1995.
9. Secret Intelligence Service archives.
10. Decrypt CX/MSS/59/T10.
11.Secret Intelligence Service papers, HWI/14.
12. Secret Intelligence Service papers, HWI/14.
13. HW 1/381.
14. HW 1/383.
15. HW 1/386.
16. HW 1/138.
17. HW 1/390.
18. HW 1/392.
19. HW 1/401.
20. HW 1/402.
21. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No. 352 of 1942, 9 March
1942: Churchill papers, 20/132.
22. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No. 384 of 1942, 14
March 1942: Churchill papers, 20/88.
23. Secret Intelligence Service papers: HW 1/590.
24. Secret Intelligence Service papers: HW 1/710, 712, 713, 715,
718, 719, 721 and 722.
25. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram, T.1270/2, “Most Secret
and Personal”, 30 September 1942: Churchill papers, 20/80.
26. “Personal”, Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram 1363 of 1942,
8 October 1942: Churchill papers, 20/88.
27. Tunny was an on-line encyphered teleprinter (Schlüsselzusatz
40 or SZ-40) designed by the Lorenz Company.
28. Ralph Erskine and Peter Freeman, “Brigadier John Tiltman:
One of Britain’s Finest Cryptographers,” Cryptologia, October 2003.
29. “Personal,” Kremlin, Moscow, 7 November 1942: Churchill
papers, 20/82.
30. Secret Intelligence Service archive, series HW1/1183.
31. “Personal and Most Secret,” Kremlin, Moscow, 27 March
1943: Churchill papers, 20/108.
32. Erskine and Freeman, “Brigadier John Tiltman,” op. cit.
33. Staff Conference of 23 July 1943, Chiefs of Staff Committee
No. 135 (Operations) of 1943, 23 June 1943: Cabinet papers 79/62. The
Ministers present were Churchill (in the Chair), Lord Selborne and Lord
Cherwell. Sir Alexander Cadogan represented Eden. Also present for the
Yugoslav discussion were Major Morton and Lord Glenconner.
34. “Personal and Most Secret”, Prime Minister’s Personal
Telegram No. 971 of 1943, 7 July 1943: Churchill papers, 20/114.
35. “Secret. For you alone”, Prime Minister”s Personal Telegram
No. 1083 of 1943, 22 July 1943: Churchill papers, 20/115.
36. “Mr President,” 13 August 1943: Premier papers, 3/353, folios
92-93.
FINESTHOUR150/42
WIT AND WISDOM
Churchill on Russia
A
frequent request from students is: “Please tell me all
about Churchill and Russia, and can you let me
have this to me by Friday?” That, and Martin
Gilbert’s foregoing testimony to just how much Churchill
risked to help Russia with secret intelligence, prompt us to
offer a few of his comments on the country and its people.
It is fair to accept that Churchill never warmed to
Russia. When he was a subaltern, it posed a threat to India.
In World War I, trying to save the Czar’s empire by forcing
the Dardanelles, he was sacked from the Admiralty, and was
no sooner gone than the Czar was, too. The Germans, he
wrote, smuggled Lenin into Russia like a “culture of
typhoid,” and when after Hitler’s invasion he declared his
support for the USSR, Stalin was already demanding to
know when he would launch a Second Front. Yalta ended
with Churchill thinking—or hoping—he could trust Stalin,
only to be frustrated, and denounced by the Kremlin as a
warmonger. Yet he spent his waning years in office (pages
20-24) trying to reach a Russian settlement. Churchill liked
and admired individual Russians, such as Savinkov and
Maisky (page 38), and even felt a twinge of pity for
Nicholas II. But he instinctively feared the Communist ideology, and knowing him as we do, it is not hard to visualise
him rejoicing at the demise of the Soviet Union, which he
predicted at his M.I.T. speech in 1949.
kkkkk
“If Russia is to be saved, as I pray she may be saved, she
must be saved by Russians. It must be by Russian manhood
and Russian courage and Russian virtue that the rescue and
regeneration of this once mighty nation and famous branch
of the European family can alone be achieved. Russia must
be saved by Russian exertions, and it must be from the heart
of the Russian people and with their strong arm that the
conflict against Bolshevism in Russia must be mainly
waged.” —MANSION HOUSE, LONDON, 19 FEBRUARY 1919
kkkkk
“The Bolsheviks robbed Russia at one stroke of two
most precious things, peace and victory—the victory that
was within her grasp and the peace which was her dearest
desire...her life ever since has been one long struggle of agonizing war.” —HOUSE OF COMMONS, 5 NOVEMBER 1919
“I cannot forecast to you the action
of Russia. It is a riddle
wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma. But
perhaps there is a key.
That key is Russian
national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the
interest or the safety of Russia that Germany should plant
itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should
overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic
peoples of South-Eastern Europe. That would be contrary
to the historic life-interests of Russia.”
—BROADCAST, LONDON, 1 OCTOBER 1939
kkkkk
“I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no
Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own
despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”
—HOUSE OF COMMONS, 27 FEBRUARY 1942
kkkkk
“Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They
keep their own secrets alike from foe and friends.”
—HOUSE OF COMMONS, 23 APRIL 1942
kkkkk
“Never forget that Bolsheviks are crocodiles.…I
cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them. Force
and facts are their only realities.” —CIRCA 1942; PRO, 2002
kkkkk
“It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient
States of Europe.” —21 OCTOBER 1942, THE HINGE OF FATE, 1950
kkkkk
“[After the war,] what will lie between the white
snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?”
—CHEQUERS, 23 FEBRUARY 1945
kkkkk
“From what I have seen of our Russian friends and
Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing
they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for
which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.” —FULTON, MISSOURI, 5 MARCH 1946
kkkkk
kkkkk
“There are thirteen or fourteen very able men in the
Kremlin who hold all Russia and more than a third of Europe
in their control.” —HOUSE OF COMMONS, 23 OCTOBER 1946
“Were they [Britain, France and America, in 1919-20]
at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot
Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian
soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government.…
But war—shocking! Interference—shame! It was, they
repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians
settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial—
Bang!” —THE AFTERMATH, 1929
“The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds
with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations
of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen
in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from
God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of
lies and oppression is on trial for its life. ”
—MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 31 MARCH 1949 ,
kkkkk
FINESTHOUR150/43
continued from page 33...
Books, A rts
& Curiosities
Two Thumbs Up for Lionel and B-B-Bertie
DAVID FREEMAN
The King’s Speech: A film directed by
Tom Hooper, written by David
Seidler, with Colin Firth as George
VI, Helena Bonham Carter as Queen
Elizabeth, and Timothy Spall as
Winston Churchill, released 2010.
I
n 1925, HRH Prince Albert, Duke of
York, the twenty-nine-year-old second
son of King George V, made his first
broadcast speech at the closing of the
Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
Addressing an audience of 100,000, his
words came haltingly, and he was
acutely embarrassed. One man listening
that day, a speech therapist recently
arrived from Australia, remarked, “He’s
too old for me to manage a complete
cure, but I could very nearly do it.”
_________________________________
Professor Freeman teaches history at the
University of California Fullerton.
One year
later, with the
Duke and
Duchess
about to visit
Australia,
Lionel Logue,
his reputation
outweighing
his lack of
medical credentials, was
brought in.
Therapy had
been sought
before, never
with success,
but the Duke
and Logue hit it off from the start.
HRH left their first meeting brimming
with confidence. After two months of
treatment, his delivery was significantly
improved, and the Australian tour was a
fine success.
King George V was delighted.
Although he had verbally abused his
children when they were young, he
admired the adult “Bertie,” his favored
son and preferred successor. But primogeniture was not to be questioned in
those days, and so arose the 1936
Abdication Crisis.
Once Edward VIII had abdicated
and the Duke of York had become
George VI, the latter asked Logue’s help
preparing for his Coronation broadcast.
Logue continued to prepare the King
for big speeches until the end of the
Second World War, but by Christmas
1945, the King felt confident enough to
FINESTHOUR150/44
manage on his own. Far from feeling
discarded, Logue enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing his work was complete.
“You know, Ma’am,” he said to Queen
Elizabeth, “I feel like a father who is
sending his boy to his first public
school.” The Queen patted his arm and
replied, “I know just how you feel.”
This compelling story is nicely
dramatized in The King’s Speech by
screenwriter David Seidler, a Londoner
whose own childhood stammer led him
to see George VI as a hero. In fine
Shakespearean fashion, Seidler telescopes
events and takes some liberties with the
facts in order to tell a dramatic story in
a reasonable amount of time.
In 1935, King George V is shown
hectoring the adult Bertie about being
tongue-tied, causing the Duke to turn
to Logue ten years later than he actually
did. (In reality, Bertie’s stammer was
never debilitating, as Andrew Roberts
wrote: “In fact it was relatively mild,
and when he was concentrating hard on
what he was saying it disappeared altogether.”)
Roberts also noted that his brother
never taunted Bertie for his stutter, or
accused him of wanting to usurp his
throne, adding: “the ludicrous old lies
about Joachim von Ribbentrop sending
Wallis Windsor seventeen red roses
every day, and her working as a geisha
in Shanghai, are trotted out to blacken
her character and make the Yorks look
better.” Improbably, the film suggests
that Logue used the Duke’s family nickname and worked in a ramshackle
office; in fact Logue had a smart set of
rooms in Harley Street.
After the Abdication of his
brother, and George VI’s successful
Coronation speech (which is skipped),
the action fast-forwards to the start of
the war, when the King has to deliver
another major broadcast and calls upon
the faithful Logue for assistance; this
segment represents how the King prepared for all his broadcasts until the end
of the war.
Into this mix Winston Churchill
is dropped rather gratuitously. Since all
but the final scenes in the film take
place during Churchill’s Wilderness
Years of the 1930s, WSC’s screen-time
is both brief and contrived. No doubt
the point is to illustrate that George VI
was the sovereign whom Churchill
served in the war, when the Royal
Family, like Churchill himself, helped
maintain public morale. In any case,
Timothy Spall shows enough character
and Churchillian diction in his fleeting
appearances to suggest that given the
chance at an expansive portrayal, he
would do a splendid job.
Churchill is first shown disapprovingly waiting upon Edward VIII at
Balmoral. He next appears privately suggesting to the Duke of York the use of
George as a regal cognomen instead of
Albert, which “sounds too German.”
There is no evidence that this idea originated with Churchill, but the scene
serves to make it clear to the audience
that “Bertie” became George VI.
Finally, Churchill appears in 1939,
newly-installed as First Lord of the
Admiralty, encouraging the King by
saying he too once suffered from a
speech impediment, which he turned to
his advantage. In reality, Churchill never
overcame his inability to pronounce the
letter “s,” but the intention here is to
convey that Churchill and his Sovereign
had something in common.
The most moving footage is the
King’s successful war broadcast on 3
September 1939—fictitiously attended
by Churchill, Chamberlain and the
Archbishop of Canterbury, as if they
had nothing else to do that day.
T
-he King’s Speech won Best Picture
and Best Actor Oscars in an offyear—it’s not exactly Gone with the
Wind, after all—and is a touching, wellacted film. Planting explanatory lines,
however ahistoric, in the mouths of
characters is an acceptable dramatic
practice to move the story along. Most
of this is minor and forgivable, except
for one howler: Stanley Baldwin is
shown submitting his resignation as
Prime Minister in 1937 on the grounds
that he had been wrong about Hitler
and Churchill had been right, and
informing the King that Chamberlain
would succeed him.
In fact, the supremely self-satisfied
Baldwin retired for the sake of retiring,
DRAMA AND REALITY: Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth (left) were well cast and played
convincing roles as Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of York, later George VI. The real King and
Queen greeted the crowd from Buckingham Palace on VE-Day, 8 May 1945 (right): Princess
Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Churchill, King George VI and Princess Margaret.
certain that Neville Chamberlain would
continue his policies. It would be two
years before major British leaders conceded that Winston was right. And, of
course, it is the Sovereign’s prerogative
whom to send for as Prime Minister.
Even the smug Baldwin would not have
mentioned a successor unless the King
asked—and had he thought Winston
had been right, he would have suggested
Churchill.
If the film makes for better drama
than it does history, it nevertheless gets
one thing absolutely right. It was the
Duke’s wife, later Queen Elizabeth, as
charming as Helena Bonham Carter
plays her, who encouraged Bertie to see
Logue, offered moral support, assisted in
the therapy sessions, and provided her
testimonial to Lionel Logue in a bittersweet footnote to history.
When in the 1950s the sad task
fell to Queen Elizabeth the Queen
Mother of selecting George VI’s official
biographer, she chose John WheelerBennett. If Wheeler-Bennett wrote with
particular sensitivity about the matter of
the King’s speech, it probably stemmed
from the fact that he was himself a
former patient of Lionel Logue. ,
Missing the Trees and the Forest
TED HUTCHINSON
Christian Encounters: Winston
Churchill, by John Perry. Thomas
Nelson, softbound, 166 pp., $12,
Amazon.com $10.50, Kindle $8.99.
T
he “Christian Encounters” line of
books is a series of short biographies
intended to “highlight important lives
from all ages and areas of the Church,
through prose as accessible and concise as
it is personal and engaging.” Ostensibly,
then, it should at least partially examine
Churchill’s inner spiritual life.
The problem, which the author
acknowledges, is that Churchill’s spiritu____________________________________
Mr. Hutchinson is Executive Director of the
American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics,
and editor of the society’s journal, JLME.
FINESTHOUR150/45
ality is awfully hard to pin down. When
he was young, Churchill could sound
like a monkish devotee of the Christian
Church one moment, only to say something positively atheistic the next.
Sometimes these contrasting views were
found even in the same letter home. >>
CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS...
With few apparent beliefs to guide
him, Perry is left to rely on the handful
of pithy comments Churchill made
about organized religion, his offhand
reflection on God and fate in his
speeches, and the beliefs and teachings
of Churchill’s stalwart nanny, the decidedly low-church Mrs. Everest.
As Churchill matured, organized
religion became less of a focus in his life,
and the second half of Perry’s volume
becomes little more than another
straightforward biography. As an examination of Churchill’s spiritual life and
relationship to Christianity the volume
is hardly successful; but one cannot hold
the author too accountable. He didn’t
have much to work with.
As a “brief life,” however, the
book is really quite bad. It’s not just
that it lacks any originality, or that it is
no more than a thumbnail sketch; it’s
that Perry just gets so much wrong.
It begins, as problematical books
often do, with the sources. Perry, for
instance, seems to think that John
Pearson served as some sort of personal
assistant to Churchill (135) and frequently uses Pearson’s ridiculous The
Private Lives of Winston Churchill
(demolished in FH 73) as a reliable
source. He also quotes lighter books like
Gretchen Rubin’s Forty Ways to Look at
Winston Churchill, while seeming to
ignore Martin Gilbert, David Reynolds,
and a host of other scholars who have
added immeasurably to our understanding. It seems Perry did not use any
primary documents at all, other than a
handful of WSC’s best-known books;
there are no references to the official
biography document volumes in his bibliography, nor any acknowledged visits
to actual archives.
Problems with sources lead
inevitably, as they often do, to problems
in the text. A full list of the errors would
be tedious, but for example: Perry badly
misdates Churchill’s first visit to
America (7) and says Churchill had
Iroquois ancestors, a canard long discredited (2). He suggests, in a backdoor
manner, that Randolph Churchill was
homosexual, while offering no attribution for the suggestion (34). He tells us
that Churchill “unapologetically called
in the troops” to crush striking miners
in 1910 (81). He frequently misquotes
Churchill, and misunderstands basic
facts about T. E. Lawrence (95). He
deploys throwaway comments that
betray an utter lack of understanding of
his subject, such as the allegation that
Churchill “had never been a family
man” (149)—a statement that, at best,
vastly oversimplifies the complex rela-
tionship Churchill had with his children, whom he dearly loved.
Someday someone will write a
very interesting book about Winston
Churchill’s spiritual life. I can’t blame
Perry for not achieving that goal; but
even a brief biography should at very
least acquaint readers with the most
important sources, and strive to get
basic facts right. ,
Dev’s Dread Disciples; the Big Fella as Hero
DAVID FREEMAN
The De Valera Deception, by Michael
McMenamin & Patrick McMenamin.
Enigma Books, hardbound, 436 pp,
$23.95, member price $19.15.
M
ichael McMenamin, longtime
Finest Hour contributor, coauthored with Curt Zoller a fine 2007
study of the influence the American congressman Bourke Cockran exercised
upon young Winston Churchill. He has
now applied his historical knowledge to
fiction. McMenamin’s co-author is his
son Patrick, an award-winning television
producer, who brings to the project the
ability to tell a fast-paced story that
keeps readers’ attention.
After leaving office as Chancellor
of the Exchequer in 1929, Churchill, his
son Randolph, brother Jack and nephew
Johnny crossed the Atlantic for an
extended tour of Canada and the United
FINESTHOUR150/46
States. Their adventures have been well
documented, and dramatized in The
Wilderness Years starring Robert Hardy.
Only now, though, more than eighty
years later, can the full story be told—or
at least imagined.
It turns out that Churchill had an
ulterior motive. During his journey he
acted as secret envoy for the new prime
minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to the
new American president, Herbert
Hoover. Along the way Churchill was
shadowed by IRA terrorists, German
spies and double agents. The adventure
climaxed with an attempted assassination
in a Hollywood hotel.
Such is the storyline of The De
Valera Deception, a “Winston Churchill
Thriller,” first in a series set in WSC’s
Wilderness Years. In fact Churchill is not
the main character. That role goes to
Bourke Cockran, Jr., the fictitious son of
Churchill’s real-life mentor.
The real Bourke Cockran was a
well-connected Irish-American politician. His fictitious son is a lawyer, like
his father, who has inherited important
contacts. Cockran Jr., it transpires,
fought in the First World War and
became deeply involved in “The
Troubles” that consumed Ireland after
1918. The legacy of his Irish activities,
directed by the “Big Fella” himself—
Michael Collins—provides the
springboard into the narrative of The De
Valera Deception.
The governments of Britain and
Ireland have been alerted to efforts by the
Irish Republican Army to smuggle arms
from the United States. The terrorists are
diehard republicans opposed to the 1922
settlement, in which Churchill and
Churchill Centre Book Club
Managed for the Centre by Chartwell
Booksellers (www.churchillbooks.com),
which offers member discounts up to
25%. To order please contact
Chartwell Booksellers, 55 East 52nd
Street, New York, NY 10055.
Email [email protected]
Telephone (212) 308-0643
Facsimile (212) 838-7423
Collins participated, that resulted in the
Irish Free State, a self-governing entity
within the British Commonwealth.
Behind their activities lurks the sinister
hand of pre-Nazi Germany.
Churchill and his factotum
Cockran set out to foil the dastardly
plan and keep the peace throughout the
British Isles. Along the way they receive
assistance from such larger-than-life historical figures as William Randolph
Hearst, “Wild Bill” Donovan, and even
Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti. Providing
Churchill and Cockran with their
greatest support, though, is intrepid
Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary.
She also serves as Cockran’s love
interest, and the other main protagonist
in the remaining books in the series.
Among the IRA, Michael Collins
comes off as a former hero and mentor,
but the bad guys are very bad indeed.
And here a word of caution: the wicked
deeds of the antagonists and their
inevitably grisly fates, set out in discomfiting detail, are not for the faint of
heart. Wisely, the authors have kept
Churchill safely removed from the
book’s more lurid passages.
In fact Churchill’s primary role in
the plot is to act as part spymaster and
part father-confessor to Cockran and
McGary, the latter represented as
Churchill’s goddaughter. Churchill also
ties together the real historical background against which these imagined
adventures are set. The result is something of a cross between the stories of
John Buchan and Robert Ludlum.
As for Eamon de Valera, whose
name provides the title, his appearance
is limited to a cameo. Still it is Dev’s
actual efforts to establish himself as the
dominant political force in Ireland that
drive the events in this novel.
While this is a work of fiction, the
duplicity, backstabbing and graphic violence represented here were all too much
a part of Ireland’s real struggle for selfgovernment. First in fact and now in
fantasy, Churchill did his part to diffuse
the dread situation. ,
The Right Words at the Right Time
breadth of Churchill’s thinking (as does
the editor’s introduction to each)—the
flag, the island race, Commonwealth,
equality, freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, freedom from want and fear,
freedom to vote, great Britons, independence, the individual, liberty, peace,
the rule of law, service to the nation,
war, work, opportunity and invention.
Some of these are further broken down
into sub-themes.
I thought I detected a familiar
chapter structure, and Langworth
admitted to have been guided by
Caroline Kennedy’s A Patriot’s
Handbook: Songs, Poems, Stories and
Speeches Celebrating the Land We
Love. “I admired her anthology,” he
says. “Although she quotes many
authors, its structure gets to the root of
what we think of when we think, rarely
enough, of patriotism. Churchill, of
course, thought of it frequently. But that
was another time.”
The source of every quotation is
cited (a real strength in Langworth’s
books), many coming from Hansard, or
Churchill’s books and articles (15
million words), or writings by others
quoting him. An index makes finding
specific thoughts relatively easy, though
readers may simply prefer to page
through the collection, finding treasures
and insights as they go. A handy pocket
size encourages one to take it along. ,
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
The Patriot’s Churchill: An Inspiring
Collection of Churchill’s Finest Words,
Richard M. Langworth, editor. Ebury
Press, 170 pp., £9.99, available from
Amazon UK (http://xrl.us/bijnxx)
N
____________________________________
Professor Sterling teaches media law and
policy at George Washington University.
eeding no introduction to readers of
this journal is the editor of Finest
Hour, and the definitive collection of documented Churchill quotations. Churchill
By Himself (2008), Langworth here distills the vibrant kernel of Churchill’s
words on patriotic themes. Patriotism
being a topic close to Churchill’s heart, he
could, as might be expected, express that
theme in many ways.
The hundreds of brief selections are
provided chronologically under chapter
headings that provide a sense of the
FINESTHOUR150/47
Winston: A Verse Biography, by
Gillian Bence-Jones. T-Link,
softbound, 60 pp., £7.99.
G
iven that Churchill’s life has been
told in countless forms and languages (even comic books), why not
tackle the long saga in verse? Gillian >>
WINSTON...
Bence-Jones, described by her publisher
as an East Anglian landowner of 77, was
inspired to write this book by reading
Walt Whitman’s poem about Abraham
Lincoln.
Written in blank verse, the nonrhyming form of poetry, the book
distills down (or mixes in) the many
events, people, and ups and downs in
Churchill’s private and public lives in
very concise stanzas. The format,
divided into six parts, naturally elimi-
Christmas Eve, 1941
MICHAEL RICHARDS
In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941
Christmas Eve Story, by David
McCullough. Shadow Mountain, 56
pp., hardbound, illus. with DVD,
$19.99, Amazon.com $12.07.
T
he noted biographer of Harry
Truman and John Adams created
this book for the 2010 Christmas
season. It comprises an essay by the
author, the 1941 addresses by President
Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill
(then in Washington) at the lighting of
the White House Christmas tree; a
touching photo collection of Americans
during World War II; and a DVD of
McCullough’s presentation of the story
at the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 2009
Christmas concert, including the choir’s
nates most detail and explanation—this
is more about the highlights, though
Bence-Jones does include many of the
great man’s famous words, which fit
right in.
Here and there through the book
the author’s own life mixes in (her
memories as a child, and whether
Churchill’s state funeral might have
forced a change in her long-scheduled
wedding—it did not). These are not
deep waters. You can read the whole
thing in less than a half hour. ,
performances of “O Little Town of
Bethlehem” and “I’ll Be Home for
Christmas.” Critics seem undecided on
whether the book is a narcissistic exercise
by someone who enjoys hearing his voice
or a nostalgia piece. Eva Mitnick in the
Library Journal considered the lead essay
(“Music is Part of Our History”) inconsequential, saying the work “isn’t
particularly successful as either a
Christmas book or an account of an
important moment in history.” The
story of Churchill’s 1941 visit, of course,
is already well known from a multitude
of previous books, and the Roosevelt and
Churchill speeches were brief.
On the other hand, many readers
praise the book, especially the DVD
recording and the FDR and Churchill
speeches: “It would take a tougher heart
than mine not to shed a tear,” says one.
“This book is a touching and appropriate gift...especially for those who share
memories of WW2 or their loved ones
that have been far away from home....”
It is certainly priced more modestly than
it might have been.
k
“Let the children have their
night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of
Father Christmas delight their play. Let
us grown-ups share to the full in their
unstinted pleasures before we turn again
to the stern task and the formidable years
that lie before us, resolved that, by our
sacrifice and daring, these same children
shall not be robbed of their inheritance
or denied their right to live in a free and
decent world. And so, in God’s mercy, a
happy Christmas to you all.”
—WSC, 24 December 1941 ,
FINESTHOUR150/48
History as Exposé
EARL BAKER
Secrets of the Dead: Churchill’s Deadly
Decision, produced by Richard Bond,
aired by PBS in June 2010. DVD
$22.49 from Amazon.com.
“T
he British accomplished a difficult, sensitive yet necessary
military operation July 3, 1940, when
they ensured the large and powerful fleet
of the vanquished French nation would
not be turned against them in a war in
which their existing alliance had been
abandoned by the French, and were left
to fight on alone....the French authorities were informed that a situation in
which those ships could be turned
against the solitary British war effort
could not be tolerated. The French
signed an armistice with the Germans
which ordered their navy to return to
French ports under the supervision of
the German government. What would
you have done? What do you think
Churchill should have done?”
PBS asks these questions about
Churchill’s decision to attack the French
fleet at Oran and Mers-el-Kébir in July
1940—and then proceeds to condition
the viewer about the character of the
players. The video provides important
comments by scholars, interviews aging
survivors, and runs contemporary film
clips; but by the end, you have seen and
heard enough insinuations, innuendos
and implications to make you suspect
that Churchill betrayed his allies, was
perhaps a war criminal, and at the least
was willing to kill French sailors to
impress distant America. (Just to make
sure you get it, all these implications are
on the packaging, to be read before you
insert the video in your CD player.)
The video is in a series called
“Secrets of the Dead,” which PBS says
will explore “iconic moments in history
to debunk myths and shed new light on
past events….[it] shatters accepted
wisdom, challenges prevailing ideas,
overturns existing hypotheses, spotlights
forgotten mysteries, and ultimately
____________________________________
Mr. Baker ([email protected]) is a longtime
CC member living in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
rewrites history.” My chief question is:
does this history need rewriting?
In today’s era of tabloid news,
packaging containing sinister words like
“controversial…blackmail…deadly” and
close-ups of Churchill in dour mood is
routine sensationalism to get you to buy
the video: history as exposé. I believe
that the producers respect and admire
Churchill, but I tend to see the product
more televised suspense than balanced
documentary.
The conclusion (including comments by a French survivor) seems
finally, if somewhat reluctantly, to
provide support for the Churchill
Cabinet’s decision to attack. The
strongest part is the factual story line,
portrayed effectively in stills and in
some cases by actors.
Among experts, Sir Martin Gilbert
is his usual knowledgeable and articulate
self; naval historian Andrew Lambert is
low-keyed and excellent; Warren
Kimball is as usual on top of the issues;
the survivors are touchingly authentic. I
was disappointed, however, to hear
Professor Kimball say that the action
“showed the British would fight…even
if they fought dirty.” Did the Marquess
of Queensberry rules apply in World
War II? “I daresay he had to do some
pretty rough things, but they didn’t
unman him,” Lady Soames recalled of
her father.
Balance particularly fails in the
More Darlan Film Notes: Casablanca
E
mily and Norman
Rosenberg, professors of American and
international history,
offer an interesting
sidelight on Darlan
from the classic 1942
film Casablanca.
In the movie, the
fugitive Czechoslovak,
Victor Laszlo (Paul
Henreid), and his wife
Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman),
ex-lover of Rick Blaine
“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she
walks into mine.” —Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in
(Humphrey Bogart),
Casablanca, with Rains, Henreid and Bergman, 1942.
need Rick’s purloined
“letters of transit,”
signed by Charles de Gaulle, which will give them safe passage to America—
letters which Rick eventually passes to them, then makes off with Inspector
Louis Renault (Claude Rains) to join the French Resistance.
When Norm Rosenberg wrote an article analyzing Casablanca and
mentioning the de Gaulle role, a professor in Europe cited a major “auditory
error,” saying that the letters would almost certainly have been signed by
Darlan, then the Vichy prime minister, not the exiled and outlawed de Gaulle.
Norm called screenwriter Howard Koch to ask if and why the switch was
made from Darlan to de Gaulle. Koch simply said it was because de Gaulle
was better known.
Can a reader watch a European version of Casablanca and tell us if
the name cited (early in the film) is Darlan? We may then answer Prof.
Rosenberg’s speculation that the European version was historically accurate.
If so, the U.S. version certainly took the better moral approach.
Incidentally, Claude Rains is buried just a few miles from FH’s home
office in New Hampshire. We pay occasional visits, always reciting Bogie’s
final line: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” ,
FINESTHOUR150/49
portrayal of French Admiral Darlan,
who is made out to be an authoritative
and trustworthy figure (lots of close-ups
of the Admiral splendidly uniformed
with determined expressions). We are
not told that Darlan was an
Anglophobe, an anti-Semite, a liar and a
pompous ass, one of the most reviled
Vichy leaders, who, when assassinated at
the end of 1942, was unmourned. A
rounder view of Darlan would have
better informed the account of his role
in July 1940.
What about the collapse of the
French army—and the French government, which abandoned its solemn
commitment not to make a separate
peace? We may sympathize with the
French in the throes of their shame and
surrender, but it does not alter the fact
that they left their ally alone and were
ready to put their fleet under German
supervision.
Contrary to “fighting dirty,” the
video shows that the engagement was
preceded by clear and open high-level
messages by the British, offering
numerous alternatives to an attack,
seeking to avoid fighting their former
ally—including personally delivered
messages to the field commanders: a
punctilious concern that seems almost
archaic today. The British even sent a
high-ranking, French-speaking officer to
meet with the French Admiral, extended
the deadline to allow them to meet—he
was received in high dudgeon by an
Admiral miffed because he held the rank
of a mere Captain.
If you can ignore the hype engendered by the need to sell CDs, this is a
well=done video about a painful but significant incident. The decision to attack
the French Fleet was made under conditions created by the Germans and
French, not the British, who were forced
to react. And they did.
Oran became a dramatic and historic climacteric in Churchill’s
premiership, demonstrating that Britain
was determined to fight on, as he said,
“if necessary for years, if necessary
alone.” I suppose history and entertainment may converge once in a while
among the skulls, tombs and secrets of
the dead. ,
reviews continue overleaf >>
Memories, but No Startling Revelations
BARBARA F. LANGWORTH
My Years with the Churchills: A Young
Girl’s Memories, by Heather WhiteSmith. Cotesworth, 64 pp.,
softbound, £9 from Amazon UK.
H
eather Wood was only seventeen
when she was hired as a secretary
to assist Grace Hamblin with
Clementine Churchill’s correspondence
at Ten Downing Street in 1953. Her
charming little book reads like many
reminiscences of people associated with
the Churchills published over the years
in Finest Hour, but is light on new contributions to history. There are no
startling revelations and many of the
incidents have been presented before.
Jo Sturdee (Lady Onslow), Sir
John Colville, Edmund Murray, Sir
Anthony Montague Browne and other
members of the entourage have written
about working day to day with the
Churchills. The Churchill Centre has
heard the only words ever spoken in
public by the inimitable Grace Hamblin
at the 1987 Dallas conference, later
published as “Chartwell Memories,” in
Churchill Proceedings 1987 and later
reprinted in FH 117.
White-Smith helped with dictation, shopped for Mrs. Churchill and
arranged the flowers Clementine so
loved. She was at Number Ten when Sir
Winston was knighted, when he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1953, and when he resigned in April
1955. She saw many famous visitors and
spent hours with Lady Churchill,
accompanying her to St. Moritz where
Clementine was treated for neuritis.
The book is a series of vignettes,
some of which are new to us. One
evening, Sir Winton’s valet could not
get to Chartwell to run his bath.
Churchill was reputed to be mechanically hopeless, even lacking the ability to
squeeze his own toothpaste, but his quip
on this occasion betrayed amusement
with that idea: “…if I turned on the
taps myself, with a little bit of luck,
some water may come out.”
A friend, Lady Thurso, gave
Clementine a Siamese kitten named
Gabriel. Sir Winston was “roped” into
taking him to Chartwell and they wondered how he would manage this “saucy
cat.” Sir Winston “gave Gabriel a long,
hard stare and said to him very firmly, ‘I
am your Father and ’tis a great honour!’
And, of course, all went well.”
In February 1956 at 28 Hyde Park
Gate, Lady Churchill was ill and proposed a sea voyage to Ceylon to
recuperate, asking Heather join her.
Then only twenty, White-Smith wanted
to carry on with her life and felt she was
missing family time. Reluctantly she
announced that she would be leaving
the Churchills’ employ. As a mature
woman, she wonders if she made the
right decision.
Her impressions of the Churchills
are classic: “What I remember most of
all, in spite of his obvious fame and
greatness, were his unique reactions to
the challenges he faced during his life,
whether political or personal, and his
wonderful kindness. Throughout everything he never failed to show his
puckish sense of humour. Of course he
could be angry and upset at times, but
he was never arrogant or rude.”
Of Lady Churchill, whose companion she was on many occasions, the
author writes that she was quiet, but
“rarely calm.” Clementine, she adds, was
“the intellectual equal to Sir Winston
and well able to give him unbiased
opinions on any subject….beautiful,
charming, well-read and multi-lingual,
[she was] the perfect companion for the
great man.”
It is disappointing that WhiteSmith does not recall the scary time in
June 1953 when Churchill suffered a
severe stroke at 10 Downing Street (see
also pages 23 and 28). News of this was
kept from the public and from
Parliament, who were told that
Churchill was suffering from exhaustion. He went to Chartwell to
recuperate from the effects of the stroke
which had affected his speech and
ability to walk. ,
The Compleat Wrks of Wnstn Chrchl (Abridged)
MAX EDWARD HERTWIG
“The Man Who Saved Europe: How
Winston Churchill Stopped the
Nazis,” by Klaus Wiegrefe. Der
Spiegel Online http://xrl.us/bijvec.
FINESTHOUR150/50
T
his nine-part webpost is oddly
remindful of “The Compleat Wrks
of Wilm Shkspr (Abridged),” in which
three actors deliver all of Shakespeare’s
works in a couple of hours.
There’s nothing particularly novel
or new in this series. Aside from the
familiar attempts to cast Churchill as
occasionally demoniac, it agrees that he
“Saved Europe.” But one would do
better reading about World War II on
Wikipedia—or, if you have time, one of
the good specialty studies, like Geoffrey
Best’s Churchill and War—or, if you
really want to know what Churchill
thought, his abridged war memoirs. The
early parts dwell on the sagas of
Churchill and Hitler starting in 1932.
Wiegrefe then skips ahead to the
bombing of Germany (which he says
killed mostly civilians, and on which
Churchill was “strangely ambivalent”),
and the postwar division of Europe.
Much is oversimplified and fails to consider the contemporary reality of
fighting for survival—which, after all, is
what Britain was doing.
Part 1 recounts the timeworn
story of the stillborn Hitler-Churchill
meeting, which Hitler’s pro-British
foreign press chief, “Putzi” Hanfstaengl,
attempted to arrange in Munich in
1932. Wiegrefe’s account (based on
Hanfstaengl’s 1957 memoirs) is reasonably accurate, but concludes that
Churchill felt “regret” that the meeting
did not take place. Not so. What
Churchill wrote was: “Thus Hitler lost
his only chance of meeting me. Later
on, when he was all-powerful, I was to
receive several invitations from him. But
by that time a lot had happened, and I
excused myself.” (Gathering Storm, 66).
This hardly sounds like regret.
In World War II, Wiegrefe writes,
Britain’s premier “conducted a significant portion of government affairs from
a horizontal position. Dressed in his red
dressing gown, he would lie on his fourposter bed, chewing a cigar and sipping
ice-cold soda water, and dictate
memos...often titled ‘Action This Day.’”
Of course he dictated correspondence (sitting up) in bed of a morning.
It helped him squeeze a day and a half
out of every day. He did not conduct
the war from his mattress. It’s trivial,
but “Action This Day” was a label not a
title, and he never drank iced soda
water. What he drank was a kind of
“scotch-flavored mouthwash.”
The author seems confused over
the likelihood of a 1940 German invasion of Britain, first saying it was never
planned, then that Hitler was ready to
launch it if the RAF “could be put out
of commission first,” then adding: “The
Germans felt they stood a better chance
of succeeding in May 1941....” (When
they were about to invade the Soviet
Union?) The imminence of invasion
seemed real enough when the Battle of
Britain hung by a thread.
Some authors will never get over
the idea that Churchill contemplated
using “poison gas,” whether he meant
tear gas (Iraq, 1922) or the real stuff.
Why, he “even toyed with the idea of
dropping poison gas on German cities,
but his generals objected.” Any source
for that? (We know he was willing to
use it in battle—if they used it first.)
Understandably Germans felt the
horror of the air bombardment of
Germany more than anyone else, and
Wiegrefe doesn’t fail to claim that
600,000 died, even Churchill admitting
that the bombings were “mere acts of
terror and wanton destruction.” This is
a bad condensation of Churchill’s views.
Dresden, WSC wrote to his Chiefs of
Staff Committee and Air Marshal
Portal, “remains a serious query against
the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of
the opinion that military objectives
must henceforward be more strictly
studied in our own interests rather than
that of the enemy...rather than on mere
acts of terror and wanton destruction,
however impressive” (Martin Gilbert,
Road to Victory, 1257).
Oversimplification is rampant in
Part 9, “Churchill’s Role in the
Expulsion of Germans from Easter[n]
Europe,” accusing him of “ethnic
cleansing” in moving Poland west at the
expense of German areas like Silesia, to
accommodate Stalin’s westerly ambitions. The shift of territory, Wiegrefe
writes, required giving resident Germans
“a brief amount of time to gather the
bare necessities and leave.”
Like the Jews of Warsaw, perhaps.
Leaving to one side how much personal responsibility Churchill bore for the
maltreatment of deportees—which often
appalled him, whoever was maltreated—
one’s heart doesn’t exactly bleed.
A cooler observer might include
Churchill’s 1942 comment: “The
Germans have received back again that
measure of fire and steel which they
have so often meted out to others.” Or
his memoirs of 1945: “My hate had
died with their surrender and I was
much moved by their demonstrations,
and also by their haggard looks and
threadbare clothes.”
Perhaps the short scope of Internet
posts prevents deeper analysis, but there
FINESTHOUR150/51
is no attempt throughout these articles
to consider the reality and complexities
of fighting a resolute and formidable
enemy while allied with a third party,
the Soviet Union, that might flip or flop
various ways depending on its interests,
or play off the Anglo-Americans against
each other—which Stalin freely did.
S
eventy years on, we have the luxury
to sniff at Churchill’s representing
the fate of Silesian Germans with
matchsticks, or suggesting “spheres of
influence” in Eastern Europe (which
saved Greece). We should pause to
reflect that war is hell, as General
Sherman said, and that nobody knew at
the time who would win.
At the end of the war, “the only
decision remaining for the Allies was to
determine what to do with Hitler and
the Germans once they were defeated.”
(No worries about Japan, the role of the
United Nations, decolonization, nuclear
technology, or European recovery.)
“Churchill vacillated between extremes,
between a Carthaginian peace and
chivalrous generosity. In the end,
Stalin’s and Roosevelt’s ideas prevailed.”
We search for examples of the
Carthaginian peace toward which
Churchill vacillated. Did he not walk
out at Teheran, when Stalin proposed
mass executions? Did he not reject the
Morgenthau Plan of reducing Germany
to an agrarian state, stripped of the
industry to support herself? Did he not
endorse the postwar Berlin Airlift, and
urge rapprochement between France
and Germany? Was he not the champion of Adenauer, and as good a friend
abroad as Germany ever had?
“Before the Holocaust,” we are
informed, “Churchill toyed with the
idea of banishing Hitler and other top
Nazis to an isolated island, just as
Napoleon had once been banished to
Elba. Or perhaps he was simply tipsy
when he voiced this idea.”
Perhaps Herr Wiegrefe was simply
tipsy when he wrote these articles. What
we have here is a rough capsule history
of the war, along with several clangers
and exaggerations. But in the main this
account is, as an earlier reviewer once
said of a much longer Churchill critique: “Too easy to be good.” ,
CHURCHILL IN FICTION
Historical Characters
in Need of Character
MICHAEL MCMENAMIN
HHH
Novels are rated one to three stars on
two questions: accuracy of the Churchill
portrayal and reading value. The
following two novels are both worth
reading, and similar only in the fact that
both employ real characters, including
Churchill. But neither should be read
for that reason alone, because they will
probably disappoint.
Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett
(Dutton, 2010, hardbound),
Amazon.com $18.69, Kindle $19.99.
Portrayal H Worth Reading HHH
K
en Follett’s latest is a big production
aat 986 pages. Billed as “Book One
of the Century Trilogy,” it covers the period 1911 to 1924. Book Two will carry
the story through the end of World War
II, and a third book will cover the Cold
War period.
Follett’s fictional characters, who
come from Britain, Russia, Germany
and America, are involved in a wide
range of accurately portrayed events:
Welsh coal mine strikes and mine safety
deficiencies, women’s suffrage, the excesses of pre-1914 Russian and British
aristocracy, origins of the Great War
(fairly presented from all sides, including
the Britons and Germans who wished to
avoid war), Woodrow Wilson’s 1914
war of dubious legality with Mexico, the
horrors of the great war on land and sea,
the two Russian revolutions (1916,
1917), Allied intervention against the
Bolsheviks, Germany’s dramatic push to
win the war in 1917 before American
troops could arrive, the draconian Versailles Treaty. It’s all there and well told.
Historical characters include
Churchill, Grey, Asquith, French, Lloyd
George; Germany’s Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Bethmann-Hollweg and Zimmermann; Russia’s Lenin and Trotsky;
America’s Wilson and Bryan. But sadly,
they are all mere cardboard stage props,
inserted and deployed to lend little except verisimilitude.
In a note at the end of the novel
Follett explains his use of historical characters in a novel: “In some cases…my
fictional characters are witnessing an
event that really happened. A speech by
Sir Edward Grey in Parliament, for example, is Grey’s actual words, though
shortened. Sometimes a real person goes
to a fictional location, as when Winston
Churchill visits [the imaginary Welsh estate of ] Ty Gwyn. In that case, I have
made sure that it was not unusual for
him to visit country houses, and that he
could well have done so at around that
date. When real people have conversations with my fictional characters, they
are usually saying things they really did
say at some point….My rule is: either
the scene did happen, or it might have;
____________________________________________________________________________
Mr. McMenamin, who writes “Action This Day” in each issue of FH, is co-author of Becoming
Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor. He and his
journalist son Patrick are writing a series of “Churchill Thrillers” set during 1929-39, the first of
which, The De Valera Deception, is reviewed on page 46. See www.winstonchurchillthrillers.com.
FINESTHOUR150/52
The Churchill of Fall of Giants
either these words were used, or they
might have been.”
In the case of Churchill, who is
mentioned often but rarely actually appears, Follett’s descriptions don’t really
sound like him.
At a 1918 dinner party at Ty Gwyn,
for example, the “star guest was Winston
Churchill. Winston was a member of the
Liberal Party and might have been expected to sympathize with [Welsh] revolutionaries; but he was also the grandson
of a duke, and he had an authoritarian
streak. Fitz [Churchill’s host] had long
thought of him as a traitor to his class,
but was now inclined to forgive him because his hatred of the Bolsheviks was
passionate.” Authoritarian?
Later, during the dinner party, Follett puts more accurate thoughts in the
dinner host’s head: “There’s much talk
about why the Prime Minister had
brought back such a troublesome and
unpredictable colleague and the consensus was that he preferred to have
Churchill inside the tent spitting out.”
And some of Churchill’s dialogue is
accurate: “‘The Bolshevik regime should
be strangled at birth,’ Winston said. He
looked thoughtful. ‘Strangled at birth,’
he repeated, pleased with the expression.
Fitz controlled his impatience. Sometimes Winston imagined he had devised
a policy when all he had done was coin a
phrase.”
These latter characterizations are
scarcely inaccurate, but let’s draw the
line at saying Churchill had an “authoritarian streak.” Even his worst Tory detractors—of which there were many—
weren’t saying that in 1918. Follett, having used Churchill as a literary character
in the past, should know better. In his
Man from St. Petersburg (FH 143),
WSC was a key character with a major
supporting role.
The problem with Churchill is that
of the other real characters: they don’t
come to life. Given Follett’s decision to
tell the story almost exclusively through
fictional characters, the speaking roles of
real characters are limited, giving little
opportunity for their personalities to
emerge except through dialogue—and
here Follett is very sparing.
We can only hope that Ken Follett
will take a different approach in Book
Two and give a major role in the plot to
and more dialogue from Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler, allowing the
reader a feel for their character. Still, this
was an entertaining and enjoyable book
with an excellent grasp of the broad
sweep of history on a massive array of
world-shaping events during the first
quarter of the 20th century.
Emily Dunnit,
But Who Done Emily?
A Weekend at Blenheim, by J. P.
Morrissey (Dunn, 2002, paperback),
Amazon.com $18.23, Kindle $9.99.
Portrayal H Worth Reading HH
B
oth an English country house murder mystery and a historical whodunnit, Morrissey’s novel features an
equal number of historical and fictional
characters. The former include
Churchill’s first cousin Sunny, Ninth
Duke of Marlborough; his wife, the
American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt;
the Duke’s American mistress Gladys
Deacon; Consuelo’s mother Alva Vanderbilt Belmont; the American artist
John Singer Sargent and of course
Churchill himself.
The protagonist is an American architect, John Vanbrugh, namesake of
Blenheim’s designer, engaged by Consuelo to redesign her rooms. Vanbrugh
and his wife Margaret are invited to
spend a weekend at Blenheim so that he
can inspect the job. The year is 1905.
In his own note about historical
characters, Morrissey discusses his “actual
places and people” at length. While many
of the settings and characters “are based
on actual places and people,” the house
party comprising the main plot “is a complete invention (as is the novel’s narrator),
though it is certainly plausible that
Churchill [and the other historical characters] could have strolled the corridors
and gardens of Blenheim together. But
what they say—and perhaps more important, what prompts them to act—are my
invention.”
Obviously this leaves Morrissey far
more leeway then Ken Follett left for
himself in Fall of Giants. The reason is
the genre. Follett wrote a historical novel
based on actual events. Morrissey, like
Follett in The Man from St. Petersburg,
places real historical characters in a fictional story.
At a recent suspense and mystery
fiction convention in San Francisco, I
was on a panel with several authors, including one who wrote mysteries featuring Ernest Hemingway as an amateur
detective. Everyone on the panel agreed
that when you place a real historical
character in a situation that never happened, you still have an obligation to get
the character right. I gave only one star
for the portrayal of Churchill, though I
otherwise enjoyed the book.
Morrissey’s Winston has many lines
of dialogue, with both real characters
and imaginary ones. WSC’s conversations with the Marlboroughs are well
done, accurately portraying their mutual
affection.
But when you’re writing real characters into a piece of fiction, it is easy to
destroy the suspension of disbelief which
fiction requires. Notwithstanding Morrissey’s wide knowledge of Edwardian
FINESTHOUR150/53
The Churchill of A Weekend at Blenheim
England, that point arrived for me when
the thirty-one-year-old Churchill announces, “I am painting tomorrow.” To
which Consuelo adds “Mr. Churchill is
the family artist. It is a wonder that my
husband engaged Mr. Sargent at all.”
Whoops! An elementary Churchill
fact is that, while he drew as a boy, he
did not begin painting until 1915, after
being sacked at the Admiralty.
The gist of the story involves the
Duke’s suspicion of a love affair between
Consuelo and Sargent, and an alleged
portfolio of Sargent sketches of the unclothed Duchess, which the Duke wants
dearly to find (notwithstanding his own
ill-concealed affair with Gladys).
Consuelo, for reasons I still don’t
understand, places the portfolio in the
care of a servant, Emily, with instructions to hide it. Sunny, for unexplained
reasons, suspects Emily and tries to
browbeat her into telling him. But then
poor Emily is murdered and no one
knows where the portfolio has gone.
A Weekend at Blenheim is not the
only mystery set at Woodstock in this
era. A Death at Blenheim Palace, by
Robin Paige, reviewed unfavorably in
FH 133, was set in 1903 and has many
of the same characters. But A Weekend
at Blenheim is a far better mystery and a
better all around book.
I gave Morrissey only two stars
under “Worth Reading” because mysteries are not to everyone’s taste. But if you
like the genre, it’s a three-star book and
you won’t be disappointed. Also, if you
can figure out why Consuelo gave the
portfolio to Emily, and how the Duke
found out about it, please advise. ,
EDUCATION
How Guilty were the German Field Marshals?
Churchill’s maxim, “In Victory, Magnanimity,” seems certainly to have been
applied toward Kesselring and von Manstein. Did they have it coming?
STUDENT CORRESPONDENCE • ROB GRANGER
I
’ve read quite a lot
was Attlee who, a
about Churchill, but
week later, advised
I came across someChurchill to leave the
thing completely new
Kesselring matter in
on the on-line encycloabeyance, as the
pedia Wikipedia.
matter was sub
judice. Provided,
Anthony Eden’s biogChurchill replied,
raphy page describes in
‘there is a suitable
some detail how
interval between an
Churchill lobbied for
adverse sentence and
commutation of the
the execution of the
death sentences for
sentence.’ Churchill’s
German Field Marshals
letter continued: ‘It is
Albrecht Kesselring
in my opinion a
and Erich von
ALBRECHT KESSELRING (LEFT) AND ERICH VON MANSTEIN
matter of public
Manstein, and even for
policy whether the process of killing the leaders of the
them to be released early. Apparently, Churchill even
defeated enemy has not now exhausted any usefulness it
donated some money to Manstein’s defence.
may have had.’”
How could Churchill justify defending Manstein, who
Kesselring (1885-1960) and von Manstein (1887signed an order to treat Jews as partisans, providing a
1973) held important commands in the Battles of France
pretext for their execution; or Kesselring, who personally
and Britain, and in the invasion of Russia. They were
authorised atrocitites against civilians in Italy? Being an
popular with their troops, although not necessarily with the
admirer of Churchill and his stand against the Nazis, I was
Führer: von Manstein was dismissed by Hitler in March
shocked to discover that he was instrumental in getting two
1944, following frequent clashes over strategy.
heinous war criminals released. —ROB GRANGER, UK
Since they were two of only three German field marFH’s Response: Sir Martin Gilbert writes in the offishals to publish war memoirs, it would be useful to know
cial biography, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, “Never
what they had to say for themselves, because this is a murky
Despair” (1988), 325:
subject, not nearly so cut and dried as the entries on
“Two years had passed since the end of the war in
Wikipedia—so try to find and check their memoirs.
Europe. But its repercussions were continuous. ‘Am conAt Nuremberg, Kesselring was tried and sentenced to
cerned about Kesselring’s death sentence,’ Churchill
death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment
telegraphed to Field Marshal Alexander on May 6 [1947],
and in 1952 he was released on health grounds. Von
on learning that the Commander-in-Chief of the German
Manstein was sentenced to eighteen years for neglecting to
forces in Italy had been sentenced to be hanged for war
protect civilian lives and using scorched earth tactics
crimes. ‘Propose to raise question in Parliament,’ Churchill
denying food to local populations, but the sentence was
added, and he went on to ask: ‘Can you do anything?’ It
later reduced to twelve years and he was released in 1953,
becoming a military adviser to the West German government. There must have been reasons for the commutations:
________________________________________________________
Mr. Granger ([email protected]), a 17-year-old student planfind out what they were and evaluate them.
ning an extended project on the life and times of Winston Churchill,
Churchill was known for magnanimity in victory and
wrote us seeking clarification on Churchill’s role in securing the release of
did
not
favor, as he stated in 1947 (and at Teheran to Stalin
German war criminals, starting in 1947. Reader comment most welcome.
FINESTHOUR150/54
in 1943) mass executions of enemy officers. Had he
believed they had taken direct part in the Nazi genocide, he
would almost certainly have had a different attitude.
For example: When the death camps were being discovered in July 1944, Churchill wrote (Gilbert vol. 7, Road
to Victory, 847): “There is no doubt that this is probably the
greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the
whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a
great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite
clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our
hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their
association with the murders has been proved.”
kkk
T
hanks for a speedy reply which will hopefully help my
project. The only real source I have on this is
Wikipedia, and I haven’t come across this information
elsewhere. The only reasons Wikipedia gives for Churchill
and Eden favouring the release of von Manstein and
Kesselring are anti-communism (presumably implying a
more lenient attitude towards German war criminals), and a
desire to rearm the new West Germany as a bulwark against
the Soviet Union.
Apparently Churchill denounced the trial of von
Manstein as the Attlee government’s attempt to appease the
Soviets. Wikipedia makes much of the fact that behind-thescenes pressure was allegedly exerted on prison doctors to
emphasize Manstein’s and Kesselring’s health problems,
which were then “spun” by their defence attorneys.
The most controversial aspect seems to be Churchill’s
exact motivations for intervening, and how he could possibly be ignorant of the atrocities committed, in particular,
on Manstein’s orders.
There is a long paper trail linking von Manstein to the
massacre of Jews in the East under the pretext of dealing
with partisans. How could Churchill not have known this,
or been made aware of it at later date? —RG
FH’s Response: Wikipedia is a useful online tool, but
relying on it exclusively may skew your research and avoid
consideration of different opinions or findings. Wikipedia
goes to great lengths to establish objectivity, but the fact
remains that its entries are somewhat uneven.
The Wikipedia Eden article is footnoted, and provides
the sources used for its conclusions. As I read it, it seems to
me that the writer has a definite point of view—referring
for example to Eden’s “cleverly drafted policy,” putting
quotes around “medical,” referring to “allegedly cancerous
throat,” and expressing shock that Eden’s defenders (Field
Marshals Alexander and Montgomery, and the historian
Basil Liddell Hart) would use “melancholy confinement” as
an excuse to release Kesselring. Eden, Alexander and
Montgomery hold no reputation as Nazi apologists.
Therefore, they must have had better reasons than the
article states for arguing as they did.
The Eden article adds that the release of Kesselring
and von Manstein is “now seen as no more than embarrassing.” This means what, exactly? Seen by whom?
This illustrates one of the troubles with Wikipedia.
Though they work hard to police it, they do not have a
research team like the Encyclopedia Britannica, and they
rely heavily on lay writers who are not always the best qualified, or evenhanded.
Incidentally, Eden’s “clever draft,” allowing pre-trial
detention to be counted in their sentences, amounted only
to four years (1945-49)—not “double the reduction,” as the
Wikipedia article states. Its author is right on one thing:
given the Soviet menace, Churchill and Eden had begun to
think there was no benefit in continuing to fight the previous war. They would have been irresponsible as statesmen
had they considered otherwise.
If you look at the Wikipedia entries for von Manstein
and Kesselring, you will find more about the trial, and the
reasons for the reduction from death, to life, to a few years,
in Kesselring’s case.
The first thing you will notice is that von Manstein’s
indictment was a Soviet indictment, which the British
pursued only after Soviet pressure. Soviet indictments were
not always well founded. In the 1980s they tried to indict
Churchill for firebombing Dresden; later, Martin Gilbert
proved that it was the Russians themselves who had
requested the Dresden raid and Attlee who had approved it
(although Churchill certainly would have also, in response
to a request from his ally).
You will also read of certain mitigating circumstances
which the courts considered: von Manstein’s attempts to
save Italian cultural artifacts from destruction, and
Kesselring’s ignoring Hitler’s orders.
This is not to suggest that the two Germans were
heroes. But there is a lot more to this issue than the Eden
article suggests. It is likely that Churchill knew more facts
than the Wikipedia writers—and acted accordingly.
kkk
Note to readers: Aiming students toward good sources
and balanced viewpoints about Churchill is one of the most
rewarding parts of this job. We avoid writing essays for
them, and have become fairly adept at spotting that kind of
request. Students like Mr. Granger, who didn’t accept our
first reply and came back looking for more answers, are particularly welcome. I am no expert on German field marshals
or their behavior toward captive populations, so I tried to
tread carefully and not to take positions, only to point
toward more avenues of research. I would be interested in
our readers’ views on how well I succeeded, and any further
notes on the question of guilt. —RML ,
FINESTHOUR150/55
125-100-75-50 YEARS AGO
by Michael McMenamin
125 Years Ago
Spring 1886 • Age 11
“Delight over a Locomotive...”
W
inston was still recovering from
pneumonia contracted during
the winter, which had brought him
close to death. Lord Randolph did not
neglect his son and in April brought
him a well-received present, writing
Lady Randolph: “Winston is going on
well & is attended by Dr. Gordon. He
cannot go out yet as the weather is raw
with a N.E. wind He is in great delight
over a Locomotive steam engine I got
for him yesterday.”
By May, Winston had fully
recovered and was back in school in
Brighton, where he wrote his mother
on 10 May: “I have much joy in
writing ‘Ye sealed epistle’ unto thee….I
received your letter and intend to correspond in the best language which my
small vocabulary can muster. The
weather is fearfully hot. We went to the
Swimming Baths to-day. I nearly swam
the length which is about 60 feet. We
are going to Play a Football Match
tomorrow. Last night we had a certain
Mr. Beaumont to give a lecture on
Shakespeare’s play of Julius Caesar. He
was an old man, but read magnificently. I am in very good health and
am getting on pretty well. Love to all.”
100 Years Ago
Spring 1911 • Age 36
Arrival of the “Chumbolly”
uring Clementine’s second pregnancy, she and Winston called
their unborn child “The Chumbolly”
D
(alternately “Chum Bolly”) who
became their only son Randolph. In
the second volume of his father’s biography, Randolph writes that “no one
remembers why” his parents so nicknamed him. On 18 April, Clementine
wrote Winston that she was “counting
the days till May 15th when the Chum
Bolly is due. I hope he will not have
inherited the Pug’s unpunctual habits!”
Sure enough, Randolph’s birth was two
weeks late on 28 May. His parents took
their time naming him, and for well
over a week after his birth, they were
still calling him the Chumbolly in their
letters. Winston wrote on 2 June:
My precious pussy cat, I do trust &
hope that you are being good & not
sitting up or fussing yourself. Just get
well & strong & enjoy the richness
wh[ich] this new event will I know
have brought into our life. The chumbolly must do his duty and help you
with your milk, you are to tell him so
from me. At his age greediness & even
swinishness at table are virtues.…How
I wish you were here, it wd be such fun
for you—there are lots of young men
to [talk] with & sounds of music, &
beautiful trees & all sorts of things,
including in a corner your ever loving
& devoted Pug.
Clementine replied,
The beautiful Chumbolly who grows
more darling & handsome every hour
& puts on weight with every meal; so
that soon he will be a little round ball
of fat. Just now I was kissing him,
when catching sight of my nose he
suddenly fastened upon it & began to
suck it, no doubt thinking it was
another part of my person!
By June 7th Winston, returning
FINESTHOUR149/56
home, was “longing to see you & the
Ch B. again...& tell you all my news &
give you lots of kisses on your dear
cheeks & dearest lips.”
Churchill was now involved in a
fierce battle to limit the veto power of
the House of Lords over legislation
passed by the Commons. In his advocacy, he did not spare even close
friends. Of his former best man, Lord
Hugh Cecil, a prominent Tory supporter of the Lords, who had urged
that referendums be held to decide
“contentious issues” rather than entrust
them to the Liberal-controlled
Commons, WSC said on April 4th:
The Noble Lord has a very bad
opinion of the institutions of his
country. He is not only in favour of
reforming the House of Lords, but he
shows us, in speech after speech, in
Amendment after Amendment, on
subject after subject, that he would like
to accompany and precede that operation by abolishing the existing House
of Commons. The Noble Lord has the
worst possible opinion of His Majesty’s
Ministers, and he has frequently
expressed that view in terms which
have secured the utmost enthusiasm in
the Opposition part of this Assembly.
His opinion of this Assembly is quite
on a par with his opinion of His
Majesty’s Government, but his bad
opinion of this Assembly is limited to
the time when there is a Liberal
Government in power. It is only the
Liberals who are corrupt; it is only
when a Liberal Government is in
power that voting by ballot must be
instituted.
75 Years Ago
Spring 1936 • Age 61
“Fairies swooped down...”
hurchill was giving many speeches
on foreign policy, German rearmament and Britain’s neglected defenses.
His words went unheeded by Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin who, in Sir
Martin Gilbert’s words, “had convinced himself of Churchill’s lack of
judgment.” Gilbert quotes Baldwin’s
remark to a colleague:
C
One of these days I’ll make a few
casual remarks about Winston.…I’ve
got it all ready. I am going to say that
when Winston was born lots of fairies
swooped down on his cradle with
gifts—imagination, eloquence,
industry, ability; and then came a fairy
who said, “No one person has a right
to so many gifts,” picked him up and
gave him such a shake and twist that
with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why,
while we delight to listen to him in
this House, we do not take his advice.
It is remarkable that someone
with such a “lack of judgment” could
attract such a wide range of informants
eager to bring him classified information—most of it in violation of the
Official Secrets Act—at great risk to
themselves. A listing of dates and names
of individuals forming Churchill’s intelligence network during a single threemonth period is startling in scope and
number. (For more details, see Gilbert,
Chapter 36, Winston S. Churchill, vol.
5 The Prophet of Truth.)
27 March: Ralph Wigram, a
highly placed Foreign Office official,
sends Churchill “a substantial portfolio
of documents and material” on Hitler
and the Nazis, all of which, Wigram
notes, are “SECRET.”
3 April: Desmond Morton, head
of the Industrial Intelligence Centre at
the Foreign Office, writes to Churchill
about inaccuracies in Air Ministry statistics regarding German air strength.
3 April: Notwithstanding his
deeply-felt anti-communism, Churchill
begins a series of meetings with the
Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky.
21 April: At behest of Sir Robert
Vansittart at the Foreign Office,
Reginald Leeper sends WSC a “secret
and official letter” seeking his advice on
how public opinion can best be guided
to support the League of Nations.
24 April: Morton says he believes
WSC’s figures for German arms expenditures are too high.
29 April: WSC thanks Morton
but disagrees, saying the figures
Morton questions were provided by the
prominent London banker Sir Henry
Strakosch, and that the government
had declined to contradict them.
5 May: Sir Ernle Chatfield, First
Sea Lord, writes to Churchill outlining
matters affecting the Royal Navy, the
first of what Martin Gilbert described
as “regular and substantial accounts of
the Navy’s work and problems.”
5 May: A.G. Clark, joint man-
aging-director of Plessey, a major radio,
telephone and electronics corporation
and contractor to the War Office,
meets with Churchill to discuss his visit
to German munitions factories.
9 May: Morton sends Churchill
the results of Dutch firing tests on
naval armor-plate. British armor-plate
was destroyed while German armorplate came through virtually unscathed.
12 May: Wigram sends Churchill
additional Foreign Office extracts from
Mein Kampf, including two sentences
deleted from the English edition, one
of which is: “If one tells big lies, people
will always believe a part.”
16 May: French Foreign Minister
Pierre Flandin sends WSC a statistical
summary of French air force expenditures and the latest French estimates of
German first-line air strength.
25 May: Squadron Leader Torr
Anderson, director of the Air
Ministry’s training school, shows
Churchill charts and statistics demonstrating that the school’s educational
standards are declining.
12 June: Ralph Wigram sends
Churchill three more Foreign Office
dispatches dealing with Nazism, which
he asks Churchill to read and destroy.
12 June: Robert Watson-Watt,
one of the principal developers of
radar, tells Churchill the Air Ministry is
holding back the rate of development
of radar, and criticizes its “unwillingness to take emergency measures.”
As he did in 1911, Churchill
continued to be critical of public positions taken by his former best man,
Lord Hugh Cecil. They had remained
friends, however, and Churchill’s
attacks were now more mellow, if not
good-humored. Cecil advocated
excluding the Soviet Union and other
authoritarian countries like Italy from
any alliance Britain formed against
Germany, and even expressed doubts
about the wisdom of an alliance with
France. In reply to Cecil, Churchill
wrote The Times on 13 May:
It must be very painful to a man of
Lord Hugh Cecil’s natural benevolence
and human charity to find so many of
God’s children wandering simultaneously so far astray. In these
circumstances I would venture to
suggest to my noble friend, whose gifts
FINESTHOUR150/57
and virtues I have all my life admired,
that some further refinement is needed
in the catholicity of his condemnation. It
might be a good thing, for instance, for
him to put his censures down in order of
priority, and then try to think a little less
severely of the two least bad, or least
likely to endanger our own safety. The
problem would then simplify itself; and
the picture would acquire the charm of
light and shade.
50 Years Ago
Spring 1961 • Age 86
Moses or Jesus?
I
n March,
Churchill
completed a
Caribbean
cruise aboard
the Onassis
yacht
Christina, and
had intended
DAVID BEN-GURION
to fly to
London April 13th, but strong winds
made it impossible for him to leave the
vessel until the next day. Six weeks later
in London, he received a visit from
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion of
Israel. In briefing the Foreign Office of
their talks, Private Secretary Anthony
Montague Brown reported that BenGurion believed Iraq would “be strong
enough to contain her own
Communists,” but was more worried
about the survival of Jordan, which he
said would depend on the king. Egypt,
however, was “slowly preparing for war.”
Churchill expressed his lifelong
support for the Jewish people and
Zionism, and Ben-Gurion responded
with gratitude for Churchill’s leadership
in the Hitler war. Churchill said in
passing that he had once written an essay
on Moses, and promised the Israeli
leader a copy of the book containing it,
Thoughts and Adventures. (Later,
Montague Browne joked, “I thought at
first I might have found it in Great
Contemporaries.”)
It is incidentally related that the
two leaders had a debate: who was the
greater man, Moses or Jesus? Churchill,
it is said, argued on behalf of Moses,
while Ben-Gurion took the side of Jesus!
(We have lost the reference and would
be grateful for any light readers may
shed on this interesting story.) ,
CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGS
Great Contemporaries:
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher
Washington Society for Churchill, April 2008
At the end of the day it was Fisher who prepared the great naval instrument of
victory in the Great War—and Churchill who sent the Fleet to its battle stations at the
outset. The Navy never forgot who gave it the super-dreadnoughts. These were
notable and noble achievements when Britannia still held Neptune’s trident.
BARRY GOUGH
I
n his time he was one of the
most remarkable of men—
adored by some, dreaded by
others, despised by more than a few.
He was a human dynamo. Jacky
Fisher (1841-1920) always left froth
in his wake, and he moved at the
speed of one of his torpedo boat
destroyers.
An expert in gunnery and torpedoes, Fisher was an advocate of
naval power. He loved the Royal
Navy with all his heart. He deplored
the old methods of promotion solely
on the grounds of seniority, believing
firmly that the best way of promoting efficiency was to
see persons he liked and trusted given preferment in
appointment and advancement.
Fisher equally hated the old system for training
officers, thinking it class-ridden and technologically
backward, and he called for a wholesale revision to naval
training and education. This included the introduction
of new courses of study and the building of the
Britannia Royal Naval College in Devon. In everything
he was an iconoclast, widely seen as a revolutionary—
and he was as well a serious troublemaker.
He rose to the top partly on the basis of his own
manifold abilities and partly with support of various
politicians. When he came to the
Admiralty as First Sea Lord on
Trafalgar Day 1904, he did so with
the nervous support of a Tory government. When the Liberals came to
power in 1905, Fisher was firmly
entrenched in position. Before long
his famed innovation the battleship
Dreadnought was in commission,
sporting its impressive armor, guns
and speed. Soon to follow were fast
battlecruisers giving wide-ranging
mobility to British naval power.
Fisher advocated the idea of
flotillas, though he seldom saw them
in action. He became the greatest administrator of the
Royal Navy since Lord Barham and, as the great historian Arthur Marder proclaimed, his name will always be
connected with the Navy at the apex of its power.
Fisher retired on 25 January1910, his sixty-ninth
birthday, having been made Admiral of the Fleet and
elevated to the House of Lords. By then he was well
known to Winston Churchill, who soon arrived at the
Admiralty as First Lord—civilian chief of the service—in
1911. When, in October 1914, Churchill needed a First
Sea Lord to replace Prince Louis Battenberg, he hauled
in Fisher despite objections that the latter was old and
past his prime.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Barry Gough is an Archives Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His latest book, Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder,
Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History, will be reviewed in our next issue. His Titans at the Admiralty: Churchill and Fisher
is nearing completion. Churchill Proceedings are papers and speeches presented at Churchill Centre conferences and meetings.
FINESTHOUR150/58
These were immensely
attempt to silence the Turkish
challenging times. The war
forts guarding the entry to the
was not over by Christmas, as
straits. The 29th Division was
had been predicted. The powfinally committed to the camerful German High Seas Fleet
paign, and ANZAC forces were
was not easily brought to
thrown in beginning 25 April.
account, and through the early
But the campaign never sucmonths of 1915 the Royal
ceeded despite repeated
Navy missed several opportuattempts and changes of
nities to engage the enemy.
command. By December it was
Churchill and Fisher
over—with the attacking forces
operated in loose and diswithdrawn to other obligations
jointed harness, but their
and challenges.
incompatibility of temperaThe Fisher-Churchill
ment and outlook prevented
association lasted until midthem from working in
May 1915, when their
harmony for long. They kept
struggle, based on irreconcildifferent hours at the
able principles about who was
Admiralty, and in his optiin charge (and which naval
mism, WSC wrote that this
assets were to be deployed), led
gave them a round-the-clock
to Fisher’s abrupt resignation
watch; but they often had to
and abandonment of his post,
communicate by memo. And
telling Churchill he was leaving
grave difficulties lay ahead.
because he could not out-argue
Fisher had always
him. This led quickly to a govHAPPIER DAYS: Churchill and Fisher in 1912.
believed that the Navy—and
ernment crisis, a coalition
the British war effort—needed
government, and Churchill’s
“one man” to win the war: himself. Sea power, with
exit from the Admiralty. A shells crisis also occurred at
lightning strikes by amphibious forces, would bring the
this time, but it was Fisher’s action that caused Winston
enemy to its knees. From time to time he let it be
Churchill’s downfall.
known (at least to Churchill) that he believed WSC was
Churchill was devastated by his loss of the
“the man.” In any event, a Fisher plan to take control of
Admiralty and the influence it had given him over the
the Baltic got nowhere, though he did build a fleet of
war effort, but Fisher’s isolation was even greater. Fisher
shallow draft monitors and other vessels for an expedicontinued his behind-the-scenes activities, weakened
tion there.
because of his walk-out (disgraceful in the circumBy the end of 1914, the War Cabinet turned its
stances). For a time he headed the Board of Invention
mind to a bold military scheme: sailing through the
and Research, looking for means of hunting the new
Dardanelles to knock Turkey out of the war, securing
threat of U-boats, which were mauling Allied merchant
Constantinople (Istanbul) for the Russians, reinforcing
shipping. But he never found a countermeasure.
the Eastern Front, and tying down the Germans there.
To the surprise of many, Fisher and Churchill
By January 1915 the Dardanelles campaign was no
cooperated on the evidence they presented to inquiries
longer an idée fixe: it was an accepted feature of British
of the Dardanelles Commission. Churchill throughout
government policy.
was loyal to his Admiral friend and never deserted him.
In the absence of any ground forces forthcoming
In March 1916 Churchill even proposed in Parliament
from Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War,
that Fisher should be brought back. This was treated
Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had been told
with derision and disbelief. The idea died there and
that the Dardanelles must be taken “by ships alone.”
then. Fisher for his part was more suspicious. He often
Thus was launched the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign.
alluded to Churchill’s mercurial nature, but this was a
Fisher held that it could be successful if done quickly,
characteristic he himself held.
but days wore on, and before all ships and supplies were
Neither Churchill nor Fisher was present at the
in place, British and French naval gunnery began an
surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in >>
FINESTHOUR150/59
CHURCHILL PROCEEDINGS
Admiralty. He would do so
again, he declared, with the
knowledge he had at that time.
Fisher, Churchill wrote,
brought energy to the
Admiralty: a builder of warships
whose genius was that of a constructor and organizer who
delighted in trampling on the
Treasury. Build ships—that was
his message and his mission—
and build them he did.
But Fisher was old and in
declining health. In fact,
Churchill stated (for the first
rue to his nature,
time in this essay), that he
Churchill was prepared to
believed Fisher had suffered a
let bygones be bygones.
nervous breakdown at the criHe did not seek to open old
HMS DREADNOUGHT: Product of Fisher’s vision,
the first of Britain’s fast, all-12-inch-gun battleships
tical juncture in May 1915.
wounds, and would have been
and the first capital ship powered by steam turbines.
This may be true, and brings to
happy to leave Fisher as a piece
Ironically, she saw no major action in the Great War,
mind yet again the influence of
of memory. But in 1929
missing the Battle of Jutland because she was refitting. Painting by Norman L. Wilkinson (1878-1971).
health on statecraft and the
Admiral Reginald Bacon, a
running of great departments of
trusted Fisherite devoted to
state or of the military. (See also pages 25-30 this issue.)
“Jacky’s” memory, produced a laudatory Fisher biogThe Dardanelles (see FH 126, whose theme was
raphy. Churchill thought Bacon imparted “a mood of
that campaign) will long be studied as one of those
hatred and spiteful controversy into the discussion of the
might-have-beens of history: If only the Allies had
memorable transactions with which Lord Fisher was
pressed their military attack just a little longer! Even
concerned.”
more puzzling is this question: “What would have hapSo Churchill responded with what is now called
pened in 1916 had the House of Commons taken
“damage control,” in a News of the World article, “Lord
Fisher and his Biographer”—which received an extended
Churchill’s advice to reinstate Fisher? Of course, by
lease on life when Churchill’s poular book Great
then, Fisher was politically unacceptable, and Churchill
Contemporaries, first published in 1937, was expanded
almost equally so.
the following year with four more essays including the
Churchill learned many lessons from his experiFisher piece—which was really as much about Bacon as
ences in World War I. Not least among them was that
about the late Admiral.
service chiefs could be egotistical and domineering prima
Churchill’s essay nevertheless offered many warm
donnas. That Churchill was able to cope with them in
appreciations of his old colleague. A flash of light always
World War II owes much to his difficult and challenging
came from Fisher, Churchill wrote, yet there was always
tug of war with Jacky Fisher.
something foreign to the Navy about him. He was never
At the end of the day it was Fisher who prepared
among the “band of brothers” of Nelsonic tradition. He
the great naval instrument of victory in the Great War—
was the “dark angel” of the naval service, and he gloried
and Churchill who sent the Fleet to its battle stations at
in it. “Ruthless, relentless and remorseless” were Fisher’s
the outset. The Navy never forgot Churchill’s 1913
favorite epithets about himself. Highly partisan, he was
triumph in the naval estimates that gave it the superthe author of his own misfortune, inviting vendettas
dreadnoughts and more. These were notable and noble
and maneuvers: as Churchill put it, “behind him and
achievements. The torpedo may have ended the possihis professional progeny, the bloodhounds followed
bility of a close blockade of enemy ports and coasts, but
sniffing and padding along, and now and then giving
the grinding preponderance of British naval power, ubideep tongue.”
quitous if not always crushing, played a huge role in the
Churchill made no attempt to sidestep the charge
final outcome. In World War I, Britannia still held
that it was he who had brought Fisher back to the
Neptune’s trident. ,
LORD FISHER...
November 1918. Fisher died in
1920, his last complaints being
letters to The Times about the
state of naval affairs. He even
proclaimed republican sympathies. The most unlikely of
British admirals, he was nevertheless one of the great
Englishmen of his time. To this
day he casts a long, entrancing
shadow across British naval and
political history.
T
FINESTHOUR150/60
2. In his book The River War, what
did Churchill describe as “the most
signal triumph ever gained by the arms
of science over barbarians”? (W)
3. Haldane (Secretary of State for War,
1912-14) once said that an argument
with him in Cabinet was like “arguing
with a brass band.” To whom did
Haldane refer? (C)
4. Why was Sunday 28 May 1911 a
special day for Winston and
Clementine Churchill? (P)
5. In which speech did Churchill say:
“If we can stand up to him [Hitler], all
Europe may be free and the life of the
world may move forward into broad,
sunlit uplands”? (W)
6. In a note to cousin Ivor Guest on 19
January 1899, WSC wrote: “I have
been busy with my book and live in a
strange world bounded on the north by
the Preface and on the south by the
Appendix & whose natural features
consist of Chapters & paragraphs.” To
which book did he refer? (L)
Level 3
7. Which U.S. President, according to
Churchill, “did not truly divine the
instinct of the American people”? (W)
11. Churchill told the Indian Empire
Society in 1930: “It is no use trying to
satisfy a tiger by feeding him with
cat’s-meat.” To whom did he refer? (M)
12. In his first public speech in 1894,
WSC stood on a soapbox and said:
“Ladies of the Empire! I stand for
Liberty!” Which Empire? (P)
Level 2
13. Who in 1953 called Churchill “an
old man in a hurry”? (S)
14. In 1911, WSC told Violet Bonham
Carter, “They are so overrated. They
only said everything first. I’ve said just
as good things myself. But they got in
before me.” Who were they? (L)
15. WSC said, “Why will people keep
referring to that bloody pot-boiler?” To
which of his articles did he refer? (L)
16. In which book does Churchill proclaim the maxim, “In sport, in courage,
and in the sight of heaven, all men
meet on equal terms”? (L)
17. Whom did Churchill like to call
“The noblest Roman of them all”? (C)
18. When did WSC say: “I am a child of
the House of Commons and have been
here I believe longer than anyone. I was
much upset when I was violently thrown
out of my collective cradle”? (M)
Level 1
19. Who wrote of Churchill after a
luncheon in 1925: “[he] was in his best
form: He is a Chimborazo or Everest
among the sand-hills of the Baldwin
Cabinet”? (C)
8. In 1943 Professor R.V. Jones saw
“an individual in a boiler suit come
padding into the room; I imagined him
to be a Ministry of Works maintenance
engineer.” Who was he? (M)
20. Who complimented Churchill on
his speech about the Brussels Sugar
Convention on 2 March 1904: “The
first part of that speech was the most
sustained piece of irony I have ever
heard in the House of Commons.” (C)
9. In which speech did WSC say, “We
have before us an ordeal of the most
21. Who remarked about Churchill’s
flight to Moscow in August 1942: “A
FINESTHOUR150/61
22. In which speech did WSC say, “Do
not despair, do not yield to violence
and tyranny, march straight forward
and die if need be—unconquered”? (S)
23. WSC said at the Free Trade Hall,
Manchester, on 9 May 1938: “We
express our immediate plan and policy
in a single sentence: ‘Arm and stand by
the Covenant.’” Who were “we”? (S)
24. What was Winston Churchill’s
connection with the Londonderry
Arms Hotel in Carnlough, County
Antrim, Ireland? (P) ,
Answers
(1) Churchill when Secretary of State for
War and Air. (2) Battle of Omdurman, 2
September 1898. (3) Churchill. (4) Their
son Randolph was born. (5) “Their Finest
Hour,” 18 June 1940, the anniversary of
the Battle of Waterloo. (6) The River War.
Level 4
1. A 1919-20 limerick: “There was a
young man of Dundee / Who they
granted command of the sea / So they
gave him command / Of the air and the
land / Just to make it quite fair for all
three.” Who was the young man? (M)
10. “If there is a game which could
prepare a youth for a soldier’s life, that
game is —— .” Fill in the blank. (P)
(7) President Woodrow Wilson. (8) Prime
Minister Churchill. (9) His first speech as
Prime Minister on Monday, 13 May 1940.
(10) Polo, as described by “A Cornet of
Horse” [WSC] in an article on Sandhurst
in Pall Mall magazine, December 1896.
(11) Gandhi. (12) The Empire Theatre,
Leicester Square, London.
Each quiz includes four questions in six
categories: contemporaries (C), literary
(L), miscellaneous (M), personal (P),
statesmanship (S) and war (W), easy
questions first. Can you reach Level 1?
(13) Harold Macmillan, echoing Lord
Randolph Churchill’s comment about
Gladstone in 1886. (14) The Greeks and
Romans. (15) “Moses: The Leader of a
People,” in The Sunday Chronicle, 8
November 1931, reprinted in Thoughts
and Adventures (Amid These Storms). (16)
The Story of the Malakand Field Force.
(17) Gen. George C. Marshall. (18) The
opening of the new House of Commons
Chamber on 24 October 1950.
JAMES LANCASTER
flight of 10,000 miles through hostile
and foreign skies may be the duty of
young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world’s cares it is an act
of inspiring gallantry and valor”? (W)
(19) Herbert Asquith. Chimborazo, at
20,560 feet, is the highest mountain in
Ecuador. (20) Prime Minister CampbellBannerman. (21) Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
(22) VE-Day, 8 May 1945. (23) The Focus
for Defence of Freedom and Peace, a crossparty, anti-appeasement group, formed in
1936. Churchill was always in the chair.
(24) In 1921 he inherited the hotel from
his cousin Henry Vane-Tempest, third son
of the Fifth Marquess of Londonderry. He
sold it in 1934.
Churchill Quiz
grievous kind. We have
before us many, many long
months of struggle and of
suffering”? (S)
MOMENTS IN TIME
Churchill in North
Africa, August 1942
KEVIN MORRIS
PHOTOS BY ROBERT EDWARD JOHNSON
H
istorians delight in publishing photographs of
Churchill taken by servicemen present on his
wartime journeys, often taken impromptu, with
“Brownies” or other basic equipment: an intimate view that
is lost to the press cameras and official photographers.
These photographs, taken by my late guardian Robert
Johnson, were snapped of Churchill and Air Chief Marshal
Tedder on the PM’s visit to North Africa in August 1942.
All were taken shortly after landing. One image shows WSC
surrounded by officers and servicemen, another his inspection of them on parade; another his farewell.
The little information I had is that the photos were
taken “somewhere in Egypt,” with the very sketchy date of
18 August 1942. Robert Johnson served with 40 Squadron
RAF (Wellington Bombers can be seen in some photographs), which my research reveals was located at Shallufa,
Egypt at time of Churchill’s visit. On the basis of information furnished below, I now believe these photos were taken
on 5 August 1942.
“Getting There” (Finest Hour 148) notes that
Churchill flew to Gibraltar, Cairo, El Alamein, Teheran,
and Moscow, and back, by roughly the same route, between
2 and 24 August 1942. The result of his visit to the Middle
East was a drastic and immediate change of command, with
Alexander commander-in-chief Middle East and
Montgomery subordinate to him in command of the
Eighth Army. (See Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of
Fate, Chapter XXVI.)
On this trip Churchill was in North Africa on 4-9 and
17-23 August. The photos likely date to August 5th, when
he records visiting “the Alamein positions.” (He spent the
6th with Brooke and Smuts and the 7th with the 51st
Highland Division; he was in Cairo from the 8th-10th, in
Moscow on the 10th-16th. He also visited with North
African troops on his return trip, but travelled by car.) ,
_________________________________________________
The author may be contacted at [email protected].
FINESTHOUR150/62
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