N.B. March 2021: The original post contains author Clark’s response, which is about the most cordial reply to a grumpy review I’ve ever read. He kindly takes heed of my criticisms and says he will attend to them in the paperback in due course. RML

Churchill’s Britain abridged

I did want to like this book. Having hosted ten tours of Churchill’s Britain, we’ve long hoped for a comprehensive travel guide to all the places in what Lady Soames called “The Saga.” But some improvements are needed to this one, to make it truly helpful.

The first thing one notices is: no photos. How can a book discuss Churchill’s Britain without depicting it? There is no admission information on places open to the public. The index is unhelpful. It lists names but not venues—not even London or Chartwell. To find, say, Ditchley, you have to know it’s in Oxfordshire. (Its map location is buried in the gutter—the maps are double-page spreads.) When you do get to what you want, you find that coverage is often sparse. Woodstock is there for Blenheim Palace; but nothing about its famous haunt the Bear Hotel, or Lord Randolph Churchill’s constituency, which drew young Winston’s close interest.

Churchill’s Britain says the West Country holds few places of interest. Yet a 1996 Churchill tour spent four days there, visiting places associated with Marlboroughs and Churchills. They included Round Chimneys, birthplace of the first Sir Winston; Little Churchill Farm, where the family had its earliest beginnings; Great Trill, birthplace of the First Duke of Marlborough; Ashe House, where Sir Winston thought the Duke was born; and other private homes and churches. Churchill’s Britain does mention Plymouth and Bristol University. Portland gets half a page, but omits the drama of Churchill sending the King’s ships to sea before the 1914 war.

Churchill’s London

London, to which Churchill’s Britain devotes 100 pages, receives good coverage but many omissions. I couldn’t find the Albert Hall or Guildhall, though lesser speech sites are included. In Hyde Park, we find nothing on the old London Magazine (right).

The two London chapters are organized by postal code: SW1 and “everything else.” So to find Winston’s nanny’s grave, you must know the City of London Cemetery is in NW12. From his office at Ministry of Munitions (Hotel Métropole), Churchill gazed with ominous thoughts on Armistice Day 1918. Where is it in Churchill’s Britain? You’ll find it if you can find “Northumberland Avenue” (not in the index).

Clubs and Eateries

Here too is the National Liberal Club (actually on Whitehall Place), celebrated haunt of the young Winston. A more precise account of this and nearby venues is on Hillsdale’s walking tour of Churchill’s Whitehall. The book omits most of Sir Winston’s clubs: Boodles, Bucks, the Reform, the Athenaeum. I could not find the Savoy Hotel’s Pinafore Room, home of The Other Club.

Whitehall is well covered, but omits the former Carlton Hotel (now New Zealand House), where WSC dined on the eve of war in 1914, and Ho Chi Minh cooked his vegetables. Included is the Foreign Office, where he didn’t serve, but not the Colonial Office, where he did. To its credit, Churchill’s Britain contains most of WSC’s residences (so long as you know the postal code), missing only four or five.

Round the Island

The 2019 Hillsdale College cruise circumnavigated Churchill’s Britain, passing or visiting many historic locations. The book omits several key ones. In Broadstairs, Kent, young Marigold Churchill died and WSC observed the planning for D-Day. Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough, Yorkshire were shelled by the Germans 1914, causing Churchill’s violent reaction. All go unmentioned.

Creditably Churchill’s Britain addresses all four of Churchill’s Parliamentary constituencies: Oldham, Manchester North West, Dundee and Epping/Woodford. But the discussion of Woodford (1945-64) mainly involves its underwhelming statue of him, not his long career there. The book misses St. Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, where a fine Nemon statue broods over the Channel. Statues are not the book’s forte, and are unindexed. Fortunately, there are good books on Churchill as MP for Dundee and Woodford.

Scotland

The Scottish coverage is somewhat uneven. Dirleton, East Lothian, an Asquith residence where Churchill was offered the Admiralty, goes unmentioned. Nevertheless there’s room for a mythical, story involving another Asquith abode, Slains Castle. Here, we are told, Violet Asquith nearly died of grief when she heard that Winston was going to marry that “ornamental sideboard,” Clementine Hozier. Peter Clark doesn’t, however, fall for the canard that the despairing Violet tried to throw herself from the cliffs.

Clementine’s ancestral home, Airlie Castle, is omitted, and other Scottish connections. A book more about people than places should include WSC’s friend Molly, Duchess of Buccleuch, who once informed him that Chamberlain was coming to speak.  “It doesn’t matter where you put [his podium],” Churchill advised her, “as long as he has the sun in his eyes and the wind in his teeth.”

Edinburgh needs more attention for Churchill’s early drive for devolution (long before it was fashionable); his visits to Scottish statesmen; the German Fleet surrender in 1919; his Freedom of the City in 1946. In Dundee, the story turns mainly on how he was pushed out of office by a Prohibitionist in 1922—never mind that he won five previous elections, one joyfully described by Luigi Barzini. Scapa Flow in the Orkneys is barely mentioned, with nothing about the tragic sinking of HMS Royal Oak, and how the Churchill Barriers prevented further attacks.

Still room for more

Martin Gilbert, on our second Churchill Tour, spoke of “Churchill’s London,” a lecture happily still online. Stefan Buczacki, in the Churchill Companion, admirably listed all of Churchill’s residences, owned, leased and borrowed. Sir Martin had long wanted to publish a book entitled, Churchill’s London in Maps and Photographs. Alas he didn’t have the time, and a truly comprehensive guide to Churchill’s Britain remains to be written. Peter Clark has opened the case for one, and may yet be heard from again.

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.

Among the more pernicious distortions of Churchill’s record is that he was a lifetime opponent of rights for women, including their right to vote. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 2….

In 1999 Time magazine explained that Churchill could not be “Person of the Century” because he “bulldoggedly opposed women’s rights.” In 2012 London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: “Churchill believed that women shouldn’t vote, telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.’”

As I show in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Churchill never said those words, in or out of Parliament. He did write something similar in 1897, a private note when he was 23. Yet as a politician (from 1901 on), he never campaigned against women’s suffrage, and changed his youthful attitude. Today, we would say he “evolved.”

Remember that in 1897, more British women were opposed to suffrage than for it. Neither of Churchill’s parents supported it. His wife Clementine did, and as a young MP, Winston agreed with her. But his support cooled during the 1906 election campaign. Here he encountered the formidable suffrage leaders Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst.

“Henpecked”

At one rally, Christabel interrupted so frequently that she was hauled into court and fined. Churchill offered to pay her fine; she heatedly refused and spent a week in jail. Young Winston was not amused. “I am certainly not going to be henpecked,” he said. Any more of this, he added, and he would not vote for suffrage in the new Parliament.

He did oppose a 1910 bill extending the vote to female heads of household, but his reason was tactical. As a Liberal, he feared that most of these would be propertied women who voted Conservative. This was quite less than his Prime Minister, Asquith, who opposed votes for women seriatim. In 1928, when Parliament extended the vote to all women over 21, Churchill expressed fear in cabinet that it would increase the Labour vote at the expense of Conservatives. While these may be considered petty objections, a century later some politicians resist immigration reforms they think will increase another party’s vote. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Women in War

With the advent of World War I in 1914 domestic arguments, including women’s suffrage and Irish Home Rule, were set aside. In 1918, with Churchill’s support, Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, enfranchising women over thirty who met minimum property qualifications. Churchill supported this reform, in part because of his observations of the role women had played in the war.

In Churchill’s view, women had been the moral backbone of the country; their work had been vital. They might not have fought in the trenches, but they drove vehicles almost to the front lines, served in field hospitals, took men’s places in war industries. A few served as spies and paid with their lives. That, Churchill wrote, enshrined for them “the vote which for so many years they had vainly sought to wrest from successive Governments by methods too often suggesting that they had not the civic sense to use the privilege rightly.”

Again in World War II, Churchill was deeply moved by the efforts of British women. To his former private secretary, John Colville, he said: “When I think what women did in the war I feel sure they deserve to be treated equally.” Colville recalled the “astonishment” when Churchill said he hoped that Churchill College, founded as a national memorial to him, would admit women on equal terms with men. “No college at Oxford or Cambridge had ever done any such thing,” Colville wrote. “I asked him afterwards if this had been Clementine’s idea. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and I support it.’” He had, indeed, evolved from 1897. 

In Sum

When Churchill entered politics in 1900, seven million men had the vote; when he died, thirty-six million men and women had it. In 1945, Churchill cited “the will of the people expressed by free and fair election on the basis of universal suffrage.”

Contrary, then, to the imprecations of Time and others who have not done their homework, Churchill was not against rights of women at any time in the 20th century. His hesitations in 1905-12 arose when militant women tried to break up his speeches. He was against certain measures at certain times, for tactical reasons—unlike, say, Asquith, who opposed the very principle.

Churchill’s support for women’s rights was less ideological than his wife’s, though she was certainly an influence. In part, too, it stemmed from political common sense. In 1945, for example, the Labour margin of victory was 19% among males but just 2% among females. “Papa supported votes for women,” said his daughter, Lady Soames, “when he realized how many women would vote for him.”

World War I…

is another rich source of Churchill mythology. We are told that he bungled the defense of Antwerp in 1914; caused the deaths of thousands in the Dardanelles campaign; steered the Lusitania into the path of a German submarine; wanted America to keep out of the war; and supported the use of poison gas. Every one of these accusations is utter fantasy—including the outrageous allegation that Churchill was hell-bent for war in 1914. Continued in Part 4…

Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

“Saving the Nations from Hell”: The “Kingly Conference,” 1914 (Excerpt)

(Read more at Hillsdale College Churchill Project)

Churchill’s faith in personal diplomacy—solving intractable problems by meetings at the highest level—was famously expressed during World War II.

Less widely known is Churchill’s 1914 proposal for a conference of heads of state (including, it seems, French President Raymond Poincaré) in an effort to head-off World War I. The scheme failed, but not for Churchill’s lack of trying.

There is little on Churchill’s “kingly conference” in the literature. There is no reference in Churchill’s The World Crisis, Asquith’s memoirs, or biographies by Manchester, Jenkins, Rose, Charmley and Birkenhead, though Sir Martin Gilbert includes in the official biography an excerpt from a cabinet member which records Churchill’s words in the cabinet of July 27th:

Churchill said we were now in a better than average condition, & the fleet was at war strength….Churchill, however, added: it was an appalling calamity for civilised nations to contemplate & thought possibly sovereigns could be brought together for sake of Peace. [1]

Although there is evidence that the principal powers were willing to participate, Churchill’s proposal was dashed. On July 28th he wrote his wife Clementine from the Admiralty, expressing his continued wish for peace:

I cannot feel that we in this island are in any serious degree responsible for the wave of madness which has swept the mind of Christendom. No one can measure the consequences. I wondered whether those stupid Kings and Emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was somebody else’s operation! [2]

Endnotes

1. Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, volume 3, The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 1971), 10.

2. WSC to his wife (CSC Papers), Tuesday, 28 July 1914, in Randolph S. Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Document Volume 5, At the Admiralty 1911-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 1989-90.

Llanelli and the Railway Strike: concluded from Part 1…

Throughout the August 1911 railway strike, troops stood by. Their orders were to interfere only against threats to public security. But there was another reason why anxiety ran high at that time. A few weeks earlier, the Germans had sent a gunboat to Agadir, French Morocco. Rumors of war with Germany were rampant. David Lloyd George said the Agadir Crisis was a threat to peace. The Germans, he warned, “would not hesitate to use the [strike] paralysis,,,to attack Britain.” Paul Addison, in Churchill on the Home Front, described the public mood. A simultaneous national railways stoppage alarmed the nation. Fear of German subversion also worried Churchill:

He was also informed by Guy Granet, the general manager of the Midland Railways, of allegations that labour leaders were receiving payments from a German agent….Conservatives applauded him for taking decisive action. But there were loud protests from the Labour party and left-wing Liberals, who accused him of imposing the army on local authorities against their will, and introducing troops into peaceful and law-abiding districts.

“Guilty with an Explanation”

What Churchill’s critics could not see, Ted Morgan wrote, “was the number of saved, and the number of tragedies averted. In their drunken frenzy, the Llanelli rioters had wrought more havoc and shed more blood and produced more serious injury than all the fifty thousand soldiers all over the country.”

After the deaths at Llanelli, Churchill was roundly condemned and the Manchester Guardian, which had praised him after Tonypandy, now turned against him. Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party, accused Churchill and Prime Minister Asquith of “deliberately sending soldiers to shoot and kill strikers.” That exaggeration has endured for a century. Yet Churchill in August 1911 was clear in the House of Commons. “There can be no question of the military forces of the crown intervening in a labour dispute.”

Why did they at Llanelli? Defending himself in a handwritten letter to a Manchester Liberal colleague, Churchill considered both sides of the argument:

The progress of a democratic country is bound up with the maintenance of order. The working classes would be almost the only sufferers from an outbreak of riot & a general strike if it c[oul]d be effective would fall upon them & their families with its fullest severity. At the same time the wages now paid are too low and the rise in the cost of living (due mainly to the increased gold supply) makes it absolutely necessary that they sh[oul]d be raised. a I believe the Government is now strong enough to secure an improvement in social conditions without failing in its primary duties.

 Old Men Remember

Among those interviewed by the BBC fifty-five years later for their memories of Tonypandy was W.H. (Will) Mainwaring, one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields, who was subsequently co-author of a famous pamphlet, The Miners’ Next Step. Over fifty years later he still spoke with pride of his record as a strike leader.

Of Churchill’s decision to send troops into the Rhondda in 1910, Mainwaring said on camera:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Sources:

BBC documentary: The Long Street: Road to Pandy Square (1965)

Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 250-52, and correspondence with the author, 2014.

Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (London: British Academy, 1981), 96.

 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2, Young Statesman 1901-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 385-86.

Ted Morgan, Churchill: The Rise to Failure 1874-1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 328.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ‘Among innumerable false, unmoved;

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;

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

continued in part 2…