On 20 Octo­ber 2009, at a Lon­don din­ner hon­or­ing Leader of the Oppo­si­tion David Cameron MP, The Churchill Cen­tre will be dis­play­ing Sir Win­ston Churchill’s famous gold Breguet pocket watch. WSC pre­ferred radio to tele­vi­sion and, not sur­pris­ingly, pocket watches to wrist­watches. He called his Breguet “The Turnip.” There are sev­eral amus­ing ref­er­ences to it in the canon:

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Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapes­try, 38:

“One day at lunch when cof­fee and brandy were being served my father decided to have a slight ‘go’ at Prof[essor Lin­de­mann, his sci­en­tific adviser] who had just com­pleted a trea­tise on the quan­tum the­ory. ‘Prof’ he said, ‘tell us in words of one syl­la­ble and in no longer than five min­utes what is the quan­tum the­ory.’ My father then placed his large gold watch, known as the ‘turnip,’on the table. When you con­sider that Prof must have spent many years work­ing on this sub­ject, it was quite a tall order. How­ever with­out any hes­i­ta­tion, like quick­sil­ver, he explained the prin­ci­ple and held us all spell-bound. When he had fin­ished we all spon­ta­neously burst into applause. Over the years I made a spe­cial effort to ask those who had known Churchill well to tell me about Lin­de­mann. They all told the same story, that of clos­est friend­ship. Churchill’s nephew Johnny, a painter and racon­teur, told me when we talked at his home in Lon­don about his uncle: ‘He swore by Lindemann.’”

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Christo­pher Long, “Chartwell Mem­o­ries,” Finest Hour 126, Spring 2005, 33:

“I spent the entire after­noon in the draw­ing room, clam­ber­ing all over an accom­mo­dat­ing old man in an arm­chair who seemed designed for the pur­pose. Though very ancient, he had sev­eral unusual attrac­tions to rec­om­mend him, which included an inter­est­ing gold watch on a chain strung across his stom­ach and a cigar which needed to be cut with a cigar-cutter. Indeed, at my insis­tence, it needed to be re-cut quite frequently.”

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William Man­ches­ter, The Last Lion II, 12:

“Even at Chartwell his dila­tori­ness is a source of dis­tress for both his fam­ily and the manor’s staff. Once a manser­vant con­spired against him by set­ting his bed­room clock ahead. It worked for a while, because he scorned that off­spring of trench war­fare the wrist­watch, remain­ing loyal to his large gold pocket watch, known to the fam­ily as ‘the turnip,’ which lay beyond his grasp. After his sus­pi­cions had been aroused, how­ever, the game was up; he exposed it by sim­ply ask­ing morn­ing vis­i­tors the time of day.”

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Roy How­ells (WSC’s male nurse), Churchill’s Last Years, 20-21:

“We tried all kinds of ruses to get him out of bed in time and one of them was putting for­ward every clock in his bed­room. We tried this too often how­ever and even­tu­ally he became wise to it. I spot­ted him one day check­ing the bed­room clocks against his pocket-watch. In an attempt to beat this manoeu­vre I coun­tered by putting his pocket-watch on ten min­utes when he was not look­ing. Still he was sus­pi­cious. He used to win in the end by ask­ing some­one enter­ing the room, no mat­ter how many clocks he had around him, ‘Uh-huh, what time is it?’ The per­son nat­u­rally told the truth and we were back where we started.”

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Edmund Mur­ray, Churchill’s Body­guard, 85:

“The morn­ing passed in much the same way as the pre­vi­ous after­noon, and as one o’clock approached I looked at my watch. ‘It’s one o’clock, sir,’ I said, ‘time for lunch.’ With great delib­er­a­tion he pulled out his pocket watch and con­sulted it. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It’s only five to one. Why do you wish to rob me of five min­utes of my life?’ ‘Sorry sir. My watch must be fast … but lunch is at one.’”

Pho­tos cour­tesy Win­ston S. Churchill

Sir Winston’s Breguet, still in per­fect work­ing order, is now in the pos­ses­sion of his great-grandson Ran­dolph, whose late father described it:

It is attached to a heavy gold waistcoat-chain which, at the end has a small round gold case for hold­ing gold Sov­er­eigns, a V for Vic­tory emblem (sim­i­lar, we believe, to one WSC gave the mem­bers of his Wartime Cab­i­net in 1945), a sil­ver head of Napoleon (of whom he was a great admirer), a keep­sake medal­lion of the (West­min­ster) Abbey Divi­sion by-election of 1924 (which WSC lost by just 43 votes), a garnet-stone set in a gold heart (the gift of Clemen­tine on their wed­ding day in Sep­tem­ber 1908) and another golden heart, which Clemen­tine gave Win­ston on his 90th Birth­day (after 56 years of mar­riage and less than eight weeks before his death).

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Tagged as: " Edmund Murray, "The Turnip, Breguet, Frederick Lindemann, Lindemann, pocket watch, Sarah Churchill, William Manchester