Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun. 

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This  assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain  were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927.  “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971),  BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

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

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

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

The Poodles, Rufus I and II

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

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

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

Perches and pates

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

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

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

Lord Wardens of the Cinque Mouseholes

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

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

“Tender solicitude”

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

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

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

“Man’s faithful friend the horse”

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

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

A world of animals

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

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

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

Lady Diana Duff Cooper had a penetrating mind and brilliant pen, capable of capturing a time when women considered the world laden with opportunity for fulfillment.

She proved this with her famous seven-year performance in Max Reinhardt’s “The Miracle.” Her “Winston and Clementine,” first published in The Atlantic just after Sir Winston’s death, was as fine a tribute to the Churchill marriage as we are likely to encounter.Her collaboration with her husband’s ambassadorship to France was notable. So was her beautiful and literate trilogy of memoirs.

Sir Alfred Duff Cooper was one of Churchill’s most stalwart friends and allies, serving loyally as WSC’s first wartime Minister of Information and then as his liaison to de Gaulle. The end of the war found him serving as British ambassador in Paris.

In 2013 their son John Julius (Lord Norwich) published Darling Monster, the correspondence between him and his mother. Excerpts of Lady Diana’s letters offer many wonderful views of Winston Churchill, whom she deeply admired throughout a lifelong friendship.

Diana on Winston

18 October 1940: “Papa [Alfred Duff Cooper] came home all right at about nine [after dining at Downing Street], as Winston dines at seven in a little blue sort of workman’s overall suit. He looks exactly like the good pig who built his house of bricks.”

19 February 1941: “Great excitement last weekend. We went to Ditchley where Winston was staying….Winston does nearly all his work from his bed. It keeps him rested and young….We had two lovely films after dinner —one was called Escape and the other was a very light comedy called Quiet Wedding. There were also several short reels from Papa’s Ministry. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.”

9 January 1944: “There was our old baby in his rompers [boiler suit], ten-gallon cowboy hat and very ragged oriental dressing gown, health, vigour and excellent spirits.”

13 January 1944 (at a picnic): The Colonel [Churchill’s codename] is immediately sat on a comfortable chair, rugs are swathed round his legs and a pillow put on his lap to act as table, book-rest, etc. A rather alarming succession of whiskies and brandies go down….

….[Churchill then insisted on descending a gorge, and had to be heaved up with a rope.]  Clemmie said nothing, but watched him with me like a lenient mother who does not wish to spoil her child’s fun.”

14 November 1944, Paris: The first night we dined…with the Duckling [WSC] at the Quai d’Orsay. It was rather boring. Clemmie was sleepy and Winston as difficult as he always is until the champagne has warmed him….but after the feast, in the Napoleon III salon, with English [Scotch!] whisky dropping on the exquisite Savonnerie carpet, his old magic took charge of us all as he weaved his slang and his pure English into a fantastic pattern.”

Diana on Duff

Lady Diana was a worldly woman who took no notice of Duff’s many affairs: “Why should I mind if they made him happy? I always knew: they were the flowers, I was the tree.” She left her son with practical advice (31 December 1957): “Drink less for your health and looks and charm’s sake, beware of unclean whores, love your mother, and sleep deep.”

Diana and Duff were two bright lights of the Churchill era. It is a joy to read their correspondence (A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1913-1950 (London and New York 1983, edited by their granddaughter Artemis), if only to preserve such writing as this, Diana to Duff (in the trenches), 1918:

It is I that must read [our letters] to the envious young—flauntingly, exultantly—and when they hear yours they’ll dream well that night, and waking crave for such a mythical supreme lover and regret that they are born in the wrong age—as once I did before I saw your light, crying for Gods and wooers…

Shortly after they met, Duff wrote to Diana: “Bores with God’s help we will never be.” They weren’t.

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. 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,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”  These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

 … as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

Q: Did Winston Churchill ever use public transport while PM, particularly the tube?

On Courage

Q: We accept that the screenplay is a dramatisation of events. But is it likely that Churchill would have left a government car for a no-security ride on the tube? Would he stop to talk to the people before such an important speech? If not, why not?

Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944, nineteenth of a projected twenty-three document volumes in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, is reviewed by historian Andrew Roberts in Commentary. 

These volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill.” The present volume sets the size record. Fateful Questions is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day. Yet at $60, it is a tremendous bargain. Order your copy from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.

Here is an excerpt from my account, “Fresh History,” which can be read in its entirety at the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Questions: Science

A criticism frequently leveled at Churchill is that he was so fixed on defeating Hitler that he never looked ahead—to the problems of the peace as well as the likelihood of a powerful, proselytizing Soviet Union. Proof that Churchill recognized the Soviet danger is well documented in this book; he also looked toward the years of peace, and the potential of science for good or ill. (Professor A.V. Hill, who married a sister of John Maynard Keynes, was Independent MP for Cambridge University, 1940-45.)

30 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Professor A. V. Hill. (Churchill papers, 20/94).

Dear Professor Hill, I am very glad to have the opportunity to send through you my greetings and good wishes to Indian men of science and especially to the six Indian Fellows of the Royal Society, of which I am honoured to be myself a Fellow.

It is the great tragedy of our time that the fruits of science should by a monstrous perversion have been turned on so vast a scale to evil ends. But that is no fault of science. Science has given to this generation the means of unlimited disaster or of unlimited progress. When this war is won we shall have averted disaster. There will remain the greater task of directing knowledge lastingly towards the purposes of peace and human good. In this task the scientists of the world, united by the bond of a single purpose which overrides all bounds of race and language, can play a leading and inspiring part.

Questions: Recrimination vs. Magnanimity

Churchill famously deplored blaming British and French leaders for mistakes in the years leading up to the Second World War: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,” he declared after France fell in June 1940,“we shall find that we have lost the future.” He made good that magnanimous philosophy on many occasions—as these excerpts suggest, concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain and French General Georges. (Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information.)

4 October 1945. Winston S. Churchill to Brendan Bracken: Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.638/3  (Churchill papers, 20/104)

In the film “The Nazis Strike” I must ask that the section showing Mr. Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airfield after Munich, and also the shot of his going fishing with a reference to the “tired old man of Munich” should be cut out, otherwise I could not be associated with the series. The story would run quite well from the signature at Munich to the meeting in Birmingham where Mr. Chamberlain made his declaration that we would support Poland, &c.

*****

19 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper: excerpt.  (Churchill papers, 20/94)

Personal and Secret: With regard to General Georges. In my opinion he is a very fine, honourable Frenchman. For him I feel a sentiment of friendship which started to grow when we made our tour of the Rhine front together a month before the War. I do not think he was to blame for the catastrophe, except that he ought to have been very much stronger in demanding the retirement of Gamelin at the outbreak of war. Much of his strength and energy was expended in opposing Gamelin, but the inherent rottenness of the French fighting machine and Government would have denied victory to any General.

Moreover, Georges is crippled from wounds received both in the late War and the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. I do not forget, though this is a point which should not be mentioned to the French, that when Petain and Weygand at Briand in May 1940 were clamouring for our last reserves and resources, including the last Fighter Squadrons, well knowing that the battle was lost and that they meant to give in, it was Georges who informed our Military Liaison Officer that the French Government would ask for an armistice and that we should take our steps accordingly.

Questions: The Second Front

The greatest Anglo-American-Soviet strategy questions were over how much to throttle back the campaign in Italy (which had begun in September 1943) in support of “Operation Overlord,” the invasion of France, which all three allies agreed was the most direct route to Berlin and must go forward in 1944. Though this subject dominates our volume, these documents frame the debate. Among other things, they  illustrate that Churchill was not the only British leader who fumed over lost opportunities in Italy.

25 October 1943. General Sir Alan Brooke: diary. (“War Diaries, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,” page 56)

It is becoming more and more evident that our operations in Italy are coming to a standstill and that owing to lack of resources we shall not only come to a standstill, but also find ourselves in a very dangerous position unless the Russians go on from one success to another. Our build up in Italy is much slower than the German, and far slower than I had expected. We shall have an almighty row with the Americans who have put us in this position with their insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross Channel operations. We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.

*****

26 October 1943. Lord Moran: diary. (“Winston Churchill, the Struggle for Survival,” pages 130–31)

The PM is already beginning to have his own doubts and hesitations….His face was glum, his jaw set, misgivings filled his mind. “Stalin seems obsessed by this bloody Second Front,” he muttered angrily. “I can be obstinate too.” He jumped out of bed and began pacing up and down. “Damn the fellow,” he said under his breath. And then he rang for a secretary. When he began dictating a telegram to the Foreign Secretary I got up to leave the room. “No, Charles, don’t go. This,” grumbled the PM, “is what comes of a lawyer’s agreement to attack on a fixed date without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war.”

Alex’s [Field Marshal Alexander] fears had upset the PM. His mind was now made up. He turned to the secretary, who held her pencil ready. “I will not allow the great and fruitful campaign in Italy to be cast away and end in a frightful disaster, for the sake of crossing the Channel in May. The battle must be nourished and fought out until it is won. Molotov must be warned,” the PM continued striding to the door and back, “that the assurances I gave to Stalin about ‘Overlord’ in May are subject to the exigencies of the battle in Italy. Eisenhower and Alex must have what they need to win the battle, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations. Stalin ought to be told bluntly that ‘Overlord’ might have to be postponed.”

*****

29 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Anthony Eden. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1764/3 (Churchill papers, 20/122)

Most Immediate. Most Secret and Personal. There is of course no question of abandoning “Overlord” which will remain our principal operation for 1944. The retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay, perhaps till July, as the smaller class of landing-craft cannot cross the Bay of Biscay in the winter months and would have to make the passage in the Spring. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces, and also that the full bombing effort on Germany would not be damped down so soon. We are also ready at any time to push across and profit by a German collapse. These arguments may be of use to you in discussion.

 *****

30 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill and Josef Stalin: notes of a conversation, Soviet Embassy, Teheran (Cabinet papers, 120/113)

Most Secret. The Prime Minister said that he was half American and he had a great affection for the American people. What he was going to say was not to be understood as anything disparaging of the Americans and he would be perfectly loyal towards them, but there were things which it was better to say between two persons.

We had a preponderance of troops over the Americans in the Mediterranean. There were three to four times more British troops than American there. That is why he was anxious that the troops in the Mediterranean should not be hamstrung if it could be avoided, and he wanted to use them all the time. In Italy there were some 13 to 14 divisions of which 9 or 10 were British. There were two armies, the 5th Anglo-American Army, and the 8th Army, which was entirely British. The choice had been represented as keeping to the date of “Overlord” or pressing on with the operations in the Mediterranean. But that was not the whole story.

*

The Americans wanted him to attack, to undertake an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal against the Japanese in March. He was not keen about it. If we had in the Mediterranean the landing craft needed for the Bay of Bengal, we would have enough to do all we wanted in the Mediterranean and still be able to keep to an early date for “Overlord.”

It was not a choice between the Mediterranean and the date of “Overlord,” but between the Bay of Bengal and the date of “Overlord.” He thought we would have all we wanted in the way of landing craft. However, the Americans had pinned us down to a date for “Overlord” and operations in the Mediterranean had suffered in the last two months. Our army was somewhat disheartened by the removal of the 7 divisions. We had sent home our 3 divisions and the Americans were sending theirs, all in preparation for “Overlord.” That was the reason for not taking full advantage with the Italian collapse. But it also proved the earnestness of our preparations for “Overlord.”

 

Questions: Bombing Civilians

Churchill’s questioning of Allied “carpet bombing” is well established in this volume. Churchill was concerned over bombing civilians in the forthcoming invasion of France. Here he voices his worries to the Supreme Commander; in the event, Eisenhower convinced him that certain French casualties would have to be expected.

3 April 1944. Winston S. Churchill to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Churchill papers, 20/137)

Top Secret. Personal and Private. My dear General, The Cabinet today took rather a grave and on the whole an adverse view of the proposal to bomb so many French railway centres, in view of the fact that scores of thousands of French civilians, men, women, and children, would lose their lives or be injured. Considering that they are all our friends, this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces. It was decided that the Defence Committee should consider the matter during this week, and that thereafter the Foreign Office should address the State Department and I should myself send a personal telegram to the President.

The argument for concentration on these particular targets is very nicely balanced on military grounds. I myself have not heard the arguments which have led to the present proposal. The advantage to enemy propaganda seem to me to be very great, especially as this would not be in the heat of battle but a long time before. Would it not also be necessary to consult General de Gaulle and the French National Committee of Liberation? There were many other arguments that were mentioned, and I thought I ought to let you know at this stage how the proposal was viewed.

Questions in the House

Despite his burdens, Churchill routinely faced Questions in the House of Commons. He did so with relish and skill. From many questions and answers, this exchange on “Basic English” provides an example.

Willie Gallacher, a frequent critic, was Communist MP for West Fife, Scotland. Henry Wedderburn, Conservative MP for Renfrew, was jibing Churchill over one of his invented words, “triphibian,” referring to British prowess on land, on sea and in the air. The Prime Minister responded with one of his favorite archaic words, “purblind”….

4 November 1943. House of Commons: Questions

Sir Leonard Lyle asked the Prime Minister when the Committee of Ministers set up to study and report upon Basic English are expected to reach their conclusion?

The Prime Minister: I hope to receive the recommendations of this Committee before very long.

Sir Lonard Lyle: When we do get this Report will the BBC be asked to adopt it, or will they still continue to use Basic BBC?

The Prime Minister: Basic English is not intended for use among English-speaking people but to enable a much larger body of people who do not have the good fortune to know the English language to participate more easily in our society.

Mr. Gallacher: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider introducing Basic Scottish?

Mr. Wedderburn: Does Basic English include the word “triphibious”?

The Prime Minister: I have tried to explain that people are quite purblind who discuss this matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English language.

 

Questions: Will he die when it’s over?

Little escaped the wide net of Sir Martin Gilbert, who assembled a virtual day-by-day record of Churchill’s life. From here the Hillsdale team has assembled them in readable form, attaching a host of footnotes and cross references. Occasionally we include published recollections. Here is one by Lady Diana Cooper: a startling and grim prediction she heard from Clementine Churchill. Fortuitously, in this case, Clementine was wrong.

 12 January 1944. Mary Soames: recollection. (‘Clementine Churchill’, page 350)

Diana Cooper recounted a “curious calm and sad conversation” with Clementine, after a dinner in Marrakesh:

“I was talking about postwar days and proposed that instead of a grateful country building Winston another Blenheim, they should give him an endowed manor house with acres for a farm and gardens to build and paint in. Clemmie very calmly said: “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.”

She said this so objectively that I could not bring myself to say the usual “What nonsense!” but tried something about it was no use relying on death; people lived to ninety or might easily, in our lives, die that day…. But she seemed quite certain and quite resigned to his not surviving long into peace. “You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”  It was touching and noble.