The Greeks are still not laughing about their mid-1940s civil war, so levity may be inappropriate. Nor was at the time was Winston Churchill. “There is a lot of ruin in any nation,” he once mused. In Athens, 1944, Britain was “responsible for building up the nest of cockatrices for EAM [communist partisans] in Greece.” (His vocabulary was broad: A cockatrice is a mythical, two-legged dragon or serpent-like creature with a cock’s head.)

Nevertheless, the peace deal Churchill brokered between warring Greeks in 1944 had so many hilarious moments that, 75 years later, we may be permitted to indulge in lighter aspects. The previous post (“Antithesis of Democracy,” Athens, 1944) drew much comment and several asked about these episodes. So here we go.

Moscow, October 1944: the “Naughty Paper”

Well-known is the background to Churchill’s Greek excursion. It began with what he in his war memoirs called the “Naughty Paper.” This was the “percentages agreement” with Stalin in their Moscow talks (the Tolstoy Conference,  9-19 October 1944). The deal was to grant Britain preponderant influence in Allied-occupied Greece, a scheme Stalin honored, for awhile. (Stalin began meddling in Greece after Churchill was out of office.) The Soviets made no move to interfere when Churchill flew to Athens to broker a truce between communist and royalist insurgents. Churchill recalled in his memoirs:

The moment was apt for business, so I said, “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans…. How would it do for you to have 90% predominance in Roumania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” While this was being translated I wrote [it] out on a half-sheet of paper…. I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation….

We were only dealing with immediate war-time arrangements. All larger questions were reserved on both sides for what we then hoped would be a peace table when the war was won. After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length I said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.” “No, you keep it,” said Stalin.

Athens, December 1944: “Missed again”

Churchill was much criticized over the “Naughty Paper.” It was said (omitting the context) that he and Stalin were dividing the Balkans between them. From the record it is clear he was only trying to avoid conflicts between occupying forces. Confident, therefore, in Stalin’s approval of Britain’s “90% of the say,” he sent troops to “hold and dominate Athens…with bloodshed if necessary.” Then on Christmas 1944, forsaking family holiday celebrations, he personally flew there to mediate.

Churchill stationed himself in HMS Ajax, anchored in strife-torn Piraeus, the harbor for Athens. (Ajax was famous for her part in pursuit and scuttling of the Graf Spee in 1939.) The Piraeus was ringed with smoke and gunfire. Churchill, as usual, was disdainful of danger. A secretary recalled him chortling “Missed again!” when rebel gunners sent shells hurtling toward the ship.

Ajax‘s Captain John Cuthbert said, “I hope, sir, that while you are with us we shan’t have to open fire.” Churchill was only amused. “Pray remember, Captain, that I come here as a cooing dove of peace, bearing a sprig of mistletoe in my beak—but far be it from me to stand in the way of military necessity.”

Risky encounters

Churchill drove in an armored car to meet the opposing sides. Bullets were flying, and he asked his private secretary Jock Colville if he had a pistol. “I certainly had my own.” At the British Embassy a young officer, Robert Mathew, greeted him amidst rifle fire. Mathew shoved him inside and they landed in heap.

“Do you normally push prime ministers around?” Churchill asked.

“Sir, I’d rather have an angry prime minister than a dead one.”

WSC: “What did you say your name was?”

“Mathew, sir.”

“Any relation to General Charles?”

“My father, sir.”

Churchill softened: “We charged together at Omdurman.” Robert was later Member of Parliament for Honiton, 1955-66.*

He parleyed in an unheated room lit by hurricane lamps, reminding both sides of Greece’s fame and majesty. “Whether Greece is a monarchy or a republic is a matter for Greeks and Greeks alone to decide,” he told them. “All we wish you is good, and good for all.” Somehow, for the time being, he pulled it off. Both sides drew back, accepting Archbishop Damaskinos as Regent of Greece.

“Man of God or scheming prelate?”

I have this from a reliable source, the late Bill Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review. Bill passed it along from Henry Anatole Grunwald, later editor-in-chief of Time and U.S. Ambassador to his native Austria. In 1965, Grunwald edited one of the finest tributes to Sir Winston, Churchill: The Life Triumphant. 

Grunwald learned the story from a reporter in Athens, 1944. It’s double hearsay, of course, but likely reliable. Churchill was welcomed in Greece by Lt. Gen. Sir Ronald Scobie, the British officer commanding. The PM had never met the Archbishop, and was curious about him, asking:

“Who is this Damaskinos? Is he a man of God, or a scheming prelate more interested in the combinations of temporal power than in the life hereafter?”

Scobie replied: “I think the latter, Prime Minister.”

Churchill said: “Good, that’s our man.”

The Funny Party

At 7pm on Christmas Day Damaskinos was piped aboard Ajax to meet Churchill. Six feet tall, he wore  a headdress that raised him nearly another foot.  Churchill’s naval aide Cdr. Tommy Thompson then recalled “a dramatic and entirely unforeseen development.” To his horror he saw advancing towards them the ship’s “Funny Party.”

A Christmas-time custom in the Royal Navy is a group of sailors careering about in extravagant fancy dress. They make rounds of the ship, occasionally throwing a one of their number overboard. The first of these Damaskinos met was a man in a curly-brimmed bowler, a large white hunting stock, a tiepin in the shape of a gold fox, and a false nose. He had a glass of gin in each hand and was leading others similarly attired. Thompson recalled:

There they stood—a hula-hula “girl” with a grass skirt and a brassiere with winking red and green lights on either side; the clown Coco; Charlie Chaplin; and three other equally bizarre characters with grotesquely blackened faces…. When they caught sight of Archbishop Damaskinos they concluded with grudging admiration that the Commander…had produced someone far funnier than they were—a rival one-man Funny Party. They gaped unbelievingly at the Archbishop with his immense black beard, his tall hat, and his long robes. Then they howled with laughter.

The sailors advanced upon what they beheld as a fellow celebrant, with every intention of tossing him over the side. They were dissuaded with difficulty, and the cleric in ruffled dignity went on to his meeting with Churchill. “From the look of utter incredulity on his face it was quite clear that the Archbishop thought he was imprisoned in a gathering of lunatics.”

His Beatitude and “Plaster-arse”

After the meeting Damaskinos went to his stateroom for a rest. Between Churchill and the Funny Party, he probably needed it. Someone remarked that he secured himself from interruption by hanging a notice on his door: “His Beatitude is at prayer.”

Churchill said: “I’d like to try that at Downing Street, but I’m afraid no one would believe it.”

After the deal with Damaskinos, Greek King George II reluctantly approved his Regency. The contentious prime minister Georgios Papandreou resigned in favor of General Nikolaos Plastiras and a ceasefire ended the fighting. Churchill left Athens satisfied that he had saved the peace and kept Greece non-communist. Typically, however, the Prime Minister couldn’t get his tongue around foreign pronunciations. The General’s name is pronounced “Plah-steer’-as,” but Churchill, impeded by his lisp, couldn’t manage it. He finally settled for a more congenial and easy-to-pronounce moniker: “General Plaster-arse.”

* N.B.

Robert Mathew’s story was told by his son David to Bruce Anderson, who related it in The Spectator, 12 December 2020, p. 162.

Revision and redraft

We are asked: “As I recall Churchill labeled his manuscripts something like “draft,” “almost final draft” and “final draft.” Do you recall what those categories were?”

We cannot establish that he routinely used those labels. Instead he tended to use “revise” or “revision.” Frequently his finished draft was marked “final revise.” It often took a long time before, with a sigh of relief, his private office staff reached that point. But the amount of revision varied with the project.

Whether the product was profound or simple, his first iteration was close to the mark. Grace Hamblin, a longtime secretary, recalled: “His dictation wasn’t difficult because it was very, very slow and he weighed his words. As one knows he had a tremendous command of the English language, but he didn’t use it loosely. He considered very carefully what he was going to say.”

Articles

Churchill’s articles saw less revision than his books and speeches. He wrote over 2000, notably in the 1930s, when constant income was needed to sustain his expensive lifestyle. In Artillery of Words, Frederick Woods wrote that some articles “were unashamed potboilers [which] sometimes sank to the level of ‘Are there Men on the Moon?’ and ‘Life under the Microscope.’” But others, like “Mass Effects in Modern Life” and “What Good’s a Constitution?” were profound reflections on statesmanship and government—both of the present, and (with some foreboding) the future. In Churchill Style, Barry Singer notes that during his 1931-32 North American lecture tour, Churchill contracted for twenty-two magazine articles. Ultimately “they would generate income in excess of £40,000.”

Michael Wolff, in a thoughtful introduction to Churchill’s Collected Essays, says his articles offer “the authentic Churchill in a way that can otherwise only be captured in his speeches.” His method of composition didn’t vary, Wolff writes. But assembling a major history or memoir was far removed “from the original Churchillian utterances as he dictated the first paragraphs in the middle of the night perhaps many months before…. But Churchill was never a dull man, was almost incapable of writing or speaking a dull sentence, and his ideas were nearly always imaginative.”

“Delayed-fuse chortle”

Robert Lewis Taylor’s excellent biography, Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness (1952), highlights another purpose of Churchill’s articles—influencing public opinion: For magazines in England and America, Taylor wrote,

he spoke up with authority on subjects high and low, but always at high prices. Collier’s was the outlet for most of his American articles. He struck some provocative notes. In one issue he casually predicted the return of silent movies, basing his stand on the enjoyment he recently had derived from a film of Charlie Chaplin’s. The piece was, in fact, substantially a minute biography of the comedian, with side lights on pantomime, then and now. Churchill gave credit for the art to the Emperor Augustus, and added that “Nero practiced it, as he wrote poetry, as a relaxation from the more serious pursuits of lust, incendiarism and gluttony.”

Many Collier’s readers took the notion, right or wrong, that the great statesman was hitting his ripest vein—a kind of genteel, delayed-fuse chortle—in the pages of the popular weekly. The humor that would seem ill timed in a history of war, or a treatise on his father, often sprang into joyous life in his rapid-fire potboilers.

Social media, 1930s style

Today, people read more social media than lengthy articles. Similarly, Churchill noticed the “popular press” replacing long newspaper columns of speech transcripts. After the First World War, wrote Michael Wolff,

it was not enough to appeal to the country through verbatim reports of speeches in the columns of The Times or the Morning Post…. Churchill felt that he had to address himself directly to the new electorate, taking the battle against Socialism and Communism straight into working-class homes…. So it is that we find him writing in a new style for popular Sunday newspapers [and] in the years leading up to the Second World War, for the News of the World and the Sunday Chronicle as well…. But more than anything, Churchill—rejected, as it seemed, by the “establishment”—needed a new audience and a new political base….

Does that not remind us of the Twitter and Facebook campaigns of modern politicians? Some, apparently, are as aware of the changing face of communication as Churchill was a century ago.

Speeches

Churchill took more pains with his speeches than his articles. Once he told his grandson they required “one hour of prep for each minute of delivery.” That was normally an exaggeration, though his great war speeches might have taken that kind of time. He dictated, as secretaries took his words in shorthand. Typed drafts saw revision after revision. Finally came “Speech Form,” with each passage picked out by indents. Grace Hamblin remembered that

the difficulty was to know which word he really meant you to put down. You would hear him mutter so often the same phrase in a different way. You could easily put him out if you entered a line in the wrong place. Also he had a way of shortening his words. “Ch of Exch” meant Chancellor of the Exchequer, but “C of E” meant Church of England. I once transposed them. My most notable mistake was when he’d dictated “tenure of office” and I wrote “ten years of office”…. You can imagine what he said about that!

Books

Churchill constantly revised his books, before, during, and after publication. Inevitably they went through multiple impressions, issues and editions, so he had ample opportunity. Frederick Woods wrote:

Revise would follow revise, eventually to become a “Final Revise”; this title, however, rarely fulfilled its promise. More often than not “Overtake Corrections” then began to arrive, sometimes even after the presses had started running. For his memoirs of the Second World War, this complex process resulted in a situation whereby Volumes II and IV had, respectively, two and three complete and variant texts.”

This writer remembers another secretary, Elizabeth Nel, saying, “We all heaved a sigh of relief when asked to type the ‘final revise.’” But that wasn’t the end of it. The publishers heaved an even bigger sigh after waves of “overtakes.” Jock Colville, a personal private secretary, said WSC was one of the few authors for whom publishers tolerated two or three complete reprints of page proofs.

Further reading

Richard M. Langworth, “How Churchill Saw the Future: Prescient Essays from Thoughts and Adventures.”

Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill’s Collected Works.”

Justin D. Lyons, “Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government by Dr. Larry P. Arnn.”

Video: Dr. Larry P. Arnn, “Churchill as a Defender of Constitutionalism.”

“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.

My friend Steve Hayward had the wit to paraphrase, in reaction to the arrival of Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, some comments about another incoming PM, eighty years ago next May. “Cambridge Cute,” says another friend of Steve’s good piece.

Speaking of Cambridge Cuties, I immediately thought of what Andrew Roberts described as “The Respectable Tendency,” the British establishment, in his great book, Eminent Churchilllians.  So I dug into the sources to find more of what they said back then about the new Prime Minister. (Lightly paraphrased.)

“Coup of the rabble…”

“Even whilst the new PM was still at Buckingham Palace kissing hands, the junior private secretary and Chamberlain’s PPS, Lord Dunglass [Alec Douglas-Home] joined Rab Butler and ‘Chips’ Channon at the Foreign Office. And there they drank in champagne the health of the ‘King over the Water’ (not King Leopold, but Mr. Chamberlain).”

“Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history…. The sudden coup of the rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one. The ‘pass had been sold’ with a weak surrender to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.”

“Since the new PM came in, the House of Commons had stunk in the nostrils of the decent people. The kind of people surrounding him are the scum and the peak [bottom? -RML] came when Brendan [Bracken] was made a Privy Counsellor! For what services rendered heaven knows. The PM’s adventurism is suspect, and his promotion of those  in whom he detected the buccaneering spirit, doubly alarming.”

“A bright blue suit, cheap and sensational looking…”

“He has not put his own henchmen in the highest offices. That does not prevent his detractors from convincing themselves otherwise. Butler is one of a number who contend with the fact that they are serving in an administration led by the man they have spent the best part of a decade briefing against and cat-calling.”

“His appointment sent a cold chill down the spines of the staff at 10 Downing Street…. Our feelings were widely shared in the Cabinet Offices, the Treasury and throughout Whitehall. Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment…so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified.”

“He sees no way of putting his ideas into practice at present and is not ashamed of admitting the fact. Lloyd George was afterwards offered the Ministry of Agriculture (for which the cheap press has always tipped him). He refused it because he thinks the country is in a hopeless position and he is generally despondent.”

Jock Colville: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government. But of course Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive, and should be able to get things done….”

Retrospective

Thus spake the Respectable Tendency of new Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940. Flash forward seventy-nine years. Nobody, of course, knows what Mr. Johnson will make of his honorable and ancient office. Friends of Britain must wish him well. What happens now is up to him. But opinion can change rapidly.

Back in 1940 Jock Colville soon shed his cheap blue suit. June 1940 found him in conservative pinstripes, an ardent admirer of his new Prime Minister. Correctly he surmised that the PM’s administration would “get things done.”

On getting things done today, refer to a thoughtful piece by John O’Sullivan on the now-nearly-complete Johnson Cabinet.

We report, you decide. And for historical perspective on the British establishment in days gone by, read Andrew Roberts’ book.