Q: “How many jibes were aimed at Churchill?”

Charles Legge, the Daily Mail Q&A editor, was asked by a reader: “Entire books celebrate Winston Churchill’s insults, but what jibes were directed at him?” Mr. Legge offered a classic, delivered by Lord Haldane, a portly colleague given to witty rejoinders (below). Daily Mail readers added two more. Surely Churchill picked up many more jibes than this. Is there a list? —N.D., Camp Hill, Penna.

A: Incoming! 

No, but you prompt us to create one. Churchill, of course, received as good as he gave. For the most part, he took jibes sent his way good-naturedly, sometimes repeating them himself.

In compiling this list, we were struck by the good humor of many critics. Relatively few expressed real malice—Samuel Hoare and Aneurin Bevan being exceptions. (Rab Butler’s nasty aside when Churchill became prime minister quickly subsided when he saw opportunities and was given a Cabinet ministry.) Some were delivered with, or for, laughs. A few evidenced affection. It was another world, when decorum was expected— and prevailed.

Readers are welcome to add to this list in the comments box. Please provide the source (Hansard or book, author and page) and the most exact date available. Thanks for many of the following jibes to Richard Cohen, Andrew Roberts, Dave Turrell, William John Shepherd, Charles Legge  and Daily Mail correspondents Peter Gilbert and Dave Taylor.

Archie MacLaren

1888: “He’s quite useless and a snotty little b****r.”

Leopold Maxse

June 1904: “Churchill’s attitude cannot surprise since he is himself half-alien and wholly undesirable.”

F.E. Smith Lord Birkenhead

1918: “When Winston is right, he is unique. When he’s wrong—Oh My God.”

1920: “I finally come to the Dundee Advertiser. I mean the paper, not the politician.”

Arthur Balfour

1923: “I am immersed in Winston’s magnificent autobiography [The World Crisis], disguised as a history of the universe.”

Samuel Hoare

1923: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.”

1 June 1934:  “I do not know which is the more offensive or more mischievous, Winston or his son. Rumour, however, goes that they fight like cats with each other and chiefly agree in the prodigious amount of champagne that each of them drinks each night.”

Richard Haldane

1920s: [WSC, prodding Haldane’s ample belly: “What’s in there?”] Haldane: “If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston.”

Philip Snowden

Ca. 1928: “I understand that Winston has taken up a new pastime—fiddling, and very appropriate, too.”

Herbert Samuel

May 1935: “[T]he House always crowds in to hear him. It listens and admires. It laughs when he would have it laugh, and it trembles when he would have it tremble—which is very frequently in these days; but it remains unconvinced, and in the end, it votes against him.”

Leopold Amery

June 1935: “Here endeth the last chapter of the Book of Jeremiah.”

Adolf Hitler

6 November 1935: “If Mr. Churchill had less to do with traitors and more with Germans, he would see how mad his talk is, for I can assure this man, who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Germany opposed to the regime.”

Stanley Baldwin

22 May 1936: “When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle bearing gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice.”

Neville Chamberlain

4 April 1939: “It doesn’t make things easier to be badgered for a meeting of Parliament by the two Oppositions and Winston who is the worst of the lot, telephoning almost every hour of the day. I suppose he has prepared a terrific oration which he wants to let off.”

Rab Butler

10 May 1940: “This is a black day in England’s history. We have been given into the hands of a drunken adventurer with all the worst characteristics of Charles James Fox…. A half-breed American whose main support is that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

James Maxton

10 May 1940: “I am getting more and more fatalist—it was written in the book of fate, say, perhaps on the battlefield of Blenheim or someplace, that he would one day be prime minister…. But frankly, I cannot see the wonderful motive power that has been produced by the transference of the relative positions of the two Rt. Hon. Gentlemen opposite [Churchill and Chamberlain].”

Franklin Roosevelt

1940s: “Winston has a hundred ideas a day and four of them are good.”

Aneurin Bevan

2 July 1942: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.”

9 September 1942: “[His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…. The Prime Minister was dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.”

13 July 1945: “[For Churchill], democracy is a state in which the people acquiesce in the rule of property. Democracy is an admirable institution so long as the poor continue to carry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democracy falls into disrepute. That is why, whenever you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist.”

Ezra Pound

1945: “Winston believes in the maximum of injustice enforced with the maximum of brutality.”

Joseph Stalin

14 March 1946: “Mr. Churchill is now in the position of a war-monger…strikingly reminiscent of Hitler… also with a racial theory…. [He says:] ’Recognize our supremacy over you, voluntarily, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable.’ [We will not] change the rule of the Hitlers for the rule of the Churchills.”

Clementine Churchill

No date: “Winston is a sporting man; he always likes to give the train a chance to get away.”

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“No Cards, No Flowers: Churchill on the Death of Stalin,” 2021.

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Mr. Paul Bonowicz staged a one-man protest against Churchill in South Ruislip, Middlesex. He denounced “the lies in British books about Winston Churchill. I am Polish and we know he betrayed Polish people.” He added: Churchill “knew about the Holocaust. He knew Jewish people were dying, but he didn’t help. After the war there was a deal between Churchill and Stalin, and the price was Poland. Part of my country went to the Soviets. It was Churchill who decided which part, not the Poles.” —Uxbridge Gazette.

Churchill did know about the Holocaust, and alone among allied leaders, he tried to do something about it. As to the alleged Polish betrayal…

Virtues and mistakes

In 1938, the Teschen District of Czechoslovakia was absorbed by the Poles, who happily took it, as a result of the Munich Agreement. In 1939 Polish parts not taken by Hitler went to the Soviets. Toward war’s end Churchill first protested, then acquiesced, and ultimately agonized over the shifting of Poland to the west. An eastern slice went to Russia and the Poles received part of Germany. In August 1945 Churchill told Parliament: “I think a mistake has been made, in which the Provisional (Communist) Government of Poland have been an ardent partner, by going far beyond what necessity or equity required.” (Churchill By Himself, 179). “There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess—and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.”

The matter has ben raised more recently in the modern round of Churchill criticism. It is difficult to comprehend what Churchill, and Roosevelt for that matter, could have done abut the land shift. By 1945 the Red Army occupied all Polish territory. The Anglo-Americans hoped (forlornly) that Stalin would make good his promise of free elections. Some Poles have never forgiven them, although Churchill was first to predict Communism’s fall, thanks to patriots such as Lech Walesa.

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

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

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

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

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

Stalin and the “Percentages Agreement”

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

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

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

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

“Saving the Nations from Hell”: The “Kingly Conference,” 1914 (Excerpt)

(Read more at Hillsdale College Churchill Project)

Churchill’s faith in personal diplomacy—solving intractable problems by meetings at the highest level—was famously expressed during World War II.

Less widely known is Churchill’s 1914 proposal for a conference of heads of state (including, it seems, French President Raymond Poincaré) in an effort to head-off World War I. The scheme failed, but not for Churchill’s lack of trying.

There is little on Churchill’s “kingly conference” in the literature. There is no reference in Churchill’s The World Crisis, Asquith’s memoirs, or biographies by Manchester, Jenkins, Rose, Charmley and Birkenhead, though Sir Martin Gilbert includes in the official biography an excerpt from a cabinet member which records Churchill’s words in the cabinet of July 27th:

Churchill said we were now in a better than average condition, & the fleet was at war strength….Churchill, however, added: it was an appalling calamity for civilised nations to contemplate & thought possibly sovereigns could be brought together for sake of Peace. [1]

Although there is evidence that the principal powers were willing to participate, Churchill’s proposal was dashed. On July 28th he wrote his wife Clementine from the Admiralty, expressing his continued wish for peace:

I cannot feel that we in this island are in any serious degree responsible for the wave of madness which has swept the mind of Christendom. No one can measure the consequences. I wondered whether those stupid Kings and Emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was somebody else’s operation! [2]

Endnotes

1. Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, volume 3, The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 1971), 10.

2. WSC to his wife (CSC Papers), Tuesday, 28 July 1914, in Randolph S. Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Document Volume 5, At the Admiralty 1911-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 1989-90.

I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why  did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans? That is his crime and the recognition of it will come. —H.W. via email.

The choice before Churchill and Britain in 1939-40 was anything but clear-cut. There were good reasons, however, supporting the choice they made.

While considering the fate of Eastern Europe it is reasonable also to consider that of Western Europe, and what Europe would have looked like had Hitler triumphed, and moved on into the nuclear age.

Before assuming that Churchill didn’t care about Bolshevism, it is necessary to read a little. Read about 1919-20, when he supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks, earning no love from his practical, wise and eminent colleagues, who didn’t see what he did.

Read on into the 1930s. Who occupied the Rhineland in violation of treaties? What was the March 1938 Anschluss about? What happened at Munich? What about March 1939, and the absorption of all those Bohemians, Moravians and Slovakians into the Reich? Which country first allied herself with Russia—Britain or Germany? Cities like Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam were all hit before the RAF had dropped a single bomb on the Reich. Indeed, for many months after the war started in 1939, the most the British would drop were pamphlets. Bombing, some in the government believed, would amount to destruction of private property.

Why side with Stalin in 1941? If your back is to the wall you tend to welcome allies without being too choosy about them. It is a legitimate criticism that Churchill was too trusting of Stalin; those arguments are not coming out, they’ve been out for thirty years. But if he hated Germans, his postwar declaration that the only way to salvage Europe was through rapprochement between France and Germany was an odd way to express it. “My hate,” he wrote later, “died with their surrender.”

In 1931 Churchill wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life”: words that still ring today:

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

“Implicit in those words,” says Dr. Larry Arnn, “are the speeches of 1940. Churchill told the British people we must fight to the death—better to die than to give this thing up. The sin of Hitler, almost superhuman in its scale but not, is that he tried too form a polity that would eliminate the very heart of humanity. No one saw that more clearly than Winston Churchill.”

The prime minister enjoyed ArArAt brandy when it was served by Stalin at the Yalta conference in February 1945. After the Second World War, the Soviet leader arranged for Churchill to be sent 400 bottles every year.

This seems highly doubtful. If so, for how long, one wonders? By 1946, Churchill was saying things about the Russians that they probably didn’t think merited gifts. There is no record in the Churchill Archives Centre of even a bottle of brandy being sent to Churchill—although he did compliment Stalin on an Armenian brandy served at Yalta.

I am indebted to archivist Lynsey Darby at the Churchill Archives Centre Cambridge, who writes:

I’ve looked at a number of files in the Churchill Papers, and at Cita Stelzer’s book, Dinner with Churchill. The evidence points towards Churchill enjoying a range of different (but always high-quality) brandies, not just Armenian cognac. Mrs. Stelzer does mention Churchill picking up a bottle of Armenian cognac during a dinner given by Stalin in 1942.

Other brandies mentioned in the book are l’Hertier de Jean Fremicourt (which Anthony Montague Browne said was Churchill’s favorite in his later years) and Prunier (which Churchill served at Potsdam). In the Churchill Papers, frustratingly the name of the brandy is often not given. In accounts from his wine merchants, the brandy is usually described simply as “fine old liqueur.”

ArArAt Brandy

ArArAt is produced by the Yerevan Company, whose Armine Ghazaryan queried me about their brand “Dvin.” She asked for the origins of the Churchill story.  I have found no record of cases of either brandy being shipped to Churchill, either at his request or Stalin’s. But Ms. Ghazaryan kindly explains how “Dvin” relates to “ArArAt”:

My own contribution to all this is that the standard brandy Churchill served at Chartwell was Hine (which is quite agreeable). A London wine merchant, hired to appraise the cellar at Chartwell in the 1950s, pronounced it “a shambles.” The only contents worth mentioning were a collection of vintage Hine, and of course Pol Roger Champagne.

Trivialities

Churchill drank a still white wine on occasion. The only such type mentioned by the appraiser was a case of’ “perfectly dreadful” Chardonnay. Churchill had personally bottled this with his longtime friend Hilaire Belloc. He forbade throwing it out.

It was reported years ago that Churchill agreeably paid all the liquor accounts except for his wife Clementine’s gin, which he insisted she pay for herself. I referred this story to Sir Winston’s grandson, the late Winston Churchill. He replied: “I never saw my grandmother drink gin; her tipple, at least in later life, was Dubonnet.”

Equally short shrift was given by Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames, who thundered.  “Absolute b—-; and you may quote me! Of course they would have had the odd Martini, especially when staying with the Roosevelts. FDR mixed a mean one. But they were certainly not gin-drinkers by habit.”