“Churchill: The Wilderness Years”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.

I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s. (In his business, as he explains, laying an egg means something different.) Now I am not so sure. I hope, to use Robert’s terms, that it was not a noxious egg.

Boston, 1981

Well, it was a great show, folks. And, inasmuch as any good material about Churchill is a plus, we welcomed and enjoyed it. We are beholden to WGBH in Boston, which most kindly mentioned Martin Gilbert’s accompanying Wilderness Years book.

Let us dismiss Lord Boothby’s complaint that this Winston is “a grumpy, vindictive old man [who] shouts all the way through.” Robert Hardy captures the Churchill of the Thirties. He was politically frustrated, ineffective as a father, worried about Germany. Simultaneously, he enjoyed of his most productive decades as a writer and historian. Perhaps it would be remarkable of anyone else. Churchill was engaged in multiple literary projects, any one of which would fully occupy a normal person. Simultaneously he turned Chartwell into a paradise and was a force, however spurned, in politics. His only wilderness was the one observers assigned to him.

And this may be the weakness of the production. It is hard to provide much TV action around the writing of Marlborough, though we’d have enjoyed seeing the great Duke’s battlefields. There is no drama to painting a canvas or building a brick wall.

We are given instead what plays well: politics, love, scandal, hate. Here enter several exaggerations. Adolf Hitler (Gunter Meisner), on the eve of power, glares through a restaurant window at the Churchill he refuses to meet. Of course the real Hitler did no such thing. Neville Chamberlain (Eric Porter), and his toady Sir Horace Wilson (Clive Swift, “Richard Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”) still think well of Hitler after March 1939. That is unfair to Chamberlain, who knew by then what he was up against. The desert scene with William Randolph Hearst (Stephen Elliott) and Marion Davies (Merrie Lynn Ross) never happened.

On the money historically

On the other hand, “The Wilderness Years” brings out important aspects of the story. Randolph (Nigel Havers) couldn’t be more like Randolph. The risks run by Ralph Wigram (Paul Freeman), Desmond Morton (Moray Watson) and Wing Commander Tor Anderson (David Quilter), in bringing Churchill news of German rearmament, are rightly emphasized. How often Stanley Baldwin (Peter Barkworth) played Churchill foul in the 1930s! (And how often WSC forgave him.) “The Wilderness Years” relays all this well.

In general the casting was superb. British television draws on an army of brilliant actors, and can always find a near-clone of anybody. I thought Baldwin was too pixieish, Ramsay MacDonald (Robert James) too mousy, Hitler a caricature. But Frederick Lindemann, “The Prof” (David Swift), Brendan Bracken (Tim Pigott-Smith), and Beaverbrook (Stratford Johns) were perfect. So was Lord Derby (Frank Middlemass, transformed from the kindly head master in “To Serve Them All My Days”). Neville Chamberlain couldn’t have been closer to life. Samuel Hoare (Edward Woodward) comes across as the evil force he really was.

Most of the women—WSC’s vivacious sister-in-law “Goonie” (Jennifer Hilary), noisy Nancy Astor (Marcella Markham) and Sarah Churchill (Chloe Salaman)— were well played. But there was one exception. Clementine Churchill (Sian Phillips) was simply awful. A friend who remembers Phillips for her role in the Roman drama “I Claudius” says: “I keep seeing her sipping wine and wearing a toga.” Was she typecast? Viewers must be the judge.

Flaws and edits

Phillips was not the “Clemmie” we know through Martin Gilbert’s and Mary Soames’s biographies. Instead we see a pretentious, unhappy aristocrat. Less a pillar of strength than a flitting mayfly, she is always ready to run off with some handsome adventurer. All the more curious (for Phillips said she researched the role), Clemmie is at sea literally and figuratively. The scene in which she returns from a South Seas voyage with an unnamed swashbuckler (in life, Terence Phillip) would thrill the National Enquirer, however unsubstantial its implications. Phillips could have saved the scene by reciting Clementine’s own words. “Do not be vexed with your vagabond cat. She has gone off toward the jungle with her tail in the air, but she will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably.”

We could have done without the bowdlerization of Churchill’s great speeches. Robert Hardy had his part down perfectly. (One soon forgets the lovable vet Siegfried Farnon in “All Creatures Great and Small.”) But almost every great speech, though beautifully delivered, was mercilessly cut to ribbons by the editors. The hatchet job on Churchill’s greatest prewar speech (“I have watched this famous Island…”) is unforgivable.

Still it is a great yarn. What historical character other than Churchill could excite a latter-day audience by reprising his life’s lowest ebb? As ever, Winston Churchill stands alone. I hope that the fine reception of “The Wilderness Years” has been sufficient to encourage further dramatizations of equally important periods—particularly the Admiralty sojourn of 1911-15, and of course, 1940. We’ll be waiting for it.

A popular weekly half hour podcast, Revisionist History takes aim at shibboleths, real and imagined. This episode is Churchill’s turn in the barrel.

Scientific Nemesis

The villain, aside from Sir Winston, is his scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann,  later Lord Cherwell, aka “The Prof.” You’ve probably never heard of him, says narrator Malcolm Gladwell. You should have. It was Lindemann who made Churchill bomb innocent German civilians and starve the Bengalis.

Ironically, the program begins with an ad for its sponsor, Chanel Perfume. After World War II Coco Chanel—“fierce, precious, sovereign,” the ad says—was spared from prosecution as a Nazi collaborator. Churchill, renowned for his loyalty to friends, rescued her. I doubt Mme. Chanel would have sponsored this program.

Accompanied by background music, uplifting or ominous as required, Mr. Gladwell unfolds his case. He claims to have read six books on Lord Cherwell (whose title he mispronounces). But his only two quoted sources are the British scientist C.P. Snow¹ (very selectively; Snow admired Churchill); and Madhusree Mukerjee, author of a widely criticized book on the Bengal Famine.² There are no contrary opinions or evidence.

The Prof: Facts and Fantasies

Lindemann met Churchill in 1921; they became fast friends. Prof had the knack of being able to reduce complicated scientific theories to a form anyone could understand. Churchill relied on his insights during Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s. In World War II, Lindemann played a key role in development of Britain’s “wizard weapons.” One of these was “H2S,” a surface mapping radar, one version of which enabled aircraft to locate surfaced submarines. He was a crack tennis player, a dazzling conversationalist, a formidable debater, a brilliant scholar. Colleagues compared him to Isaac Newton.

But Gladwell, often quoting Snow, sees Lindemann in the worst light. He cites unprovable mental attitudes—“ill at ease in the presence of black people,” for example. (We could equally ask: was Snow envious of Lindemann? Who knows?)

Snow describes Lindemann as tall, thin, pallid, Germanic, “quite un-English.” He dined on cheese, whites of eggs, rice and olive oil, and drank only at Churchill’s table. He carried with him “an atmosphere of indefinable malaise.” He was “venomous, harsh-tongued, malicious, with a sadistic sense of humour. He made a novelist’s fingers itch.” The Prof is described as “lacking in the bond of human sympathy for every chance person who was not brought into a personal relationship with him.” This, Gladwell says, was “the crucial fact about him.” It would seem a crucial fact about many people.

Was Lindemann Anti-Semitic?

Lindemann, Gladwell notes, once even tried to upstage Albert Einstein—“he didn’t like Jews very much.” He asserts this without evidence. We don’t know the truth of it. But here is a counterpoint: Lindemann booked Einstein’s lectures in England and, after Hitler came to power helped Einstein rescue Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany.³  Surely this must be considered in evaluating Lindemann’s attitude toward Jews. There is more on this, in Lindemann’s official life by the second Lord Birkenhead:

Lindemann’s dislike of Jews and the sneers which he sometimes directed against the Jewish people [was] an unworthy prejudice which was never more than skin deep. In Berlin he had come into contact with many brilliant Jews whom he had admired, and when the Hitler persecution began he went to Germany and persuaded some of the greatest Jewish physicists in Europe to join him at the Clarendon Laboratory. With all these men…he remained on terms of admiration and affection, and Professor [Sir Francis] Simon in particular became a lifelong friend.”⁴

Lindemann’s Influence

That’s the wind-up; here’s the pitch: We are asked why a leader like Churchill could promote such a flawed adviser. Why Lindemann had the power to overrule everyone, even to dictate policy? C.P. Snow: “If you are going to have a scientist in a position of absolute power, the only scientist among non-scientists, it is dangerous whoever he is.”

But Mr. Gladwell is misled. Churchill did not give Lindemann absolute power. Nor was he Churchill’s only scientific adviser. Gladwell makes the error of many revisionists before him: attributing to a single crony far more influence than he had.

Lindemann and Bombing Policy

Snow deplored Lindemann’s influence on Britain’s bombing of Germany.⁵ “The Prime Minister and the Prof” says Lindemann’s support for bombing civilian over military targets was accepted without qualm. This, we are told, led to the devastation of “innocent people” in German cities. According to Gladwell, Peter Blackett, another scientific adviser, believed that “the war could have been won six or twelve months earlier had bombers been used more intelligently.”

But hold on: another scientific adviser? Was Lindemann not the only one?

Not mentioned by Gladwell is a pantheon of scientific advisers—including Sir Henry Tizard, Solly Zuckerman and J.D. Bernall—who declared Lindemann’s estimates of civilian bomb damage 500% too high. Ironically, Lindemann had brought all of them to Churchill’s attention. For a loner so disdainful of others, Prof had an odd knack of recruiting brilliant people who disagreed with him.

* * *

Also contrary to Revisionist History, Churchill maintained independence of thought. His private secretary, Jock Colville, wrote: “Many people made the mistake of thinking that somebody—it might be General Ismay or Professor Lindemann—for whom the Prime Minister had the utmost respect and affection—would be able to ‘get something through,’ [but] unless the Prime Minister was himself impressed by the argument, pressure by others seldom had any effect….he was never persuaded by the fact that those who argued a certain course were people whom he liked and respected.”⁶ We do not get this impression from “The Prime Minister and the Prof.”

Actually, Churchill’s ultimate decision on bombing completely pleased neither Lindemann nor his opposition. To understand this, we need to know something about the argument—which the podcast doesn’t cover.

Britain’s Air Staff formuated its area bombing strategy during ​late 1941.​ The War Cabinet approved it in February 1942, before ​Arthur “​Bomber​”​​Harris’s appointment to Bomber Command. ​While Lindemann had a hand in the decision​, his​ famous 30 March ​memo arguing for prioritizing bombing cities ​and made no difference to the policy already agreed, though it reinforced the case. The scientists did not argue over area bombing—which had already been decided—but over ​Lindemann’s statistics.

Bomber Allocations

The real argument was over allocation of new bomber production, and bombers sent by the USA to the skies over Germany (under Bomber Command) or the U-boat menace to the Western Approaches (Coastal Command). Although Lindemann favored the former. Bomber Harris questioned his figures,  saying, “Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide-rules?”⁷ Professor Antoine Capet, in a recent study of Lindemann’s role, explains what really happened:

It was a wonderful row by serious people, all devoted to Churchill and the war but pulling in opposite directions…. Blackett, for instance, was known for his principled opposition to bombing civilians (and, it must be mentioned, his profound dislike of Lindemann)…. Tizard, who also disliked Lindemann, was a great believer in attacking the U-boats…. Zuckerman and Bernal agreed.

Bomber Command had a slight priority, if only to placate Stalin, who was loudly denouncing Britain’s lack of enthusiasm for a Second Front. Bombing Germany was the only “front” Churchill could offer. Likewise, the British public demanded retaliation after German air raids. Nevertheless, planes allocated to Coastal Command were sufficient to rid the Western Approaches of U-boats by the end of 1943.⁸

Thus, contrary to Revisionist History, Lindemann did not get everything he wanted. Churchill, as usual, made up his own mind. Paradoxically, Professor Capet adds, Lindemann’s role in the development of H2S enabled bombers to sink U-boats in vast numbers. “The postwar official history apportioned praise: ‘Cherwell did for Bomber Command what Tizard did for Fighter Command—he gave it the scientific means of becoming an effective instrument of war.’”⁹

The Bengal Famine

Mr. Gladwell next turns to the Bengal Famine, which broke out in autumn 1943. “Pleas for grain to relieve the famine went to Lindemann,” we are told, and “Lindemann said no.” Interviewed, Madhusree Mukerjee says Australian ships loaded with wheat sailed “right past India.” Churchill “was adamant that England could not help India.”

Whereas Lindemann played a key role in bombing policy, there is little to connect him with decisions on the Bengal Famine. Those involved the War Cabinet, the Ministers of Food and Transport, the fighting departments, and the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery. Lindemann is not prominent in War Cabinet discussions of India. Churchill, however, frequently expressed his sympathy for the suffering. A sample from the small mountain of evidence:

1943

• Churchill to the new Viceroy, Field Marshall Wavell, 8Oct43: Churchill enumerates Wavell’s duties: 1) defense of India from Japanese invasion and 2) “material and cultural conditions of the many peoples of India.” Churchill implores Wavell “to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good.”¹⁰

• Leo Amery, House of Commons, 12Oct43: Shipping was provided for “substantial imports of grain to India in order to meet prospects of serious shortage.” Despite a good spring harvest, another shortfall occurred. Britain is making “every effort to provide shipping, and considerable quantities of food grains are now arriving or are due to arrive before the end of the year.”¹¹

• Churchill to Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 4Nov43: Churchill thanks King for offering 100,000 tons of Canadian wheat, but this would compromise King’s shipments of Canadian timber and Chilean nitrate for the war effort. Canadian wheat would take “at least two months” to reach India. From Australia it would take only “three to four weeks.” So the War Cabinet is shipping wheat from Australia, adding the 100,000 extra tons.¹²

1944

• War Cabinet Conclusions, 14Feb44: Churchill is “most anxious that we should do everything possible to ease the Viceroy’s position.” But the Minister of War Transport says he cannot continue 50,000 tons a month of imported wheat. Instead he proposes sending Iraqi barley, “cutting the United Kingdom import programme.…”¹³ (Alas Indians refused to consume barley.)

• War Cabinet Conclusions, 24Apr44: India’s needs have grown to 724,000 tons, far beyond the latest shipment of 200,000, due to unseasonable weather and the loss of 45,000 tons in a Bombay explosion. Given the danger, “we should now apprise the United States of the seriousness of the position.” Churchill says the government will replace the 45,000 tons, but can provide further relief only “at the cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions.” At the same time “his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India.”¹⁴

Appeal to FDR

• Churchill to President Roosevelt, Personal Telegram, 29Apr44: “Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died…. I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more. I’ve had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India…. I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.”

Roosevelt replied that while the appeal had his “utmost sympathy,” the Joint Chiefs were unable to divert the necessary shipping.¹⁵

These are a few of the statements, letters, minutes and telegrams attesting to Churchill’s and the War Cabinet’s effort to ease the Bengal Famine. Together they provide overwhelming evidence. The Cabinet tried everything possible, in the midst of a war for survival. And it accomplished a great deal. Without that aid, the famine would have been worse.

What Churchill Believed  

“In wartime,” Revisionist History correctly states, “countries operate right at the brink.” There is scant evidence that Mr. Gladwell comprehends this. Ms. Mukerjee quotes Churchill in his war memoirs: India was “carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.” It is more illuminating to consider the rest of Churchill’s statement:

But all this is only the background upon which the glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma….

The loyalty of the Indian Army to the King-Emperor, the proud fidelity to their treaties of the Indian Princes, the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war….upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces, and by 1942 an Indian Army of one million was in being, and volunteers were coming in at the monthly rate of fifty thousand….the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.”¹⁶

Let us consider those fine words before labeling Churchill an unrepentant racist who hated Indians and was content to let them starve.

From Counterfactuals to Howlers

Revisionist History commits a number schoolboy howlers: “Throughout his life Churchill lost huge amounts on investments.” (No, he mainly lost in the Depression, like everybody else.) “There was no order to Churchill’s life.” (How could a life without order produce fifty books, 2000 articles, 5000 speeches, a Nobel Prize, and high office for half a century?) Churchill’s champagne cost “the modern equivalent of $62,000” in 1935. (Yes, but as a politician he entertained lavishly; it was part of his overhead.)

Counterfactuals abound: “Churchill hated Gandhi.” (At times perhaps, but they ended with mutual respect.¹⁷) Churchill becomes prime minister “just after the war breaks out.” (Nine months later.) “There should have been a proper debate about strategic bombing in the British War Cabinet.” (There was: see above.) “To an Englishman of that generation, the only living creature you’re allowed to show affection for is your dog.” (Churchill alone contradicts that.)

“Bombing innocent people,” an appalling practice, began with the Luftwaffe over Warsaw and Rotterdam. Most of the adults among those innocent people put Hitler in power. Most loved what he said about Jews and other Untermenschen, and sustained him to the end. The worst of them then claimed they were just following orders, or didn’t know what was going on. Give us, please, broader examples of innocent people.

“He sweetened English life”

Mr. Gladwell quotes C.P. Snow so liberally to condemn Churchill that it is necessary to correct the record.“Brilliant, but without judgment” was the common description of Churchill before the war. But judgment, Snow says, has two meanings:

The bad thing is the ability to sense what everyone else is thinking and think like them. This Churchill never had, and would have despised himself for having. But the good thing in “judgment” is the ability to think of many matters at once, in their interdependence, their relative importance and their consequences….Not many men in conservative Britain had such insight. He had. That was why he could keep us going when it came to war and we were alone. Where it mattered most, there he was right. And that is why we shall never deny our gratitude.¹⁸

Writing after Churchill’s death, Snow penned words “The Prime Minister and the Prof” doesn’t include. I warmly recommend them to its sponsors and producers, and to anyone whose lack of understanding leads them far afield:

It was Churchill’s own high-hearted behaviour that became the substance of his myth. People wanted something to admire that seemed to be slipping out of the grit of everyday. Whatever could be said against him, he had virtues, graces, style. Courage, magnanimity, loyalty, wit, gallantry—these were not often held up for admiration in our literature, or indeed depicted at all. He really had them. I believe that it was deep intuition which made people feel that his existence had after all sweetened English life.¹⁹

Endnotes

1. C.P. Snow (1905-1990), novelist and civil servant, technical director in the Ministry of Labour in WW2. At Harvard in 1960, Snow heavily criticized Lindemann in his wartime arguments over strategic bombing with Sir Henry Tizard.
2. See for example Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, India’s 1943 Famine Would Have Been Worse,” (review of Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War), in Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11, 50-51.
3. See Klaus Larres, “Churchill and Einstein: Overlapping Mindsets,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 22 November 2016.
4. Lord Birkenhead, The Prof in Two Worlds (London: Collins, 1961), 24.
5. “A Point of View: Beware of Experts,” BBC News Magazine, 9 December 2011.
6. Sir John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955. 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, I 145.
7. R.V. Jones, “Churchill and Science,” in Robert Blake & Wm. Roger Lewis, Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 437.
8. Antoine Capet, “Scientific Weaponry: How Churchill Encouraged the ‘Boffins’ and Defied the ‘Blimps,’ in The Churchillian, National Churchill Museum, Winter 2013, 13.
9. Ibid.
10. Martin Gilbert & Larry P. Arnn, The Churchill Documents, vol.19, Fateful Questions September 1943 to April 1944 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2017), 421.
11. Hansard, the Parliamentary Debates, ibid., 474-45
12. Churchill Papers 20/123, ibid., 784-85.
13. Cabinet Papers, 65/41. ibid., 1740-42.
14. Cabinet Papers, 65/42, ibid. 2553-54.
15. Churchill Papers, 20/163, ibid., 2587. Roosevelt to Churchill, 1 June 1944 in The Churchill Documents, vol. 20 (Hillsdale College Press: forthcoming).
16. Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1950, 181-82)
17. Richard M. Langworth, “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi,” The Weekly Standard, 21 July 2014.
18. C.P. Snow, “We Must Never Deny Our Gratitude,” Reader’s Digest, 26 February 1963, 67-71.
19. C.P. Snow, A Variety of Men (London: Macmillan, 1967), 129-30.

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“In High Places”: Munich, 1932

In “The Wilderness Years,” Robert Hardy faithfully captures Martin Gilbert’s image of Churchill in the Thirties: politically frustrated, less than effective as a father and a husband, worried over ominous developments in Germany—yet also enjoying his most productive decade as a writer and historian.

This defining excerpt is set in Munich on 30 August 1932, before Hitler gains power, as Churchill comes as close as he ever will to meeting Hitler face to face—amid sobering scenes of marching, chanting brownshirts singing Die Horst Wessel Lied.

Churchill has been touring the Danubian battlefields of the First Duke of Marlborough, whose biography he is writing. He is accompanied by his wife Clementine (Sian Phillips), their son Randolph (Nigel Havers), their daughter Sarah (Chloe Salaman), his close friend Frederick Lindemann, “The Prof” (played by David Swift). With them are Brigadier Packenham-Walsh who is drafting maps for Marlborough, and his wife (known to Churchill as “Mrs. P-W”).

At the hotel they are met by Randolph’s acquaintance and Hitler’s foreign press secretary, Harvard-educated Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (played very accurately by Roger Bizley). Putzi hopes to introduce Churchill to his boss.

Writer-director Ferdinand Fairfax takes liberties to shorten and dramatize what actually happened. Hitler (a very grim-looking Gunter Meisner) is shown in evening dress, apparently ready to sit down with the Churchills. But first he watches furtively from a distance, and then balefully gazes through the restaurant window, catching the eye of the ever-curious Prof, who signals Hanfstaengl. Putzi tries to fetch Hitler, but is furiously turned away.

Here is what really happened. Hanfstaengl left the restaurant in mid-meal in search of the Fuhrer, who he found near his Munich apartment. “Herr Hitler,” he said, “don’t you realise the Churchills are sitting in the restaurant?…They are expecting you for coffee and will think this a deliberate insult.” Hitler said he was unshaven and had too much to do. “What on earth would I talk to him about?,” he added. “They say he is a rabid Francophile. What part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” Hanfstaengl replied: “People say the same about you.”

Fairfax neatly gets around all this with the brief, dramatic scene we see here. True to fact, Churchill makes his famous declaration about the pitfalls of anti-Semitism, not to Hitler, but to his press secretary.

Putzi Hanfstaengl is considered reliable. Suave and westernized, he tried to exert a moderating influence, but fell out of favor in 1936. Suspecting he was marked for assassination by Goebbels, he left Germany in 1937 and wound up in the United States, where he advised Roosevelt on the Nazi regime. The anecdote is based on his 1957 book, Hitler: The Missing Years, and corroborates Churchill’s The Gathering Storm.

“Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me,” Churchill cutely wrote. In the film he says he would be glad to meet Hitler in London, but alas the Fuhrer—er—never quite got there. “Later on, when he was all-powerful,” Churchill added, “I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.”

This episode begins with a poignant scene between Winston and Clementine which neatly defines their marriage—one of deep mutual devotion, but needing periods of separation from time to time, lest the high-strung Clemmie collapse from the pressure. Winston longs for a closer relationship; Clementine says he should have married Goonie (Lady Gwendolyne Bertie, his sister-in-law). She wishes he would be content with things as they are.

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.