Underneath the lantern, By the barrack gate
Darling I remember, The way you used to wait.
‘Twas there that you whispered tenderly, That you loved me, You’d always be
My Lili of the lamplight, My own Lili Marlene. 

Epping and Woodford

Churchill represented the Essex constituencies of Epping and Woodford forty years, from 1924 to 1964. (In 1945 they were subdivided and he stood for Woodford.) Through his retirement in 1964, that was more than half his adult life. In about a year, we mark the centenary of his first election there. Richard Cohen, who lives in Loughton, is developing a suitable celebration—of which more anon.

Mr. Cohen kindly sends me a lecture by Allen Packwood, around the 90th anniversary of Churchill’s election. Many who labor in the Churchill vineyard know Mr. Packwood as head of the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. Collectively we are all in his debt for vast assistance in researches large and small. Speaking in 2015, Allen explained how much the Essex seat had meant to WSC:

Churchill was never really a party politician. He always strove to be a national figure. He may not have been highly involved in local affairs, preferring to leave such matters to his efficient local team…. But he did bring national issues to Epping and Woodford. If anything, even more to Woodford after the war, for when he came here it was as one of the most famous men of his age…

Woodford handily elected Churchill in 1945, but in the General Election his Conservative Party was thrown out. Only temporarily sidetracked, he came back as a scintillating Leader of the Opposition. Recalling his postwar appearances in Essex, Mr. Packwood reminded me of the wartime song Lili Marlene, and an anecdote by Sir Fitzroy Maclean.

Lili Marlene

Written 1915 by Hans Leip (1893–1983), but not well known until 1941, Lili Marlene was first recorded in 1939 by Lale Andersen, a Swedish singer popular in Berlin cabarets. Two years later it was broadcast as a filler between news programs by the troop station Deutsche Soldatensender in occupied Belgrade. It was an instant sensation among German troops from Norway to Africa. But that was just the beginning.

In 1942, soldiers of the British 8th Army in North Africa heard Lili on the German wireless. A 1944 BBC video takes up the story, related by Denis Johnston:

On 4 July 1942 the 8th Army held the line at El Alamein. There weren’t many radios up forward near the battle area, except probably the one in our recording truck. We used to turn on the news every night and listen to it…. Chaps would come in from all over the desert, like birds coming in around a lighthouse. They’d sit and listen. You’d see the glow from their cigarettes and pipes, and the little glow from the radio dial. After the news was over, we’d switch over to the “Messages Home” programme from Germany. And before long it would go Ompa, Ompa—and there was Marlene…. The 8th Army swept on, capturing on its way 800 miles of desert, 75,000 prisoners, 5000 tanks, 1000 guns, and the famous enemy song of Lili Marlene.

The captured tune

Suddenly a German war ballad became the 8th Army battle song, copyright El Alamein, 1942. The BBC wrote its own lyrics, sung by Jewish refugee Lucy Mannheim and beamed right at Berlin….

Your men is dead I hear it. It graves the Russian snow,
Yes die you must I fear it, For Hitler wills it so.
Oh could we only meet once more, Our country free of shame and war,
And stand beneath the lantern. We two— Lili Marlene

Führer I thank and greet you, For you are good and wise
Widows and orphans meet you, With hollow silent eyes,
Hitler, the man of blood and fear, Hang him up on the lantern here
Hang him up from the lantern! Oh Führer —Lili Marlene

German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was incensed. After a lame attempt at a more martial version, he banned Lili Marlene from the radio, ordering Lale Andersen never to sing it again. It didn’t matter. German troops continued to sing it, listening surreptitiously to BBC broadcasts. (Dame Vera Lynn recorded a less grim version.)

“Pleasing to the ear…”

Churchill returned to speak in Essex in October 1946. Allen Packwood related an appearance unrecorded in the Complete Speeches. This was at a private dinner at the King’s Head Public House in Chigwell. (On the menu was trifle “garnished with the outline of a cigar.”) Mr. Packwood found this account in a local newspaper:

Whilst he was having his dinner, the patrons in the bar below regaled him with many of the songs which became famous during the war years, including “Roll Out the Barrel,” “Hanging Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and last but not least “Lili Marlene.” The former German army song was apparently the most pleasing to the ear of Mr. Churchill, for he was heard to observe that its “capture from the enemy was one of the most satisfactory features of our victory in North Africa.”

Before he left, Churchill asked them to sing it one more time, and tapped along heartily with his cane. “It is a wonderful image,” Mr. Packwood commented. Indeed so. Lili Marlene was the war prize of His Majesty’s 8th Army.

For some reason, the story reminds me of another great leader and enemy song—years before. After victory in the American Civil War, to general surprise and some grumbling, President Lincoln ordered that Washington bands play Dixie. He said, “I always thought it was a dandy tune.” And, like Lili Marlene, Dixie too had a separate set of lyrics on the Union side.

Fitzroy Maclean remembers Lili

 Video

“The True Story of Lili Marlene,” BBC, 1944

Further reading

Proofing galleys for Winston S. Churchill: Document Volume 20, May-December 1944, the Hillsdale College Churchill Project came across many gems. Not least of these was an account by Fitzroy of Churchill’s first meeting with Tito—and a minor adventure in Bay of Naples in August 1944.

Maclean on Tito

I found him to be a tough, alert man of about fifty, at the head of a far more formidable resistance movement than anyone outside Yugoslavia could possibly have imagined…. He made no bones about being a Communist, but… he showed a surprising independence of mind, and above all an intense national pride which did not at all fit in with my idea of a Russian agent. All this I reported to Mr. Churchill [in late 1943]…. I thought it right to remind him that the Partisans were Communist-led.

“Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Neither do I,” he said. “That being so, don’t you think we had better leave it to the Yugoslavs to work out their own form of government? What concerns us most now is who is doing the most damage to the Germans.” Thinking our conversation over afterwards, I felt convinced, and still feel convinced, that this was the right decision.

[Tito indeed proved to be a Communist, but one with ardent independence, who balked at following the Soviet line. As a schoolboy I remember maps of the Soviet empire, its nations colored red, except for Yugoslavia, which was always colored pink.]

The PM and Tito

They met in Naples on 12 August at what had been Queen Victoria‘s summer villa. Tito was wearing a splendid new uniform which Fitzroy was sure had been made for the occasion. Although suffering from the heat, Tito “looked every inch a Marshal, which he had just made himself.” With Tito were two gigantic bodyguards, Boško and Prlja, who, with submachine guns at the ready, kept a constant watch over him.

It was at lunchtime when Churchill, with all his cowboy instincts, almost caused an international incident. It might have ended with the death of the Prime Minister by semi-friendly fire. Sir Fitzroy recalled:

At one o’clock precisely, we broke for lunch. The villa was large enough to provide freshening-up facilities for each delegation. Accordingly, the Prime Minister and I disappeared down one long corridor. Tito and the two bodyguards, their submachine guns still at the ready, went off down another, running at right angles to each other.

Five minutes later, having washed our hands, we made our way back, converging from different directions on the same corner. It was thus that the Prime Minister found himself looking down the barrels of two submachine guns.

Boško’s and Prlja’s near-miss

This, I realized too late, was the sort of situation that appealed to him immensely. He at once entered into what he imagined to be the spirit of the thing. Whipping his large gold cigar case out of his pocket like a pistol and suddenly lunging forward, he presented it in one abrupt movement at Tito’s stomach.

What he didn’t know, but I did, was that Boško and Prlja, after three years as guerrillas, were men of lightning reflexes who took no chances at all. If they thought their Marshal’s life was in danger they would gladly have wiped out all three of the Big Three in a single burst.

In the space of a split second I saw their trigger fingers twitch. I only had time to hope that I for one would not survive what came next.

Then Tito began to laugh. Winston, seeing that his little joke had been a success, laughed too. Boško and Prlja, observing that the danger had passed, lowered their guns. Following on into Queen Victoria’s fusty dining room, I took out a large khaki handkerchief and wiped the cold sweat off my brow.

“Careering around the Bay of Naples”

During Churchill’s stay in Naples, an urgent decision was needed from the PM, who was nowhere to be found. Someone mentioned that he had said he was going swimming in the Bay of Naples. The Allied commander instructed Fitzroy Maclean to find him:

The Royal Navy kindly provided a motor torpedo boat, and the United States Army a stenographer—a young lady of considerable personal attractions, in a form-fitting tropical uniform…..

The first thing we saw as we emerged from the harbour into the wider waters of the Bay was a great fleet of ships of every size and shape, steaming majestically towards the open sea. It was the first phase, as I suddenly realized, of the Allied invasion of the south of France….

As we watched, one of the troop ships slightly slackened speed, as if to avoid something. Simultaneously there was a burst of excited cheering from the troops on board, and a small, bright blue object shot across their bow. I recognized it as an admiral’s barge. And there, standing by the coxswain, wearing a boiler suit and a broad-brimmed Panama hat, smoking a cigar and giving the “V” sign, was the object of my search.

Royal Navy greetings

He swerved out and round and disappeared behind the next ship in the convoy. Clearly there was nothing for me but to give chase…. We set out boldly on our erratic course down the line. As we passed them, the troops on the transports gave us an extra cheer for luck—followed by a salvo of whistles as they spotted my female companion….

Eventually, we overtook and headed off the blue barge. There followed an intricate boarding operation in rather a rough sea. I landed precipitously in my kilt at the Prime Minister’s feet. The blonde stenographer, anxious to miss nothing, hung over the rail of the MTB.

Mr. Churchill seemed keenly interested. “Do you usually,” he asked, “spend your afternoons careering around the Bay of Naples in one of His Majesty’s ships with this charming young lady?” In vain I explained the object of the exercise. He wouldn’t listen. I was not to hear the last of that episode for a long time.

Sir Fitzroy on WSC

I should not like to give the impression that all Fitzroy had to say was jocular. His memoranda to Churchill crucially influenced British policy in the Balkans and his evaluations of Tito and other players in Yugoslavia was uniformly accurate. Nevertheless, these wonderful snippets are worth recalling, if only as a testimony to what he always considered the premier experience of his life.

He spoke to us twice on the Churchill tours my wife and I conducted. The venue was his Creggans Inn in Strachur, on Scotland’s Kintyre Peninsula. He spoke movingly and I think profoundly on the Great Man he’d known so well:

Today, looking back over a long life, I can honestly say that almost the only things in which I take any conscious pride or esteem in one way or another is my association with Winston Churchill. After the war I was lucky enough to be a member of his Government and also, with my wife, to be asked every now and then to Chequers or Chartwell to join him and his family in their noisy, affectionate, hilarious, often uproarious family life. That, as a friend said to me the other day, was something that left you both wiser and also warmer at heart.

After our meeting in Naples I asked Tito, a most perceptive man, what had struck him most about Winston. Tito replied instantly and I thought it was very clever of him: “His humanity. He is so human.”

By this central humanity, and his statesmanship and courage, Churchill did something that not many politicians seem to do nowadays. He caught people’s imagination and won their affection.

When I heard of his death I was on the hill here with my head shepherd. Not a man much given to sentiment, he was greatly moved. “I feel,” he said, “as if I’d lost one of my own family.”

That is how, I think, many of us felt and still feel today.

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