Q: Who coined the a half-breed insult?

Didn’t one or more of Churchill’s detractors use this slur to criticize him? Google is no help. Surely you know? —S.B., Cleveland

A: Rab Butler

My colleague Michael McMenamin summarizes the answer to your question:

In his controversial book, A Republic, Not an Empire, American news commentator Pat Buchanan joined with England’s John Charmley to argue that it would have been better for Britain to make an honorable peace with Germany in 1940….

Charmley…attributes it to Churchill’s rhetorical skills and concludes with negative references to WSC’s “theatricality” [by Alexander Cadogan] and his “disorderly mind” [by Lord Halifax]. He repeats “Rab” Butler’s view of Churchill as “the greatest adventurer of modern political history,” Lord Hankey’s description of him as “a rogue elephant,” and John Colville’s memorable “half-breed American.”

“Winston and his rabble”

John Colville was quoting Richard Austin “Rab” Butler, then on the Foreign Policy Committee. He initially shared Butler’s doubts. His view on 10 May 1940 is worth quoting in full, since many elite Conservatives shared it:

7.15 PM: Alec [Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass] and I went over to the Foreign Office to explain the position to Rab, and there, with Chips [Channon] we 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. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed.

He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the “pass had been sold” by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

A civil servant, Colville was then assigned to the new prime minister, though three days later his opinion hadn’t changed: “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.”

Some opinion changed

Yet even then, Colville was beginning to soften. “It must be admitted,” he wrote in his diary, “that Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive; and men like Duff Cooper, Eden, Lord Lloyd and Herbert Morrison should be able to get things done.”

Churchill made Butler President of the Board of Education, his first cabinet-level position, on 20 July 1941—only to wax apoplectic when he found Butler had been in touch with the Swedes about a possible truce with Hitler. Historian Andrew Roberts believes it was Butler who kept Lord Halifax open to a compromise peace long after the Cabinet had backed Churchill’s determination to fight on. Yet he kept Butler on until 1945.

Churchill insiders tended to look upon Butler as an opportunist with no particular loyalties. Speaking in 1985, WSC’s last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was typical. Relating Butler’s “half-breed” comment, he referred to Rab as someone “who was later to achieve great prominence in this country, but in my view no true fame.”

“The Respectable Tendency”

Michael McMenamin, in his and Curt Zoller’s seminal book on Churchill and Bourke Cockran, reflected again on Churchill’s reputation among what Andrew Roberts called “the Respectable Tendency” of the Conservative Party. The Tories who disdained Churchill were similar to those American aristocrats who disparaged Theodore Roosevelt:

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, explaining why her father disliked Churchill, takes on added significance: “Because they were so alike.” Which indeed they were: well-known writers before they were politicians, impulsive risk takers, soldiers and accomplished speakers. One was called a “cowboy” by his detractors, the other a “half-breed American.” Both eventually held their country’s highest office and each was a Nobel Prize winner—giants of their time.

“Mettle”

The historian Graham Stewart summarizes the High Tory attitude toward Churchill as he replaced Chamberlain—just in time, as it happened—in May 1940. Commenting on Butler, Dunglass and Channon drinking the health of the deposed Chamberlain, Stewart writes:

The cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had a better claim to being aristocratic than many of those who affected to look down on him. Dunglass would inherit an earldom, but Butler was primarily wealthy because he had married into the Courtauld family, the same path that Channon—a half-breed American—had taken into the Guinness family.

So it went for a few weeks after Churchill took over. The more fair-minded among the Respectable Tendency eventually changed their minds. Some of the others never quite did. The former saw in Churchill a quality he himself cited when asked for the most important characteristic of a statesman: “Mettle.”

Related reading

“The Respectable Tendency and the New PM, 1940-2019,” 2019.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Consistency: ‘Politics before Country,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“Barbara Leaming’s Churchill Defiant: Still the Best on Churchill Postwar,” 2022.

The source of this quote is the journalist C.L. Sulzberger (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, The Last of the Giants, page 304. In it Sulzberger reports his “five hours with old Winston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberger, thought Stalin “a great man, above all compared to Khruschev and Bulganin,” and quoted Churchill as follows:

Stalin never broke his word to me. We agreed on the Balkans. I said he could have Rumania and Bulgaria; he said we could have Greece (of course, only in our sphere, you know). He signed a slip of paper. And he never broke his word. We saved Greece that way. When we went in in 1944 Stalin didn’t interfere. You Americans didn’t help, you know.

Sulzberger was a reliable reporter, so the source although hearsay, is credible. As a  gauge of Churchill’s final view of Stalin, it is more problematic.

By 1956 Churchill was an aged 81, out of power and still smarting over his failure to achieve a summit conference with the Russians. (Eisenhower held one almost immediately after Churchill left office, saying, privately. that he feared “Winston might give away the store.”) Churchill had long argued for a three-power meeting and “settlement” with the Russians, based on the brand of personal diplomacy he’d practiced with Stalin during World War II.

Stalin and the “Percentages Agreement”

In saying Stalin never broke his word, Churchill referred to the much misrepresented “naughty paper.” This was the “percentages agreement” with Stalin in their Moscow talks (Tolstoy Conference,  9-19 October 1944)—which Stalin did honor. The Soviets made no move to interfere when Churchill flew to Athens to broker a truce between communist and nationalist insurgents. Stalin began meddling in Greece after Churchill was out of office. He met stiff resistance from President Truman.

After the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill said he thought he could trust Stalin. His success in Greece was fresh in his mind, and Stalin had promised free elections in Poland. Within a month Churchill admitted, in correspondence with Roosevelt, that he’d been wrong. Even in the immediate aftermath of Yalta, on 23 February 1945, he wondered, after Germany’s defeat, “what will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?” (John Colville, Fringes of Power, 563).

It is fair to say that Churchill believed Stalin had not broken his word through 1944. To some extent his 1956 remark to Sulzberger was meant to contrast what Churchill saw as the giant figure of Stalin. But trust in Stalin was certainly not something Churchill expressed often after 1945. In the end, I doubt that he had very much.

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (3 March 1949) Churchill predicted the fall of communism, fueled by “a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.” Jock Colville told me that WSC said to him: “I won’t live to see it, but you will.” Colville died in 1987. He didn’t quite make it.

Churchill is misquoted as saying—with reference to the Nazis versus the Soviets—‘We butchered [or slaughtered] the wrong pig.’ The implication: he should have fought Stalin, not Hitler. This seems to me revisionist wishful thinking. He could never have said that, since there is no such idiom in English. He would have had to say, “We fought the wrong enemy.” Can you reveal some authentic information as to the origin of this misquotation?

Several queries along these lines followed publication of Herbert Kuhner’s A Revival of Revisionism in Austria. Apparently Kuhner gave the source as Lord Boothby. (The website says it is currently under revision.)

Wrong pig – wrong quote

If I may digress into amusement, Churchill would have found this phrase offensive to pigs. He did use animal analogies, and could have invented such an idiom. But he liked pigs. He never compared Britain’s enemies to porkers. His favorite animal villains were tigers, jackals, hyenas, crocodiles and boa constrictors….

I searched the Hillsdale College Churchill Project digital scans of Churchill’s canon, some 80 million words by and about him. This includes virtually everything in his books, articles, speeches and published papers. I found no instance of this phrase, either with the word “slaughtered” or the word “butchered.” Nor the words “wrong pig.” Neither did I find any statement of his suggesting Britain had “fought the wrong enemy.” This includes the memoirs of Lord Boothby.

The primary enemy

One of Churchill’s virtues was to recognize the main threat to civilization at each juncture in his career. From 1933 to 1945, he was certain that Nazi Germany was that threat. He did begin to think, late in the war, that one mortal foe had given rise to another. But he always kept things in perspective.

His change of view as the war wound down was obvious. Here is a key private remark recorded by his private secretary, John Colville, on 23 February 1945. The venue was Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence. The source is Colville’s diaries, The Fringes of Power (1986), 203-04:

[W]e sat in the Great Hall and listened to The Mikado played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The P.M. said it brought back “the Victorian era, eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Antonine Age.” Now, however, “the shadows of victory” were upon us. In 1940 the issue was clear and he could see distinctly what was to be done. But when [Air Marshal] Harris had finished his destruction of Germany, “What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?”

Perhaps, however, the Russians would not want to sweep on to the Atlantic, or something might stop them, as the accident of Genghis Khan’s death had stopped the horsed archers of the Mongols, who retired and never came back. Harris: “You mean now they will come back?” Churchill: “Who can say? They may not want to. But there is an unspoken fear in many people’s hearts.”

1947

Later Churchill wrote of a fancied encounter with the ghost of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Entitled “The Dream,” it recounts their conversation about the years since his father’s death in 1895. Now it was 1947, and Winston says:

Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands. They are Communists now, you know—Karl Marx and all that. It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.

No—never despair, he always said. But the historical image of Genghis Khan was still on his mind.

1955

In autumn 1955, after Churchill had retired as Prime Minister, he and his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, dined together for seventeen evenings. Those encounters were fascinating, Anthony wrote. “All sorts of curious pieces of information came out….

Concerning 1940, I played the Devil’s Advocate. Leaving aside the appalling issue of the extermination camps, which was then not evident, would it have been better if we had joined the New Order, as a substantial part of France was then inclined to do?…

Hitler most certainly would have attacked Russia and, unharassed in the West, almost certainly would have won. Would the equally monstrous tyranny of the Nazi regime have been mitigated or abbreviated by British influence? Hitler had always respected Britain. Would we have kept our Empire and our financial strength?

Churchill’s reply was brief:

You’re only saying that to be provocative. You know very well we couldn’t have made peace on the heels of a terrible defeat. The country wouldn’t have stood for it. And what makes you think that we could have trusted Hitler’s word—particularly as he could have had Russian resources behind him? At best we would have been a German client state, and there’s not much in that.

This I think summarizes Churchill’s consistent view of the West’s two great antagonists of his era. Significantly, he always kept open the prospect of what he called “a settlement” with the Russians—particularly after Stalin’s death. He never entertained the notion of settlement talks with Hitler.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

Question:

A r eader writes: “Rather late in the day, I have been reading The Spectator (UK) Christmas Special dated 15/21/29 December 2018. Page 28 refers to one Ronnie Boyd, who had been a teenage Ordinary Seaman aboard HMS Ajax in December 1944, when Winston Churchill arrived in Athens to try to end the ongoing civil war.

 “British forces ‘helped put down, with considerable force of arms, a perceived partisan/communist uprising—the so-called Battle of Athens, or the Dekemvriana in Greece,’ the article states. There follows the extraordinary statement ‘Not Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour, it has to be said.’ It is accompanied by a mini-cartoon showing WSC on the bridge of HMS Ajax making this announcement. What is it all about?”

Answer:

Well, Athens 1944 was not his foremost finest hour—since, as he wrote, “Nothing surpasses 1940.” But in any list of his finest hours, it’s right up there.

It wasn’t a “perceived partisan/communist uprising.” It was the real McCoy, by ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army. Fortunately, in Moscow a few weeks earlier, Churchill had had the foresight to work out an agreement with Stalin to keep Soviet hands off Greece. To his credit, our benevolent “Uncle Joe” did so—for the time being. Some consider the “Percentages Agreement”, handing Stalin dominance over eastern Europe less Greece, another of Churchill’s Not-So-Finest-Hours. But the Greeks seemed all right with it.

Sarajevo, 1992 – Athens, 1944

I wrote this news article in 1993:

A reporter named Burns was talking the other night about the United Nations’ “inspection mission” to Sarajevo in 1992, during the Bosnian War. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and company arrived at the airport, were driven through the streets in bullet-proof limousines. They enjoyed an elaborate lunch while blocks away people were starving. They drove back to the airport, where guards protected their luxury jet. Then they flew home, to abhor the ongoing horror but do nothing.

Which reminds me of Churchill, Greece and December 1944.

Similar situation: civil war had made Athens a killing field. Churchill sent troops, telling his generals to “hold and dominate Athens…with bloodshed if necessary.” Then he flew in personally, stationing himself in HMS Ajax moored in the Piraeus, the harbor for Athens.

He chortled “Missed again!” when ELAS gunners sent shells hurtling toward the ship. He drove into the fighting zone to meet the opposing sides with bullets flying. He asked his private secretary, Jock Colville if he had a pistol: “I certainly had my own.” He parleyed in an unheated room lit by hurricane lamps, reminding both sides of Greece’s fame and majesty. Peace followed in his wake.

Further Reading

Read more about Churchill’s intervention in Athens in December 1944 in Hillsdale College’s The Churchill Documents, Volume 20, Normandy and Beyond, May-December 1944.

For a photo of Churchill signing autographs for HMS Ajax sailors, see previous post.

Red Herrings: Quotes not by Churchill (or things he said quoting someone else), continued from Part 3.  Compiled for the next expanded edition of Churchill by Himself. Chapter references are to present editions of that book.

Earthy or sexist gags were not really Winston Churchill’s métier. His daughter Mary doubted an alleged crack to Bessie Braddock MP, who accused him of being drunk: “And you, my dear…are disgustingly ugly, but tomorrow I’ll be sober….” But I produced the Scotland Yard bodyguard who was standing next to him during the Braddock encounter. Lady Soames reluctantly agreed. “Well, maybe, under those circumstances….!” (It proved to be a wisecrack her father had remembered from a movie starring W.C. Fields.)

Sexism – Simple Tastes

Sexism: A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. 

Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds? [Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill…Well, I suppose.”] Would you sleep with me for five pounds? [“What kind of a woman do you think I am?”] We’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

• No attribution and both quotes are out of character. WSC was not given to misogynistic wisecracks.

Seymour Cocks: Yes, Seymour Cocks and hear more balls.

• Ripe for Churchillian Drift (WSC might have repeated it), this was attributed by Anthony Montague Browne to the Foreign Office’s Orme Sargent (Long Sunset, 58). Piers Brendon suggests Aneurin Bevan (Churchill’s Bestiary, 295).

Shooting his son-in-law: Ah! but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law!

• Supposedly said 20 July 1944 to Duncan Sandys, Chequers. Cecil King wrote (267): “Churchill’s favourite theme is of the great burden resting on him and of the unfairness that any one man should have to bear so great a responsibility. He was groaning away on the usual lines, so Duncan Sandys, to cheer him (according to the story), pointed out that Hitler had an even greater burden to bear—so had Mussolini—because, after all, everything was going wrong for them.” Quotes usually relate this as a crack to Vic Oliver, a less beloved son-in-law than Duncan Sandys. However, I cannot find reliable attribution to the Oliver remark. See Chapter 20, People…Mussolini.

Shy a Stone – Simple Tastes

Shy a Stone: You will never get to the end of the journey if you stop to shy a stone at every dog that barks.

• Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre, London, 3 December 1923. Among his quotes of someone else. He preceded this by stating, “As someone said…” A similar statement urging courage “when the dog growls” is in Chapter 29, Leadership, Courage.

Simple Tastes: I am a man of simple tastes—I am quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.

• According to Sir John Colville, F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead said “Winston is easily satisfied with the best” (without “man of simple tastes” or “of everything.”) Churchill with his great memory could have repeated this to the manager of the Plaza Hotel in New York, as is sometimes said. 

Sleeping – Something vs. Norhing

Sleeping to Noon: A man who gets the reputation of rising at dawn can sleep to noon. • No attribution.

Socialist and Capitalist: “If a man is 20 and not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man is 40 and not a Capitalist, he has no head.”

• No attribution. A variation on “Liberal and Conservative.”

Socialism: You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. • No attribution.

Something vs. Nothing: It is better to do something than to do nothing while waiting to do everything. • No attribution.

Soviet politics – Strategy

Soviet politics: It’s like dogs fighting under a carpet.

• Although WSC compared British party politics to a dog-fight on occasion, there is no attribution for this expression to describe Kremlin in-fighting. Nor is there any occurrence of the phrase “under the carpet.”

Speeches: A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. • No attribution.

What if, instead of “We shall fight on the beaches,” I had said, “Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter”? • No attribution.

I am going to make a long speech today; I haven’t had time to prepare a short one.

• If he said it (there is no evidence), WSC borrowed the idea from Blaise Pascal who, in 1656, wrote: “I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.” 

Stalin and Russia: The core of Stalin’s historic achievements consists in this, that he had found Russia working with wooden ploughs and is leaving her equipped with atomic piles. He has raised Russia to the level of the second industrial Power of the world. This was not a matter of mere material progress and organisation.

• Circa 1953, quotes by Isaak Doitcher, Ironies in History: Essays in Contemporary Communism. Supposedly a tribute by WSC after Stalin’s death , it has no relation to any known statement by Churchill. For his actual appraisal see Chapter 20, People, Stalin.

Statistics: Do not trust any statistic you did not fake yourself. [Or: The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.]

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

• No attribution. Mark Twain credited the last to Benjamin Disraeli.

Strategy – Submarines

Strategy: However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. • No attribution.

Street-sweeper’s tale: You see, if you had married him, you would be the wife of a street-sweeper today. [Clementine Churchill: “No, if I had married him, he would be prime minister today.”

• Supposedly Clementine Churchill, after greeting a street-sweeper, says to her husband: “He was in love with me a long time ago.” Manufactured quotes without attribution.

Submarines vs. U-boats: Enemy submarines are to be called “U-boats.” The term “submarine” is to be reserved for Allied underwater vessels. U-boats are those dastardly villains who sink our ships, while submarines are those gallant and noble craft which sink theirs.

• Widely quoted by numerous books on the naval war, not one of which carries a footnote to a valid attribution. While Churchill expressed the same view in other ways, we must regard this as apocryphal.

Success – Trees

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. • No attribution.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

• Broadly attributed to Churchill, but nowhere in his canon. An almost equal number of sources credit I to Abraham Lincoln; but none provide attribution.

Suicide: It is never necessary to commit suicide, especially if you live to regret it. • No attribution. Such quotes sound more like Yogi Berra than WSC.

Sweden: The Swedes ignored the greater moral issues of the war and played both sides for profit. • Quoted by Wikipedia, but without any valid citation.

Taking office: Take office only when it suits you, but put the government in a minority whenever you decently can.

• Published in Lord Randolph Churchill, I, 188. WSC put this in quotes because he did not claim it; he ascribed it to his father.

Tardiness: I am a sporting man. I always give them [trains and planes] a fair chance to get away.

• Often ascribed to WSC, actually said about him (in the third person) by his wife Clementine. See “Faults, but remarked by his wife (misquoted here). See Chapter 31, “Personal Matters….Faults.”

Temptation: Don’t worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, she will avoid you. • No attribution.

Trees Growing to the Sky: The trees do not grow up to the sky.

• Described by WSC as an “old German saying,” on 25 September 1938 in “The Effect of Modern Amusements on Life and Character,” in News of the World, following his concerns about dramatic falls in future birth rates. Also deployed with slightly different wording over bombing London. See Chapter 22, Politics; The Home Front, Insurance, Blitz. Frequent among his quotes: Churchill used this on thirteen later occasions

Troubles – Umbongo

Troubles: Most of the things I have worried about never ended up happening.

• Quotes by WSC but not original. (See Chapter 31, Personal Matters, Troubles.) Fred Shapiro (Yale Book of Quotations), believes the originator was Mark Twain (“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”) or Thomas Jefferson: (“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”) A similar remark, attributed to an anonymous octogenarian, appeared in The Washington Post, 11 September 1910.

Umbongo: Umbongo, umbongo, they drink it in the Congo

• Reported by the Daily Telegraph during the Brexit debate, 27 February 2019. No attribution. Brexit cynics might prefer: “General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” (See Chapter 20, “People.”)

Virtues and Vices – Whisky

Virtues and Vices: He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. [Or: he was possessed of all the virtues I despise and none of the sins I admire.]

• Often and prominently quoted, with respect to Stafford Cripps and Edwin Scrymgeour; no evidence of this or similar quotes in Churchill’s canon.

Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice. • No attribution.

While England Slept 

• The American edition of Arms and the Covenant was not entitled by Churchill. WSC’s cable, suggesting The Locust Years to publisher Putnam, was garbled to read The Lotus Years. Baffled, Putnam’s staff looked up “lotus,” finding “a plant inducing dreaminess.” Then one director said, “I’ve got it: While England Slept.” WSC was delighted. —Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 1947, 201 (confirmed by Clementine Churchill).

Whisky: If you mean whisky, the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates  misery and poverty…I am opposed to it with every fibre of my being.” However, if  you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life…Then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favour of it. • No attribution, though he might have shared the sentiment.

White Meat – “Winston is Back”

White Meat: [After asking for a chicken breast at a Virginia buffet, Churchill was informed by his genteel hostess that Southern ladies preferred the term “white meat.” The next day he sent her a corsage, with a card:] I would be much obliged if you would pin this on your white meat. • No attribution.

Wine: A magnum of claret is the perfect size for two gentlemen to share over lunch—especially if one isn’t drinking. • No attribution; indeed claret was not a common lunchtime tipple.

Winston is Back: I therefore sent word to the Admiralty that I would take charge forthwith and arrive at 6 o’clock. On this the Board were kind enough to signal the fleet, “Winston is back.”

• Mentioned by Churchill (The Gathering Storm, 320, 1948) and repeated by Lord Mountbatten at Edmonton in 1966. Sir Martin Gilbert and others find no record of such a signal when Churchill returned to the Admiralty in 1939.

Women

Women and Children First: There are three things I like about being on Italian cruise ships. First, their cuisine is unsurpassed. Second, their service is superb. And then, in time of emergency, there is none of this nonsense about women and children first.

• All over the Internet after the 2012 wreck of the Italian liner Costa Concordia, but Churchill’s entire makeup excluded such sentiments. The Quote Investigator ascribed the remark to travel writer Henry J. Allen in 1917. (For Churchill on loss of life at sea, see Chapter 15, Naval Person…Titanic Sinking.)

Women’s Suffrage: The women’s suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.

• Allegedly to Asquith, 21 December 1911. But his letter was on political tactics, not suffrage, and it is tendentious to suggest he would oppose liberal causes since he was then a Liberal. He wrote something similar to this in 1897, when he was 23: a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register. By 1911 he had come a long way; he never overtly opposed suffrage in the 20th century.

Words – Ypres

Words: We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. • No attribution.

            Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last for ever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought.

• In this first appearance of a repeated phrase, to the Author’s Club, London on 17 February 1908, Churchill credited the quote to someone else.  (CS I, 905). In a 10 June 1909 press conference, he remarked: “It has been said words are the only things that last forever.” (CS II, 1262).  But by the 1930s he had adopted the line as his own. See Chapter IV Writer and Speaker…Language.

Yale and MIT: An after-dinner speaker was giving the audience at least 15 minutes for each of the four letters that spell “Yale”… “Y is for Youth…A is for Achievement…L is for Loyalty…E is for enterprise,” etc. Halfway through “enterprise” a member of the audience said: “Thank God he didn’t go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” • No attribution.

Ypres, Belgium: I should like us to acquire the ruins of Ypres.…a more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.

• Allegedly 1918. Widely attributed with no reliable source. These were certainly Churchill’s sentiments, according to his private secretary Eddie Marsh’s diary of 29 October 1918: “Winston wants to turn that group of buildings into a cemetery, with lawns and flowers among the ruins, and the names of innumerable dead.” (Hassall, 455).

End of “All the quotes he never said” — for now!

A great joy of reading The Churchill Documents is their trove of historical sidelights. Volume 22 (August 1945—September 1951, due late 2018) covers the early Cold War: the “Iron Curtain,” the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift and Korean War. It reminds us of the political battles swirling around the Anglo-American “special relationship.” The issues seem very clear in hindsight. Seven decades ago, the future was unknowable. Take Governor Dewey and the question of America’s commitment to world security.

The Dewey Lament

In late 1950, Churchill received a letter from twice-unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The New York governor took issue with his fellow Republican, former President Herbert Hoover:

I have hesitated for a long time about burdening you with this [but] I am taking the liberty of imposing upon you…. Mr. Hoover made a speech night before last, the implications of which are appalling to me. The press reports today it has had wide and unhappy repercussions in Great Britain and on the Continent.

I am still not quite sure why I ran again [for president in 1948] but in any event, having no ambitions or expectations of having any other office I am free to proselyte to the limit of my capacity for the point of view expressed in my speech and intend to do so. [Churchill, a lover of concise English, must have blanched at that.]

If you find any spot on the horizon more cheerful than I do, I should appreciate hearing of it. The world is filled with gloom and almost in extremis.¹

Not “another man or dollar…”

Probably a lot of people beside Dewey wondered why he had run again (he had lost to FDR in 1944).  But to me, the surprise was to find Dewey, a former Republican nominee, taking issue with Hoover the last Republican president. They certainly didn’t like each other. Hoover reportedly said Dewey had “no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking…. A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”

I asked Professor George Nash, Hoover’s biographer, what Dewey was referring to. Dr. Nash referred us to Hoover’s broadcast of 20 December 1950, the text of which he sent. He also helped us compose a footnote to Dewey’s note to Churchill:

On December 20, Hoover gave a speech to advocate a Western-hemisphere-oriented “Gibraltar” geopolitical strategy, a buildup of American air and naval forces, but not of its army, focused on defending the Western Hemisphere and the free island nations on the Pacific and Atlantic rims, like Taiwan and the UK “if she wishes to cooperate.” Hoover would also refuse to send “another man or dollar” to continental Europe for its defense until​ the non-​communist nations there strengthened their own military forces. His advice (denounced by his critics as isolationist) differed from President Truman’s plan, announced just the day before, to send more U.S. troops to western Europe to assist in NATO’s defense preparations.²

“Some great common bond…”

As World War II had wound down, America’s attitude toward the postwar defense of Europe was a major concern of Churchill’s. The Churchill Documents contain many examples of this. ³ Churchill’s worries continued after Roosevelt’s death. What would be the attitude of the new president? In May 1945 Churchill wrote Truman, asking for a “standstill order” on the movements of U.S. forces. Truman replied, “I must not have any avoidable interference with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.”⁴

To Churchill’s relief, Truman adopted a robust attitude toward Soviet aggression. The President tacitly (though not publicly) approved of Churchill’s forceful 1946 message about the Iron Curtin. He responded vigorously to communist challenges in Greece and Turkey. When the Russians seemed to hesitate in withdrawing troops from Iran, Truman sent a naval task force led by the battleship Missouri into Sea of Marmara.⁶

In 1948, Stalin threatened to cut off Allied access to Berlin. Truman and Prime Minister Attlee defied him with the Berlin Airlift. In the House of Commons, a jubilant Churchill congratulated Labour with gusto.⁷ He even hoped for “some great common bond of union, like we had in 1940.”⁸ It was typical of Churchill’s lifelong preference for coalitions at times of crisis.

“We cannot buy [Europe] with money…”

Hoover was not proposing American isolation. He wanted America armed to the teeth, able to repulse any challenge. Like Churchill, he voiced “the need to preserve Western Civilization on the Continent of Europe [and] our cultural and religious ties to it.”⁹

They diverged in two critical areas. The first was the atomic bomb, which the Soviets had by then acquired. Hoover said the bomb was “a far less dominant weapon than it was once thought to be.”¹⁰ Churchill differed profoundly. “It may well be,” he had declared in 1946, “that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread, and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”¹¹

Hoover also balked at helping a Europe that refused to help itself. “The test is whether they have the spiritual force, the will, and acceptance of unity among them by their own volition. America cannot create their spiritual forces; we cannot buy them with money.” Churchill was doing his best to create unity of purpose and collaboration, but this view was anathema to him. With the best spiritual will and unity, he declared again and again in those years, Europe could not defend itself. It was America’s obligation to do everything to help.

Otherwise, however, the Hoover and Churchill theses run parallel. Hoover like Churchill favored peace through strength. He advocated a joint naval and air strategy, a unity of minds between the United States and the British Empire and Commonwealth. That is what Churchill had worked for most of his life.

“I would denounce such a plan scathingly”

Churchill’s 1950 reply to Dewey was brief: “It is a comfort to me that you felt Hoover’s speech was ‘appalling.’ I think that your own declarations are of far more consequence.”¹² But two years later Eisenhower was elected. And Eisenhower, like Hoover, seemed betimes to regard the atomic bomb as just another weapon.

Oddly or ironically, Dewey now proposed a defense posture much like Hoover’s. He and Churchill met in New York in January 1953, before Eisenhower took office. They were joined by John Foster Dulles, about to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

The details of that meeting will appear in the final volume 23 of The Churchill Documents. We already know much of it from Never Despair 1945-1965, Martin Gilbert’s final Churchill biographic volume. On 7 January Churchill cabled his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler:

Dewey proposed a scheme for a Pacific Treaty between all Pacific powers including the Philippines, Formosa [Taiwan], and the like, excluding (repeat excluding) Great Britain. I said I would denounce such a plan scathingly. Dulles then gave a long account of the negotiations leading up to the Anzus Treaty, and how the Labour Government had made no objection to it at all.

I explained our point of view. Dewey, who is thoroughly friendly, then said that if I objected so strongly, he would let his baby, i.e. the Pacific Treaty, die. In fact I could consider it dead. On the spur of the moment he said that an alternative plan might be for the United Kingdom and the United States to make a joint declaration (comparable to our guarantee to Poland in 1939) that if Communist China attempted to occupy Indo-China, Burma or any other countries in the Pacific Area, we and the Americans would declare war.¹³

“Great Slab of a Face”

Jock Colville and Christopher Soames, respectively Churchill’s private and parliamentary private secretaries, were present during this chilly interview. Dewey suggested that Churchill “could cast a spell on all American statesmen and that if he were directly associated with the economic talks, the fears of the people and of Congress would be aroused to such an extent that the success of the talks would be endangered.” Colville continued:

Winston took this very reasonable statement ill, but Christopher and I both took pains to assure Dulles afterwards that we thought he was absolutely right. Irritated by this, Winston let fly at Dewey after dinner and worked himself into a fury over certain Pacific Ocean questions. Christopher and I again applied soft soap subsequently. We told Dewey that a sharp debate was the PM’s idea of a pleasant evening…. But…Winston was really worked up and, as he went to bed, said some very harsh things about the Republican Party in general and Dulles in particular…. He said he would have no more to do with Dulles whose “great slab of a face” he disliked and distrusted.¹⁴

So it was that Thomas Dewey reversed himself, but Churchill’s views remained consistent. He went away with grave doubts about Foster Dulles, who would confirm his misgivings by his attitude toward a Soviet summit at the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower the following December.

“I tell you all this,” Churchill concluded in his cable to Eden and Butler, “to show you the rough weather that may well lie ahead in dealing with the Republican Party who have been twenty years out of office; and I feel very sure we should not expect early favourable results. Much patience will be needed.”¹⁵

And that indeed is another story—one that The Churchill Documents 1951-1965 shall relate.

Endnotes

¹ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 22, August 1945-October 1951 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming).

² See Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in This Crisis,” Broadcast on 20 December 1950, in Addresses Upon the American Road 1950-1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 3-10. Online at http://bit.ly/2NQXOs2.

³ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, The Shadows of Victory, January-July 1945 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming, October 2018.)

⁴ WSC to Truman, 12 May 1945; Truman to WSC, 21 May 1945, ibid.

N.B. Material referred to in footnote 5 is omitted in this excerpt.

⁶ Churchill to Attlee and Bevin, 7 March 1946, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁷ Winston S. Churchill, “Foreign Affairs,” House of Commons, 10 December 1948, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁸ Churchill, speech at Leeds, 4 February 1950, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁹ Hoover, “Our National Policies,” 4.

¹⁰ Hoover, ibid., 5.

¹¹ Winston S. Churchill, Zurich, 19 September 1946, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill By Himself (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 315.

¹² Churchill to Thomas Dewey, 30 January 1951, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

¹³ Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 791.

¹⁴ John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955, 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, II 320. Note: It is widely reported, but without attribution, that Churchill also said Dulles was “the only bull who carries his china shop with him.”

¹⁵ Gilbert, Never Despair, 791.

The Dream…

… is the most mysterious and ethereal story Winston Churchill ever wrote. Yet the more we know about him, the better we may understand how he came to write it.

Replete with broad-sweep Churchillian narrative, The Dream contains many references to now-obscure people, places and things. The new online version published by Hillsdale provides links to all of them. You need only click on any unfamiliar name or term for links to online references. After reading the story, click here for a thoughtful appreciation by Katie Davenport, a Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College.

Churchill wrote The Dream in 1947, a low point in his political career. Two years earlier, British voters had turned his Conservative Party out of office. The former Prime Minister was now a frustrated Leader of the Opposition. But political reverses often brought out the best in his writing. Churchill’s great war memoir, The World Crisis, began appearing at a similar low point, after he had lost his seat in Parliament in 1922-24. Marlborough, his noble biography, was written in the 1930s, as he grieved over the nation’s failure to heed his warnings about Hitler.

Origins

The poignancy of The Dream is heightened by the appearance of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Dead in 1895 at the age of forty-six, Lord Randolph had not lived to see, nor indeed ever imagined, his son at the pinnacle of their country’s affairs.

Lord Randolph’s own career had lasted scarcely twenty years. Elected to Parliament in 1874, he rose meteorically. By 1884 he was Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in 1886 he resigned over a trivial matter, never to rise again. Compared with Winston, Randolph was a footnote in British history.

The boy Winston worshiped his father from afar, but never conquered Lord Randolph’s disdain. It was his lifelong regret that his father did not live to see what he had achieved. It is part of the artistry of this tale that the inquisitive young father of forty never learns what his seventy-three-year-old son became.

The Dream was first mentioned during a family dinner at Chartwell, Churchill’s beloved home in the lush Kentish countryside, twenty-five miles outside London. He entitled the story “Private Article,” showing it only to his family, resisting their urgings that it be published. In his will he bequeathed the text to his wife, who donated it to Churchill College, Cambridge. On the first anniversary of his funeral, 30 January 1966, it was published in The Sunday Telegraph. The Dream has also appeared as a stand-alone volume in two private printings and a fine 2005 edition by Levenger Press.

Reactions

Winston Churchill was a man of transcendental powers. He could, it seems, peer beyond reality. Jon Meacham, author of the seminal Franklin and Winston, believes The Dream sheds light on Churchill’s ability to put a better face on things than they really were: to revere a father who overlooked him; to revere Roosevelt, who, in their later encounters, was less than forthright.

Margaret Thatcher, in my view the greatest British prime minister since Churchill, took a right and kind view of The Dream’s Victorian lurches—which are anything but politically correct. In 1993 I presented her with a private printing. She thanked me in her own hand the next day. “I read it in the early hours of this morning,” she wrote, “and am totally fascinated by the imagination of the story and how much it reveals of Winston the man and the son.” Later I asked what she thought of Churchill’s remark about women in the House of Commons: “They have found their level.” Lady Thatcher beamed: “I roared at that one.”

While vague about the hereafter, Churchill always held that “man is spirit,” and believed in a kind of spiritual connection with his forebears. On 24 January 1953, he told his private secretary, John Colville, that he would die on that date—the same date his father had died in 1895. Twelve years later Churchill lapsed into a coma on January 10th. Confidently, Colville assured The Queen’s private secretary: “He won’t die until the 24th.” Unconscious, Churchill did just that.

One question about The Dream that tantalized his family  is whether the story was really fiction. When asked this question, Sir Winston Churchill would smile and say, “Not entirely.”

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.

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”