Walter Henry Thompson 

…was Winston Churchill’s protection officer and detective, on and off between 1921 and 1945. They had many adventures together, and Thompson wrote four books about his experiences. The first, Guard from the Yard (1938, now very rare) involved Churchill and others whom Thompson protected.

After World War II, Thompson published I Was Churchill’s Shadow (1951), Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill (1953), and Assignment: Churchill (1956). He promoted them enthusiastically, with many book signings. As a Churchill bookseller, I used to describe a pristine copy of Sixty Minutes as “the rare unsigned edition.”

In 2005, Sixty Minutes was recently republished as Beside the Bulldog. Simultaneously there appeared Churchill’s Bodyguard: The Authorised Biography, which intersperses some new material with a large number of factual errors. The earlier works are pure Thompson and therefore worth seeking out.

Thompson’s Epic 

Thompson’s first Churchill assignment was the statesman’s Cairo Conference of 1921. Around the same time he was seconded to Churchill during negotiation of the Irish Treaty. When Churchill set out on a North American lecture tour in December 1931, Thompson was again assigned. The detective was resting after twenty-six-hours’ duty on December 13th, when Churchill was struck and nearly killed by a car on Fifth Avenue. Thompson always regretted that he had not been present, and perhaps able to prevent the accident.

Walter Thompson’s tall, angular features are frequently seen on Churchill photos during World War II. From 1939, when recalled to guard duty, he was rarely absent on the Prime Minister’s travels. Along the way, he accidentally shot himself while cleaning a weapon, and lost son in the RAF. He did however romance and later marry Mary Shearburn, one of the PM’s secretaries.

The Bodyguard Mini-series

I approached this production with doubt. The Authorised Biography contained so many howlers that I feared they would reappear in the video. But the episodes avoid this—and any hindsight moralizing, thought so necessary by producers today. It is, in the main, straight reporting from Thompson’s memoirs. Though I disliked Thompson’s steady references to the boss as “Winston,” I found no serious errors. Please advise if the episodes I didn’t watch contain some awful clanger!

The series does speculate in places. One such involves the actor Leslie Howard, “Ashley Wilkes” in one of Churchill’s favorite films, Gone with the Wind. The story goes that Howard and his bodyguard—shot down by the Luftwaffe in the belief they were Churchill and Thompson—were intentional decoys. This is of course nonsense.

The great strength of Churchill’s Bodyguard is its visuals. Some photos aren’t chronologically accurate, but most are little-known and fascinating. The producers cleverly applied the right poses to go with the dialogue, presenting what is almost a motion picture.

The synopses suggest that Thompson saved Churchill’s life in every episode. But I have no doubt that many potential threats did preoccupy him. And to his credit, he disregarded no possibility.

Churchill’s Bodyguard Synopsis (IMdb)

Sadly, all but three of these videos have been deleted from YouTube. Links to the other three (below) were still active in mid-2019.

Introductions. Here we learn how two very different characters met, and how Thompson, born in the East End, saves his boss from an IRA assassination attempt. Ten years earlier, they had both been present, unknowingly, at the Siege of Sidney Street.

Middle East, 1921. Walter Thompson gets the challenge of keeping his boss alive during a visit to the Middle East. A leading British politician is the natural target for assassins, and on several critical occasions, Thompson is helped by the enigmatic Lawrence of Arabia.

The 1920s; travels in the New World 1929-32. Churchill buys cars and a house. In 1929 ceases to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and Thompson’s duties end. Within two years, Churchill’s outspoken views gain him new and deadly enemies, and Thompson is recalled.

North American Lecture Tour 1932. Thompson keeps Churchill safe during his lecture tour, but then leaves the police force. It seems that Churchill’s career is over, too. But a sinister new force is rising which sees him as an implacable enemy. Threats to his life bring the two men together again.

* * *

From Wilderness to War 1932-40. Despite being out of office, Churchill’s enemies prove dangerous. With war imminent, French Intelligence hears of a German assassination plot. Thompson returns from retirement. Britain goes to war in September 1939, and Churchill is back at the Admiralty.

Dangerous Travels and the Fall of France 1940. Sent to the Admiralty in September 1939, Churchill becomes Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, as Hitler invades the Low Countries. He embarks on a campaign of personal diplomacy, with travels including six trips to France. To Thompson’s concern, they are often within range of Luftwaffe fighters.

Surviving the Blitz, 1940-41. The early days of the war prove difficult and dangerous. The Luftwaffe bombs London. The Prime Minister walks the streets among the people, watches air raids from rooftops, and visits anti-aircraft batteries. Often only Thompson is with him.

Meetings with FDR, 1941-42. Running a gauntlet of U-boats in the North Atlantic, Churchill sets out for meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt. On one return journey, as the PM prepares to board a flying boat for the trip home, a gunman lurks nearby.

* * *

Turning Point, 1942-43. A precarious trip to Moscow to visit Stalin is followed by victory for the Eighth Army in North Africa. Aware that Churchill is traveling, the Germans at least twice try to shoot down his plane.

Teheran, 1943. After two Atlantic crossings and two trips across the Mediterranean, Churchill grows increasingly frustrated with Allied planners and suspicious of Stalin. When the Big Three meet in Tehran in 1943, the Germans launch Operation Longjump, in which commandoes plan to parachute into the city.

The Kiss of Life, 1943. Returning from the Tehran Conference, a sick and exhausted Churchill survives a dangerous illness, Thompson keeping vigil at his bedside.

Athens, 1944. Flying to Greece to forestall a civil war, Churchill plans to stay at a hotel where communist guerrillas had placed dynamite. He changes quarters to HMS Ajax in Piraeus harbor, while guerrillas fire at the ship.

Victory in Europe, 1945. Churchill and Thompson make several journeys through jubilant crowds. Churchill wants to walk among them. Instead Thompson pulls him onto the roof of his car,  accidentally breaking a woman’s arm in the process.

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.