Beaverbrook died on 9 June 1964, some 220 days before Churchill. Sir Winston’s letter of sympathy to Lady Beaverbrook will be displayed by the Saint Andrews, New Brunswick Civic Trust. It is part of a Churchilliana collection donated by Douglas Young, a former Liberal politician who once served as federal fisheries minister.

Grandson Winston to Lady Beaverbrook

The error occurred when CBC New Brunswick accompanied the article with a two-page handwritten letter identified as Sir Winston’s. WSC was not writing anything that long by 1964, and I recognized the handwriting of his grandson. Signed “Winston,” it mentions being Lord Beaverbrook’s godson—which he was. (His grandfather was five years older than Beaverbrook.)

I notified CBC New Brunswick, and Ms. Urquhart immediately rang with good news. The Civic Trust also has Sir Winston’s letter—typed and signed in his very shaky 1964 hand. She faithfully corrected the article, where the correct letter is now posted.

Sir Winston’s sympathies

Churchill’s devoted private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, brought him the news of friend’s death. “Churchill as usual was propped up in bed reading,” wrote Kenneth Young. “When the secretary said as gently as possible that he had just been told of Max’s death, Churchill made no reply but his chin sank on his chest. A great depression settled upon the house.”[1]

The next day Churchill roused himself to write. His words to Lady Beaverbrook were beautiful. His correspondence by then had ground almost to a halt. Montague Browne drafted most of his letters. Yet it is impossible to think he had nothing to do with the words in this one:

My dear Christophor,

Words are vain, but I wanted to give you my true sympathy in your distress. I know how you loved dear Max and how wonderfully you sustained him and made his life a happy one.

I, too, grieve for my oldest and closest friend, for whom my feelings of affection and admiration grew only stronger with the passing of time. It was heart-warming that he should have made such a splendid speech so recently,* and that he then received such well-justified tributes to his great stature.

Clemmie and I so much hope that later you will come and see us whenever you can. Yours very sincerely, Winston S. Churchill[2]

The Archives show that WSC wrote similarly to Beaverbrook’s son: “You know my feelings for your dear Father too well for me to tell you of them. I am happy to think that you will carry on as he would have wished.”[3] He issued a brief statement to the press: “I am deeply grieved at the loss of my oldest and closest friend, who served his country valiantly and was the most loyal and devoted of comrades.”[4]

* One last triumph

Lord Beaverbrook had turned 85 on 25 May 1964. A grand banquet of 650 friends and associates was planned at the Dorchester by Lord Thomson of Fleet, like Max a Canadian-born  newspaper baron.  Stricken with gout, Beaverbrook was almost immobile, his voice a whisper. Somehow, wrote Kenneth Young, he pulled himself together:

Beaverbrook’s son, now Sir Max Aitken, brought him up from Cherkley Court. He had not walked unaided for several months. But that night with an escort of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Red Indian chiefs and RAF trumpeters, he walked firmly into the banqueting hall and took his place at table between Lord Thomson and Lord Rothermere. After dinner he rose and in a voice both firm and strong made his last and perhaps most brilliant speech in all his old vein of forcefulness, humour and indomitable spirit.[5]

“I am old bones,” he told them. “My legs are very weak. But I’ve still got something in the way of a head.” And, perhaps with premonition: “It is time for me to become an apprentice once more, sometime soon.”[6]

One man was missing…

…from this memorable evenoing. Sir Winston had been invited, of course, but “by this time he was beyond such occasions.” Yet with Montague Browne’s help he reached again the Churchillian heights. To those assembled at the Dorchester, writes Kenneth Young,

…he recalled some of the words of magnificent praise he had written about Beaverbrook as his colleague, the Minister of Aircraft Production, in those far-off, desperate days of 1940 almost a quarter of a century ago. “I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him. He did not fail. This was his hour;” and, Churchill added, “Time has but added to the intensity of what I then felt, and to my regard and affection.”

It was a fitting epilogue to a friendship which had subsisted through thick and thin for fifty years. To it Beaverbrook added a P.S.—a letter of thanks. It was the last communication between him and Churchill: “It was characteristically generous of you to recall on my birthday the words you wrote about me all those years ago. Certainly I have never forgotten them but it was wonderful to hear them again.”[7]

Lady Beaverbrook responded to Churchill’s condolences: “You who were so very close in friendship to him will know how I am feeling just now. That triumphant speech at the Dorchester on the 25th has left me with a memory which will never grow stale.”[8]

Nor did it, for the three decades left to her. A man never dies as long as he is remembered.

Endnotes

[1] Kenneth Young, Churchill and Beaverbrook (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: James H. Heineman, 1966), 326.

[2] Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC) to Marcia Anastasia Christoforides, Lady Beaverbrook, 10 June 1964, Churchill Archives Centre, CHUR 2/519B/189.

[3] WSC to Sir Max Aitken, 2nd Baronet Beaverbrook, 10 June 1964, CHUR 2/519B/185.

[4] WSC message to the Press, 9 June 1964, CHUR 2/519B/187.

[5] Young, Churchill and Beaverbrook, 325.

[6] “Beaverbrook, 85, Honored at Party; Mighty and Not Mighty Join in Outpouring of Affection,” The New York Times, 26 May 1964, 11, Archive.today, accessed 16 June 2023.

[7] Young, 325-26.

[8] Lady Beaverbrook, to WSC, 13 June 1964, CHUR 2/519B/188.

Further reading

Bradley Tolpannen, “Great Contemporaries: Max Beaverbrook,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2016.

Richard M. Langworth, Chapter 20, “People…Beaverbrook,” in Churchill by Himself, 2016.

Kenneth Young, Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics. 1966.

Consistency in Politics…

…was a theme of Churchill’s, and he often wrote about it. He made many mistakes, but throughout his career he was seldom guilty of lacking consistency. Continued from Part 1…

“Much better if he had never lived”

Churchill maintained friendly relations with Baldwin until Baldwin died in 1947. Nevertheless—which was rare for him—he never forgave and never forgot. In June 1947 he made an astonishing statement: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” Official biographer Martin Gilbert wrote that this was not Churchill’s usual consistency, but exactly the opposite:

In my long search for Churchill few letters have struck a clearer note than this one. Churchill was almost always magnanimous: his tribute to Neville Chamberlain in 1940 was among the high points of his parliamentary genius. But he saw Baldwin as responsible for the “locust years” when Britain, if differently led, could have easily rearmed, and kept well ahead of the German military and air expansion, which Hitler had begun in 1933 from a base of virtual disarmament. Churchill saw Baldwin’s policies, especially with regard to Royal Air Force expansion, as having given Hitler the impression, first, that Britain would not stand up to aggression beyond its borders, and second, that if war came Britain would not be in a position to act effectively even to defend its own cities.[9]

As we contemplate current world events, let us hope that today’s leaders do not put politics before country. At the moment, I very much fear that many of them are.

Praising Chamberlain

In 1937, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin retired in favor of Neville Chamberlain. Churchill had served with him in an earlier government, and respected Chamberlain despite their differences. But Churchill’s consistency remained intact. He was soon disenchanted with Chamberlain’s foreign policy. This remained as dedicated to Appeasement as Baldwin’s had been.

Chamberlain did begin to rearm the country, which stood Britain well in the war to come. In 1939, Hitler absorbed Czechoslovakia, contrary to his promises in the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain sent a British guarantee to the likely next target, Poland. “Here,” wrote Churchill in his memoirs, “was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the last satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”[10]

After Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940, the latter remained loyal. He supported Churchill against those who argued that Britain should reach an accommodation with Hitler and end the war. Chamberlain died in November 1940. Churchill eulogized him in Parliament in generous words. But he never forgot what he saw as Baldwin’s admission of putting politics before country. Praising Chamberlain, he said, “was not an insuperable task, since I admired many of Neville’s great qualities. But I pray to God in his infinite mercy that I shall not have to deliver a similar oration on Baldwin. That indeed would be difficult to do.”[11]

What can be learned

America and the great democracies  face  problems long simmering, now perhaps no longer just simmering. They may indeed result in a wreckage similar to what might have befallen the world, had Churchill’s Britain and its Commonwealth not stood alone against Hitler. Until, he remarked ruefully, “those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.”[12]

The clearest declaration of Churchill’s character and principle I have ever read came in July 1936, at the height of the rearmament debate, Churchill told Parliament:

I would endure with patience the roar of exultation that would go up when I was proved wrong, because it would lift a load off my heart and off the hearts of many Members. What does it matter who gets exposed or discomfited? If the country is safe, who cares for individual politicians, in or out of office?[13]

That ringing declaration demonstrates Churchill’s devotion to principle and to his nation, regardless of poll ratings or unpopularity—characteristics some leaders also demonstrate, from time to time.

Consistency vs. inaction

Striking also are certain earlier Churchill remarks in 1928. They serve as a warning against inaction in the face of the obvious, by leaders today. They were written by Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, after he had read Beaverbrook’s Politicians and the War. Meant in no invidious sense, they express only sorrow:

Think of all these people—decent, educated, the story of the past laid out before them—What to avoid—what to do etc.—patriotic, loyal, clean—trying their utmost—What a ghastly muddle they made of it! Unteachable from infancy to tomb—There is the first and main characteristic of mankind.[14]

Worth heeding too are Churchill’s words from 1933, which are evergreen: “We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.”

Endnotes

[9] Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey (London: HarperCollins, 1994, 106. WSC to Leslie Rowan, 19 July 1947, courtesy Churchill Archives Centre.

[10] Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 271-72.

[11] Harold Nicolson, diary for 22 November 1940, in Nigel Nicolson, ed., Harold Nicolson Diaries and Letters, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1966-68), II, 129.

[12] Winston S. Churchill, theme of Their Finest Hour (1949), in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill in His Own Words (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 271.

[13] WSC, House of Commons, 20 July 1936, in Churchill in His Own Words, 493.

[14] WSC to Beaverbrook, 21 May 1928, in Churchill in His Own Words, 28.

[15] Churchill to the Royal Society of St. George, 24 April 1933, in Churchill in His Own Words, 78.

A work of art on Churchill’s art

This beautiful book combines Churchill’s favorite French painting venues with fastidious research on their locations. The horizontal format blends quality binding with brilliant color on thick, coated paper, and the price is a bargain. Paul Rafferty, himself an artist, brings Churchill’s oils alive as adjuncts to WSC’s personality. (N.B.: this writer played a minor part in verifying quotations.)

The book’s forte is its “then and now” juxtaposition of Churchill’s art with photos of the precise venues. Again and again, the eye feasts on double-page spreads nearly two feet wide, showing a Churchill painting alongside the very spot today. Finding those spots often required exhaustive research and exploration.

Sometimes, Rafferty relied on photos Churchill had snapped to allow him to finish a portrait back at his studio. Familiarity with the area helped locate many spots. Occasionally a passerby would know where Sir Winston painted. But more often, it required Sherlockian sleuthing, sometimes resulting in bizarre adventures.

In search of the “Red Rocks”

Rafferty carried 100 laminated cards of elusive paintings to help him “reacquire” Churchill’s targets. Among the elusive was “Red Rocks, L’Esterel.” There the whole coastline is red rocks! With two artist friends he drove along, vainly searching. Finally they stopped at one last lay-by. There they were! Paul and his friends decided this was one scene they would try their hands at painting themselves:

Venturing down to see if access was possible, we came upon a nudist beach, much to our—and their—surprise…. We climbed over the cliff and down into the empty cove, with only piles of driftwood lying around. We began painting and after an hour or so I looked up to see a naked woman on top of the ridge we had just climbed over. She waved, probably wondering what we were doing: I waved back, certainly wondering what she was doing. I returned to my painting and suggested to the others, “You don’t see that, painting in Trafalgar Square.”

Mentors and paraphernalia

The depth of research is not confined to venues. Rafferty devotes pages to Riviera artist mentors, like Sir William Nicholson, John and Hazel Lavery and Alfred Munnings. Other pages illustrate his equipment, including his traveling easels, brushes, paintboxes and oils, even his Stetson hat.

Most of Churchill’s oil paints came from his “colourman” Willy Sax. Having tried Sax’s oils, WSC became devoted. In his famous essay, Painting as a Pastime, he compared oil painting to a military campaign:

You have a medium at your disposal which offers real power, if you only can find out how to use it…. You need not build downwards awkwardly from white paper to your darkest dark…. strike where you please, beginning if you will with a moderate central arrangement of middle tones, and then hurling in the extremes when the psychological moment comes. Lastly, the pigment itself is such nice stuff to handle (if it does not retaliate).

In one of his letters to Sax he asks for “six tubes garance (Rose Madder), Rose Dorée or Pink Madder, two tubes Neutral Tint, four tubes Pale Violet Cobalt.” This reminds us of his dialogue with Field Marshal Alexander, painting together at Lake Como. “I always use just a touch of Rose Madder; do you use Rose Madder, Winston?” “But of course, Alex, I always use Rose Madder.”

Rafferty on the Churchill trail

A double page spread (right) offers a map showing the amazing breadth of the Riviera places Churchill painted. Some are familiar: Three favorites were Roquebrune-Cap-Martin: “La Pausa” (Emery and Wendy Reves) “Les Zoraïdes” (Daisy Fellowes) and “La Dragonnière” (Lord Rothermere). Then there were Lord Beaverbrook’s “La Capponcina” at Cap d’Ail, and Maxine Elliott’s Chȃteau de l’Horizon, in Golfe-Juan.

Rafferty also tracked the more obscure places, such as Consuelo Balsan’s villa near Eze, and Ralph Curtis’s “Villa Sylvia” at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Churchill painted churches and chapels, like St.-Paul-de-Vence, and loved water scenes. The River Loup in the Alps Maritimes whetted his passion for depicting water. He loved and painted certain preferred restaurants, like Restaurant Philip at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse in Provence. Its proprietor, aged 92, still remembers him: a gourmet who would order from the menu. He particularly fancied the trout that abounded in the cold river—which again excited his artists’s eye.

The work continues

Satiated with this vivid display of artistry and erudition, the reader is disappointed to get to the end. No worries. Just flip the book over and start again. There is so much detail, so many amazing comparisons of then and now, that it always seems fresh and new. Even trivia, such as Churchill’s motorcars (a sideline of this writer) gets some attention.

I’d never seen a photo of his 1956 Humber Hawk estate car, presented by his friend Lord Rootes. Churchill was rumored to have used it to haul his painting gear on the Riviera. Sure enough, Rafferty shows him seated in the Hawk, arriving at Villa La Pausa, no doubt driven by his faithful bodyguard Sergeant Murray.

And the work is not complete. In the back of the book Raffety offers a dozen Churchill paintings not yet pinpointed. They are “the elusive ones still to find.” Perhaps there will be a future addendum, with these paintings matched to vivid photographs of the venues today. It would be fun, even if only online, perhaps here. We’ll be hoping for it.

Shakespeare’s Henry: Parallels and Inspirations

Above all and first, the importance of Henry V is what it teaches about leadership. “True leadership,” writes Andrew Roberts, “stirs us in a way that is deeply embedded in our genes and psyche.…If the underlying factors of leadership have remained the same for centuries, cannot these lessons be learned and applied in situations far removed from ancient times?”

Churchill’s war speeches are—what shall we say—inspired by, remindful of, analogous to Shakespeare’s works in ancient times. First example: the enemy’s overconfidence. At Agincourt, before any fighting takes place, as the French prepare to rout the English, the Duke of Orleans opines:

Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear
and have their heads crushed like rotten apples.
You may as well say that’s a valiant flea
that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion….
It is now two o’clock: but, let me see, by ten
We shall have each, a hundred Englishmen.

Animal analogies are things Churchill deployed, but that is not the connection here. That passage smacks of his 1941 speech to the Canadian Parliament about the French generals in 1940. Remember how he quoted them? “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” And his response: “Some chicken!. . .Some neck!”

1415…

At the siege of Harfleur, before Agincourt, Churchill writes in his History that the British were badly outnumbered, yet “foremost in prowess.” And Shakespeare quotes King Henry:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead …
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips …
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

This is echoed in Churchill’s war memoirs, where he writes: “Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined, and ruthless German race. Once again. So be it.”

…1940

And in his peroration to his outer cabinet on 28 May 1940—the speech that ensured Britain would not seek an armistice with Hitler: “We shall fight on, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Hugh Dalton remembered: Churchill’s ministers stood shouting, slapping him on the back, while tears poured down his cheeks, and theirs. A.P. Herbert wrote:

Mr. Chamberlain, after all, was tough enough, and since the war began, had been heart and soul with Mr. Churchill. But when he said the fine true thing it was like a faint air played on a pipe and lost on the wind at once. When Mr. Churchill said it, it was like an organ filling the church, and we all went out refreshed and resolute to do or die.

“A Little Touch of Harry in the Night”

On the night before Agincourt, King Henry tours the English camp incognito, to gauge morale. The scene recalls Churchill’s 1899 account of the night before the Battle of Omdurman. Or Churchill’s visits with the troops in North Africa, before D-Day, and in France. But the closest analogy, I think, is in 1941. That was when President Roosevelt sent his confidant, Harry Hopkins, to Britain, to tell him if the UK was still worth backing.

Hopkins traveled up and down the land, devastated by the bomb damage he saw. Everywhere he went, he observed grit and determination, and faith in final victory. Hopkins had no doubts. In Glasgow, introduced by Churchill, he famously quoted the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go,” and he added, “even to the end.” Churchill wept.

We few…

Back in London, Lord Beaverbrook hosted Hopkins and the press at Claridge’s. “We wondered,” a Beaverbrook reporter said, “as our cars advanced cautiously through the blackout toward Claridge’s, what Hopkins would have to say. [He went round] the table, pulling up a chair alongside the editors and managers…and talking to them individually. He astonished us all, Right, Left and Centre, by his grasp of our own separate policies and problems. We went away content. And we were happy men all.”

We few, we happy few…

To many who heard or read his words—FDR, Beaverbrook, Robert Sherwood, even J. Edgar Hoover, who had FBI agents present—Hopkins reminded them of Henry V, touring the camp before Agincourt:

With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty,
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

1415 and 1940

William F. Buckley Jr. said, “It was not the significance of victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. It is the roar that we hear when we pronounce his name…. The Battle Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the Battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of men and women who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln.”

I think that might be true. It is the words, not the battles, that make the blood run faster in times to come. On the eve of Overlord in June 1944, General Ismay was reminded of Henry’s words at Agincourt:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

Ismay heard one parachute commander say as he entered his aircraft:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

Of course that was a time, as I’ve said, when almost every Briton knew Shakespeare. And it was also a time, as Churchill added, “when it was equally good to live or die.”

Old Men Forget

In the same act, Henry tells his soldiers:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages,
What feats he did that day….

In early 1943, writes Lewis Lehrman, “Churchill paraphrased those words to soldiers of the Eighth Army, who had defeated Rommel: ‘After the war, when a man is asked what he did, it will be quite sufficient for him to say, ‘I marched and fought with the Desert Army.’”

Churchill wrote in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples: When one of Henry’s officers “deplored the fact that they had ‘but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day,’ the King rebuked him and revived his spirits in a speech to which Shakespeare has given an immortal form:

If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

Compare that to May 28th again, or to Churchill’s greatest speech, 18 June 1940: “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

“Collective Consciousness”

It was no coincidence, Jon Meacham writes, that

he tied the trials of the present to the collective consciousness of the world to come. Men will still say was a call to arms reminiscent of Henry V with the image of how the tale would be told from generation to generation. This story shall the good man teach his son [became] “Be brave now, and the future will cherish your memory and praise your name”—an impressive, if risky, means of leadership, for under stress not all of us are like Bedford and Exeter.

Churchill’s history records the King’s actual quoted words: “‘Wot you not,’ he said, ‘that the Lord with these few can overthrow the pride of the French?’ He and the few lay for the night.” On 20 August 1940, Churchill spoke of another small, outnumbered band, the RAF fighter pilots: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed, by so many, to so few.”

Crispin’s Day

Remarkably, Churchill in his speeches or History never quoted from Henry V’s grand climacteric, the Crispin’s Day speech. In fact, writes Geoffrey Best, “he made far fewer historical and literary references than a more commonplace performer might have done. But the effect was to reproduce the congratulations addressed by Shakespeare’s hero to the Englishmen lucky enough to be with him at Agincourt.”

In his History, Churchill offers lines that are not Shakespeare’s: “The King himself, dismounted…and shortly after eleven o’clock on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, he gave the order, ‘In the name of Almighty God and Avaunt Banner in the best time of the year, and Saint George this day be thine help.’ The archers kissed the soil in reconciliation to God, and, crying loudly, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Saint George and Merrie England!’”

Since he’d written those words already, who can say that Churchill didn’t remember them in his 19 May 1940 speech, “Be Ye Men of Valour?” There he said: “Our task is not only to win the battle but to win the War…for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means.” More modern language—but the sentiments are the same.

Constables of France

In the 1944 movie the Constable of France (Leo Genn) is not an empathetic figure. He is arrogant, imperturbable, impassive and phlegmatic—and supremely confident of victory. Then with the battle almost lost, he insists on returning to the fray and dying in combat.

I think Churchill recalled this character when he wrote about Charles de Gaulle, during the fall of France in June 1940. Churchill tells us how, among the defeatist French, he came across this “impassive, imperturbable…tall, phlegmatic man.” On the last of those meetings before France surrendered, prompted I think by a recollection of the strongest French character in Henry V, he said of de Gaulle: “This is the Constable of France.” And so he was.

Acts of Union

Toward the end of the play, after wooing Katherine, Henry promises they will sire, out of Saint Denis and Saint George, celestial patrons, one of France and the other of England,

a boy, half French, half English,
who will go to Constantinople
and take the Grand Turk by the beard!

Marthe Bibesco, the Rumanian princess, in a good little 1950s book on Churchill, noticed this comparison: “And here we have,” she wrote, “in defiance of chronology, already predicted, the day after Agincourt, the Dardanelles expedition, which, in 1915 during the alliance between France and England will be so near to Churchill’s heart.”

She then cites words of the priest at the altar, Ye shall be two in the one flesh. “All those who know him,” she wrote, “would be prepared to swear that Churchill had this whole scene of Shakespeare’s in mind when he undertook that nuptial flight on 11 June 1940… The man who came that evening to ask for the hand of France in marriage offered her people dual nationality, with two passports, the right to vote in both countries, the pooling of the armed forces, in a word a true wedding!”

That’s a bit of a stretch—Churchill did make that offer, the Act of Union. But he little expected that it would be accepted, or have much effect, and it didn’t.

For Them Both, “It was Always England”

As Churchill goes on to write, Henry V’s French union was not to last. Churchill in old age likewise lamented that he had accomplished much, only to accomplish nothing in the end. And yet, what a self-description he offers us, writing of the King in 1938, not published until 1956. Henry V, he wrote:

was no feudal sovereign of the old type with a class interest which overrode social and territorial barriers. He was entirely national in his outlook: he was the first king to use the English language in his letters and his messages home from the front; his triumphs were gained by English troops; his policy was sustained by a Parliament that could claim to speak for the English people. For it was the union of the country [that gave Britain her] character and a destiny.

Is that not a description of Churchill himself? I think, if only subconsciously, he meant it to be.

His old friend Desmond Morton surmised that

for Churchill, it was always England…And thus Churchill was its man. He had never moved away from such a world…it had caught up with him from behind, a back slip in time. This was Henry V and all the great music of Shakespeare in the tribal soul….he saw himself mirrored in the pool of England. And England in him.

“Here Firm, Though All Be Drifting” —WSC

It’s all over the Internet, so it must be true. Not only did Winston Churchill oppose women’s rights, gas tribesmen, starve Indians, firebomb Dresden, nurse anti-Semitism and wish to nuke Moscow. He even cheated on his wife—in a four-year affair with Doris Delevingne, Viscountess Castlerosse.

So declare the authors of “Sir John Colville, Churchillian Networks, and the ‘Castlerosse Affair’”—unreservedly repeated by British television, multiple media, even a university: (“Winston Churchill’s affair revealed by forgotten testimony.”)

All these fables—every one demolished by serious inquiry—are commonplace today. As Secretary of State Cordell Hull observed: “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.”

Why is “Churchill’s Secret Affair” (the television title) important? Who cares? It matters because the Churchill marriage was admirable and historically significant. Winston Churchill would have saved liberty without his wife Clementine, if not quite as effectively. Shucks, calling him a mass murderer is easy. But if you’re going to besmirch his marriage, you need to present facts.

Castlerosse or Elliott?

“The Castlerosse Affair” declares that Churchill’s philandering, “hidden until now, was something in the nature of a bombshell.” It was neither hidden nor a bombshell. Rumors of it have been around ninety years—with conflicting dates and two different women.

Late in his life I came to know Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath, a Churchill admirer and collector. He told me that Sir Winston, famously loyal to Clementine, had “strayed only once”—with the American actress Maxine Elliott. Elliott was a lifelong friend, whom Churchill visited at her Riviera villa, Chateau d’Horizon, in the 1930s. She was then in her seventies, but Lord Bath placed the affair twenty years before that. He could offer no proof, save his own circle of friends. Was there anyone beside Maxine? I asked him. “Not that I ever heard of.”

Ironically, Doris, Lady Castlerosse, was also a friend of Elliott’s. Indeed, according to the authors, her affair with Churchill took place in 1933-36, at Chateau d’Horizon.

Gossip about l’amour between Churchill and Castlerosse actually began five years earlier. The rumor’s ephemeral nature is suggested by the first alleged encounter—at the Paris Ritz in 1928. Four years later Doris, a notorious courtesan, apparently did sleep with Churchill’s son Randolph. The story goes that when her husband rang him saying, “I hear you are living with my wife,” Randolph replied: “Yes, I am; and it’s more than you have the courtesy to do.”

The only source for that quote is John Pearson’s Citadel of the Heart, a scathing tell-all about the Churchill family. Yet even Pearson, who omitted no scandal, dismissed the idea of a Castlerosse affair with Randolph’s father: “As with so many rumours of this sort, it is unprovable either way.”

Sir John Colville

Now the Castlerosse story is back, with an apparently solid source: Churchill’s longtime private secretary. In a 1985 interview with the Churchill Archives Centre, Sir John “Jock” Colville disclosed the “evidence,” which we are told no-one previously listened to. (This is inaccurate; other historians had heard it, but dismissed it as unprovable.)

Colville said he was having tea with Winston and Clementine when literary assistant Denis Kelly approached with what Colville said were love letters from Castlerosse. “Clementine read the correspondence and went pale,” the article states. “She had never previously thought that Winston had been unfaithful….she was frightfully anxious about it for months….Colville, in response, tried to play it down….” (Actually, Colville says he told her, “I bet he didn’t,” in effect contradicting himself.)

All this begs a rather obvious question: What was Sir Winston’s reaction? After all, Colville says, he was right there. Did he admit his sin and ask forgiveness? Hotly deny it? Would a man revealed to his wife as a philanderer say nothing? Neither Colville nor the authors tell us.

* * *

In the 1980s I had several conversations with Jock Colville, whom I loved and respected as a “keeper of the flame.” I do not pretend they were of any great importance, but we did discuss Lord Bath’s belief in Churchill’s affair with Maxine Elliott. Sir John labeled this ridiculous. He did not refer to Castlerosse. Of course, that is hardly dispositive.

Moreover, Colville did not even meet Churchill until 1940, years after the supposed indiscretions. The best “The Castlerosse Affair” can offer is that “he believed it” and “would not have made the allegation lightly.” In my experience he was not above repeating chatter among his social set. Before the Kelly episode, that is the only way he could have heard about it.

And that is how everybody heard about it. The television program is replete with family tittle-tattle: “It was known….a tradition in our family….my mother told me.” Decades ago, biographer George Malcolm Thomson speculated that the couple “may have enjoyed a ‘romantic friendship.’” In 2016 (well before the current article) Lyndsy Spence, Castlerosse’s biographer, cited “much repeated gossip,” citing Pearson. “On the face of it,” the authors state, “Pearson’s and Spence’s claims do not look well supported.” But Pearson did not make the claim—he denied it. Still they insist that “Colville’s claim of an affair was, at least, plausible.”

Denis Kelly

The only real evidence Colville offered was the Kelly episode, but “The Castlerosse Affair” doesn’t tell us what Kelly thought. As it happens, he thought a great deal.

I knew Denis Kelly well, corresponded with him, and published an imaginative article of his about conversing with the ghost of Sir Winston. He was a dear man, a gifted barrister. In 1947-57 he’d worked at Chartwell, Churchill’s home, sorting out the muniment room for his official biography—“to make Cosmos out of Chaos,” as Churchill put it.

Like Colville, Kelly laughed off the Maxine Elliott story, saying it wasn’t the boss he’d known. “Of course,” he said honestly, “that was long before my time.” To the best of his belief, Sir Winston had never been unfaithful (Churchill Archive Centre, file CHOH 1/DEKE). If, per Colville, he had handed Lady Churchill “love letters,” he therefore had no inkling of their content—which sounds nothing like the Denis Kelly I knew. 

Documentary evidence?

Surviving Churchill-Castlerosse correspondence cannot be described as “love letters.” Most of it comprises the bread and butter notes people wrote in those days—how nice to see you, will you be back next season, you were “a ray of sunshine around the swimming pool.” At the same time, Churchill was writing lovingly to his wife, describing his days at Maxine’s and everyone present, including Castlerosse—not the letters of a cheater.

“The Castlerosse Affair” tries to make the most of them anyway. In 1937, Doris wrote Churchill: “I should like to see you. I am not dangerous anymore.” This, we are told, “could be read as an indication that the affair was now over, and that Doris did not mean to try to revive it.” She was referring to her divorce, but it could equally be read that she was over a case of ’flu. In it she provides Winston with her London telephone. This has to be the first time in history of affairs that the philanderer did not have his mistress’s phone number.

The authors say Colville “implied” that the really incriminating “love letters” were destroyed, “presumably by Clementine.” True, she was not above destroying offensive material—for example, she burned the appalling portrait presented by Parliament on Sir Winston’s eightieth birthday. I guess she overlooked the “I am not dangerous” letter. But let’s assume she destroyed the rest. Why then did she include a Churchill portrait of Doris Castlerosse among the paintings she set out for display at Chartwell by the National Trust after Sir Winston’s death? (It’s still there.)

* * *

We are told that the lovestruck Churchill painted Doris four times, and that she owned two. Historian Andrew Roberts writes that he also painted Sir Walter Sickert’s and Sir John Lavery’s wives, Arthur Balfour’s niece, his sister-in-law, his secretary, his wife’s cousin, and Lady Kitty Somerset: “There is no suggestion he was sleeping with any of them. Meanwhile, he painted his wife Clementine three times.”

Ah, but none of those paintings were as sultry as that of a recumbent Doris, wearing shorts, which is supposed to be revealing. Everybody wore shorts on the Riviera in the 1930s. Yet on television a royal biographer says: “She’s lying down, so they’re halfway there.” Can these people be serious?

* * *

In 1942, years after the apparent affair apparently ended, Doris was in New York, appealing to Churchill to help her return to London. This he did. He often performed kindnesses for friends, but this, we are told, was crucial: It “could be taken to imply that Doris tried to blackmail Churchill with the portraits.” Furthermore, Churchill allegedly tried to get the paintings back.

After Lady Castlerosse died in December 1942, the paintings “ended up for a time” with newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. The television show calls him “Churchill’s political fixer.” More precisely he was a sometime friend and part-time nemesis. After the war, they returned to her family. Which again proves nothing.

Where is the “sultry” painting today? To my amusement, I tracked it to Longleat, home of the late 6th Marquess, who told me the Maxine Elliot story. There is humorous irony in the wriggles and windings of this shaggy dog story.

Retaliatory sex?

“The Castlerosse Affair” also suggests that Clementine herself was unfaithful. “On the long cruise which she took without Winston in 1935, Clementine ‘fell romantically in love’ with one of her fellow voyagers, Terence Philip. Whereas it seems doubtful that she was reacting to knowledge of an affair between Winston and Doris, the episode could be taken as indicative of a coolness in the Churchill marriage at this time.” It certainly does seem doubtful—if she knew about it in 1935, she could not have “gone pale” when confronted by the “love letters” two decades later.

In the television program a Clementine biographer claims that their “marriage was on the rocks” at the time. (It omits to note the same biographer’s denials of both Clementine’s and Winston’s affairs.) Reality check: Terence Philip was a personable, socially useful art dealer, often entrusted to accompany unescorted women. Lady Soames, Clementine’s daughter and best biographer, told me her mother never gave reason to believe Philip was more than Clementine’s affectionate companion.

“Too easy to be good”

At the time of the “Castlerosse affair,” when Churchill was desperately warning of the Nazi threat, the French Ambassador suggested that Britain and France join with Hitler in a war against European communism. Churchill’s reply to that ill-considered proposal precisely applies to this farrago of innuendo: “Too easy to be good.”

Why do we continually encounter character assaults on figures most of the world reveres? It stems from a skewed vision of the egalitarian principle, the theory that there are no great figures, we are all the same. The scholar Harry Jaffa cited a public appetite for books and articles “which denigrate nobility or idealism. Politics as a vocation is today in bad repute. Young people are led to believe that to succeed is to prove oneself a clever or lucky scoundrel. The detraction of the great has become a passion for those who cannot suffer greatness, and will not have it believed.”

The single remark of an old colleague, honorable though he was, is contradicted by other old colleagues, the actions of Churchill’s wife and friends, lack of facts, and plain common sense. The Churchill marriage remains undiminished, as it should: a tribute to a historic partnership. As Churchill was wont to remark of his fifty-seven-year union: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”

“No doubt where the right lay”: 1940-95

Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky was a “Bollinger Bolshevik” who mixed support for Communism with a love of Western luxury. Friendly to Churchill, he knew the Englishman hoped to separate Hitler and Stalin, even after World War II had started.

But Maisky tended to see what he wished to see. In December he recorded: “The British Government announces its readiness to recognize ‘de facto’ the changes in the Baltics so as to settle ‘de jure’ the whole issue later, probably after the war.” There was no such announcement.

“The Russian danger…”

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Churchill broadcast: “the Russian danger is therefore our danger.”  Why then not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia? The question came now, not only from soft-liners like Cripps and Halifax, but from close Churchill associates like Eden and Beaverbrook. But de jure recognition was one thing Stalin would never get get.

When Eden, now foreign minister, visited Moscow in December 1941, he implored Churchill to modify his stance. It was Eden’s first major foreign policy assignment. Temperament, ambition, anxiety for victory impelled him. American opinion influenced Churchill too, and the USA at that time remained opposed to recognizing a Soviet Baltic.

While Eden was in Moscow, Churchill was in America. Eden urged him and Roosevelt to recognize immediately the Soviet Baltic. “Stark realism” demanded it. The Anglo-Americans could not stop the Russians from getting their way.

Churchill still demurred. The 1941 Soviet conquests, he replied,

were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic States to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause….there must be no mistake about the opinion of any British Government of which I am the head, namely, that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

“The Ireland of Russia”

In February 1942 the War Cabinet discussed alternatives to outright recognition. Eden proposed agreeing to Russia’s Baltic military bases. Halifax proposed quasi-independence, with Russian control of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian defense and foreign policy. Churchill opposed both.  In Washington, Halifax mentioned recognition to Roosevelt. The President was interested, but Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles told FDR it would epitomize “the worst phase of the spirit of Munich.” In another thrust, Beaverbrook asked: “How can it be argued now that territory occupied then by the Russians—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—is not the native soil of the Russians?” Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians could offer some arguments.

The pressure of events wore on the Prime Minister. The Russians were holding down 185 German divisions on a thousand-mile front. On 7 March 1942, Churchill sent a feeler to Roosevelt:

The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter, and I expect that a severe process of liquidating hostile elements in the Baltic States, etc. was employed by the Russians when they took those regions at the beginning of the war.

* * *

Churchill’s suspicions were correct. Latvia’s President Karlis Ulmanis had been arrested and deported; he died in 1942. Konstantin Päts of Estonia spent years in prisons or “psychiatric hospitals,” finally dying in 1956. Lithuania’s Antanas Smetona, the first Baltic president to institute an authoritarian regime (1926), fled, ultimately to the USA, where he died in 1944. From June 1940, politicians, teachers and intelligentsia—anyone who seemed a threat to the Soviet rule—was deported.

On 8 April 1942, the War Cabinet approved British recognition of the 1941 Soviet borders. But now Roosevelt objected. The United States, he said through Secretary of State Hull, “would not remain silent if territorial clauses were included in the [Anglo-Soviet] treaty.” Eden conveyed this to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov who, surprisingly, accepted.  Thus it was that American, not British diplomacy that forestalled de jure recognition of the Soviet Baltic in 1942. But Martin Gilbert maintained that this was actually “to Churchill’s relief.” Alexander Cadogan, a Foreign Office official who shared Churchill’s views on the Baltic, wrote, “We must remember that [recognition] is a bad thing. We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.”

Baltic “Ostland”

There matters rested while the Germans, first hailed as liberators, conducted another violent ethnic clensing. Over 300,000 Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians—one out of ten—were executed. They slaughtered Jews in hastily-built death camps. The Gestapo and a few quislilngs ruled the Nazi colony “Ostland.” With the Red Army’s return in 1944 came a third holocaust. An Estonian remembered: “The Germans were brutal, the Russians worse.” Clearances of Baltic citizens continued under Stalin’s successors. Ethnic Russians moved in while natives were shuttled out. To this day, native Latvians form barely a majority in their country.

At the Teheran conference in late 1943, Roosevelt abandoned his non-recognition policy—but not openly. With remarkable cynicism, he explained to Stalin that he did not wish to lose the votes of the six or seven million Polish-Americans, or of the smaller, though not negligible, number of voters of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian origin.

How easily Roosevelt surrendered the liberties he had so strongly defended a year earlier. “Moral postures in the harsh world of power politics may acquire a certain nobility in their very futility,” wrote David Kirby. “But when tainted by a history of compromise and failed bargains, they tend to appear somewhat shabby.”

* * *

But Teheran also left Churchill with a softer attitude toward Stalin. His feelings had changed, he wrote Eden, tempered by hard reality on the ground:

The tremendous victories of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin—these have all had their effect. Most of all is the fact that the Russians may very soon be in physical possession of these territories, and it is absolutely certain that we should never attempt to turn them out.

Churchill was a politician depending on the support of a majority, and no politician could remain blind to that reality. But in judging Churchill, must consider his complete record. And for him, the subject remained.

To his War Cabinet in late January Churchill said the “ideal position would be to postpone any decision about frontiers until after the war, and then to consider all frontier questions together.” Nevertheless, the Red Army was  “advancing into Poland.” Churchill knew he was caught in a shocking compromise of proclaimed principle. What were they to say to Parliament and the nation, he asked Eden, about the idealistic principles declared in the Atlantic Charter?

The March of Fate

As the Red Army swarmed west in 1944, surviving Balts had the unpalatable choice of siding with one barbarian or the other. More fought with the Germans than the Russians. Stalin expended half a million men vainly trying to storm the “Courland Pocket,” declaring that the imperialist West would try to prevent reestablishment of Soviet authority. But the West had no such intentions. Instead, Balts faced tanks bearing American white stars. They were U.S. Shermans, thrown into battle without their new red stars. But the Baltic fighters gave up only with the German surrender.

In 1950, Churchill sadly summarized the tragedy of the Baltic States:

Hitler had cast them away like pawns in 1939. There had been a severe Russian and Communist purge. All the dominant personalities had been liquidated in one way or another. The life of these strong peoples was henceforward underground. Presently Hitler came back with a Nazi counter-purge. Finally, in the general victory the Soviets had control again. Thus the deadly comb ran back and forth, and back again, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There was no doubt however where the right lay. The Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples.

In the end, the United States, along with Britain, Australia, Canada and a few other countries, never recognized the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Baltic gold remained safe in London, and their embassies continued to function. But Balts fortunate enough to escape, and their children, have long memories. They did not look kindly on Roosevelt, nor, one has to say, on Churchill.

What we can learn

It is useful to study Churchill and the Baltic for what it can teach us today about powerful aggressors and the fate of small nations. In wartime negotiations, the Soviets were consistent. They made the most extreme demands, offering little in exchange. Meet their demands and more followed. Whenever the other side said they would not agree, an eleventh-hour shift by Moscow would result. Even this was not a defeat, since the democracies were often so grateful for evidence of good will that they would struggle to meet the next round of Soviet demands. The perceptive Churchill once told Eden, “do not be disappointed if you are not able to bring home a joint public declaration.”

Churchill frequently repeated the Boer expression, “All will come right.” By 1992, when I made my first visit, the Baltic was free. In 1995 with three friends, I bicycled the Latvian coast from Lithuania to Estonia, and presented a Latvian translation of Churchill’s The Dream to President Guntis Ulmanis.

The British ambassador had arranged for us to meet local officials along the way. I will never forget the words of Teodors Eniņš, Mayor of Liepaja. He raised the question of why the Anglo-Americans hadn’t fought Russia to free Eastern Europe in 1945. We said the American and British public would have never countenanced it. “You should have done it anyway,” Mayor Eniņš replied. “Think of how much trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

Attlee was the first prime minister of a socialist government with an outright majority (1945-51). In 1940-45, he had served Churchill’s wartime coalition government, chiefly as deputy prime minister. Attlee presided over the cabinet whenever Churchill was abroad (which was a lot). In early 1945, it was he who gave the fateful order, later much regretted, for firebombing Dresden. In May 1945, on behalf of his party, Attlee told Churchill that Labour was withdrawing from the coalition. Churchill, who wanted it to last until the Japanese surrender and end of World War II, was deeply distressed. In the ensuing election of July 1945, Churchill’s Conservatives were routed, and Attlee took over as the head of British government.

Churchill regarded his wartime Labour associates with gratitude and admiration. In the dark days of 1940, when he thought it might come to some grim last stand against the onrushing Germans, he said he had thought to fight it out with a triumvirate of Lord Beaverbrook and another Labour colleague, Ernest Bevin.

Domestically, Attlee and Churchill agreed on nothing significant. But both had fought as soldiers in the deadliest war in history. And both had governed together in the worst war in history. The respect and collegiality they shared is a model for our time. Or any time.

The supposed Attlee gags—”an empty cab drew up and Mr. Attlee got out”; “He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing”—do not track to Churchill. He did say, when President Truman said that Attlee seemed a modest man, “he has much to be modest about.” But that was a private remark, which someone on Truman’s staff overheard and repeated. When confronted with the other Attlee barbs, Churchill would vehemently deny them. Sometimes he would say, “Mr. Attlee is a gallant and faithful servant of the Crown and I would never say such a thing about him”—or words to that effect.

No wonder, then, that Mr. Cohen and I appreciate what Attlee said. He was truly, in the words of the old song, one of the Giants of Old. It why so many, Churchill friends and opponents alike, found Attlee’s speech deeply moving.

The Rt. Hon. The Lord Attlee

My Lords, as an old opponent and a colleague, but always a friend, of Sir Winston Churchill, I should like to say a few words in addition to what has already been so eloquently said.

My mind goes back to many years ago. I recall Sir Winston as a rising hope of the Conservative Party at the end of the 19th century. I looked upon him and Lord Hugh Cecil as the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party. Then, with courage, he crossed the House—not easy for any man. You might say of Sir Winston that to whatever Party he belonged, he did not really change his ideas. He was always Winston.

The first time I saw him was at the siege of Sidney Street, when he took over command there, and I happened to be a local resident. I did not meet him again until he came into the House of Commons in 1924. The extraordinary thing, when one thinks of it, is that by that time he had done more than the average Member of Parliament, and more than the average minister, in the way of a Parliamentary career. We thought at that time that he was finished.

Not a bit of it. He started again another career, and then, after some years, it seemed again that he had faded. He became a lone wolf, outside any party; and yet, somehow or other, the time was coming which would be for him his supreme moment, and for the country its supreme moment. It seems as if everything led up to that time in 1940, when he became prime minister of this country at the time of its greatest peril.

* * *

Throughout all that period he might make opponents, he might make friends; but no one could ever disregard him. Here was a man of genius, a man of action, a man who could also speak and write superbly. I recall through all those years many occasions when his characteristics stood out most forcibly.

Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.

Then I recall the long days through the war—the long days and long nights—in which his spirit never failed; and how often he lightened our labours by that vivid humour, those wonderful remarks he would make which absolutely dissolved us all in laughter, however tired we were. I recall his eternal friendship for France and for America; and I recall, too, as the most reverend Primate has said already, that when once the enemy were beaten he had full sympathy for them. He showed that after the Boer War, and he showed it again after the First World War. He had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world.

* * *

I think of him also as supremely conscious of history. His mind went back not only to his great ancestor Marlborough but through the years of English history. He saw himself and he saw our nation at that time playing a part not unworthy of our ancestors, not unworthy of the men who defeated the Armada, and not unworthy of the men who defeated Napoleon.

He saw himself there as an instrument. As an instrument for what? For freedom, for human life against tyranny. None of us can ever forget how, through all those long years, he now and again spoke exactly the phrase that crystallised the feelings of the nation.

My Lords, we have lost the greatest Englishman of our time—I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time. In the course of a long, long life, he has played many parts. We may all be proud to have lived with him and, above all, to have worked with him; and we shall all send to his widow and family our sympathy in their great loss.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has published two articles on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s loyal ally and friend for four decades. The first begins with a memoir by the late Ron Robbins, a Canadian journalist who early on covered the House of Commons, where he met Bracken. The postscript is by me, followed by reviews of the two Bracken books by George Gale and A.J.P. Taylor.  A second feature—Bracken’s defense of Churchill’s frequent visits to war fronts—is also published.

Excerpts follow. For the full articles click on “Great Contemporaries:  Brendan Bracken” and “Necessary Risk: Churchill at the Front.”

Bracken Observed

There was no more enigmatic figure in Churchill’s life than Brendan Bracken, who cloaked his birth and upbringing with mystery while hinting broadly that he was the great man’s illegitimate son. Close friendship, not errant fatherhood, encompassed their relationship. But Churchill, with characteristic impishness, apparently never gave the direct lie to Bracken’s implied claim. This annoyed Churchill’s wife and peeved his son, Randolph, who spoke satirically of  “my brother, the bastard.” To quell the noisome rumor Churchill quipped: “I have looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”

By the time I encountered him, he was a formidable figure in corridors of power and London financial circles. The Labour Party came to power in July 1945. Bracken’s arch opponent was the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, a fiery Welshman. Bevan was steering the National Health Bill, the first large-scale national heath service, through morning committee meetings. I wrote “running reports.” A copy boy would come in every five minutes or so, collect what I had written, and phone it to the agency.

* * *

Bracken would thrust at Bevan, jolting him in a tough fight over every clause in the Bill. Bracken always attacked in time to catch new editions of the evening papers. This ensured him headlines, especially in the Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook, an intimate friend of his and Churchill’s.

One morning as I hurried to the committee, Bracken caught up with me and complimented me on my coverage. No journalist worth his salt likes to feel exploited, particularly by a politician. So I said: “You have a great knack of talking in headlines just in time to catch every edition.” He roared with laughter and produced a pocket diary. He flaunted a page on which he had written the edition times of all the London papers. Smiling ruefully, I said: “I didn’t imagine that you were relying solely on chance.” “No,” he replied, “it’s a trick I learned early on from Churchill.”

Bracken died of cancer in 1958 at the age of 57. Churchill reacted sorrowfully to the news of his death. Churchill mourned for him with a father’s grief. —Ron Cynewulf Robbins

Bracken postscript

We have a memorable glimpse of Brendan Bracken on 11 May 1940, Churchill’s first full day in office. One of the first axes fell on Chamberlain’s toady Sir Horace Wilson, a civil servant promoted far above his station. He was an arch appeaser, both indirectly (as an adviser) and directly (as an emissary to Hitler).

With his usual courtesy, Churchill told Wilson he would obliged if Sir Horace left Ten Downing Street by 1pm. Wilson characteristically took this as a “negotiable demand” and toddled off to lunch. Returning, he found Bracken and Randolph Churchill seated on his office sofa, smoking huge cigars and glaring at him. They exchanged no words. Wilson turned and fled. Later he sent for his effects. He never appeared at Number Ten again.

During the war, Bracken enabled Evelyn Waugh to obtain leave so that he could write Brideshead Revisited. Waugh unkindly wrote Bracken into the story as Rex Motram, a boorish, money-grubbing exploiter of the colonies. That was typical of Waugh, but undeserved. As Lord Beaverbrook said: “To know Bracken was to like him; those who didn’t know him did not like him.”

Bracken in biography

The Bracken biographies may be viewed in similar light. (Click here and scroll to “Further reading.”) Boyle’s Poor Dear Brendan is the more showy and brash, Lysaght’s Brendan Bracken the deeper and more revealing. “Above all,” wrote Charles Lysaght,

Bracken was great fun. He found appropriate names for everyone. Baldwin was “the ironmonger,” Neville Chamberlain“the coroner.” Eden was “Robert Taylor,” or “the film star at the Foreign Office.” He described Harrow, Churchill’s old school, as “that bloody old Borstal of yours.” Only Churchill himself was exempt from Bracken’s darts. His description of Aneurin Bevan, enjoying Beaverbrook’s champagne, is of classic quality: “You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin! Look at you swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist.” Bevan listened to this tirade with delight.

After the war Bracken seemed to burn out like a fallen meteor, contemplating a future with, alas, all too accurate a vision. He said of Keynes: “He will be best remembered as the man who made inflation respectable.” He said of himself: “I shall die young and be forgotten.” History will not forget him. —RML

Necessary risk: Bracken’s defense

During World War II, Churchill’s frequent excursions to various fronts caused critics to complain that he was taking unnecessary risk. Criticism mounted when Churchill hied to France only six days after D-Day.  He revisited the front several times through March 1945.

Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid DFC (1895-1977) was a distinguished flying ace in World War I. In 1922-45 he served periodically as a Conservative Member of Parliament. Peppery and contentious, he engaged in numerous arguments, which in 1943 resulted in fisticuffs with another MP. Both apologized the next day, but in America the Los Angeles Times headlined, “England Grins as Members of Commons Trade Punches.”

Churchill went to France in mid-June 1944. Cunningham-Reid complained: “The Prime Minister should not risk his life unnecessarily…. Was there ever such a good target as the one presented by our not inconspicuous Prime Minister perched up high on a Jeep? Nobody could have mistaken or missed that massive figure, complete with cigar to identify him…. Subsequently, the Prime Minister, General Montgomery, Field-Marshal Smuts, General Sir Alan Brooke, and, in all probability, the Supreme Commander [Eisenhower] and other key men got into a huddle…. The Minister of Information will, no doubt, correct me if that is not so.”

* * *

The Minister of Information was Brendan Bracken, who did indeed respond. In a brilliant few minutes, Bracken delivered a superb defense of Churchill’s visits to the front. Because it has not been published, even in The Churchill Documents, we thought it worth bringing to the attention of readers. Here is an extract:

I think it is a good thing for prime ministers that they should go into the front line and see the troops, and the soldiers, who matter most, like to see them. I daresay some hon. Members of this House remember that, in the last war, some suggestions were made by timid French Ministers to M. Clemenceau that, owing to the Germans having a big gun that shelled Paris, they should leave that city for a safer place. They discovered for the first time that the old Tiger was amenable. He said, “Yes, let the Government leave Paris. Let it go to the front.” It was a very sound piece of advice. If men like Clemenceau lived in this generation, France would not be in its present predicament.

Click here for Bracken’s complete speech.

“Churchill’s Secret“: good film portrayal of how Bracken and two other Press Barons dekated the news about Churchill’s 1953 stroke.

Excerpted and condensed from “Great Contemporaries: Hilaire Belloc,” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full article click here.

_______________

Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc

(1870-1953)—writer, sailor, poet, friend of Churchill—helped fuel Churchill’s passion for the survival of free government. Anti-statist, anti-collectivist and anti-establishment, he deplored the servitude of the industrial wage-earner and longed to reconcile his two great loves, “the soil of England and the Catholic faith.”

Born in France but educated at Birmingham and Oxford, he served with the French Artillery before becoming a naturalized British subject in 1902. Between 1906 and 1910 he was Churchill’s Parliamentary colleague.

* * *

French though he was, Belloc looked more like John Bull than anyone: “He wore a stand-up collar several sizes too large for him [and] was big and stocky and red of face.” Churchill’s nephew John Spencer-Churchill described him as “plump and cherub-like…. He used to take me sailing. We would start early in the morning, chug down the narrow Sussex lanes in his vintage Ford, lustily singing shocking French songs, and board his boat at Arundel.…Belloc was a devout Catholic, and undoubtedly his intellectual approach to the Catholic religion influenced my own interpretation of it in later years.”

Although English by choice, Belloc shared Churchill’s reverence for France. A friend remembered an Oxford Union debate in 1893. The motion was “That at the present juncture the advent of a Dictator would be a blessing to the French people.” Belloc replied with “passionate eloquence…reminding us of all that France had meant to human thought and human freedom, of how treacherously she had been forced into war in 1870 and how ruthlessly dismembered. It was one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard…. Belloc’s eloquence prevailed and the motion was defeated.”

Incandescent Brilliance

His book, The Servile State, championed “Distributism,“ a combination of apparent opposites. At the same time it involved broad land distribution, corporate organization of society and workers’ control of the means of production. It also emphasized decentralization of power, Jeffersonian democracy, and private property. Like Churchill, Belloc had traveled in America. It is odd that he never saw aspects of the USA as close to his vision.

Belloc shared Churchill’s interest in John Churchill First Duke of Marlborough. But Churchill thought Marlborough’s victories had contributed to British glory. Belloc disagreed, saying they had only entrenched the class system and rule by elites. In stimulating sessions at Chartwell they hashed over their differences. Few English writers, thought Brendan Bracken, “could hold a candle to Belloc, in his day, for wit, hard logic and felicity of phrasing.”

What a joy to have been to be present at such conversations! “Wit, charm, genius for friendship, conversational brilliance, all these are transitory qualities not easily captured,” wrote John Charmley.  “Bob Boothby recalled a lunch with Alfred Duff Cooper and Belloc when ‘the food was excellent, the claret superb,’ where he would never again ‘hope to listen to talk of such incandescent brilliance.'” Belloc started to recite some of his own poems, but laughed so much that Duff had to finish them…. A unique experience, not repeated.

World War II

Churchill was a fiftyish 65 when the next German war came. Belloc was an aging 69, and in no way ready for it. Uniquely and sadly, he had lost his first son in World War I, his second in World War II. He did not like the modern world. Still less he liked the horrific, blacked-out streets of shattered London. The England of his time was far away. He flourished only there. Churchill offered him a high honor in the name of the King, in the twilight of Belloc’s life. Belloc turned him down courteously.

Old and dispirited, Belloc had become pessimistic about the future. An admirer noted lines of his (often repeated by William F. Buckley, Jr. in morose moments). They might describe everyone you met at your last cocktail party….

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Churchill’s Tribute to Belloc

Nearing his eighty-third birthday, Belloc was dozing before the fire in his daughter’s home when he fell into the flames. Badly burned, he died in hospital on 16 July 1953. The mourners were few. Churchill was one of them.

After the war Hatch Mansfield, Churchill’s wine merchants, bought up all the ’28 and ’34 Pol Roger champagne in France for Churchill’s exclusive consumption. In 1954, they investigated Chartwell’s cellar and pronounced it a “shambles.” Accordingly, Ralph Mansfield threw out the dross and instituted a cellar book. It was scarcely necessary. The cellar was almost all Pol Roger, vintage Hine and Johnny Walker scotch.

One set of bottles, which Mansfield pronounced “awful,” was designated for the rubbish bin, but Sir Winston intervened. They contained a white burgundy which Churchill had personally bottled with Belloc.

Don’t touch them, declared Sir Winston Churchill. Let them rest.

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.”