Q: On life and living

If I want to understand Sir Winston Churchill’s philosophy of life and living, what books would you recommend? —B.A., via email

A: Lengthy sources

At first your question reminded us of the old fraternity initiation technique: asking pledges an unanswerable question. I remember mine personally: “Tell us your philosophy for living among men.” This was an intentional red herring. Whatever you answered, it obviously would never satisfy the questioner!

But in pondering the thought, there very definitely is a body of work that helps answer your query. Please use the Hillsdale Churchill Project’s online annotated bibliography for details and notes on books mentioned,  or to search for others in the same field. Search for key words like “philosophy.”

Churchill Style by Barry Singer

The book to start with is Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill. Author Barry Singer owns Chartwell Booksellers and will sell you an inscribed copy—along with copies of other books below, many of them inscribed by the authors.

Churchill Style expertly discusses Churchill’s philosophy of life and how he lived it. Mr. Singer has a unique approach. He considers nine facets of Churchill that were the essence of his style: autos, books, cigars, dining, fashion, friendships, home, imbibing and pastimes. (I”m glad he included cars—there are amusing stories there.)

The publisher, Harry Abrams, is well known for elegant productions, so Churchill Style is an heirloom, finely printed and bound and laden with full color illustrations, including rare first editions of Churchill’s books. It is a book readers will refer to often. Mr. Singer’s Hillsdale lecture on the subject is accessible here.

No More Champagne by David Lough

Churchill (or his friend F.E. Smith) was known to have declared, “Winston is a man of simple tastes. He is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.”

With no inherited wealth, WSC had to earn enough to finance his pleasures, remarking, “I lived from mouth to hand.” The standard work on his finances is David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money. Reviewing this book for Hillsdale, Michael McMenamin wrote:

Ploughing fresh ground, Lough offers a well-written, deeply researched text about Churchill’s finances, and how they affected his politics. As private as some may regard personal finances, the book does not detract from Churchill’s greatness or humanity. It is an absorbing story about an extraordinary man ensuring his financial survival with one hand, while warning about the danger to, and then leading the fight for, Western Civilization with the other. Uniquely, Churchill did both.

Churchill’s Bestiary by Piers Brendon

Animals were important in Churchill’s life. He was always surrounded by pets—or, at least, animals he thought of as pets. He was fiercely loyal to those he “knew personally,” and liked to use animal analogies in his speeches. Fortunately for students of his life, 2019 brought us a comprehensive book devoted to the subject: Piers Brendon’s Churchill’s Bestiary reviewed here. From my review:

This is an encyclopedic account of Churchill’s life with animals, starting with “Albatross” and ending in “Zoos.” That spans only a fraction of Piers Brendon’s comprehensive book. He avoids repeating material in previous accounts, and goes much deeper into the subject.

Most of the anecdotes have not appeared previously and are thus quite valuable. Mr. Brendon deeply investigates each species. The text is sprightly and readable, “unputdownable.” Anyone interested in this aspect of Churchill’s life owes it to themselves to buy a copy.

In his own words

For Sir Winston’s own comments on his philosophy of life, see the chapters “Personal Matters” and “Tastes and Favorites” in my book, Churchill by Himself aka Churchill in His Own Words. Here are quotations relating to Churchill personally: his character, habits and family, and his prescriptions for living life to the full, which he certainly did.

Many quotations speak to his political and personal characteristics, some with a high degree of frankness. Reactions to election results, and thoughts about his being variously a Conservative and a Liberal, are pithy and pointed. Of course his domestic existence always came second after politics. But family life was a rousing, warm affair, except for his occasionally tempestuous relationship with his son Randolph.

WSC’s comments to and about his wife Clementine, the best of which I trust are here, would make a perfect series of greeting cards for any husband wondering how to express himself. Their daughter Mary gave testimony to her father’s favourite maxim describing his marriage: “Here firm though all be drifting.”

What strikes me about these quotations as a group is what one of his secretaries said about Churchill: “He was so human, so funny—that always saved the day.” Marshal Tito, a most perceptive man, was once asked what most struck him about WSC. “His humanity,” Tito said immediately. “He is so human.”

Philosophy of politics

If your interest extends to political life there are three chapters in Churchill by Himself containing quotations on war and the two World Wars. Another chapter covers “Political Theory and Practice.” Also, there are at least two powerful scholarly studies of his political philosophy that should be part of the serious library.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill’s Political Philosophy (1981) is rare but worth seeking out. (Try bookfinder.com,) It is based on a Gilbert lecture which uniquely captured Churchill’s attitudes toward politics and government. WSC’s overriding doctrine, Gilbert says, can be summarized in five words: “His quarrel was with tyranny.”

Likewise excellent on political philosophy is Larry Arnn’s Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government. As a bonus, this book contains WSC’s essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” From the book review by Justin D. Lyons:

Churchill studies reveal important lessons that remain powerfully relevant for the leaders and citizens of free societies. This notion is itself founded on the belief that though the threats to civilization may have altered since Churchill’s day, there is consistency between his challenges and ours—that he is a good guide to follow in the cause of defending freedom.

Such a belief must lie behind any conception of history as providing guidance. If these commonalities do not exist, neither Churchill’s story, nor history in general, has anything to say to us now. This is a unique and important work on Churchill’s political thought.

Addenda

These books focus closely on your question, though we could go on naming specialized studies. For example, who were the mentors who made Churchill what he was in life? For three such individuals, see Michael McMenamin’s “Churchill’s Mentors,” Part 1 of which is posted here, with links to two more parts.

Churchill’s life was long and occupies the authors of over 1200 books, not including the thirty-one volumes of Official Biography. Many contain exaggerations, and it is well to look out for them. For just one such example see “On Churchill’s ‘Sybaritic’ Lifestyle” (2016).

We hope this answers your question and provides at least a start on a complicated but intriguing subject.

“Blood, Sweat and Gears”: Churchill as Motorist

1: “Mors the Pity,” 1900s-1920s.

2: “Daimlers and Austins,” 1930s.

3: “There’s Safety in Humbers,” 1940s-1960s.

“Driving Miss Nancy: Nipped in the Astor Bar,” 2022.

Q: Origins of the Lalique rooster

Many visitors to Chartwell admire the René Lalique crystal cockerel, which resides in the drawing room. It belonged to Clementine Churchill from the 1940s.

The story of its provenance is very strong, since it was a personal gift from Charles de Gaulle, likely in the Second World War era. What little we know is based on Celia Sandys’ description (in Churchill’s Little Redhead). There doesn’t appear as yet to be any textual record in the Cambridge Archives, and I’ve not yet found it mentioned elsewhere in print. Were there any other mentions? —Eugene McConlough, England (Mr. McConlough is a Chartwell docent)

A: De Gaulle’s apologia

René Jules Lalique (1860-1945) was a French jeweler known for his crystal and glass art, from diminutive perfume bottles to chandeliers. Uniquely, Lalique glass sculpture also served as motorcar bonnet mascots (hood ornaments).

As an automotive writer in another life, I am familiar with Lalique’s work on classic luxury cars of the Twenties and Thirties. Of course in that application, it usually comprises only the rooster’s head. The Lalique cockerel at Chartwell is the whole bird—large, complete, and unusually posed with his feathers folded.

The cockerel is the symbol of France—thus often Lalique’s subject. There is no doubt, as you say, that Chartwell’s was a gift to Clementine Churchill from Charles de Gaulle. Katherine Carter, the National Trust administrator, kindly provided the photo above, showing its location in the drawing room.

Celia Sandys, and the guidebook Churchill at Chartwell by Robin Fedden, both mention the Lalique bird. But there another important reference that sheds light on the loyalty and character of Clementine Churchill.

Clementine Churchill, 1979

According to Lady Churchill’s daughter and biographer, the Lalique cockerel symbolized Gaulle’s regard for Clementine. This blossomed after a wartime argument. At Winston Churchill’s personal decision, Britain destroyed large elements of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir. The object was to prevent their falling into German hands. Mary Soames writes:

On 3rd July [1940],  the Royal Navy opened fire on the French Fleet; three battleships were destroyed, with the loss of 1300 lives, and the remaining French ships at Oran and in other North African ports were either destroyed or immobilised.

It must have been just at the time of these searing events—the painfulness of which no one felt more keenly than Winston himself—that General de Gaulle lunched at Downing Street. The conversation turned to the future of the French Fleet, and Clementine said how ardently she hoped that many of its ships and crews would carry on the fight with us.

To this the General curtly replied that, in his view, what would really give the French Fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns “On you!” (meaning the British).

Clementine from the first had liked and respected this dour man, but she found this remark too much to bear and, rounding on him, she rebuked him soundly, in her perfect, rather formal French, for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country.

“Certain things a woman can say…”

From the other side of the table Winston sensed that something had gone amiss and, in a conciliatory tone, said to the General: “You must forgive my wife. Elle parle trop bien le français [She speaks French too well].”

Clementine interrupted him, and said in French: “No, Winston, it is because there are certain things that a woman can say to a man which a man cannot say, and I am saying them to you—General de Gaulle!”

After this verbal fracas, the General was much upset, and apologised profusely; and the next day he sent a huge basket of flowers for Clementine. Later on in the war he was to give her a beautiful Lalique cock—the emblem of France—which she greatly treasured.

“The Constable of France”

Surely whenever Churchill looked upon the glass bird, he must have remembered his many ups and downs with the great Frenchman. Yet their mutual respect survived. WSC wrote memorably in his war memoirs:

On the afternoon of June 16 [1940] M. Monnet and General de Gaulle visited me in the Cabinet Room…. [Monnet] turned to our sending all our remaining fighter air squadrons to share in the final battle in France, which was of course already over…. But I could not do anything to oblige him in this field.

My two French visitors then got up and moved towards the door, Monnet leading. As they reached it, de Gaulle, who had hitherto scarcely uttered a single word, turned back, and, taking two or three paces towards me, said in English: “I think you are quite right.”

Under an impassive, imperturbable demeanour he seemed to me to have a remarkable capacity for feeling pain. I preserved the impression, in contact with this very tall, phlegmatic man: “Here is the Constable of France.”

Related articles

Diana Cooper, “Duckling, Wormwood and the War,” 2024.

“Dieu Protège La France,” 2015.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

”Casablanca, Admiral Darlan, and Rick’s Letters of Transit,” 2021.

“Churchill on Joan of Arc: Agent of Brexit? Maybe Not,” 2020.

“Origins of the de Gaulle Quote, “I’ll Kiss Him on All Four Cheeks,” 2019.

“Churchill’s Christmas” is excerpted from a two-part article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text with footnotes, please click here. To Churchillian colleagues, and those who have encouraged and supported our Churchill work at Hillsdale College so many years: thank-you for being our friends.

Washington, 24 December 1941

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter… 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

“My juvenile friends…”

Churchill’s ninety Christmases saw family joy interspersed with loneliness and separation, owed to a stern sense of duty. The festival was not always a joyous time, but it always illustrated Churchill’s sensitive, caring nature.

Young Winston wrote his first letter in January 1882. He was seven, celebrating Christmas at Blenheim, minus his parents: “My dear Mamma, I hope you are quite well. I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice it was so kind of you and dear Papa I send you my love and a great many kisses.”

When he was home, he was a handful. Reports of his mother’s disinterest are exaggerated. Lady Randolph was often absorbed in the lives of her two sons, if sometimes exasperated. In 1891 his parents planned to send him to France to polish his French over the holidays. Winston erupted: “I am forced to go to people who bore me excessively…. I should like to know if Papa was asked to ‘give up his holidays’ when he was at Eton.”

His mother angrily returned his letter unread, only to reap the whirlwind: Never, he replied, would he write her a letter of any length, “as in my letter’s length I can perceive a reason for your not reading it….I expect you were too busy with your parties and arrangements for Christmas.”

“Are gentlemen all fox hunting?”

Childhood frustrations were forgotten after his father’s untimely death in 1895. Now his mother was his ardent facilitator. As she aged her feelings deepened, along with her desire to have her sons with her at Christmas. Many times this was not to be. Winston was a soldier and war correspondent now, consumed by duty and ambition.

In 1899 in South Africa, he escaped from a Boer prison camp. He spent Christmas Eve at British Commander General Buller’s headquarters in Chieveley. He awoke Christmas day in a hut a few hundred yards from where he had been captured. His thoughts were not of good will toward men.

Cabling a column to the Morning Post, he urged the dispatch of more troops to the Boer War: “More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all fox hunting? Why not an English Light Horse? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war.”

This was not received with pleasure back home. He recalled later that a London acquaintance cabled: “Best friends here hope you won’t go making further ass of yourself.”

But two years later, on an extensive lecture tour of North America, his situation had improved:  “I have promised to eat Christmas dinner with Lord Minto, Governor General of Canada, at Ottawa.”

“There’s a European in the bath”

Winston did like to move around. At Christmas 1907, now Undersecretary for the Colonies, he was in Khartoum, where he had charged with the 21st Lancers nine years earlier. Now he was making an inspection tour of African colonies. His secretary Eddie Marsh dispatched a servant to prepare him a tub. The man reported, “there’s a European in the bath.” [7] Churchill had got there first. He usually did.

He stayed home more after he married Clementine Hozier in 1908, but never at the expense of official responsibilities, which mushroomed during the First World War. From his post at the front after the Dardanelles debacle in 1915, he managed to secure leave, returning on Christmas Eve.

Christmas as Chartwell

Churchill enjoyed more conventional Christmases in the 1920s, after the war ended. The first venue was Blenheim. After his cousin “Sunny,” the 9th Duke of Marlborough had divorced, the scene shifted to Chartwell, the Churchill home from 1922.

Clementine Churchill, a marvelous hostess, was inevitably the director of events. With the births of Sarah (1918) and Mary (1922) it was a crowded household, and guests were restricted to close family: Winston’s brother Jack and Lady Gwendoline (affectionately nicknamed “Goonie”), their children Johnny and Peregrine and baby Clarissa (who would later marry Anthony Eden).

Sometimes they were joined by Clementine’s sister, the widowed Nellie Romilly, with her two “tiny monsters,” Esmond and Giles. One of the few outsiders was Winston’s scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann, who would bring along fine cigars and a case of champagne, even though he himself was a teetotaler.

Those were wonderful times, Sarah Churchill remembered. Maryott Whyte, a cousin and Mary’s beloved nanny, played Father Christmas and decorated the Christmas tree: “One day in full array she leant to put one tiny thing right and was nearly burnt to death…. The smaller children, which included me, were not told and somehow Nana as Father Christmas still appeared.”

“Associate and fraternal bottles”

Jack’s son Johnny recalled how his Uncle Winston adored children and gift-giving:

Charades, with its secrecy, dressing up and acting, particularly appealed to him. He was a generous uncle, and we in return always gave him the best presents we could afford, though choosing a gift for someone who already had everything he needed was a worry. I solved it by asking the advice of his butler or his valet….

Some of the presents, such as a pair of braces or a toothbrush, struck me as most dull, but at least I felt they were needed. The wonderful part about it is that my uncle loved, and always has loved, receiving presents. No matter how small and humble the gift, he accepted it with surprise and pleasure. “For me?” he would ask, his eyes lighting up. “How very kind!”

Johnny’s brother Peregrine remembered Christmas 1932, when their uncle created his famous still life, “Bottlescape.” Churchill had received as a present “a huge bottle of brandy, and decided to paint it, accompanied by lesser bottles.

“He sent us children scurrying around Chartwell to find them: ‘Fetch me Associate and Fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container.’”

“This sad crepuscule”

For a man who underwent civilization’s greatest storms, engineering a special Christmas was no problem. One useful prop was his outdoor heated swimming pool.

Lady Diana Cooper referred to “this sad crepuscule” as “Winston’s delightful toy.” Taking her turn in a wintery pool, Lady Diana remembered Churchill summoning Inches the butler:

“Tell Allen to heave a lot more coal on. I want the thing full blast.” Inches returned to say that Allen was out for the day. “Then tell Arthur I want it full blast,” but it was Arthur’s day out as well, so the darling old schoolboy went surreptitiously and stoked it himself for half an hour, coming in on the verge of apoplexy. Again all had to bathe in the afternoon.

More separate Christmases superseded those halcyon days. In 1934, his wife was en route to the South Seas on a voyage with their friends the Moynes; the next two holidays would also be spent apart.

In 1935, Churchill repaired for painting and sunshine to Majorca, remembering to invite Lindemann: “It would be very nice if you could come out…. Clemmie and I will have everything ready for you on the 19th. I am not sure whether she is staying for Christmas or not.” Alas she was not.

Christmas apart

In 1936 Churchill faced his ever-present money problems. “There is no less than £6,000 to pay in income and super tax during 1937,” he wrote his wife. He would sail to America on December 18th for a series of lucrative lectures. “I am disappointed not to be with you all at Christmas: and I don’t know how I shall spend my poor Christmas day [but] I feel that this particular toil is a measure of prudence.”

It didn’t work out. Instead Churchill spent a bleak holiday in the wake of the Abdication of King Edward VIII and mounting European dangers. He pleaded in vain on the King’s behalf; the House hooted him down. Temporarily he lost all the credibility he had gained in the rearmament debate.

Christmas amidst war

Nineteen thirty-nine found Britain at war. The family gathered for the last Christmas of a dying era. Now that he was again First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill’s sense of duty prevailed. “In view of the danger of surprise attacks at a time when the enemy may expect to find us off our guard, there must be no break or holiday period at Christmas or the New Year,” he minuted.

The war clamped many a lid on Christmas celebrations. When Eric Seal, his principal private secretary, asked to arrange a week’s leave for the private office, Churchill replied: “Your minute about Christmas holidays surprises me. No holidays can be given at Christmas, but every endeavour should be made to allow members of the staff to attend Divine Service on Christmas Day, either in the morning or afternoon. My own plans will be to work either here (Chequers) or in London continuously.”

He set off from Downing Street wishing the staff he left behind “a happy Christmas and a frantic New Year.” Private Secretary John Martin wrote:

We had a festive family Christmas…. For lunch we had the largest turkey I have ever seen…. Afterwards we listened to the King’s speech and Vic Oliver, Sarah Churchill’s actor husband, played the piano and Sarah sang. It was the same after dinner.

“Up to the neck”

December 1941 found the United States in the war, “up to the neck and in to the death,” as Churchill put it—and found him, quite naturally, in Washington, for the memorable remarks above.

By the end of 1942 things began to improve. Christmas at Chequers found Churchill in “a grand temper,” secretary Elizabeth Nel remembered. He “left us in peace most of the time and just sat up in bed reading a book and looking like a benevolent old cherub.”

To President Roosevelt he telegraphed: “I passed a happy Christmas in your home and now I send my heartfelt wishes to you and all around you on this brighter day than we have yet seen.” Roosevelt replied, “The old team-work is grand.”

Churchill nearly died of pneumonia in North Africa following the Teheran Conference in late 1943; his wife and doctor rushed to his side in Carthage. His doctor Lord Moran spoke of his emotion when told she was coming. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “he’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.”

Sure enough, by Christmas Day he was back on whisky and cigars, enjoying an epic plum pudding, and meeting with General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. General Alexander, Air Marshal Tedder and Admiral Cunningham were also there to discuss the coming invasion of Europe.

“This brand I snatched on Christmas Day”

The following year drew him away again, without protest from the stalwart Clementine. The family had gathered at Chequers with a huge Christmas tree, the gift of President Roosevelt. Suddenly, telegrams brought news of a civil war in Greece. Churchill immediately left for Athens, to negotiate a truce between communists and royalists that saved Greece.

Nine months later he remarked that the “Bolshevisation of the Balkans” was almost complete. All “the cabinets of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are in Soviet control, excepting only Athens. This brand I snatched from the burning on Christmas Day.”

At Chartwell on Christmas 1946, Churchill’s presents included honey from Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Service throughout his premiership. Two bottles of port arrived from Duncan and Diana Sandys. Sir Stafford Cripps, perhaps in jest, sent a bottle of turpentine.

Despite political opposition the Churchills remained good friends with the Clement Attlees. Replying to their Christmas greeting, he mentioned struggling with his war memoirs. “It is a colossal undertaking…. However, it is a good thing to get a certain amount of material together which, if not history, will still at least be a contribution thereto.”

“Whirl me round the floor once, Mule”

An aging Churchill was now less able to cope with England’s damp, cold winters. Christmas 1947 found him in Marrakesh, where he came to paint and write. At the Mamounia Hotel he hosted a party for staffers who had given up their holiday to accompany him. “There was a 25-foot Christmas tree, windows hung with orange branches, and daubs of white paint on the window panes made it seem that a blizzard was blowing outside,” wrote his daughter Sarah. “Everyone was ‘dolled up’….When midnight struck they raised their classes and clapped—and ‘Vive Churchill’ and ‘Bravo’ echoed round the room.”

The band played It’s a Long Way to Tipperary as a Christmas pudding was brought in. Much moved, Churchill bowed to them all.

Suddenly he stood. Sarah thought it was time to go. Instead he turned to her. “Whirl me round the floor once, Mule—I think I can manage it.” They took the floor for a waltz amidst a roar of applause. Then Churchill danced with all his secretaries.

“You are the Christmas Fairy”

Suddenly he noticed “a good-looking fair lady” seated by herself. Sarah remembered him asking, “Why is she alone? Dance me around the floor.” They stopped before this proud but forlorn looking woman. Churchill said: “You are the Christmas Fairy. May I have a dance?”

Sarah had no idea what they said, but “he never liked to see a beautiful woman alone. When their turn at dancing was done, he left her at her place. Meanwhile, the detectives were wondering if she had been imported as a spy.” A telegram arrived later:

YOU WILL NEVER KNOW MY NAME BUT I AM PROUD TO HAVE DANCED WITH WINSTON CHURCHILL.

“All the black swans are mating, not only the father and mother, but both brothers and both sisters have paired off. The Ptolemys always did this and Cleopatra was the result. At any rate I have not thought it my duty to interfere.”  —Churchill to his wife, Chartwell, 21 January 1935.

Return of the swans

(Updated from 2009). Visiting Chartwell in 1935, Lady Diana Cooper observed its collection of birds. There were “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 Canada geese (‘Lord and Lady Beaverbrook’) and some miscellaneous ducks.”

Chartwell’s black swans were looked after as zealously as the apes on Gibraltar. But marauding foxes and mink had reduced the population to zero by 2008.

Happily in 2009, Chartwell head gardener Giles Palmer installed a new floating “swan island” to provide natural protection, and two new black swans (Cygnus atratus) were returned to the ponds designed by Churchill himself.

 Mr. Palmer told Kent News:

I have seen the swans on their island once or twice. I am confident they will be there as soon as the foliage grows up. For now, I’m simply thrilled that the swans are settling on so well. They’re getting so brave now that they venture all the way to the kitchen garden.

The floating island has allowed Palmer to remove ugly mesh screening set up against predators, returning the lakes to their appearance in Churchill’s time.

The first black swans

The original black swans were a gift to Churchill from Sir Phillip Sassoon in 1927. The population was frequently topped up by the government of Western Australia, where they are the state symbol. C. atratus is native also to Tasmania and has been introduced to New Zealand. It is the world’s only black swan, though its flight feathers, invisible at rest, are white.

Talking to the animals

Churchill was devoted to his swans and regularly engaged them in “swan-talk,” in which he claimed proficiency. But a postwar bodyguard, Ronald Golding, told me his skill was not exclusive. It was one of WSC’s little myths. In fact, the swans would cry out to anyone who approached within a certain distance. Ron said:

Some time after this discovery that I was walking down to the lake with Mr. Churchill. I was a little in front, and watched carefully for the critical spot. I then called out in “swan-talk” and the birds dutifully replied to me.

Mr. Churchill stopped dead. I turned round and he looked me full in the eye for a moment or two. Then the faintest suspicion of a smile appeared and he walked on in silence. No comment was ever made that this secret was shared.

Related reading

“‘Darling Monster’: Lady Diana Cooper and Her Remembrances of Churchill,” 2022.

“Lady Diana Cooper on Winston and Clementine,” 2018.

“Churchill’s Butterflies Continue to Flourish at Chartwell,” 2019.

I came across an alleged saying by Churchill along the lines of: “There are 13 million feathers on a dragonfly’s wing yet it is but a mouthful for a bird.” I can’t find it. Could he have meant ‘butterfly’? He was saying that only in humans does one find sentimentality, sadness or compassion for dreadful things that happen to nature’s creatures. —R.H.

I searched our Hillsdale College digital archive of Churchill’s 20 million published words. Nothing came up for “dragonfly’s wing.” Your guess that he meant “butterfly” was a good one. I searched for “million feathers” and sure enough. Thoughtful quotation. Sorry I missed it in Churchill by Himself, but it appeared in the sequel, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill. Here is the reference:

India, 1898

On 10 January young Winston wrote to his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, from Bangalore, where was stationed. He was imploring her to help him join the Sudan Campaign as a war correspondent. He had been hoping to do likewise with the Tirah Expedition on the Indian frontier, but that war fizzled to a rapid end. Lady Randolph did help him get to Sudan later the same year.

His remarks about the butterfly are in Randolph Churchill, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 2, Young Soldier 1896-1901 (Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 856. Churchill wrote:

Oh how I wish I could work you up over Egypt! I know you could do it with all your influence and all the people you know. It is a pushing age and we must shove with the best. After Tirah and Egypt then I think I shall turn from war to peace and politics. If that is I get through all right. I think myself I shall, but of course one only has to look at Nature and see how very little store she sets by life. Its sanctity is entirely a human idea. You may think of a beautiful butterfly 12 million feathers on his wings, 16,000 lenses in his eye, a mouthful for a bird. Let us laugh at Fate. It might please her.

“A pushing age…shove with the best…sanctity of life…let us laugh at Fate.” This is indeed a cornucopia of Churchillian thought. WSC was a keen collector of butterflies in India, but in later life he couldn’t bear to kill them or even keep them captive. One day after visiting his chrysalis house at Chartwell, he left the screen door open. Secretary Grace Hamblin asked, “Did you mean to do that?” Yes, he replied, “I can’t bear this captivity any longer.”

Butterflies at Chartwell

For a photo of Churchill’s butterfly house and their proliferation at Chartwell, click here.

Q: Where did it go?

“A kindly guide at Chartwell informed me that Sir Winston’s library was dispersed and what is there (or most of it) is not his own collection. Churchill read widely and collected thousands of books. He also collected books needed for his writing projects. He had planned to write a biography of Napoleon, and amassed a vast library on Napoleon. What happened to these books?” 

A: Much survives

The Chartwell guide was right that the books on display now do not comprise the bulk of Sir Winston’s original library. The good news is that a significant portion of Churchill’s library has survived in family possession and plans to make it available are in hand.

We referred your Napoleon question to Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives at Cambridge, who writes:

His specially bound Napoleon collection of some 173 books was passed to Churchill College by Clementine Churchill after his death. It is viewable by appointment with the Churchill Archives Centre. Interested parties can access the list here. Some of the most important inscribed books passed to the family by descent and are deposited at the Churchill Archives. A list is not yet available. A core of the library of Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston and his son Randolph, passed to the late Mr. Winston Churchill. 

The back story: 1966

In 2005 I published a piece on the library by a journalist who, as a neighborhood lad of 17, helped inventory Chartwell for the National Trust. He was making good progress organizing the library until the arrival of Churchill’s son Randolph. “He ransacked my neat piles of books, combing through the volumes for those signed or annotated by his father.” These were boxed and removed, the writer recalled, “with indecent haste.”

Wishing to be accurate, I asked the late Lady Soames to vet this article and correct or comment according to her own memories. Of this account she wrote: “Under the terms of Churchill’s will, Randolph had every right to the books he removed. Many still reside as treasured heirlooms with the family or at Churchill College, Cambridge.”

Surveying the library: 1992

Thirty years ago, the bibliophile-collector Michael Wybrow and I made a day-long visit to the Chartwell library. We were then booksellers, and had encountered copies of books Randolph Churchill had removed. They usually bore his bookplate from Stour, his home in Suffolk. Invariably they also contained a small oval label reading: “From the Library of Sir Winston Churchill.” We were anxious to know their origins, and how they fitted into the original scheme of things at Chartwell’s library.

Security was less of a concern then, and the administrator, Jeane Broome, kindly let us examine books closely. We were able to survey all the shelves and even to open (very carefully!) the odd volume. Since the collection was not the original, we did not attempt an inventory. The shelves were tightly packed with spares and odd copies, and some were duplicates. For example, there were multiple copies of the Anglo-Saxon Review, edited by Lady Randolph Churchill. Among Churchill’s published books, an extraordinary number were foreign translations. (I remember my first encounter with the Turkish edition of The Second World War. It was limited to three volumes because, as Churchill’s agent Emery Reves remembered, “the Turks stopped paying royalties!”)

Further reading

Christopher C. Harmon, “The Books That Churchill Read” (American Spectator, May 2022)

A.L. Rowse, ‘There was Once a Man’: A Visit to Chartwell, 1955 (2016) 

The source of this quote is the journalist C.L. Sulzberger (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, The Last of the Giants, page 304. In it Sulzberger reports his “five hours with old Winston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberger, thought Stalin “a great man, above all compared to Khruschev and Bulganin,” and quoted Churchill as follows:

Stalin never broke his word to me. We agreed on the Balkans. I said he could have Rumania and Bulgaria; he said we could have Greece (of course, only in our sphere, you know). He signed a slip of paper. And he never broke his word. We saved Greece that way. When we went in in 1944 Stalin didn’t interfere. You Americans didn’t help, you know.

Sulzberger was a reliable reporter, so the source although hearsay, is credible. As a  gauge of Churchill’s final view of Stalin, it is more problematic.

By 1956 Churchill was an aged 81, out of power and still smarting over his failure to achieve a summit conference with the Russians. (Eisenhower held one almost immediately after Churchill left office, saying, privately. that he feared “Winston might give away the store.”) Churchill had long argued for a three-power meeting and “settlement” with the Russians, based on the brand of personal diplomacy he’d practiced with Stalin during World War II.

Stalin and the “Percentages Agreement”

In saying Stalin never broke his word, Churchill referred to the much misrepresented “naughty paper.” This was the “percentages agreement” with Stalin in their Moscow talks (Tolstoy Conference,  9-19 October 1944)—which Stalin did honor. The Soviets made no move to interfere when Churchill flew to Athens to broker a truce between communist and nationalist insurgents. Stalin began meddling in Greece after Churchill was out of office. He met stiff resistance from President Truman.

After the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill said he thought he could trust Stalin. His success in Greece was fresh in his mind, and Stalin had promised free elections in Poland. Within a month Churchill admitted, in correspondence with Roosevelt, that he’d been wrong. Even in the immediate aftermath of Yalta, on 23 February 1945, he wondered, after Germany’s defeat, “what will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?” (John Colville, Fringes of Power, 563).

It is fair to say that Churchill believed Stalin had not broken his word through 1944. To some extent his 1956 remark to Sulzberger was meant to contrast what Churchill saw as the giant figure of Stalin. But trust in Stalin was certainly not something Churchill expressed often after 1945. In the end, I doubt that he had very much.

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (3 March 1949) Churchill predicted the fall of communism, fueled 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.” Jock Colville told me that WSC said to him: “I won’t live to see it, but you will.” Colville died in 1987. He didn’t quite make it.

Q: When help was cheap

Moving right along, the 1911 Census was recently released in England. No address was “ex-directory” in those days. Winston Churchill is listed at 33 Eccleston Square, London (seventeen rooms) with wife Clementine, daughter Diana and eight servants. The help comprised a cook, nurse, lady’s maid, housemaid, parlor maid, under-parlor maid, kitchen maid and hall boy). Can this be so? —A.J., NSW, Australia

A: Absolutely.

By the 1920s and 1930s, when the Churchills were ensconced at Chartwell, the help had grown to fifteen or more, counting gardeners, handymen, secretaries and household staff. This was part of the reason Churchill had to write constantly, living, as he said, “from mouth to hand.”

Ah for the days when help was cheap. I once tried Churchill’s method of getting two days out of one by copying his Chartwell routine. The help (Barbara Langworth) was not amused.

Churchill’s daily routine

Wake around 8am for breakfast in bed. Remaining abed, you spend several hours reading correspondence, dictating replies and reading all the newspapers, including the Daily Worker.* (As he read, WSC would fling each sheet of newsprint on the floor, infuriating his valet.) Rise about 11am for your first bath, the help having drawn the water to exactly 98 degrees. The bath is “full immersion”: you must submerge and surface like a porpoise.

An expansive lunch follows, often with a special guest—from Germans bringing word of Hitler’s machinations to film stars like Charlie Chaplin. Next, a walk around the grounds, feeding the golden orfe and conversing with the black swans in the lake. Back to your first floor study (U.S. second floor) for more dictation, then a one-hour nap. The nap, Churchill explained, must never be compromised:

You must sleep some time between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half, I’m sure. —To his Life magazine editor, Walter Graebner, 1946

Rising around 4pm, do a little more dictation and then enjoy a second bath before dressing for dinner. Dinner usually runs from around 8pm to 10pm or so. Churchill prefers voluble conversation, “with myself as the main conversationalist.”  Then a film—say two hours. Finally around midnight it’s time for serious work: dictating books, articles or speeches to the night help. Sometimes the boss needs two secretaries, working in stints. He once said with a twinkle: “I am feeling very fertile; I shall require two young women tonight.”

Sleep? Yes, around 3am or 4am to 8am. That gives you five or six total hours sleep per day, and really does mean you can cram two days’ activity into one. But without all that help, your roommate is going to hate you.

*About that Daily Worker

Percy G. Reid was a newspaper stringer who kept an eye on Chartwell for the London media. Reid had an infallible way of knowing if Churchill was in residence: the Daily Worker would be missing from the Westerham newsmonger’s. The newsstand proprietor ordered only one copy, since his only customer for the Worker was Churchill. If WSC was not at home, the Worker would remain unsold.

Reid’s remembrances are in his rather rare little paperback, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham. This really should go online sometime, because it offers a unique perspective on Sir Winston’s country life. Kentish folk (including “the help”) generally loved him. And they are severe judges of character.

Most everybody has an inkling of who Winston Churchill was. But how many know of his son Randolph? How many British schoolchildren do you think have heard of him? Do they know that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who some think was a real person? They should, Sir Arthur was a great writer. Like Randolph Churchill, who founded the longest biography ever written. In the words of Dean Acheson, he was “present at the creation.”

In his autobiography Randolph wrote, “I was born in London on 18 May 1911 at 33 Eccleston Square, of poor but honest parents. Born within sound of Bow Bells, I was a Cockney and, until I was forty, was destined to spend more than half my life in London.”

He was written off recently as “a violent drunk marred by scandals, divorces and infirmity of purpose.” In 1953 he was called a “paid hack.” He sued for libel, won, and published a book about it, What I Said about the Press. What he said about the press is interesting. He said they all had the same opinions, mouthed the same lines, and never criticized each other, because as he put it, “Dog don’t eat dog.” Does that sound familiar?

Randolph Churchill as writer

Paid hack and infirmity of purpose are not charges that stick. Randolph’s career in journalism lasted thirty-six years. He wrote hundreds of articles, edited seven volumes of his father’s speeches, and published fifteen books, including the first seven narrative and document volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography.

After the cruise, we celebrated Hillsdale College’s completion of what Randolph began long ago. He always called it “The Great Work.” If he were here, he would ask, “What took you so long?”

Randolph planned five narrative and perhaps ten document (“companion”) volumes. Sir Martin Gilbert, who joined his staff in 1962 and later succeeded him, found much more material—“lovely grub,” Randolph called it. Sir Martin published eighteen volumes through his death in 2015. Hillsdale College Press began republishing all prior volumes in 2006 and has now added six new document volumes edited by Larry Arnn, who long ago was Martin’s research assistant.

Randolph Churchill was the subject of four books. The first was collection of tributes, The Young Unpretender (The Grand Original in USA), compiled by Kay Halle, the Washington socialite most responsible for advancing Sir Winston’s honorary U.S. citizenship. It’s the kind of book you’d wish your friends would write about you. He is the subject of three biographies. The best is His Father’s Son, by Randolph’s son Winston, in 1996..

Breaking bad

Randolph was what we parents describe as a handful. He went through several nannies, and was troublesome at Sandroyd School in Wiltshire, where he was sent in 1917. At home he was rambunctious. During a visit to Chartwell by Churchill’s friend Bernard “Barney” Baruch, Randolph, aged about 12, positioned a gramophone in an upper story window. As Baruch stepped from his car, Randolph let fly with a recording about a popular cartoon character, “Barney Google, with the Goo-Goo Googly Eyes.”

Baruch laughed, but Randolph’s father stormed up to his room, removed the offending platter, and broke it across his knee.

A friend wrote: “If [Winston] had not been a great man, he would have been a perfect father—building a tree house, helping Randolph with his homework, counseling and encouraging.” Winston spoiled him by inviting him to political dinners with the leading figures of the day. After dinner, Winston would hold up his famous cigar for silence while Randolph held forth.

Randolph thus became a superb extemporaneous speaker, quicker off the cuff than his father. But there was a down-side. He learned to drink hard, in the company of famous cronies like F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead. Much to his parents’ consternation, he was drinking double brandies at the age of 18. His father never drank spirits neat, but Randolph never practiced such moderation.

His outspoken, sarcastic and often boorish manner alienated his mother, and their relations were often frosty. Clementine Churchill lived for Winston and Winston was full-time work. Once she reprimanded Randolph for taking a fancy to an older woman. He shot back, “I don’t care…She’s maternal and you’re not.” What few appreciated, his cousin Anita Leslie wrote, was “Randolph’s craving for affection. He had to hide his sensitivity, not realizing either that others could be as sensitive as he.”

“Randolph, Hope and Glory”

At Eton, Randolph wrote, “I was lazy and unsuccessful…and unpopular.” At Oxford in 1929, he took little interest in studies. His father warned: “Your idle and lazy life is very offensive to me. You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence…. do not value or profit by the opportunities Oxford offers…. You add an insolence toward men and things which is rapidly affecting your position outside Oxford and is certainly not sustained by effort or achievement.” This is a remarkable parallel to the demoralizing letter Winston’s father wrote him around the same age, warning that he was in danger of becoming a “social wastrel.”

Randolph apologized, promised to do better, and campaigned for his father in the May 1929 election. The Conservatives lost and Winston began his decade in the political wilderness. That summer Winston, his brother Jack and their sons Randolph and Johnny toured North America. There Randolph met more of the good and the great. Their Hollywood hosts included Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies, Louis B. Mayer and Spencer Tracy.

In October 1930 Randolph quit Oxford and began a lecture tour of America, hoping to recoup his depleted finances. He began writing for the press and was apparently the first British journalist to warn about Hitler in print. In Munich in 1932, he tried to arrange for his father to meet Hitler—size up the enemy, so to speak. But that interesting prospect didn’t come off.

Aiming (very) high

Predicting in print that he would make a fortune and become prime minister, Randolph ran for Parliament as an independent Conservative in Wavertree, Liverpool in 1935. This embarrassed his father, for Randolph split the Tory vote and handed a safe seat to Labour. But Winston rarely let the sun go down upon his wrath, and when Randolph’s idleness ended in lectures, writing and more political campaigns, he lent encouragement.

Randolph was rebuffed twice more before getting in for Preston, Lancashire. Because of the wartime political truce he was unopposed, but in the 1945 election he lost decisively. After the war he was twice beaten by Labour’s Michael Foot, while practicing his father’s celebrated collegiality. The two candidates would fling invective at each other in public, then meet for a drink afterwards. Foot later told Martin Gilbert, “You and I belong to the most exclusive club in London: the friends of Randolph Churchill.”

Lady friends

With his good looks and affection, Randolph had many romances. He almost married Kay Halle, a lifelong friend who never doubted her decision to refuse him. His 1939 marriage to Pamela Digby, later Harriman, was a failure from their wedding night, when Randolph floored her by reading aloud from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He hoped to produce an heir before the war took him, and in 1940 Pamela gave birth to their only child, duly named Winston.

Few of his lady friends could handle him, but those who did, like Natalie Bevan, the last and greatest love of his life, were indispensable to him. Like Kay Halle, Mrs. Bevan never married him or lived with him, but they were very close in later years. Martin Gilbert wrote: “It was Natalie who, on so many occasions, raised both our spirits and his; or, in raising his, raised ours.”

I well remember the London launch of Martin’s last narrative volume of the official biography, in 1988. There was Natalie Bevan, still beautiful at 79, quietly enjoying Martin’s, and Randolph’s, triumph.

Second World War

World War II found Randolph in North Africa, performing sensitive intelligence assignments with skill and discretion. Like his father he was absolutely fearless. Anxious for combat, he talked his way into Fitzroy Maclean’s British mission to Tito. He parachuted into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, where his exploits were heralded.

In 1944 Randolph’s father met Tito in Naples, saying he was sorry he sorry he was too old to land by parachute; otherwise he would have been fighting with Tito’s partisans. Tito replied: “But you have sent us your son.” Tears glittered in Churchill’s eyes. He always declared a “deep animal love” for Randolph, while adding sadly: “every time we meet we seem to have a bloody row.”

Continued in Part 2: Randolph Postwar

I’m here to talk about Winston Churchill. I know this audience knows who he was! Did you know a survey of British schoolchildren reveals that one in five think he was a fictional character? And better than half think Sherlock Holmes was a real person?

My book is about the non-fictional Churchill. It exposes all the tall tales, exaggerations, lies, myths, rumors and distortions about him over the years. Nowadays, the old adage that you don’t speak ill of the dead is obsolete. Nowadays, it seems important to deconstruct history. Especially old-fashioned concepts like heroes.

The tool is the Internet. Without straying from your keyboard, you can anonymously spout whatever nonsense that occurs to you. The late Umberto Eco, the Italian writer and critic, nicely described this phenomenon: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community….It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

* * *

Churchill, who won a Nobel Prize, and did a few other things, cannot reply. He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” I think he’d love the controversy he stirs on media he never dreamed of. He once said the vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me.”

My book has thirty-seven chapters. I won’t cover them all! A favorite Churchill family story involves a Yale commencement speaker who told his audience, Y is for youth, A for achievement, L for loyalty, E for enterprise. He gave 20 minutes on Youth. He was ten minutes into Achievement when a voice came from the audience: “Thank God he didn’t go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Our cruise around Britain relates to interesting Churchill myths. I’ll put this map up again in the Q&A. On it, I’ve labeled every place around the British Isles with a Churchill connection. If any suggest a question, please ask. For example, what does Churchill have to do with the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides?

“Churchill Opposed D-Day”

Thursday 6 June marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day. We were opposite Normandy just after leaving port. Big party going on over there. Churchill, of course, was vital to D-Day. Yet he was charged with opposing it—and the charges began during the war itself. He wrote in his memoirs:

In view of the many accounts which are extant and multiplying of my supposed aversion [to the invasion], it may be convenient if I make it clear that from the very beginning I provided a great deal of the impulse and authority for creating the immense apparatus and armada for the landing of armour on beaches, without which it is now universally recognised that all such major operations would have been impossible.

No “Second Front” in 1942

What Churchill feared was the invasion being thrown back with losses. He’d seen that in the Gallipoli landings in World War I. He wanted to be sure of success. On the eve of D-Day, he remained anxious. “Do you realise,” he asked his wife, “that by the time you wake up in the morning, “20,000 men may have been killed?” Fortunately not.

In reality, Churchill was demanding what he called “a lodgment on the continent” before the Russians or Americans were in the war. As early as June 1940, a few weeks after Dunkirk, he was asking about relanding on French beaches. In 1941, after Hitler invaded Russia and Japan attacked in the Pacific, clamor grew for a so-called Second Front. But in March 1942 the Americans said they couldn’t provide more 130,000 troops in the near future.

Disappointed but still anxious to prepare, Churchill proposed the “Mulberry Harbours,” which he first thought of in 1917: floating piers. “They must float up and down with the tide,” he directed. “Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.” The Mulberries proved indispensable. A fine model of Port Arromonches, used by British and Canadian forces, is in the library at Chartwell.

Nor in 1943…

With a French landing impossible in 1942, the Anglo-Americans opted for North Africa. Meanwhile, the Americans promised to get 27 divisions to England for the Second Front by Spring 1943. Actually, counting North Africa and the Atlantic, there were already three fronts. But U.S. troop levels fell short. “We had been preparing for 1.1 million men,” Churchill wrote President Roosevelt. FDR replied that he had no wish to give up on 1943, but the troops and landing craft were still insufficient.

So the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and Italy proper in September. The invasion of France (now named Operation Overlord) was postponed until 1944. But the American chiefs were reluctant to divert materiel to the Italian campaign. Churchill’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General (later Field Marshal) Alan Brooke wrote: “It is becoming more and more evident that our operations in Italy are coming to a standstill.” Stalin, Churchill complained, was “obsessed by this bloody Second Front. Damn the fellow.” Italy, he declared, must be fought until victory.

When Rome fell two days before D-Day, seven crack divisions were immediately pulled out of Italy for Operation Dragoon, a supplemental invasion of southern France, in August. Churchill viewed this as a pointless sideshow. In Italy the Allies advanced northward, but it was slow going, and fighting continued until April 1945.

Though disappointed over Italy, Churchill continued to support Overlord. He missed nothing—even the fake Army under General Patton, which convinced the Germans the main invasion would come 200+ miles north of Normandy. Meeting regularly with Eisenhower, he covered every aspect of the landings. He even enlisted the London Fire Brigade, which provided pumps for the Mulberry Harbors.

D-Day myths and misinformation

Given all this, it was astonishing to read in 2016 the same old accusations. On 12-13 August 1943, Churchill was with Roosevelt at Hyde Park. There, according to Commander-in-Chief, by Nigel Hamilton, Roosevelt threatened to withhold U.S. atom bomb secrets from Britain unless Churchill supported invading France in 1944. According to Hamilton, Churchill was so outraged that he woke up in the night ‘unable to sleep and hardly able to breathe.’”

No evidence was offered for this other than Churchill’s quote, which had nothing to do with FDR. “It was so hot,” Churchill wrote, “that I got up one night because I was unable to sleep and hardly to breathe, and went outside to sit on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River.” Thus Hamilton’s thesis collapses on its face—another myth with no basis in reality.

He took what the war gave him

Churchill in war manifested two traits: eagnerness and flexibility. War is mostly chance, he said. “You have to run risks. There are no certainties n war. There is a precipice on either side of you—a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.”

Disappointed by the slow build-up for Overlord, he saw opportunity in Italy—though he certainly did not, as some insist, propose invading Germany over the Alps. Franklin Roosevelt, with good reason, resisted Churchill’s more fanciful proposals farther east. “Winston has 100 new ideas a day,” FDR cracked, and three of them are good.” I think the balance was better than that—but FDR was not entirely wrong. Legitimate criticism has its place. But not fairy tales.

President Roosevelt decided against invading France in 1943 when he realized that the forces to assure success were insufficient. Churchill too realized that circumstances had changed, and when Mediterranean opportunities arose he pursued them. Both leaders wanted to win the war quickly. Churchill challenged the assumption that Normandy was the only way to wear down the enemy. But he worked as hard as anyone to ensure its success.

David Riddle, a National Trust volunteer at Chartwell, gave me the background of the “Butterfly House” Churchill established to propagate the insects on the grounds of his home:

The Butterfly House was first used as a game larder between 1869 and 1889 by the Colquhoun family, who owned Chartwell between 1830 and 1922, when Churchill bought the estate. Two years later Philip Tilden, his architect, converted the larder to a summer house by removing the east wall. In 1946 it was converted to a Butterfly House. Churchill used it for raising caterpillars and chrysalises. He received advice from butterflies expert L. Hugh Newman, who owned a “butterfly farm” in nearby Sidcup. Lady Churchill planted buddleia, lavender and other nectar-rich flowers in order to encourage the butterflies. Sir Winston changed the walk from gravel to turf and stepping stones in 1950.

Butterflies: A Lifetime Interest

Churchill became fascinated with butterflies as a young officer stationed in India, where they were colorful and prolific. Years later, in 1939, and again after the war, he determined to propagate them at Chartwell. L. Hugh Newman, as David Riddle states, was his chief supplier.

Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective during 1946-47, told me an amusing episode involving Newman’s first visit to Churchill:

He took the breeder for a walk round the grounds and gave a general idea of his plans. The expert then gave advice and went into technical details. Mr. Churchill said very little. Rather like a penny dropping in the butterfly man’s mind, you could almost hear him thinking: “Ah, I’ve got the old boy. He’s not nearly as clever as I thought. This is one sphere in which I know a lot more than he does.”

Mr. Newman became just the slightest bit patronizing and boomf! Mr. Churchill came back at him with very lucid comments showing that he was fully acquainted with everything being said. Visibly shaken, the expert never tried to “talk down” again. It was a pattern of conversation I’d noticed with other experts. I can’t help feeling that Mr. Churchill pretended ignorance to a certain extent, then came down like a ton of bricks if there was any attempt to patronize him.

A very successful scheme was put in hand and some of the rarest butterflies and moths of the greatest beauty were hatched out. By careful provision of the right flowers and bushes, the butterflies were kept well fed.

“In Durance Vile”

Churchill’s daughter Lady Soames was not sure when he stopped raising butterflies, but it might have been after an event described by longtime Chartwell secretary and administrator Grace Hamblin, at a 1987 Churchill Conference:

He had a little hut in the garden, which is still there. In those days he had the front covered with gauze, with a gauze door opening into it. A nearby butterfly farm sent him chrysalises. which he liked to see develop. One morning, I was with him spreading out the chrysalises. Upon leaving the little hut, he left the door open. I said, “Did you want to leave the door open, or should I close it?” He said, “I can’t bear this captivity any longer!” Thus we no longer kept butterflies, but they are supposed to remain in the garden once you start. It’s a lovely occupation. When he knew that Chartwell would eventually go to the National Trust and be open to the public he said, “I hope the National Trust will grow plenty of buddleia for my butterflies.”

This charming story reminds us of Churchill’s hatred of imprisonment. In his autobiography, he writes of being jailed by the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, in a chapter entitled, “In Durance Vile.” Ten years later as Home Secretary, he strove to avoid imprisoning people for trivial offenses and was ahead of his time in his ideas about rehabilitating inmates.

============== Continued from Part 1…

Part 2: Dislocations

On 18 December 1898 Winston Churchill wrote to his friend Aylmer Haldane. “I am leaving the army in April. I have come back merely for the Polo Tournaments.”  He told his mother he would stay at Government House. He was “playing polo quite well now. Never again shall I be able to do so. Everything will have to go to the war chest.”

Fortune interfered: “Everything smiled until last night—when I fell downstairs and sprained both my ankle and dislocated my right shoulder,” he wrote his brother Jack in February.

In his autobiography three decades later, Churchill wrote that he first dislocated his shoulder on arriving in India in 1896. At the Bombay quayside he had grabbed an iron hand-hold ring when the boat fell with a sudden surge and he wrenched his shoulder. Thereafter, he wrote, he had to play polo with his arm strapped to his side.

* * *

His letters at the time make no mention of this incident. It was his habit to mention injuries—an injured knee in December 1896, for example. In the first version of this article (1991), I suggested that Churchill’s first dislocation likely occurred after falling at Government House in 1898, rather than the much more romantic quayside episode in 1896. Upon reflection and expert advice, I believe Churchill’s version is correct. After describing the Bombay accident he writes: “Since then, at irregular intervals my shoulder has dislocated on the most unexpected pretexts; sleeping with my arm under the pillow, taking a book from the library shelves, slipping on a staircase, swimming, etc.” (Emphasis mine.) This makes it clear that Bombay was the initial incident, although his staircase fall two years later certainly aggravated his condition.

Even with his arm immobilized, Churchill managed to play well. His team beat the 5th Dragoon Guards 16-2, and the 9th Lancers 2-1, in the first round on 23 February. “Few of that merry throng were destined to see old age,” Churchill ruminated sadly. “Our own team was never to play again. A year later Albert Savory was killed in the Transvaal, Barnes was grievously wounded in Natal, and I became a sedentary politician increasingly crippled by my wretched shoulder.”

Playing on

Despite his departure from the home of polo, Churchill continued to play. An appointment book for 1901, his first year in Parliament, showed ten dates in May and June. Listed for Saturday July 6th was “House of Commons versus Guards.” The games on Monday-Wednesday August 5th-7th were marked “Windsor.” 

In 1902 Churchill wrote a long letter to Secretary of State for War St. John Brodrick. He argued against a proposed prohibition of inter-regimental polo tournaments. He attributed the increasing cost of ponies to the English gentry’s participation in the game. Polo, he wrote, contributed to building a soldier’s character and skill. Two years later (after opposing Brodrick over the latter’s army estimates), Churchill left the Tories for the Liberal Party. As a consequence, he felt obliged to alter his club membership. It is often said that Churchill was unaware of the political animus he engendered. But in May 1905 he remarked to Liberal MP Alexander Murray (later Baron Murray of Elibank):

I foolishly allowed myself to be proposed for Hurlingham as a polo playing member; & was of course at once black-balled. This is almost without precedent in the history of the Club—as polo players are always welcomed. I do not think you and your Liberal friends realize the intense political bitterness which is felt against me on the other side.

Polo in later life

Pushing fifty, polo was still very much Churchill’s sport. In the summer of 1921, for example, he and his wife were looking for a family summer cottage. Clementine rented one of the houses at Rugby School, near Ashby St Ledger. “The plan was that Winston would stay with them all,” her biographer wrote, “and be diverted by polo with his Guest cousins.” This the same year Clementine cautioned Winston against speculating in stocks…. “Politics are absolutely engrossing to you…and now you have painting for leisure and polo for excitement and danger.”

At Chartwell, which he bought in 1922, Churchill would sometimes embark on a well-meant but briefly kept economy programs. In 1926 he suggested that Chartwell be rented and that all livestock—except the two polo ponies—be sold. The ponies were still sacred! Many photographs exist of the mature Churchill at play, always with his right arm strapped to his side. A group picture taken on 18 June 1925 shows WSC with fellow players Capt. G.R.G. Shaw, Captain Euan Wallace and Captain the Hon. Freddie Guest, after Churchill’s Commons team defeated the House of Lords. Winston and Clementine are seen at Hurlingham the same year, to watch the British Army play polo against an American team.

Last chukka

Winston’s last game had the longest gestation of all. Plans for it began in the autumn of 1926, when Admiral Sir Roger Keyes invited Churchill, who was taking a holiday cruise in the Mediterranean, to inspect the fleet. They were old friends, having met during polo around 1904, according to Keyes’s biographer. In those days young Keyes and his friends “would drive down to Wembley and play polo on hired ponies from 8 to 9 am. Often, before they finished, a party of young Members of Parliament would arrive to play from 9 to 10 am. It was at Wembley that [Keyes] first made the acquaintance of Winston Churchill.”

Responding to Keyes’s invitation, Churchill replied on 15 November:

As to Polo, of course I should love to have a game. It is awfully kind of you to offer to mount me. It would have to be a mild one as I have not played all this season. However I will arrange to have a gallop or two beforehand so as to ‘calibrate’ my tailor muscles [sartorius]. Anyhow I will bring a couple of sticks and do my best. If I expire on the ground it will at any rate be a worthy end!

Taken at a gallop, he must have reasoned, and would later write in My Early Life, it would be a very good death to die.

* * *

The enthusiastic Sir Roger replied immediately. “Don’t bother to bring polo sticks—you will find all kinds and lengths here. What is your Hurlingham handicap? We’ll get up a four chucker [sic] match for one day after you’ve had a bit of practice. I expect 4 would be about enough if you haven’t been playing—also where do you like playing?”

On 24 December 1926 Churchill wrote Keyes in Malta. “I shall be with you in plenty of time to play on Saturday afternoon [8 January]. I do not think one day’s practice would do me much good; in fact it would only make one stiff. I hope to do a little hacking in the next few days, if the snow which now overlays us should permit.”

Evidently, Churchill managed his final game without mishap. From Admiralty House, Malta, 10 January 1927 he wrote Clementine: “I got through the polo without shame or distinction & enjoyed it so much.”

At age 52, that was the last recorded occasion when Winston Churchill played polo.

Author’s note

Barbara F. Langworth is a New Hampshire publisher and editor. “Churchill and Polo” was first published in 1991. This updated, amended version is published by kind permission of the author in response to reader requests for more information on Churchill’s favorite team sport. The article incidentally demonstrates the rich store of material available in The Churchill Documents, published by Hillsdale College Press.

Endnotes

Barbara Langworth is a bacteriologist, editor and publisher in New Hampshire. Multi-talented, she runs everything.

Part 2, continued from Part 1: Excerpt only. For footnotes,  all illustrations and a roster of Churchill’s cars, see The Automobile, (UK), August 2016. A pdf of the article is available upon request: click here.

Wolseley to Austin

In the early 1930s Churchill switched from Wolseley to Austin cars: small fours and big sixes. One of the former, a 1938 Austin 10 Cambridge, was the Chartwell workhorse. It was driven primarily by longtime secretary Grace Hamblin. It was acquired in the 1960s by the 6th Marquess of Bath, who restored and displayed it at Longleat. In 2014 it made £66,000 at auction. Sir Winston referred to it as a “true blue” British motorcar.

The present of a Daimler

In 1929 Churchill lost almost all he had in the Wall Street crash, and two years later went on a North American lecture tour to recoup his losses. Back home, his friend Brendan Bracken was soliciting donations to buy Churchill a new car, a Daimler 35. It was waiting in London: a £2000 landaulette limousine by Barker. Over 140 affectionate friends contributed, among them the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, John Maynard Keynes, Harold Macmillan and, of course, his longtime and close friend, the Duke of Westminster.

The Daimler was a 5.8-liter sleeve-valve six, then in its last year. Churchill had earlier test-driven a more exotic Double-Six, but the Depression was at its depth and practicality prevailed. “There was some controversy as to whether you would prefer a Rolls-Royce, a Daimler or a Bentley,” Bracken told him. His friends had settled on “the car which is least expensive to maintain.”

Daimler adventures

He liked the Daimler so much that he kept it until the Second World War, repainting it several times. In it he made surreptitious rendezvous with informants who, at risk of their careers, delivered secret reports on German rearmament. In it he paid his last, sad call on Edward VIII at Windsor, who informed him he was abdicating (an act for which Churchill later was grateful).

For a moving episode featuring a lookalike Daimler, as Churchill is warned of German rearmament in the classic documentary “The Wilderness Years” click on this Hillsdale Churchill site and then on the YouTube video.

The advent of war in 1939 found Churchill back at the Admiralty. He sold the Daimler to a London dealer, saying he’d have new one “when the War has ceased.” In 1985, a Daimler 35 said to be his changed hands for £60,500 at Sotheby’s. Found dilapidated in Gloucestershire, it had been restored, and equipped with a bulldog mascot and Churchill coat of arms to emphasize, unnecessarily, its association.

There’s safety in Humbers

In London during the war, Churchill became attached to his bullet-proof Humber Pullmans, government cars skillfully driven by the Royal Army Service Corps. Again Churchill’s fondness for the horsedrawn age was reasserted. When ready to leave on a trip, he would ask not whether the chauffeur was behind the wheel but, “Is the coachman on his box?”

William Rootes founded the Rootes Group, which embraced the marques of Hillman, Humber, Singer and Sunbeam-Talbot. He was a close admirer. The July 1945 election left Churchill out of office and needing a car. Prying him away from his allegiance to Daimler, Rootes sold him a new Pullman. The company let him garage it at Devonshire House, its London headquarters.

When Churchill required a chauffeur, Rootes loaned him John Bullock, a company driver who became a favored part of his entourage. Whenever the boss wanted the Humber he would say, “I think I’ll have the Bullock Cart.”

“The constables saluted humbly”

A biographer recorded Bullock’s frequent experience: Habitually late, Churchill would typically “pile into the Humber around 5:30 for a 7:00 speech a hundred miles distant. As his chauffeur swings into the high road, Churchill crouches, with a flask, on the edge of the back seat and urges him to greater speeds. ‘But the machine is traveling at 85 now,’ the chauffeur will protest. ‘Faster! Whip it up a bit!’ comes the answer.”

Once, doing 80 on a curve, a rear tyre blew and “a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles.” Realizing who it was, they helped fix the tyre. “Churchill stood off to one side, serenely puffing at a cigar. He made no sign of apology but only got in and cried, ‘Drive off!’ The constables saluted humbly.”

On a campaign trip to Wales, Churchill conversed garrulously with O’Brien, his PR officer. They passed the brandy back and forth. Churchill urged such reckless speed that Clementine Churchill cried: “Please let me out. I refuse to continue this ride.” With the utmost courtesy, Churchill stopped at a country railway station and escorted her to the platform. Then, plying the brandy bottle, he ordered the driver “down the road like a bat out of hell for Cardiff.”

By the time they arrived, what with the brandy and his nerves, O’Brien was “done up—out practically cold. Churchill supervised the laying out of his PRO on a table in the rear of the hall. Then he went ahead and made a rouser of a speech. Afterward, he appeared confused about the origin of O’Brien’s trouble, and expressed the opinion that it was ‘probably something he ate.’”

Concluded in Part 3…

Chartwell, 1955— Here is one of the finest—as it is the most revealing—portraits of Churchill at Chartwell we can read, by the Oxford historian A.L. Rowse, who spent a memorable day at Churchill’s home.

It gives an insightful view of Churchill and Chartwell ten years after World War II, not without pathos and sadness, for even now he was beginning to reflect that he had “achieved a great deal, only to achieve nothing in the end”: a thought however inconceivable in his case, but worth pondering by us all. Read full article at Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Excerpt:

He welcomed me with old-fashioned Victorian courtesy, paying me the compliment of taking me for the professional, himself the amateur. I returned his shot by describing his Marlborough as an historical masterpiece….

At lunch he talked politics, politicians, the war….if the Germans had invaded the country and the government had had to scatter, he had it in mind to form a triumvirate with Beaverbrook and Ernest Bevin. For another: he had thought of a slogan to broadcast in case of invasion—“You can always take one with you.”

We talked of the sinking of the Bismarck. He spoke affectingly of how bad it was to wake up in the morning and hear the news of the sinking of a great British ship. “What was the name of that ship?….Yes, the Hood,” he said, tears in his eyes.

Then: “We had to get the Bismarck: the nation expected it. One admiral said his ship hadn’t enough oil to get to the spot and back again. I sent the telegram, “You get there and we’ll tow you back.” This reminded me of Hawke’s reply to the pilot warning him of the rocks and reefs of Quiberon Bay:

“Master pilot, you have done your duty—now lay me alongside of the enemy.”

Chartwell lunch: “Have some Cointreau…”

Lunch proceeded, rather burdensome for a teetotaller—I didn’t dare to be one, alone with Churchill. There had been Bristol Cream before lunch, a very good hock during lunch. I drew the line at port—port, at lunch! “What? No port? Then you must have some brandy.” (I can’t bear brandy.) “What? No brandy? Then you must have some liqueur with your coffee. Have some Cointreau: it’s very soothing.” I had some Cointreau: it was very soothing.

Slightly sozzled, I tottered upstairs while he read from my book, The Early Churchills. “Very good,” he chirped. Or, “Quite right….Quite right about James I’s execution of Raleigh: I have always thought that one of the worst blots against that—extravagant—sodomite” (this with relish at getting out the phrase).

I had been rather hard about King Charles I. More generous, Churchill said, “We don’t consider how much more difficult things were for them in the past—so much easier for us. We have all the ground prepared for us, civil servants to hand up the materials for us to make the decisions. Earlier, people had to cope with everything themselves, where we have specialists, a machine upon which things move for us.”

It was salutary to have this original comment from a great man of action, who knew well from experience the difficulties of getting things done; I registered it—and reserved my own opinion of Charles I.

“To have been seduced at sixteen…”

But there was a better one shortly about handsome John Churchill’s affair with Lady Castlemaine: “To have been seduced at sixteen by the King’s mistress must have been an interesting and—[reflectively] valuable experience.” (See also “Marlborough Drift: The Dallying Duke.”)

I left in late afternoon. Beaverbrook was coming down to dine and spend the evening, till then he was going off to bed. Evening sun poured from the west into the front door, upon the flowers, the head of Roosevelt sculpted in wood, the aged bulky figure waving goodbye.

I sank back exhausted in the lordly car, thrilled by it all, a last glimpse of the flag over Chartwell—and went back to Oxford to write it all down. It is only today, very many years after, that it occurs to me that he thought I would, and meant me to.

Remembering Grace: 1908-2002

Beloved by all Churchills, Grace Hamblin died at her home in Westerham, Kent, aged 94. Aware she was ailing, I had just sent her some little thing in the post; Carole Kenwright at Chartwell said it arrived in time, and she was able to read from it for a few minutes.

Grace Hamblin was the longest serving and most loyally devoted of Churchill’s inner circle, arriving at Chartwell in 1932 as an assistant to then-principal private secretary Violet Pearman. She spent virtually her entire career as private secretary, first to Winston and from 1939 to Clementine. In 1966 she became the first Administrator of Chartwell, serving through 1973. In 1974 she was secretary to the Churchill Centenary Exhibition.

She was one of the few Churchill intimates who rejected every opportunity to profit out of her long years and inside knowledge, though she was often consulted, most recently by the producers of the HBO/BBC film “The Gathering Storm.” Moreover, she loyally kept her promise “never to write,” although we were fortunate to have her as guest of honor at a 1987 Churchill Conference in Dallas, where she delivered a warm personal account of life at Chartwell. (Available by email.)

She did record her private memories for the historical record, and using these a recent book divulged that she and her brother had been the actual agents who burned a portrait Sir Winston had detested, at the behest of Lady Churchill. I knew her well enough to think she would be appalled at the media kerfuffle over this “revelation,” well known to many for years, but hardly worthy of publicity.

Grace was kind and obliging to everyone she met, but there were two kinds of people up with which she would not put: those who questioned or belittled the boss, and slapdash admirers of him who were careless with their facts.

To serious searchers for the truth, she was an inspiration to “get it right.” She was a privilege to know, one of the few alive whose experience dated to the so-called “Wilderness Years” of the 1930s, when Chartwell hummed with the writing of many books and articles, and surreptitious visits by worried confidantes as Germany armed.

The messages received at the news of her passing were touching and heartfelt. I could not however help thinking that it was time for her to go: a time when duty, honor and country seem so often to be replaced by irresponsibility, dishonor and nihilism, sacrifice by greed, unity by politics, righteous wrath by pleas for accommodation. Grace Hamblin was alive and sentient and at the center in 1940, the year Churchill said “nothing surpasses”; she could scarcely have understood the world we live in now.

In the first of his 1935 “Chartwell Bulletins,” sent to his absent wife on 1 January 1935, Churchill recalled in another context Milton’s description of the seraph Abdiel in Paradise. The words apply so perfectly to Grace Hamblin:

“Among innumerable false, unmoved;

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;

Her loyalty she kept, her love, her zeal.”

I reviewed the 1940-45 visitors books at Chequers. I was struck by how often Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann) was there—far more than family and staff. He visited more than Bracken and Beaverbrook, or the Chiefs of Staff. What do you make of him? What’s best to read on him? —A.R., London

Most frequent visitor

After the death of the F.E. Smith, the first Lord Birkenhead, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell (1886-1957) was probably Churchill’s closest friend. His signature is also the most frequent in the visitors book at Chartwell, where it appears 86 times, more than anyone else (Brendan Bracken only 31, although visitors usually signed only when staying overnight, and Bracken frequently returned to London). He was invaluable to Churchill in his ability to reduce complicated scientific principles and theories to brief layman terms everyone could understand.

Part 4: “Being Shouted At”

“I think being shouted at was one of the worst things to get over,” said Grace Hamblin, secretary to Winston and then Clementine Churchill from 1932, typical of the common Kentish folk who loved them. “I’d come from a very quiet family and I’d never been shouted at in my life. But I had to learn it, in time.”

In the midst of dictation one day, Grace told me, Churchill commanded: “Fetch me Klop!” Klop? she thought—what could it mean?

Finally, proudly, she struggled in with Onno Klopp‘s 14 giant volumes, Der Fall des Hauses Stuart. “Jesus Christ!” Churchill roared. What he meant was his hole punch, invariably called “Klop.” (He despised staples and other fasteners: piles of papers had to be “klopped” and then fastened together with a “treasury tag,” a bit of thread with metal “Ts” at each end.)

At first she found it daunting: “the strangeness of a large house, getting used not only to him, but to his family, his staff and friends who came and went. It was all very difficult. I went through many, many doubtful periods and was always comforted by the thought that I would only be there for a few months, and then go back to my old job.”

She wound up staying over thirty years until he died in 1965, and then remained as the first administrator, helping to turn Chartwell into a National Trust property:

As the weeks went by, I found myself trying hard to please him, to help instead of to hinder. He had a charisma: a way of making one feel wanted, making the most mundane task feel important.

He worked day in and day out and most terribly hard himself, and I think he drove us. He had a way of almost shaming one into overcoming a problem. His well-worn expression was “Find Out.” He would say, for example: “Do you know where Lord Beaverbrook is this weekend?” No, I’m afraid I don’t. “Well, find out!”

So one got into the habit of saying, “No, I’m afraid I don’t but I’ll find out,” which was a much better answer. Another thing he often said, if you looked a little bit doubtful about anything: “But surely you don’t find that difficult?”

Of course, one had to get on with it. He was always quite kind to the newcomer. I lately met a woman who went to him when she was 19. She’s still very pretty and in those days she must have been lovely; she is fair-haired and blue eyed, like a fairy.

Apparently he said to Lady Churchill when she first appeared, “Oh dear, she’s very young. I mustn’t frighten her!” I can well imagine him saying it. On her first dictation, he said something to her that he never said to me: “Don’t worry if you don’t get it all—I always remember what I’ve said.” He did indeed remember, more or less, but it didn’t get you out of making mistakes all the same.

The secretaries at Chartwell worked on the ground floor which Churchill called his “factory,” which he liked to visit. Miss Hamblin told Martin Gilbert: “He loved coming in and plonking down in the chair. He would welcome a guest at the front door, perhaps arriving for lunch, and say to them, “Do come in and see my factory.” I remember well one such occasion when I happened to he alone: “This is my factory, and this is my secretary“—pregnant pause—”Hmm, and to think I once commanded the Fleet.”  Grace added, “I don’t think he meant me, he probably meant the room.”

continued in part 5…

Part 2: Alice Bateman

Two other Westerham common folk who benefitted from Churchill’s characteristic kindliness were Tom and Alice Bateman, farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Percy Reid, a stringer for a London newspaper, who kept an eye on Chartwell doings after World War II, wrote charmingly of a cattle sale in his book, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham (Folkestone: Regency, 1969):

Capt. and Mrs. [Mary Churchill] Soames—who then lived at Chartwell Farm—were at the sale most of the time and [their children] Nicholas and Emma were also taking a child’s interest in what was going on. A daughter of one of the cows offered for sale that day grazed quietly in a less distinguished field nearby. As a calf it had been given to Tom and Alice Bateman, brother and sister, farming in a small way nearby, by Winston Churchill when he heard that they had been out of luck in their farming.

“Pedigree?” repeated Alice when asked about her two-year old Shorthorn: “I suppose we could have had the pedigree if we’d liked but then—we don’t farm their way.” A touch of rural common sense cropped up: “The paper wouldn’t make much difference to whether it was a good cow or not.”

Not surprisingly Alice Bateman had lots of time for Churchill. “Got more in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies,” she said. Alice worked for three years at Chartwell. “Not to sleep in,” she made clear, quickly. “Always has a word for you, has Winston. So has Mary, his daughter.”

Phil Johnson, a Westerham livery agent and sometime Churchill driver, told me a delightful story showing another side to Alice. Once the great man, being driven up the hill to Chartwell from Westerham village, found her trudging along the road to her farm and stopped his Humber limousine. His impulse was to offer her a lift, but realizing she would be too proud to accept one, he shouted encouragement: “Come on Alice, you can do better than that!”

“G’wan, you fat old man, you get out of that car and walk yourself, you’ll live longer!” Alice retorted.

“I’ll outlive you, Alice!” chuckled Churchill, who liked to claim (inaccurately) that he took exercise only as a pallbearer for friends who had exercised all their lives. “You will not!” Alice shot back. “And he didn’t,” Phil Johnson added, “Alice survived him by six or eight years.“

“Kent folk don’t make friends easily,” wrote Percy Reid. “Theirs is a sturdy independence which is readily mistaken for surly insularity. Once won over, however, Kentish people will remain your sincere if somewhat over-frank friends for good. It was somewhat on these lines that the unusual relationship, which finally developed between Westerham folk and Churchill and his family, grew up.”

========

With thanks for kind assistance in research to Paul Courtenay, Phil Johnson and Andrew Roberts, and to a dear friend, the late Grace Hamblin.

continued in part 3…

A recent book by a distinguished historian suggests that Winston Churchill disdained common people. It cites another Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, during World War I, providing a tow to a broken-down motorist and giving two children a lift in his car. The writer adds: “It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill behaving in such a fashion.”

It is not hard at all. In fact, Churchill did frequent kind things for ordinary people he encountered, privately and without fanfare. We know about them only through his private correspondence, thanks to the official biography, Martin Gilbert, or the testimony of observers.

A prominent example is the gypsy couple Churchill befriended in Westerham. Grace Hamblin, longtime Churchill secretary and first administrator of Chartwell, recalled them in a 1987 speech to the International Churchill Society:

 There was a funny old gypsy living in the district, called Donkey Jack, because he had a donkey and trap, and a wife and a dog. My father, who was a farmer, called him a parasite, because he lived on stolen potatoes, strawberries and apples. But Sir Winston had a more romantic view. He thought it was wonderful. When Donkey Jack died, and his donkey had to be destroyed, there was nowhere for poor Mrs. Donkey Jack to go. It wouldn’t be safe for her to live on common land. Sir Winston allowed her to live in his wood, in a little gazebo which had been there for years, full of earwigs and that sort of thing, but she loved it. It would have been stupid to offer her a house because she wouldn’t have understood it. He knew just what would give her pleasure.

In 1935, Mrs. Donkey Jack suffered a fractured ankle. Churchill sent her to hospital for treatment, but, realizing her camp and her two dogs would be left unattended, asked his gardener Arnold to look after them.

“Should the worst be realized I shall try and get her into a decent home,” Churchill wrote his absent wife. “Meanwhile her savage dog (the little one) still stands a faithful sentry over her belongings. He allows Arnold to bring food at a respectable distance and consents to eat it, but otherwise he remains like the seraph Abdiel in Paradise Lost:

 ‘Among innumerable false, unmoved;

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.’”

continued in part 2…

Much younger than her siblings, Mary had an idyllic youth, growing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Kentish home, but always in the background was his preoccupation with the growing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dramatically altered. She served with the ATS, manning London mixed anti-aircraft batteries, and shared her father’s grief when in July 1945, with the war almost over worldwide, he was summarily relieved as Prime Minister as a result of the General Election. The publisher states:

…we follow Mary’s life through her fascinating personal diary, published here for the first time. Through the immediacy of her private observations we are drawn into a world where the ordinary minutiae of a packed family, social and romantic life proceed against a background of cataclysmic events….Mary takes on her own set of professional demands while sharing the many anxieties and stresses brought to bear upon her family through her father’s position. The mutual love and affection between Mary and her parents is evident on every page, from her earliest years at Chartwell to Winston’s defeat at the 1945 general election, when Mary recounts her own pain and devastation on her father’s behalf. At this point she meets her future husband, Christopher Soames. We are left in no doubt at the end of this charming and revealing memoir that, at twenty-four, Mary has lived a full life and is well prepared for her future as young wife and mother.

For several years we have heard from Lady Soames as she progressed through the writing, a prodigious task for anyone her age, yet she has always been young at heart, and possessed with her father’s determination to “finish the job.” We take great delight in knowing that her work is now done, and that she may “rest her paw” and take pride in another outstanding Churchill literary work to add to her many earlier ones.