I found myself using an alleged Churchill witticism I have long known, but could not find in your book, Churchill’s Wit: The Definitive Collection (2009). As I have it, Churchill was preparing to meet Marshal Stalin, and a diplomatic advisor said, “He will probably expect to kiss you on both cheeks.” “Oh, that’s all right,” said Churchill, “as long as he doesn’t want to be kissed on all four.” Can you verify this one?

My own main area of scholarly research is Samuel Johnson, another subject often misattributed. Good quote collections more than just the quotation and its source. Your book with comprehensive coverage and thorough sourcing is impressive. That is the real guarantee of the ideas, wit or imagination of the quoted person, but of their ongoing presence in the cultural memory. —P.T., New Zealand

A: De Gaulle not Stalin

Your query sent me on a troll of my hard drive,  I couldn’t imagine how I left the kiss gag out! But I did. Not only in Churchill’s Wit, but in the unabridged original Churchill by Himself, from which Churchill’s Wit was derived.

However, the kiss quote above is inaccurate, and stems from something Churchill said about Charles de Gaulle, not Joseph Stalin:

“All right, all right. I’ll be good. I’ll be sweet. I ‘ll kiss him on both cheeks—or all four if you’d prefer it.”

Source

The kiss crack was related by a highly reliable source, Elizabeth Layton Nel, one of Churchill’s principal wartime secretaries. Her charming 1958 memoir, Winston Churchill by His Wartime Secretary, was recently reprinted in electronic and print editions. She was a dear lady and a faithful recounter of her experiences. She first told me the story in 1988.

October 1942: At Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, Churchill was preparing to receive the prickly Frenchman. There was a quandary over what to tell the General of “Torch,” the invasion of North Africa, scheduled to begin November 8th. Only a few months before, the Allies had been badly rebuffed in an abortive raid on the channel port of Dieppe. There was some suspicion that de Gaulle’s Free French had somehow leaked advance knowledge of the raid. The Germans had been alerted by French double agents that the British were showing interest in the area.

As Mrs. Nel recalled, Churchill opposed informing de Gaulle of “Torch” until afterward. His advisors warned him to be  diplomatic. Hence the Prime Minister’s generous offer to kiss the General on all four cheeks if necessary.

Churchill on Johnson

Researching the quotations of Samuel Johnson work must be more challenging than than Churchill, since the latter left such copious archives. Incidentally, I found this in Keith Alldritt, Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters (1992):

Writing to his wife Clementine, while off researching [Marlborough], Churchill again applied to Marlborough the word ‘sublime’, so current a word for the eighteenth-century prose stylists whom he so admired, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson.

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Jill Rose…

…begins this fine World War II narrative with a friendly warning. Don’t wait till your parents are gone before preserving their memories. The parents of “baby boomers,” Rose writes, lived through the most momentous times of the 20th century. Truly we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. I have dug around to find out as much as I can about my family…but sadly there is so much more that I will never know.”

Mrs. Rose knows and shares much about her parents, Doris and Roger Miles—he a surgeon-lieutenant, Royal Navy; she a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, London. The book is built around Doris’ letters to the absent Roger. She knew only that he was aboard HMS Tartar, a famous ship which earned twelve battle honors during close encounters with the enemy.

Their correspondence began at their moment of separation, and continued until Roger was “de-mobbed” in 1946. It offers insight to the many ordinary Britons who served faithfully in the great battle. As Churchill said, quoting Tennyson, “Every morn brought forth a noble chance. And every chance brought forth a noble knight.”

Doris nursed throughout the war, but her noble chance came in February 1943. That was when, on orders of Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson, she was summoned to Whitehall. The PM was back in London, still unwell after a grim battle with pneumonia following the Casablanca Conference.

A significant patient

Doris was advised by Sir Charles (later Lord Moran): “I must warn you, the Prime Minister doesn’t wear pyjamas.” Sure enough, Doris found, there was only a silk vest, and a velvet jacket with diamond V on the lapel. But nurses are professionals. “I had to give him a tepid sponge as he had a high fever…. WC took great interest in this and I knew that if his temperature didn’t go down I would have very little authority. Luckily it did.”

Churchill had a loyal staff. If any kept records of crucial conversations, they did so privately. (Grace Hamblin, a devoted secretary, told this writer the boss would often say hopefully, “You’re not going to write, are you?”) But Doris was free to share the lighter moments, and with Churchill there were plenty. The patient, she wrote, “is all he is cracked up to be.”

He usually requires me to bath[e] him at night, and he holds court to Sir Charles, one or more secretaries, and any odd visitors who may be around, while I’m doing it!…. He’s very interested in his blood count, which is done every day, and now talks knowledgeably about ‘pollywogs’ and ‘Eowins.’ Actually he is a lot better now, but it’s been a fairly bad hemolytic strep pneumonia, and might have developed—after all he’s 68, although he doesn’t look it.”

Sixty-eight was a lot older then than it is now. But the patient was having none of age. When he complained of head pains, Doris rubbed his head with oil of wintergreen. This became a ritual in which the PM reverted to his beloved music-hall songs: “Wash me in the water / Which you washed your dirty daughter in / And I wilt be whiter / Than the whitewash on the wall.”

At Chequers

By March 3rd, Mrs. Rose continued, the patient was much improved, and Doris Miles was the only nurse sent with him to Chequers, the PM’s official country residence. Her letters are full of admiration for the old house which, despite its grandeur, she found homey. One night the PM called her to a window. “…those are our boys going to Germany, we can rely on them.” Overhead, writes the author, “passed a flight of British bombers from nearby RAF Abingdon heading east at the start of the Battle of the Ruhr.” Stirring times in sterner days.

Doris Miles left Chequers in mid-March, her work done, but not before a humorous ceremony. “I had to march into the dining-room after dinner (all male) and present him with a ruby-red capsule on a silver try, to be told, ‘The price of a good woman is above rubies.”’ The usual cynics spin this as gauche misogyny. In truth Churchill spoke with a twinkle, and both of them knew it. “He is, of course, a little naïf when he preens himself on not losing a night’s sleep,” Doris wrote. “He forgets that he takes precaution each night to prevent such a mishap, in the shape of a little red tablet.”

* * *

Doris lived to be 100, glad at the end that her last twenty-seven years without Roger were over. This is far more than a Churchill book. We cannot convey its riches in a small space. It is well worth the read. It describes two people deeply in love, separated by war, with shrewd observations of life at the top; and at the bottom, amid the blacked-out streets of shattered London. Readers will profit from Jill Rose’s exposition of those times. They truly exemplify “the Greatest Generation.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seriously, we’ve got a press message here which says quite clearly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the General and he thought you would be the most likely to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well, if it has ended, nobody has told the Prime Minister either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had better carry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so.” [John then went back to sleep, and the war went on.]

Joys of The Churchill Documents

It is a privilege to help edit and proof Hillsdale College‘s final document volumes in the Churchill official biography. We fall over so many gems. Here is one.

This document may be a “reject”—we can’t publish everything. It was culled by Sir Martin Gilbert for Document Volume 21. That volume will release in 2018, covering the period from January to July 1945 and the end of Churchill’s premiership. (After that, we have only two more volumes to go.)

The exchange quoted above is by former Churchill Private Secretary John Peck to Dr. Robert Price of Lexington, Massachusetts, 18 July 1981. They had met at a commemorative ceremony at Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms in London. Price had sent Peck an article on the exchanges between Churchill and Truman, via Admiral Leahy, at the end of war in Europe (VE Day). Peck’s reply is an amusing insight, a thing we would never know otherwise. It shows us the richness of the Churchill Documents (Admiral William Leahy was Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman from 1942 to 1949.)

John Peck writes:

I happen to have been the Private Secretary concerned in the Leahy/Churchill exchanges on the secret telephone on May 7th, 1945…. My recollection of events, admittedly written many years later without the benefit of official records, runs as follows:

The instrument of total unconditional surrender was signed in the small hours of 7 May 1945 and all hostilities were to cease the following midnight. Evidently, as Leahy records, Churchill had sent a telegram to President Truman, the substance of which was that he wanted to declare VE Day on 8 May. There was evidence that the President felt the same way. However, from Leahy’s telephone conversation with Churchill, it was evident that the President felt obliged to go along with Stalin‘s wishes [to delay] perhaps until 9 May….

Churchill very reluctantly acquiesced, but much later he suddenly said to me, “Go and ring the President and tell him that I have got to announce the end of the war tomorrow (the 8th) as we originally intended, as the crowds know of the German surrender.” (Or words to that effect.)

I duly put through the call, thinking it highly improbable that I should speak to President Truman himself. Indeed, the call was naturally taken by Admiral Leahy. Although it is not verbatim, the following is a pretty accurate account of our brief dialogue:

Peck: “The Prime Minister wants to announce the end of the war tomorrow. The Russians want to go on until the 9th. On balance he is inclined to go ahead and end it on the 8th.”

Leahy: “We want to end it too.”

Peck: “Right, so we will both end it tomorrow.”

Leahy: “Yes, fine, okay.”

To the best of my knowledge no record of any of these conversations was kept at the London end.

Is the War Over?

John Peck’s letter continues:

I seem to have specialised in odd telephone calls around that time. You may be amused by the following extract from an autobiographical work I once wrote recording another telephone conversation, on an open telephone line , on the night of Sunday, 29 April 1945…. [After this] I ceased to be surprised at anything.

During the weekend of 27-30 April 1945 I was on duty at Chequers [the PM’s official country residence]. On the Sunday night we had finally got the PM off to bed at 3.00 am. I had just fallen into a deep sleep when my bedside telephone rang. An apologetic telephonist put through an even more apologetic Colonel Gault, the Military Assistant to General Eisenhower, speaking from his headquarters in Reims.

Gault: “John, is that you? Sorry to bother you at this hour, but the General told me to ask you if the war is over.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seriously, we’ve got a press message here which says quite clearly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the General and he thought you would be the most likely to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well if it has ended, nobody has told the Prime Minister either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had better carry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so. I’ll let you know if there are any developments here.”

Gault: “Many thanks. So I can tell the General to go on with the war?”

Peck: “Yes.”

Gault: “Goodnight. Sorry to bother you.”

Peck: “Not a bit. Goodnight.”

So it was that Private Secretary John Peck, on his own recognizance, bid World War II continue. Neither Churchill, nor Truman, nor Stalin were consulted, Peck writes: “I went back to sleep, and the war went on.”

“The Art of the Microphone”

An excellent piece on this subject was by Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war correspondent and later its leading TV news commentator. His “Churchill the Broadcaster” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a comprehensive set of essays of the many specialized attributes of WSC.

Dimbleby offers four areas of discussion: the technical background, the drama of World War II, the factual material, and Churchill’s methods of delivery.

Dimbleby provides detail about how the BBC handled the wartime broadcast, which originated in vastly different places, from commodious Chequers (the PM’s official country residence) to the cramped confines of the underground Cabinet War Rooms.

“Be Quiet—Churchill’s Broadcasting”

“Churchill had a ready-made, keen, sympathetic audience,” Dimbleby wrote:

He had created enormous national confidence in himself. The great majority of the people—there were, of course, his opponents—trusted him, supported him and were avid for anything he had to say, even if his major promises were of “blood, toil tears and sweat.” Here, they felt, was a man who would say what had to be said, however unpleasant it was, and who would always hold out some hope of better things.

Of course the man himself was deeply conscious of this waiting audience, of the fact that he was speaking with authority, with a full private knowledge of the truth….

It was not only in Britain or the countries of her allies that people hung on Churchill’s words. I was told recently by a German broadcasting official who worked at Hamburg during the war that he walked into the offices one night and found normal work at a standstill. Even William Joyce, then in the full foul flood of his radio oratory as “Haw Haw,” was away from his desk. Asking what was up, the official was told to be quiet—“Churchill’s broadcasting.”

Broadcast Consistency

Churchill’s “magic of word and phrase, the forceful delivery, the mastery of language that made each of his great wartime broadcasts a pageant,” Dimbleby continued. Ironically, Churchill’s transgressions of the rules were what made him so good:

…he breaks every accepted rule of broadcasting….He drops his voice where he should raise it, he alters the recognised system of punctuation to suit himself (some of his scripts were virtually unintelligible to anyone else), he speaks much of the time with anything but clarity. Yet such is his power as an orator, and such his feeling of the public pulse, that during the war years he was sure of a silent and appreciative audience of millions, following every word and phrase with relish.

Churchill was also consistent over the years. His patterns of speech never changed. During a lecture, Dimbleby played Churchill’s very first 1909 published recording, on the Liberal Government’s budget:

There was no need for me to announce the speaker, for the first half-dozen words established his identity. The passage of nearly half a century has made virtually no difference to the voice, except to deepen and thicken it slightly. The same faint sing-song is there and the same lilting cadences, though there is never a cadence where you might expect it, at the end of a sentence. Generally the voice goes up, leaving the listener with the feeling that the sentence has not really ended at all.

These techniques were features of the special talent Churchill laid on his palimpsest of oratory. What was the real key? Dimbleby said it was “mastery of the English language.” Churchill loved words, especially in broadcasts, when he was not there to be seen to gesture or to grimace to aid his delivery. It was all based on words alone:

“Purblind Worldlings”

The historian will not fail to note that description of Mussolini as “this whipped jackal, frisking at the side of the German tiger…..” Von Ribbentrop was “that prodigious contortionist.” Those who dared to ask what Britain was fighting for were “thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings.”

The actions of Russia in October 1939, as they seemed Churchill, were “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But there was no puzzlement about the character of “Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption.” Then there were the neutral States, each one of which “hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” The crocodile was seen in another form when it turned upon Russia in June 1941…. “Now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanised armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.”

Those were fighting words, Dimbleby continued: words that made men and women in the midst of all-out war chuckle, knowing they were “exactly what they themselves would have liked to say”:

And when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, how magnificent was that sentence, “Faith is given to us, to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny.”

This was surely the art of the microphone, or the art of the orator adapted to the microphone, at a level higher than had ever been reached before or has ever been attained since.

Whatever have been Churchill’s fate in the years after the war, Dimbleby concluded—whatever public utterances he might yet make— “he will always be remembered by the people of Britain for the way in which he spoke to them in their homes when death was very near.”

Bibliography of Recordings

The first-ever bibliography of Churchill’s recordings (which include speeches and readings from his war memoirs) has been posted by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, compiled by Ronald Cohen, author of the seminal Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill.

Mr. Cohen’s new list includes the 1909 Budget speech Dimbleby alluded to, which was published in the then-new flat disc format that, in the 1920s, replaced the roller form of recording. That was, of course, a speech, not a broadcast. Broadcasting in Britain began in June 1920.

Churchill’s first broadcast, his hilarious speech about “St. George and the Dragon,” for St. George’s Day 1933, may be the earliest speech to be broadcast and recorded. Part of his remarks can be heard online: click here. I can’t help reflecting how relevant they seem, with relation to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

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.