At least one guest finds it difficult to picture Churchill as a peacemaker, noting Winston’s account “of how he first came under fire when he was twenty-one, of his boyish delight in the proximity of danger, or his glee that he was actually ‘seeing the real thing.’ ” The hazards and discomforts of war, Winston argues, strengthen a young man’s character. Certainly they had strengthened his. But war was very different then. The industrial/technological revolution had not yet cranked out the appliances of death—machine guns, shrapnel shells, land mines—which were taking so frightful a toll in the twentieth century. In South Africa, at the crucial battle of Majuba in 1881, the British lost just 92 men. By contrast, over 400,000 young British soldiers had fallen in 1916 and 1917 in the Somme and Passchendaele campaigns—in vain, with no strategic gains. In 1932 few Englishmen know that as a young war correspondent he had written: “War, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would play at,” or that he declared after the Armistice in 1918: “War, which was cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and squalid.”46
But in his youth he had thought it magnificent. In his first book he wrote: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” and “There are men who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of danger and ruin, as others from success.” It is this very trait—and his longing to be on a battlefield, watching what he calls “the fun of the good things”—which worries all but the most devoted of his followers. His critics call him “a genius without judgment,” a man with “a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain,” the only cabinet minister who gloated when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914.
Because of the general revulsion against another European war, and because Churchill’s judgment has been discredited since the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, men will shrug and turn away when he predicts, accurately, that Hitler will come to power in Germany, and that once Hitler has moved into the Kanzlei—the German chancellery in Berlin—their only hope of avoiding another general war will lie in following his advice: shoring up England’s defenses, or, that failing, in turning to a leader who possesses not only vision and intellect, but also a capacity for brutality, faith in the superiority of his race, and a positive relish at the prospect of grappling with a nation of warriors led by a demagogue who represents everything he loathes—in short, to Winston Churchill.
The great difference between the two is that Hitler wants war and will actually be annoyed by Britons and Frenchmen who propose to give him what he wants without a fight, while Churchill, though a born warlord, is prepared to sacrifice all save honor and the safety of England to keep the peace. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a difficult book, but no one who has struggled through it can doubt that the author is a killer obsessed with Blutdurst, bloodthirstiness. Churchill, on the other hand, after telling his guests that he has already begun research on a major project which will follow Marlborough, a four-volume History of the English-speaking Peoples, gloomily adds: “I doubt if I shall finish it before the war comes.” If he does and an English victory is “decisive,” he says, “I shall have to add several more volumes. And if it is not decisive no more histories will be written for years.”
It is eleven o’clock. Churchill sees his overnight guests to their rooms and, as they retire, begins his working day. Only after entering his employ will Bill Deakin discover, to his astonishment, that Churchill lacks a large private income, that he lives like a pasha yet must support his extravagant life with his pen. The Churchill children are also unaware that, as Mary will later put it, the family “literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.” Her mother, who knows, prays that each manuscript will sell. Luckily, they all do, with the exception of one screenplay for Alexander Korda, and editors and publishers, both in Britain and America, pay him the highest rates. His output is prodigious. During backbencher years, from early 1931 to late 1939, he will publish eleven volumes and over four hundred articles, many of them hack work (“Sport Is a Stimulant in Our Workaday World,” “The Childless Marriage Threatens Our Race,” “What Other Secrets Does the Inventor Hold?”) in Strand Magazine, Sunday Pictorial, Daily Mail, The Times, Saturday Review, Answers, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Chronicle, Collier’s, Sunday Dispatch, Pictorial Magazine, Sunday Times, Pictorial Weekly, The Listener, Pearson’s Magazine, Daily Sketch, Evening Standard, Sunday Express, News of the World, Jewish Chronicle, and Daily Telegraph. His annual earnings will average £20,000, or $96,000. During the same period he will deliver 368 speeches for which he is, of course, paid nothing. He will reject some commissions: a history of Parliament because the sum is inadequate, nearly $30,000 for a speaking tour in the United States because the mounting crises on the Continent keep him in England, and $50 from William S. Paley, president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, for an appraisal of Nazi activity in Austria. Paley asks CBS correspondent William L. Shirer to make the approach. Shirer, appalled by the paltry sum, phones Winston at the House of Commons. Called out of the chamber, Churchill says he will do it for $500. Paley decides he isn’t worth it, and a fragment of history is lost.47
Winston’s Chartwell study is a writer’s dream. Entering through the Tudor doorway with its molded architrave, one looks up and up—the ceiling has been removed, revealing vaulting rafters and beams which were in place long before the Renaissance. One’s second impression—and it is strong—is a reminder of the greatest enigma in Churchill’s life. Despite his parents’ disgraceful neglect of him in his early years, a bronze cast of Jennie’s hand lies on one windowsill. The desk and the bureau-bookcase with Gothic glazing were Lord Randolph’s. The most prominent painting on the walls depicts his father writing. On the level of awareness, Winston reveres the memory of both his parents, but the resentment has to be there. His suppression of it is doubtless a heavy contributor to his periodic spells of depression, and his combativeness arises from the need to find another outlet for his anger. Significantly, he works not at his father’s magnificent mahogany desk with gleaming claw feet, but at a high Disraeli desk of unvarnished deal with a slanting top, designed by Winston and fashioned by a local carpenter—a reminder that Victorians liked to write standing up.
His appearance heralded by the harff, harff of his slippers, he enters the room in his scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown, the cords trailing behind him. Before greeting his researcher and the two secretaries on duty tonight, he must read the manuscript he dictated the previous evening and then revise the latest galleys, which arrived a few hours earlier from London. Since Churchill’s squiggled red changes exceed the copy set—the proofs look as though several spiders stained in crimson ink wandered across the pages—his printers’ bills are shocking. But the expense is offset by his extraordinary fluency. Before the night is out, he will have dictated between four thousand and five thousand words. On weekends he may exceed ten thousand words. Once his family presented him with a Dictaphone. He was delighted. It seemed miraculous. He could dictate alone; one of the secretaries could transcribe the Dictabelt later. After a productive session, he went to bed triumphant, only to be told upon wakening that it was all wasted. He had forgotten to turn the device on. Everything was lost. “No more gadgets!” he roared, and stuck to the old system till his death.
Churchill has developed what biographer Philip Guedalla calls a faculty for “organizing large works.” If he is researching a speech, a magazine essay, or a newspaper article, he needs little help. But for a major effort—his four-volume Marlborough or his History of the English-speaking Peoples—he requires a staff, most of them young Oxford graduates to whom he assigns readings and investigations; they then submit précis or memoranda which he studies between bursts of dictation. Among those thus engaged (at very small wages—£300 to £500 a year) are Deakin, John Wheldon, Keith Feiling, Maurice Ashley, Charles Hordern, and Ridley Pakenham-Walsh, both the last two former military officers. For a man approaching sixty, Winston does a great deal of his own field work, touring Mar
lborough’s European battlefields—he is amazed at their enormity—but he hasn’t time to rummage through the archives at Blenheim, translate old Flemish documents, or pore over the dispatches of William of Orange. So his staff does it for him.
This in no way diminishes his achievements. Deakin will remember that he, Winston, and the “shorthand-typists,” as Churchill calls his secretaries, would sometimes “work on Marlborough until three or four in the morning. One felt exhilarated. Part of the secret was his phenomenal, fantastic power to concentrate on what he was doing. And he communicated it. You were absolutely a part of it—swept into it. I might have given him some memorandum before dinner, four or five hours before. Now he would walk up and down dictating. My facts were there, but he had seen it in deeper perspective. My memorandum was only a frame; it ignited his imagination.” Winston asks him to write a summary of the election of 1710, and, Deakin will recall, “He read this without any comment at all and then dictated what he wanted to write in his book…. He translated it into integral power and things he understood in contemporary terms, but it was a transformation that was very special. His penetrating insight revealed insights I had completely missed.”48
Because tonight’s major project is a parliamentary speech, the researcher’s tasks are complete before midnight. Those of the shorthand-typists are about to begin. Two will be on hand, to work shifts, and they will have assembled the necessary tools: scrap paper, shorthand notebooks, pens, pencils, rulers, erasers, scissors, paste, rubber bands, copy paper, carbon paper, an assortment of green tags, a copy of Vacher’s Parliamentary Companion Guide, and Winston’s “klop” or “klopper”—a powerful paper punch. Winston despises staplers. Instead the klop perforates a batch of paper; he then threads a piece of string through the hole and attaches it to a tag. In a public address the pages must be in order, and he has an irrational fear that someone will sabotage him, reversing pages. Right up to the moment of delivery he will be nervously checking to reassure himself that they are in sequence.
Sometimes, as Cecily (“Chips”) Gemmell will recall, the opening hour is “ghastly.” There is no diverting him. A stenographer peers through a window and observes blithely: “It’s dark outside.” Churchill, giving her a bleak look, replies pitilessly: “It generally is at night.” His creative flow is blocked; he will prowl around, fling himself into a chair, bury his head in his hands and mutter, “Christ, I’ve got to do this speech, and I can’t do it, I can’t.” On such occasions, Inspector Thompson notes, Winston is “a kicker of wastebaskets, with an unbelievably ungovernable bundle of bad temper. It is better to stay away from him at such times, and this his family seeks to do.”49
But the help has no choice. In time a word will come; then another word; then a prolonged search for the right phrase, ending, after a prolonged mumbling to himself, with a chortle of delight as he finds it. But his pace is still halting; Sir John Martin, one of his principal private secretaries, will later recall it as a long process, “while he carefully savored and chose his words, often testing alternative words or phrases in a low mutter before coming out loudly with the final choice.” He is trying to establish rhythm, and once he has it, his pace quickens. Beginning where he will begin in the House, he opens with what MP and diarist Harold Nicolson calls “a dull, stuffy manner, reciting dates and chronology,” but as he progresses he takes a livelier tone, introducing his familiar quips and gestures. Most writers regard the act of creativity as the most private of moments, but for Churchill it is semipublic; not only is the staff on hand, but any guest willing to sacrifice an hour’s sleep is also welcome.
In Parliament he stands when speaking. Here he paces. In the House of Commons pacing is impossible, so he has adopted a different mode of delivery there. Nicolson notes: “His most characteristic gesture is strange indeed. You know the movement that a man makes when he taps his trouser pockets to see whether he has got his latch-key? Well, Winston pats both trouser pockets and then passes his hands up and down from groin to tummy. It is very strange.”50
In Parliament his wit will flash and sting, but members who know him well are aware that he has honed these barbs in advance, and only visitors in the Strangers’ Gallery are under the impression that his great perorations are extemporaneous. F.E. once referred to “Churchill’s carefully prepared impromptus.” Peter E. Wright, who had been among Churchill’s colleagues during the Gallipoli crisis of 1915, notes: “Mr. Churchill cannot, as is well known, improvise very easily; telling as his speeches are, they are wrought, rehearsed, and often half read. To produce it all, Mr. Churchill, in his books and in his speeches, heaves like a mountain.” But so, Wright adds, do other MPs, with disappointing results, whereas, “if Mr. Churchill’s throes are volcanic, so is the result—a burning flood of lava, often uneven and tumultuous, but sweeping and splendid in its general effect.”51
It is the product of toil, sweat, and frequent tears. On the average he spends between six and eight hours preparing a forty-minute speech. Frequently, as he dictates passages which will stir his listeners, he weeps; his voice becomes thick with emotion, tears run down his cheeks (and his secretary’s). Like any other professional writer, he takes his text through several drafts before it meets his standards; but even in its roughest stages it is free of cant and bureaucratic jargon. Where Stanley Baldwin has said “a bilateral agreement has been reached,” Churchill makes it “joined hands together.” The “Local Defence Volunteers” become the “Home Guard.” One sure way of rousing his temper is to call a lorry a “commercial vehicle” or alter “the poor” to “the lower-income group.” He wages a long, and, in the end, successful campaign to ban the civil service’s standard comment “The answer is in the affirmative” to a simple “Yes.” A Churchillian text includes such inimitable phrases as “the jaws of winter,” “hard and heavy tidings,” and—neither Pitman nor Gregg is equal to this—“a cacophonous chorus.” In both conversation and dictation he uses words with great precision and insists that others do the same. On a trip his physician comments: “I hope you did not catch cold sitting on the balcony in the chill night air.” His patient, smiling mischievously, corrects him: “Portico, not balcony, Charles.”52
Most of the action takes place in his study, but it can be unsettling even there. Once at 3:00 A.M. Winston uncharacteristically opened a window. Immediately a bat entered. The young woman on duty, more frightened of her employer than of this new uninvited immigrant of the Chartwell pet colony, closed her eyes and kept taking down words while Churchill pursued the bat with a poker, drove it back out, and slammed the window shut—meantime not missing a phrase. Another time a fire broke out in the study. Churchill’s voice continued until, enveloped in smoke, his croaks and gasps became incomprehensible. By then a half-dozen servants had arrived. The flames had been smothered and all windows opened. The secretary, who had also been on duty the Night of the Bat, as the staff now called it, vanished. (“I headed for the loo,” she recalls.) Churchill convened a court of inquiry on the spot, demanding the name of the arsonist. Kathleen Hill looked at him and said evenly, “You.” She pointed at the remains of the cigar butt in the charred seat of an overstuffed chair. He scowled darkly, turned, and shouted, “Where’s Miss?”53
His secretaries are required to take down every audible word from him; he often changes his mind in midpassage, but he may change it back. If he says “I was going” and adds after a pause “I decided to go,” they type: “I was going. I decided to go.” They spell one another from time to time, not because they are exhausted; he wants to see what he had said in cold type. He will revise it in his red ink, redictate it, and scrutinize it again. Occasionally he will add a paragraph. When at last he has a final version, it will be typed, on a machine with outsized type, on small pieces of paper, eight by four inches, the whole lot klopped and strung to a tag. The speech will be set in broken lines to aid his delivery, “speech form,” or “psalm form,” as Lord Halifax calls it. After Hitler becomes absolute master of the Third Reich
, Churchill tells the House of Commons:
I have on more than one occasion
Made my appeal that the Führer of Germany
Should become the Hitler of peace.
When a man is fighting in a desperate conflict
He may have to grind his teeth and flash his eyes;
Anger and hatred nerve the arm of strife.
But success should bring a mellow, genial air
And, by altering the mood to suit the new circumstances,
Preserve and consolidate in tolerance and goodwill
What has been gained by conflict.
Thus, when Churchill rises to speak in the House, he holds in his hand not notes on the issues he means to address, but the entire text of what he intends to say. To be sure, he may say a few words suitable to the occasion, commenting on the remarks of previous speakers, but the rest is a set piece, though few know it. Because his delivery gives an illusion of spontaneity and the notes include stage directions (“pause; grope for word” and “stammer; correct self”), each of his speeches is a dramatic, vibrant occasion.
It would be pleasant to report that his relationship with his staff is genial, that he treats them as he would his daughters, and that he is particularly patient with new secretaries. In fact, he is nothing of the sort. He treats them like servants. A. J. P. Taylor calls him an “atrocious” taskmaster, and his attitude toward his employees is difficult to understand or, at times, even to excuse. He can summon each of his pets by name, recite poetry by the hour, and remember the exact circumstances under which he learned of a certain event fifty years earlier, but he knows the names of only three or four of his eighteen servants and stenographers. They are “the tall Miss with blue eyes” or “the man with ginger hair.” Newcomers find his lisp an obstacle—they simply do not understand what he is saying—but he makes no allowance for that. Chips Gemmell will remember that during her first session she “sat there terrified; I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and I couldn’t keep up with him. I thought, this is a nightmare. This isn’t happening. So I went plop, plop, quite convinced it wasn’t real.” Winston didn’t read her typescript until the team assembled in the study the following evening. He glanced through the first two pages, his face passing through deeper and deeper shades of red and his frown growing more savage, until he rose, flung the sheets on the floor, stamped his feet, and screamed: “You haven’t got one word in fifty right! Not one word in fifty! NOT ONE WORD IN FIFTY!”54