For those of a certain age, my friend Dave Turrell sent a message under this title on January 24th. On that day fifty-nine years ago, the Great Man departed.  I saved the words for today’s anniversary, six days, later: the interment at Bladon.

Recalling January 30th, Lord Moran reached what Anthony Montague Browne described as “the top of his stylistic form.” As did dear Anthony himself, and the irreplaceable Grace Hamblin.

The poem “At Bladon” was read by Robert Hardy at the gravesite during our penultimate Churchill Tour in 2006. It is today fifty-nine years since Richard Dimbleby made the words indelible.

Charles Wilson, Lord Moran MC PRC

“He was taken at night to Westminster, to the Hall of William Rufus, and there for three days he lay in state, while the people gathered in crowds that stretched over Lambeth Bridge to the far side of the river, to do honour to the man they loved for his valour.

“On the fourth day he was borne on a gun-carriage to St. Paul’s. There followed a long line of men in arms, marching to sorrowful music. With all the panoply of Church and State, and in the presence of his Queen, he was carried to an appointed place hard by the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, under the great dome, while with solemn music and the beating of drums the nation saluted the man who had saved them and saved their honour.

“The village stations on the way to Bladon were crowded with his countrymen, and at Bladon in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to English earth, which in his finest hour he had held inviolate.” [1]

Grace Hamblin OBE

“At the end, I went down with the family to the funeral, near his beloved birthplace, Blenheim, and to me that quiet, humble service in the country churchyard was much more moving than had been the tremendous pomp and glory of the state ceremony in London. As the train made its slow journey through the snow-covered countryside on that bitterly cold day, men and women were standing in their little gardens behind their cottages, out in the fields or in the stations as we passed, the men with their heads bared, saying a silent farewell to their hero.

“I thought of these people at home, and I thought of you, and the hundreds and hundreds of letters Lady Churchill received from all over the world. And I pondered on what had made this dynamic but gentle character so beloved and respected—and such a wonderful person to work for. I think what one found first was courage. He had no fear of anything, moral or physical. There was sincerity, truth and integrity, for he couldn’t knowingly deceive a cabinet minister or a bricklayer or a secretary. There was forgiveness, warmth, affection, loyalty and, perhaps most important of all in the demanding life we all lived, there was humour, which he had in abundance.

“I hope I shan’t be infringing any copyright or displeasing anyone if I slightly misquote a passage from one of those many, many letters Lady Churchill had received on his death. It came from a distinguished member of your community here in America, and it has always been in my mind. ‘That he died is unimportant, for we must all pass away. That he lived is momentous to the destiny of decent men. He is not gone. He lives wherever men are free.'” [2]

Sir Anthony Montague Browne CBE DFC

“The procession to the graveyard at Bladon was brief, and we were few in number. We filed past the grave for the last time before it was closed. I was astonished to see a small and not particularly distinguished row of medals lying on the coffin. I could only suppose that it had fallen from the chest of one of the military coffin-bearers, and wondered if it would remain there to perplex archaeologists of many centuries hence.

“We took our departure for London in the freezing dusk…. At the back of my own mind there was the old quotation from WSC himself, of the death of Richard Coeur de Lion: ‘Worthy, by the consent of all men, to sit with King Arthur and Roland and other heroes of martial romance at some eternal Round Table, which we trust the Creator of the Universe in His comprehension will not have forgotten to provide.’

“On the way home, my mind was a blank. I tried to say some silent prayers for that brave and generous soul, but they were choked and confused, and came to nothing. I could not mourn for him: he had so clearly and for so long wanted to leave the World. But I was submerged in a wave of aching grief for Britain’s precipitous decline, against which he had stood in vain. When I reached our flat in Eaton Place it had been burgled.” [3]

“At Bladon”: Robert Hardy CBE

Drop English earth on him beneath
do our sons; and their sons bequeath
his glories and our pride and grief
at Bladon.

For Lionheart that lies below
that feared not toil nor tears nor foe.
Let the oak stand tho’ tempests blow
at Bladon.

So Churchill sleeps, yet surely wakes
old warrior where the morning breaks
On sunlit uplands. But the heart aches
at Bladon. [4]

Credits

1. Charles Wilson, Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (London: Constable, 1966), 842.

2. Grace Hamblin, “Frabjous Days: Chartwell Memories 1932-1965,” International Churchill Conference, Dallas, 20 October 1987.

3. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (London: Cassell, 1995) 328.

4. Richard Dimbleby read the poem “At Bladon,” by Avril Anderson, in a breaking voice over the BBC on 30 January 1965.

Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun. 

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This  assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain  were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927.  “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971),  BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

In 1966, the ESU Philadelphia Branch hosted an exhibit of my Churchill biographical stamp collection at the Philadelphia National Bank. It was the first public appearance of whatever limited Churchill knowledge I then had, my “awakening” as a Churchillian. I have a warm memory of the experience—but doubts about that secondhand quote.

Why secondhand?

It’s secondhand because it’s from a second party—not something we can track to Churchill’s published works. I searched Hillsdale College’s digital scans of 75 million published words by and about him. This includes his own 20 million words and over 50 million about him. It includes all his published books, articles, speeches and papers, along with biographies, memoirs and studies by others. Neither the full quote nor its components could be found.

There were no hits for “speak in this country.” There were 15 hits for “you can do anything,” and one came close. This was a speech in the House of Commons, 22 August 1916. (Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, III, 2490.) He was referring to the successful organization of war tribunals: “You can do anything in this country,” he said,  if you have the will and the intention to do it.”

Obviously that’s not good enough, I advised the ESU. So their quote seemed to be another example of secondhand invention—”Churchillian Drift.”

A Solid source

Think again! Natasha Goodfellow of UK branch of the ESU took those comments and raised me one with excellent research. Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, reported the remark in 1975, she wrote. She sent a newspaper cutting from The Observer of 11 May 1975. While the quote remains secondhand, the evidence gives it real validity—and some current interest.

On 5 June 1975, Britain held a referendum on membership in the European Union. Its successor, the European Union, is what Britain has now just left. The 1975 vote was 2:1 in favor of what was then, of course, a Free Trade association. The more objectional developments came later, with the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent loss of sovereignty. Hailsham was a judge for the 17th John Smith Memorial Mace Award for the Schools Debating Association. The winner defeated the motion, “That this House disapproves of the Referendum.”

In criticizing the debaters, Lord Hailsham said most students spoke too quickly. “Even if the speaker thought his audience was incompetent, it was not wise to make that clear.” Hailsham had further advice: Avoid Latin quips (Churchill certainly did that). Avoid clichés (like “Ship of State”). Imitate nobody (Churchill imitated his father). Above all, he added, “remember what Churchill told him” after “a magnificent speech at the Oxford Union: ‘If you can speak in this country, you can do anything.’” (The italics are Hailsham’s.)

When secondhand is valid

Given Ms. Goodfellow’s evidence, I at once advised the ESU to consider this quote genuine—provided they include the italics, which add authority by sounding exactly like Churchillian phraseology. What clinches it, however, is the reliability of the source.

Lord Hailsham (1907-2001) was a distinguished Parliamentarian. His first role in Whitehall was as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Air in the 1945 Churchill government. He later served as First Lord of the Admiralty, Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council. He was a a candidate to succeed Harold Macmillan as prime minister in 1963, and renounced his hereditary peerage to be eligible. But he was passed over in favor of the Earl of Home. He was created a life peer in 1970 and served as Lord Chancellor, the office formerly held by his father, until 1987.

The validity of secondhand quotes depends on the reliability of the quoter. Lord Moran and Lord Boothby, for example, tended to exaggerate and elaborate. Their reported diaries contained much that was not contemporary, written long after the fact. Churchill colleagues and confidants like Lord Soames or Sir Anthony Montague Browne were more fastidious, almost invariably reliable. Lord Hailsham belongs in the latter category.

I will gladly add this second but reliable quip to the 500 new quotations in the next edition of my book, Churchill by Himself, “if there is one.” (As Churchill reportedly said, but didn’t, to George Bernard Shaw about the next performance of a new play.)

A remaining question…

It would be nice to know which Oxford Union speech this was. Perhaps a kind reader will care to speculate? Clearly, Churchill said this after swimming against the tide—as he almost always did at the Union.

A: There are several candidates and variations. Taking them as a group, Churchill had from six to 100 ideas daily, of which between one and six were good. In order of the most likely. But it could be one of those all-purpose cracks applied to many people.

Roosevelt: fifty to 100 ideas, three or four good.

President Roosevelt is the most likely to have said this, since he’s quoted more than anyone else. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, heard the line from Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. In his alleged diaries, Moran was with WSC in Marrakesh in December 1947. “When I told him that Frances Perkins had quoted the President as saying that Winston had a hundred ideas a day and that four of them were good, he blew up: ‘It is impertinent of Roosevelt to say this. It comes badly from a man who hadn’t any ideas at all.'” That was an unusually rough dismissal of FDR—but possible. WSC was then writing his early war memoirs.

The journalist Colin Coote, longtime friend of Churchill and secretary of The Other Club, might have had this from Moran, but he published it before Moran did. Coote wrote the chapter, “Churchill the Journalist,” in Charles Eade’s excellent compilation, Churchill by His Contemporaries (1953). Churchill, Coote wrote, had “a prodigious memory and a mental activity like a dynamo. ‘He has,’ said the late President Roosevelt, ‘a hundred ideas a day, of which at least four are good.’ Moreover, he does not forget what he has read; and since he has now read a lot he is a walking reference library.”

In 1988 William Manchester repeated the FDR line but changed a number in The Last Lion, volume 2: “Franklin Roosevelt later said: ‘Winston has fifty ideas a day, and three or four are good.'”  He provides no footnote. Since he wasn’t always pinpoint accurate, he might have got the “fifty” wrong.

Alanbrooke: Ten ideas, one good.

Andrew Roberts in Hitler and Churchill offered a dual credit. Of Churchill he wrote: “He had an astonishingly fertile mind: ‘Winston had ten ideas every day,’ his Chief of the Imperial General Staff Lord Alanbrooke used to say of him, ‘only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was.'” But then Roberts adds that “Roosevelt made a very similar remark, saying that the Prime Minister had a hundred ideas a day of which six were good (a much larger number if an even lower percentage).” Fine historian that he is, Roberts expanded on the theme:

Nothing was too minute a detail to escape Churchill’s notice. He laid down the precise number of apes that should occupy the Rock of Gibraltar (twenty-four), tried to find out whether captured First World War trophy weapons could be reconditioned for use, worried about the animals in London Zoo during the bombing, and made sure that beer rations went to the fighting men at the front before those behind the lines. He even tried to discover whether wax might be used to protect the hearing of soldiers during bombardments.

Duke of Kent: Six ideas, zero to six good.

In Menzies and Churchill at War, the critic David Day writes that Prince George Duke of Kent told Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies that Churchill “has six ideas a day; they can’t all be right!” Day adds: “For such an ardent Royalist as Menzies, this apparent Royal displeasure with Churchill must have weighed heavily.” Menzies later became more critical of Churchill.

Lloyd George: Ten ideas, one good.

Another critic, Keith Sainsbury, wrote in Churchill and Roosevelt at War: “Roosevelt’s intelligence was not, perhaps, primarily a creative one, but to compensate for this he was extremely receptive to new ideas and would take them from as wide a range of sources as possible…. Churchill, however, was inordinately fertile in ideas, which flowed from him in a steady stream, but less sure in judgment. His early mentor, Lloyd George, had remarked of him, ‘There’s Winston, now. He has ten ideas a day, but he does not know which is the right one.'”

Verdict: FDR

It seems most likely that crack about Churchill was uttered by Roosevelt. Whether Lloyd George preceded him is a good question, and possible—LG had a pretty good wit. The others might have heard the FDR remark and kept it in readiness for their own version. Or, some gnomologist (see “Churchillian Drift” for the definition) may reveal that all these are variations on an ancient witticism dating much farther back!

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Jill Rose…

…begins this fine World War II narrative with a friendly warning. Don’t wait till your parents are gone before preserving their memories. The parents of “baby boomers,” Rose writes, lived through the most momentous times of the 20th century. Truly we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. I have dug around to find out as much as I can about my family…but sadly there is so much more that I will never know.”

Mrs. Rose knows and shares much about her parents, Doris and Roger Miles—he a surgeon-lieutenant, Royal Navy; she a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, London. The book is built around Doris’ letters to the absent Roger. She knew only that he was aboard HMS Tartar, a famous ship which earned twelve battle honors during close encounters with the enemy.

Their correspondence began at their moment of separation, and continued until Roger was “de-mobbed” in 1946. It offers insight to the many ordinary Britons who served faithfully in the great battle. As Churchill said, quoting Tennyson, “Every morn brought forth a noble chance. And every chance brought forth a noble knight.”

Doris nursed throughout the war, but her noble chance came in February 1943. That was when, on orders of Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson, she was summoned to Whitehall. The PM was back in London, still unwell after a grim battle with pneumonia following the Casablanca Conference.

A significant patient

Doris was advised by Sir Charles (later Lord Moran): “I must warn you, the Prime Minister doesn’t wear pyjamas.” Sure enough, Doris found, there was only a silk vest, and a velvet jacket with diamond V on the lapel. But nurses are professionals. “I had to give him a tepid sponge as he had a high fever…. WC took great interest in this and I knew that if his temperature didn’t go down I would have very little authority. Luckily it did.”

Churchill had a loyal staff. If any kept records of crucial conversations, they did so privately. (Grace Hamblin, a devoted secretary, told this writer the boss would often say hopefully, “You’re not going to write, are you?”) But Doris was free to share the lighter moments, and with Churchill there were plenty. The patient, she wrote, “is all he is cracked up to be.”

He usually requires me to bath[e] him at night, and he holds court to Sir Charles, one or more secretaries, and any odd visitors who may be around, while I’m doing it!…. He’s very interested in his blood count, which is done every day, and now talks knowledgeably about ‘pollywogs’ and ‘Eowins.’ Actually he is a lot better now, but it’s been a fairly bad hemolytic strep pneumonia, and might have developed—after all he’s 68, although he doesn’t look it.”

Sixty-eight was a lot older then than it is now. But the patient was having none of age. When he complained of head pains, Doris rubbed his head with oil of wintergreen. This became a ritual in which the PM reverted to his beloved music-hall songs: “Wash me in the water / Which you washed your dirty daughter in / And I wilt be whiter / Than the whitewash on the wall.”

At Chequers

By March 3rd, Mrs. Rose continued, the patient was much improved, and Doris Miles was the only nurse sent with him to Chequers, the PM’s official country residence. Her letters are full of admiration for the old house which, despite its grandeur, she found homey. One night the PM called her to a window. “…those are our boys going to Germany, we can rely on them.” Overhead, writes the author, “passed a flight of British bombers from nearby RAF Abingdon heading east at the start of the Battle of the Ruhr.” Stirring times in sterner days.

Doris Miles left Chequers in mid-March, her work done, but not before a humorous ceremony. “I had to march into the dining-room after dinner (all male) and present him with a ruby-red capsule on a silver try, to be told, ‘The price of a good woman is above rubies.”’ The usual cynics spin this as gauche misogyny. In truth Churchill spoke with a twinkle, and both of them knew it. “He is, of course, a little naïf when he preens himself on not losing a night’s sleep,” Doris wrote. “He forgets that he takes precaution each night to prevent such a mishap, in the shape of a little red tablet.”

* * *

Doris lived to be 100, glad at the end that her last twenty-seven years without Roger were over. This is far more than a Churchill book. We cannot convey its riches in a small space. It is well worth the read. It describes two people deeply in love, separated by war, with shrewd observations of life at the top; and at the bottom, amid the blacked-out streets of shattered London. Readers will profit from Jill Rose’s exposition of those times. They truly exemplify “the Greatest Generation.”

Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944, nineteenth of a projected twenty-three document volumes in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, is reviewed by historian Andrew Roberts in Commentary. 

These volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill.” The present volume sets the size record. Fateful Questions is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day. Yet at $60, it is a tremendous bargain. Order your copy from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.

Here is an excerpt from my account, “Fresh History,” which can be read in its entirety at the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Questions: Science

A criticism frequently leveled at Churchill is that he was so fixed on defeating Hitler that he never looked ahead—to the problems of the peace as well as the likelihood of a powerful, proselytizing Soviet Union. Proof that Churchill recognized the Soviet danger is well documented in this book; he also looked toward the years of peace, and the potential of science for good or ill. (Professor A.V. Hill, who married a sister of John Maynard Keynes, was Independent MP for Cambridge University, 1940-45.)

30 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Professor A. V. Hill. (Churchill papers, 20/94).

Dear Professor Hill, I am very glad to have the opportunity to send through you my greetings and good wishes to Indian men of science and especially to the six Indian Fellows of the Royal Society, of which I am honoured to be myself a Fellow.

It is the great tragedy of our time that the fruits of science should by a monstrous perversion have been turned on so vast a scale to evil ends. But that is no fault of science. Science has given to this generation the means of unlimited disaster or of unlimited progress. When this war is won we shall have averted disaster. There will remain the greater task of directing knowledge lastingly towards the purposes of peace and human good. In this task the scientists of the world, united by the bond of a single purpose which overrides all bounds of race and language, can play a leading and inspiring part.

Questions: Recrimination vs. Magnanimity

Churchill famously deplored blaming British and French leaders for mistakes in the years leading up to the Second World War: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,” he declared after France fell in June 1940,“we shall find that we have lost the future.” He made good that magnanimous philosophy on many occasions—as these excerpts suggest, concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain and French General Georges. (Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information.)

4 October 1945. Winston S. Churchill to Brendan Bracken: Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.638/3  (Churchill papers, 20/104)

In the film “The Nazis Strike” I must ask that the section showing Mr. Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airfield after Munich, and also the shot of his going fishing with a reference to the “tired old man of Munich” should be cut out, otherwise I could not be associated with the series. The story would run quite well from the signature at Munich to the meeting in Birmingham where Mr. Chamberlain made his declaration that we would support Poland, &c.

*****

19 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper: excerpt.  (Churchill papers, 20/94)

Personal and Secret: With regard to General Georges. In my opinion he is a very fine, honourable Frenchman. For him I feel a sentiment of friendship which started to grow when we made our tour of the Rhine front together a month before the War. I do not think he was to blame for the catastrophe, except that he ought to have been very much stronger in demanding the retirement of Gamelin at the outbreak of war. Much of his strength and energy was expended in opposing Gamelin, but the inherent rottenness of the French fighting machine and Government would have denied victory to any General.

Moreover, Georges is crippled from wounds received both in the late War and the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. I do not forget, though this is a point which should not be mentioned to the French, that when Petain and Weygand at Briand in May 1940 were clamouring for our last reserves and resources, including the last Fighter Squadrons, well knowing that the battle was lost and that they meant to give in, it was Georges who informed our Military Liaison Officer that the French Government would ask for an armistice and that we should take our steps accordingly.

Questions: The Second Front

The greatest Anglo-American-Soviet strategy questions were over how much to throttle back the campaign in Italy (which had begun in September 1943) in support of “Operation Overlord,” the invasion of France, which all three allies agreed was the most direct route to Berlin and must go forward in 1944. Though this subject dominates our volume, these documents frame the debate. Among other things, they  illustrate that Churchill was not the only British leader who fumed over lost opportunities in Italy.

25 October 1943. General Sir Alan Brooke: diary. (“War Diaries, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,” page 56)

It is becoming more and more evident that our operations in Italy are coming to a standstill and that owing to lack of resources we shall not only come to a standstill, but also find ourselves in a very dangerous position unless the Russians go on from one success to another. Our build up in Italy is much slower than the German, and far slower than I had expected. We shall have an almighty row with the Americans who have put us in this position with their insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross Channel operations. We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.

*****

26 October 1943. Lord Moran: diary. (“Winston Churchill, the Struggle for Survival,” pages 130–31)

The PM is already beginning to have his own doubts and hesitations….His face was glum, his jaw set, misgivings filled his mind. “Stalin seems obsessed by this bloody Second Front,” he muttered angrily. “I can be obstinate too.” He jumped out of bed and began pacing up and down. “Damn the fellow,” he said under his breath. And then he rang for a secretary. When he began dictating a telegram to the Foreign Secretary I got up to leave the room. “No, Charles, don’t go. This,” grumbled the PM, “is what comes of a lawyer’s agreement to attack on a fixed date without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war.”

Alex’s [Field Marshal Alexander] fears had upset the PM. His mind was now made up. He turned to the secretary, who held her pencil ready. “I will not allow the great and fruitful campaign in Italy to be cast away and end in a frightful disaster, for the sake of crossing the Channel in May. The battle must be nourished and fought out until it is won. Molotov must be warned,” the PM continued striding to the door and back, “that the assurances I gave to Stalin about ‘Overlord’ in May are subject to the exigencies of the battle in Italy. Eisenhower and Alex must have what they need to win the battle, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations. Stalin ought to be told bluntly that ‘Overlord’ might have to be postponed.”

*****

29 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Anthony Eden. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1764/3 (Churchill papers, 20/122)

Most Immediate. Most Secret and Personal. There is of course no question of abandoning “Overlord” which will remain our principal operation for 1944. The retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay, perhaps till July, as the smaller class of landing-craft cannot cross the Bay of Biscay in the winter months and would have to make the passage in the Spring. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces, and also that the full bombing effort on Germany would not be damped down so soon. We are also ready at any time to push across and profit by a German collapse. These arguments may be of use to you in discussion.

 *****

30 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill and Josef Stalin: notes of a conversation, Soviet Embassy, Teheran (Cabinet papers, 120/113)

Most Secret. The Prime Minister said that he was half American and he had a great affection for the American people. What he was going to say was not to be understood as anything disparaging of the Americans and he would be perfectly loyal towards them, but there were things which it was better to say between two persons.

We had a preponderance of troops over the Americans in the Mediterranean. There were three to four times more British troops than American there. That is why he was anxious that the troops in the Mediterranean should not be hamstrung if it could be avoided, and he wanted to use them all the time. In Italy there were some 13 to 14 divisions of which 9 or 10 were British. There were two armies, the 5th Anglo-American Army, and the 8th Army, which was entirely British. The choice had been represented as keeping to the date of “Overlord” or pressing on with the operations in the Mediterranean. But that was not the whole story.

*

The Americans wanted him to attack, to undertake an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal against the Japanese in March. He was not keen about it. If we had in the Mediterranean the landing craft needed for the Bay of Bengal, we would have enough to do all we wanted in the Mediterranean and still be able to keep to an early date for “Overlord.”

It was not a choice between the Mediterranean and the date of “Overlord,” but between the Bay of Bengal and the date of “Overlord.” He thought we would have all we wanted in the way of landing craft. However, the Americans had pinned us down to a date for “Overlord” and operations in the Mediterranean had suffered in the last two months. Our army was somewhat disheartened by the removal of the 7 divisions. We had sent home our 3 divisions and the Americans were sending theirs, all in preparation for “Overlord.” That was the reason for not taking full advantage with the Italian collapse. But it also proved the earnestness of our preparations for “Overlord.”

 

Questions: Bombing Civilians

Churchill’s questioning of Allied “carpet bombing” is well established in this volume. Churchill was concerned over bombing civilians in the forthcoming invasion of France. Here he voices his worries to the Supreme Commander; in the event, Eisenhower convinced him that certain French casualties would have to be expected.

3 April 1944. Winston S. Churchill to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Churchill papers, 20/137)

Top Secret. Personal and Private. My dear General, The Cabinet today took rather a grave and on the whole an adverse view of the proposal to bomb so many French railway centres, in view of the fact that scores of thousands of French civilians, men, women, and children, would lose their lives or be injured. Considering that they are all our friends, this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces. It was decided that the Defence Committee should consider the matter during this week, and that thereafter the Foreign Office should address the State Department and I should myself send a personal telegram to the President.

The argument for concentration on these particular targets is very nicely balanced on military grounds. I myself have not heard the arguments which have led to the present proposal. The advantage to enemy propaganda seem to me to be very great, especially as this would not be in the heat of battle but a long time before. Would it not also be necessary to consult General de Gaulle and the French National Committee of Liberation? There were many other arguments that were mentioned, and I thought I ought to let you know at this stage how the proposal was viewed.

Questions in the House

Despite his burdens, Churchill routinely faced Questions in the House of Commons. He did so with relish and skill. From many questions and answers, this exchange on “Basic English” provides an example.

Willie Gallacher, a frequent critic, was Communist MP for West Fife, Scotland. Henry Wedderburn, Conservative MP for Renfrew, was jibing Churchill over one of his invented words, “triphibian,” referring to British prowess on land, on sea and in the air. The Prime Minister responded with one of his favorite archaic words, “purblind”….

4 November 1943. House of Commons: Questions

Sir Leonard Lyle asked the Prime Minister when the Committee of Ministers set up to study and report upon Basic English are expected to reach their conclusion?

The Prime Minister: I hope to receive the recommendations of this Committee before very long.

Sir Lonard Lyle: When we do get this Report will the BBC be asked to adopt it, or will they still continue to use Basic BBC?

The Prime Minister: Basic English is not intended for use among English-speaking people but to enable a much larger body of people who do not have the good fortune to know the English language to participate more easily in our society.

Mr. Gallacher: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider introducing Basic Scottish?

Mr. Wedderburn: Does Basic English include the word “triphibious”?

The Prime Minister: I have tried to explain that people are quite purblind who discuss this matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English language.

 

Questions: Will he die when it’s over?

Little escaped the wide net of Sir Martin Gilbert, who assembled a virtual day-by-day record of Churchill’s life. From here the Hillsdale team has assembled them in readable form, attaching a host of footnotes and cross references. Occasionally we include published recollections. Here is one by Lady Diana Cooper: a startling and grim prediction she heard from Clementine Churchill. Fortuitously, in this case, Clementine was wrong.

 12 January 1944. Mary Soames: recollection. (‘Clementine Churchill’, page 350)

Diana Cooper recounted a “curious calm and sad conversation” with Clementine, after a dinner in Marrakesh:

“I was talking about postwar days and proposed that instead of a grateful country building Winston another Blenheim, they should give him an endowed manor house with acres for a farm and gardens to build and paint in. Clemmie very calmly said: “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.”

She said this so objectively that I could not bring myself to say the usual “What nonsense!” but tried something about it was no use relying on death; people lived to ninety or might easily, in our lives, die that day…. But she seemed quite certain and quite resigned to his not surviving long into peace. “You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”  It was touching and noble.

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.”