A New York Times correspondent writes:

I’ve been reading The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, about how we got into Vietnam. When you’re deciding whether to intervene militarily, he says, you can count on the generals to tell you everything that can go awry and stress the negative part of the picture. But once they’re invested, once it’s their job to create a good outcome through military means, it’s going to be all happy talk. They’re not going to report that they’re failing. They’re going to give you the sunnier side of what’s happening, in this case, in Afghanistan. And that’s what happened.

Duh!

Demanding the facts

Eliot A. Cohen offers another example of Churchill’s ability to ferret out truth from generals. In March 1941 he queried then-commander of Home Forces, General Sir Alan Brooke, on a January exercise called “Victor”:

1. In the invasion exercise “Victor,” two armoured, one 
motorised and two infantry divisions were assumed to be landed by 
the enemy on the Norfolk coast in the teeth of heavy opposition.
 They fought their way ashore and were all assumed to be in action 
at the end of 48 hours.

2. I presume the details of this remarkable feat have been
 worked out by the Staff concerned. Let me see them. For instance,
 how many ships and transports carried these five Divisions? How 
many Armoured vehicles did they comprise? How many motor lor
ries, how many guns, how much ammunition, how many men, how
 many tons of stores, how far did they advance in the first 48
 hours, how many men and vehicles were assumed to have landed in
 the first 12 hours, what percentage of loss were they debited
 with? What happened to the transports and store-ships while the
 first 48 hours of fighting were going on? Had they completed
 emptying their cargoes, or were they still lying in shore off the
 beaches? What naval escort did they have? Was the landing at this
 point protected by superior enemy daylight Fighter formations?
 How many Fighter airplanes did the enemy have to employ, if so, to 
cover the landing places?

Brooke gamely replied and they sparred back and forth for weeks. “What is the significance of this?” Dr. Cohen asks. First, “Brooke stood up to Churchill and not only did not suffer by it, but ultimately gained promotion to the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff. But more important is Churchill’s observation that ‘It is of course quite reasonable for assumptions of this character to be made as a foundation for a military exercise. It would be indeed a darkening counsel to make them the foundation of serious military thought.'”

Close scrutiny today…

Further reading

“Generals Wavell and Auchinleck and the Lost Art of Going Quietly,” 2023.

Eliot A. Çohen, “Churchill and His Military Commanders” (2016), part 1 of 3 parts.

“An enormously agreeable side of his character was his attitude toward animals,” Sir Anthony Montague Browne, his last private secretary, said of Winston Churchill. “Although a Victorian—and they were not notably aware of animal suffering—he had a sensitivity well in advance of his time.” Ever since Sir Anthony said that we’ve been waiting for a good book on the subject, and historian Piers Brendon has obliged. His Bestiary is well named: an encyclopedia on Churchill’s relations with animals, and allusions to them in his writings and speeches.

The book is in alphabetical order, so you can quickly find any members of the animal world. The anecdotes are not all about animals Churchill “knew personally” (as he said of a favorite goose). WSC also deployed animal analogies, many noted here.

For example, bears and eagles represented Russians and Americans respectively. Communists were crocodiles. Toads were the 1930s prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. “Rat” was applied both as a noun (to reprehensible people) and a verb (famously to himself on changing parties: “to rat twice” and to “re-rat”).

The Poodles, Rufus I and II

The Bestiary contains capsule bios of Churchill’s famous poodles, Rufus I and II. The first, acquired during the Second World War, became a constant companion. In 1947 Rufus was run over by a car. His replacement was Rufus II, a dog of variable health and “breath like a flame-thrower,” but Churchill was no less devoted.

Brendon tells us that Churchill even made assignations for his animal friend. In 1955 Rufus II received a proposal from a poodle named Jennifer. WSC sent Rufus’ reply: “My dear Jennifer, On the 10th of April I shall be going…to London. I should be very glad to receive you there.” The letter was marked, VERY PRIVATE.

Once, watching “Oliver Twist,” the movie reached the point where Bill Sykes drowns his bull terrier to throw the police off his track. Churchill covered Rufus’s eyes with his hand: “Don’t look now, dear. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.”

Perches and pates

Late in WSC’s life, Field Marshal Montgomery presented him with a green budgerigar (parakeet) named Toby. Quite tame, he was often let loose to fly around. Brendon describes a session Toby spent on the bald head of Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler. Toby left fourteen tokens of esteem on RAB’s pate. Wiping his head with a white silk handkerchief, Butler sighed: ‘The things I do for England….’”

At mealtime, Toby “strutted across the dining table, knocked over glasses, helped himself to grapefruit, fought with his reflection in the silver pepper pot. He even tried whisky, Brendon writes, and “apparently once fell into his master’s brandy glass. This did nothing to diminish Churchill’s affection….”

In his role as literary aide, Toby lapped ink from Churchill’s pen, “embellishing his letters with blots and scribbles…. He nibbled the edges of book and proof pages—“an indication, in Churchill’s view, that he had read them: ‘Oh! Yes, that’s all right,’ Churchill would say, ‘give him the next chapter.’”

Lord Wardens of the Cinque Mouseholes

Wherever Churchill lived there was a cat or two. When he moved to Downing Street from the Admiralty in 1940, he brought along Nelson, a formidable grey tom who served the war effort, he said, “by acting as a prime ministerial hot water bottle.” Nelson soon chased away the previous resident, a holdover from Chamberlain whom the Churchills had christened “Munich Mouser.” Nelson was congratulated. But the PM was aghast during an air raid, to find Nelson hiding under a chest of drawers: “Come out Nelson! Shame on you, bearing a name such as yours, to skulk there while the enemy is overhead.”

For Sir Winston’s 88th birthday in 1962, his private secretary Jock Colville presented him with a ginger tom which WSC named “Jock.” This faithful cat was on his bed at Hyde Park Gate when he died. At his request, Chartwell has kept a ginger cat named Jock on the premises ever since. Other Chartwell cats were addressed Mister or Miss Cat. Churchill attempted conversation with them, not always successfully. On a certain morning, meeting one in the passage, he said, “Good morning, Cat.” The cat deigned not to reply. He slashed at it and it ran away. Remorseful, he had a card placed in a window: “Cat: Come home. All is forgiven. Winston.” Cat did return, and was rewarded with fresh salmon and cream.

“Tender solicitude”

At Chartwell, Brendon writes, animals inhabiting the farms and woodlands were as dear as pets. “One of the heifers has committed an indiscretion before she came to us and is about to have a calf,” he wrote his absent wife in 1935. “I propose however to treat it as a daughter.”

The Churchills’ friend Lady Diana Cooper listed some of Chartwell’s more or less domestic birds: “five foolish geese, five furious black swans, two ruddy sheldrakes, two white swans—‘Mr. Juno and Mrs. Jupiter,’ so called because they got the sexes wrong to begin with—two Canadian geese (‘Lord and Lady Beaverbrook’) and some miscellaneous ducks.

Piers Brendon supplies a long chapter on swans, including the exotic black variety from Australia, which thrived in Chartwell’s ponds. Alas, they were vulnerable to the predations of foxes—who roamed freely because Churchill could not resist trying to befriend them! Sir Winston related to the swans “in a personal and paternalistic fashion…[He loved] to give them bread and feel them nibbling at his fingers, to look at them and look after them with ‘tender solicitude.’”

“Man’s faithful friend the horse”

Brough Scott’s Churchill at the Gallop is the most detailed book on this topic, but Piers Brendon does it justice in two chapters, “Horses” and “Racehorses.” From his training at Sandhurst to riding with hounds in his seventies and racing thoroughbreds into his eighties, Churchill loved horses. Stationed in India, he maintained several polo ponies, and was in his Fifties when he played his last chukka. His compassion was displayed in his efforts to repatriate Britain’s surviving war horses at the end of World War I.

Brendon thoroughly covers his postwar horse racing; Churchill owned fifty thoroughbreds, including a dozen brood mares. His most famous and winning thoroughbred was Colonist II, a French three-year-old he acquired for £1500. “Why don’t you sell your horse?” a Labour opponent shouted. WSC replied: “I am doing my best to fight against the profit motive.” Asked why he didn’t put Colonist to stud he cracked: “What? And have it said that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is living off the immoral earnings of a horse?”

A world of animals

Churchill’s first encounter with a giant panda was at the London Zoo. He “gazed long at the animal, lying supine and unaware of the honour done to it.” Then he exclaimed: “It has exceeded all my expectations…and they were very high!”

Another zoo favorite was his lion “Rota,” presented by an admirer in 1943. “I don’t want the lion at the moment either at Downing Street or Chequers owing to the Ministerial calm which prevails there,” Churchill told the Zoo. Later he showed Rota’s photograph to a diminutive secretary, Patrick Kinna: “If there are any shortcomings in your work I shall send you to him,” he winked. “Meat is very short now.”

This is just a representative fraction of Piers Brendon’s comprehensive book. He avoids repeating material in several previous accounts, and goes much deeper into the subject. Most of the anecdotes have not appeared previously and are thus quite valuable. Anyone interested in the personal side of the great man owes it to themselves to buy a copy.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has published two articles on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s loyal ally and friend for four decades. The first begins with a memoir by the late Ron Robbins, a Canadian journalist who early on covered the House of Commons, where he met Bracken. The postscript is by me, followed by reviews of the two Bracken books by George Gale and A.J.P. Taylor.  A second feature—Bracken’s defense of Churchill’s frequent visits to war fronts—is also published.

Excerpts follow. For the full articles click on “Great Contemporaries:  Brendan Bracken” and “Necessary Risk: Churchill at the Front.”

Bracken Observed

There was no more enigmatic figure in Churchill’s life than Brendan Bracken, who cloaked his birth and upbringing with mystery while hinting broadly that he was the great man’s illegitimate son. Close friendship, not errant fatherhood, encompassed their relationship. But Churchill, with characteristic impishness, apparently never gave the direct lie to Bracken’s implied claim. This annoyed Churchill’s wife and peeved his son, Randolph, who spoke satirically of  “my brother, the bastard.” To quell the noisome rumor Churchill quipped: “I have looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”

By the time I encountered him, he was a formidable figure in corridors of power and London financial circles. The Labour Party came to power in July 1945. Bracken’s arch opponent was the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, a fiery Welshman. Bevan was steering the National Health Bill, the first large-scale national heath service, through morning committee meetings. I wrote “running reports.” A copy boy would come in every five minutes or so, collect what I had written, and phone it to the agency.

* * *

Bracken would thrust at Bevan, jolting him in a tough fight over every clause in the Bill. Bracken always attacked in time to catch new editions of the evening papers. This ensured him headlines, especially in the Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook, an intimate friend of his and Churchill’s.

One morning as I hurried to the committee, Bracken caught up with me and complimented me on my coverage. No journalist worth his salt likes to feel exploited, particularly by a politician. So I said: “You have a great knack of talking in headlines just in time to catch every edition.” He roared with laughter and produced a pocket diary. He flaunted a page on which he had written the edition times of all the London papers. Smiling ruefully, I said: “I didn’t imagine that you were relying solely on chance.” “No,” he replied, “it’s a trick I learned early on from Churchill.”

Bracken died of cancer in 1958 at the age of 57. Churchill reacted sorrowfully to the news of his death. Churchill mourned for him with a father’s grief. —Ron Cynewulf Robbins

Bracken postscript

We have a memorable glimpse of Brendan Bracken on 11 May 1940, Churchill’s first full day in office. One of the first axes fell on Chamberlain’s toady Sir Horace Wilson, a civil servant promoted far above his station. He was an arch appeaser, both indirectly (as an adviser) and directly (as an emissary to Hitler).

With his usual courtesy, Churchill told Wilson he would obliged if Sir Horace left Ten Downing Street by 1pm. Wilson characteristically took this as a “negotiable demand” and toddled off to lunch. Returning, he found Bracken and Randolph Churchill seated on his office sofa, smoking huge cigars and glaring at him. They exchanged no words. Wilson turned and fled. Later he sent for his effects. He never appeared at Number Ten again.

During the war, Bracken enabled Evelyn Waugh to obtain leave so that he could write Brideshead Revisited. Waugh unkindly wrote Bracken into the story as Rex Motram, a boorish, money-grubbing exploiter of the colonies. That was typical of Waugh, but undeserved. As Lord Beaverbrook said: “To know Bracken was to like him; those who didn’t know him did not like him.”

Bracken in biography

The Bracken biographies may be viewed in similar light. (Click here and scroll to “Further reading.”) Boyle’s Poor Dear Brendan is the more showy and brash, Lysaght’s Brendan Bracken the deeper and more revealing. “Above all,” wrote Charles Lysaght,

Bracken was great fun. He found appropriate names for everyone. Baldwin was “the ironmonger,” Neville Chamberlain“the coroner.” Eden was “Robert Taylor,” or “the film star at the Foreign Office.” He described Harrow, Churchill’s old school, as “that bloody old Borstal of yours.” Only Churchill himself was exempt from Bracken’s darts. His description of Aneurin Bevan, enjoying Beaverbrook’s champagne, is of classic quality: “You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin! Look at you swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist.” Bevan listened to this tirade with delight.

After the war Bracken seemed to burn out like a fallen meteor, contemplating a future with, alas, all too accurate a vision. He said of Keynes: “He will be best remembered as the man who made inflation respectable.” He said of himself: “I shall die young and be forgotten.” History will not forget him. —RML

Necessary risk: Bracken’s defense

During World War II, Churchill’s frequent excursions to various fronts caused critics to complain that he was taking unnecessary risk. Criticism mounted when Churchill hied to France only six days after D-Day.  He revisited the front several times through March 1945.

Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid DFC (1895-1977) was a distinguished flying ace in World War I. In 1922-45 he served periodically as a Conservative Member of Parliament. Peppery and contentious, he engaged in numerous arguments, which in 1943 resulted in fisticuffs with another MP. Both apologized the next day, but in America the Los Angeles Times headlined, “England Grins as Members of Commons Trade Punches.”

Churchill went to France in mid-June 1944. Cunningham-Reid complained: “The Prime Minister should not risk his life unnecessarily…. Was there ever such a good target as the one presented by our not inconspicuous Prime Minister perched up high on a Jeep? Nobody could have mistaken or missed that massive figure, complete with cigar to identify him…. Subsequently, the Prime Minister, General Montgomery, Field-Marshal Smuts, General Sir Alan Brooke, and, in all probability, the Supreme Commander [Eisenhower] and other key men got into a huddle…. The Minister of Information will, no doubt, correct me if that is not so.”

* * *

The Minister of Information was Brendan Bracken, who did indeed respond. In a brilliant few minutes, Bracken delivered a superb defense of Churchill’s visits to the front. Because it has not been published, even in The Churchill Documents, we thought it worth bringing to the attention of readers. Here is an extract:

I think it is a good thing for prime ministers that they should go into the front line and see the troops, and the soldiers, who matter most, like to see them. I daresay some hon. Members of this House remember that, in the last war, some suggestions were made by timid French Ministers to M. Clemenceau that, owing to the Germans having a big gun that shelled Paris, they should leave that city for a safer place. They discovered for the first time that the old Tiger was amenable. He said, “Yes, let the Government leave Paris. Let it go to the front.” It was a very sound piece of advice. If men like Clemenceau lived in this generation, France would not be in its present predicament.

Click here for Bracken’s complete speech.

“Churchill’s Secret“: good film portrayal of how Bracken and two other Press Barons dekated the news about Churchill’s 1953 stroke.

Prominently quoted in this context is a remark Churchill made to de Gaulle—at least according to de Gaulle—in Unity, his 1942-44 war memoirs: “…each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.”

Nothing to do with the EU

Warren Kimball’s Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (III, 169), nicely clears up this quotation. Churchill was referring to de Gaulle, not to anything resembling today’s EU. He wrote to Roosevelt on 7 June 1944: “I think it would be a great pity if you and he [de Gaulle] did not meet. I do not see why I have all the luck.” In his remark about the “open sea,” he was criticizing the intransigent attitude of de Gaulle’s Free French, and stating his intention to side with Roosevelt. Kimball writes:

In a letter…to General Marshall, [Eisenhower] commented that only two groups remained in France: “one is the Vichy gang, and the other [is] characterized by unreasoning admiration for de Gaulle.” In the original draft Eisenhower had put it even more strongly, asserting that the second group “seems almost idolatrous in its worship of de Gaulle” (Eisenhower Papers, III 1867-68).

Even de Gaulle recalled the phrases, though he surmised that Churchill’s passion was aimed primarily at the ears of his British associates: “Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.” (de Gaulle, Unity, 153).

More definitive…

Reader Kevin Ruane (@KevinRuane2) directed me to something Churchill said which would seem more to the point. In a memo to his cabinet on 29 November 1951, Churchill addressed the question of Britain  joining the Schuman Plan, a single authority to control the production of steel and coal in France and West Germany, open to other European countries to join:

Our attitude towards further economic developments on the Schuman lines resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or commonwealth character. Our first object is the unity and consolidation of the British Commonwealth….Our second, “the fraternal association” of the English-speaking world; and third, United Europe, to which we are a separate closely- and specially-related ally and friend. (National Archives, CAB129/48C(51)32.)

“European pensioners”

In John Charmley’s Churchill’s Grand Alliance, the above is followed by a statement from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: “It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we ourselves cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities” (Charmley, 250).

On 13 December 1951, Churchill agreed with Eden’s formulation. He wrote to Conservative delegation to the European Consultative Assembly. His note suggests that the Labour Party, then as now, was generally hostile to Britain within Europe. From The Churchill Documents, Vol. 31, 1951-1965, forthcoming from Hillsdale College Press, 2019…

We seem in fact to have succumbed to the Socialist Party hostility to United Europe. I take the full blame because I did not feel able either to go there myself or send a message. You know my views about the particular kind of European Army into which the French are trying to force us. We must consider very carefully together how to deal with the certainly unfavourable reaction in American opinion. They would like us to fall into the general line of European pensioners which we have no intention of doing.

Churchill’s 1951 statements clearly arrays him against Britain joining a “federal system.” But what kind of system? The concepts and forms of 1951 are not those of today.  It may tempting and even supporting to suggest this proves Churchill would be pro-Brexit. But it is not dispositive. Neither Europe nor the British Commonwealth are what they were then.

Again on 11 May 1953 Churchill told the House of Commons: “We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a federal European system. We feel we have a special relationship to both.”

Then is not now

Let’s also clear up the story bandied about by the other side of the EU debate, from Field Marshal Montgomery, who wrote that Churchill in 1962 was “protesting against Britain’s proposed entry into the Common Market” (then the EEC, predecessor to the EU). Montgomery’s statement not only took advantage of a private conversation with an old and ailing friend; it also misrepresented Churchill’s views. Sir Winston’s daughter Lady Soames wrote: “What I remember clearly is that not only my father, but all of us—particularly my mother—were outraged by Monty’s behaviour, and he was roundly rebuked.” (For more detail see Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair, Hillsdale College Press, 2013, 1337.)

* * *

In his memoir, Long Sunset, Sir Winston’s longtime private secretary Sir Anthony Montague Browne wrote that Montgomery, while not entirely inventing Churchill’s remark, was seriously misinterpreting the old man’s opinion. Consulting no one, Montague Browne immediately released to the press a statement of Churchill’s views on the subject in a private, unpublished letter to his Woodford constituency chairman, Mrs. Moss, in August 1961.” Extracting from Churchill’s statement, on pages 273-74 of Long Sunset:

For many years, I have believed that measures to promote European unity were ultimately essential to the well-being of the West. In a speech at Zurich in 1946, I urged the creation of the European Family, and I am sometimes given credit for stimulating the ideals of European unity which led to the formation of the economic and the other two communities. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the key to these endeavours lay in partnership between France and Germany.

…They, together with Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, are welding themselves into an organic whole, stronger and more dynamic than the sum of its parts. We might well play a great part in these developments to the profit not only of ourselves, but of our European friends also…. I think that the Government are right to apply to join the European Economic Community, not because I am yet convinced that we shall be able to join, but because there appears to be no other way by which we can find out exactly whether the conditions of membership are acceptable.

Fence-sitting

Montague Browne admitted that this was “a fence-sitting letter,” with fairly mild opinions. But it “took the heat off and pacified” both the Euro-skeptics and the Euro-enthusiasts. “Now the whole scenario is so out of date as to render the letter irrelevant….”

Churchill held more stock in the “Special Relationship” with the United States than what was then the European Community, Sir Anthony said, but he did not think they were mutually exclusive: “Moreover, the British Commonwealth, or at least the old Commonwealth, was not then the charade it has now become….If Britain had taken the initiative before the Treaty of Rome in 1957 things might have been different.”

Futile speculation

In fairness, it has been pointed out to me by a respected historian that Montgomery was telling the truth. But Churchill’s remarks were about the EEC, not the EU, or anything like it. Thus, on the matter of Britain remaining in or leaving the EU, they are non-sequitur.

These passages represent Churchill’s ultimate views on European Unity, or Union. The EEC began as a free trade agreement, providing practical and benificent commercial arrangements for member nations. It has morphed into something entirely different. The British electorate voted accorcdingly.

So let’s stop all this futile speculation over how Winston Churchill would view the Brexit debate. That was then, this is now. It is impossible to know how today’s choices before Great Britain vis-à-vis the European Union would be viewed by Churchill. And to quote Sir Anthony: “improper use should not be made of him.”