The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  Churchill saw Britain’s security tied to three interlocking geopolitical circles, each separate from but overlapping the others, and each forming an association in which Britain might again flourish. Taken together, they promised safety and an honorable peace, one worthy of the sacrifice of Britons and Europeans in the late war. In June 1950 Churchill told the House: “First, there is the Empire and Commonwealth; secondly, the fraternal association of the English-speaking world; and thirdly, not in rank or status but in order, the revival of united Europe as a vast factor in the preserving of what is left of the civilization and culture of the free world.” To address the concerns of many Bevan Labourites—and Anthony Eden—who did not share his sentiments of a unified Europe, Churchill offered, “With our position as the centre of the British Empire and Commonwealth and with our fraternal association with the United States in the English-speaking world, we could not accept full membership of a federal system of Europe.” Much later, in the House, he needed only eight words to state his position on continental Europeans and their drift toward unity: “We are with them, but not of them.”107

  To stake out such a seemingly contradictory position took political adroitness: Britain would in some ways (not yet articulated with exactness by Churchill) be in a united Europe, but not completely in, which amounted to saying that Britain would in some ways be “out” of a united Europe. Indeed, from that time to this day, British governments have held to that policy. Although Churchill had voiced his belief in a united Europe for years, he had never addressed the details of the form and authority a European parliament might assume. This was a strategy more in line with Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to complex issues—offer few details—than Churchill’s usual blunt and clearly stated approach to all matters great and small. As Tories and Labourites debated the role of Britain, if any, in a European union, Harold Macmillan told his diary the question came down to “ ‘United Europe’ with Britain, on a loose basis of cooperation; ‘United Europe’ without Britain” (italics Macmillan). The extent of Britain’s participation in a European parliament would depend on whether that entity took the form of a “functional” body, having broad powers within strictly defined areas (coal and steel production, and tariffs, for example), or a federal model, with its authority vested in a European constitution. As Macmillan saw it, the former structure would not necessarily result in an erosion of sovereignty on the part of member nations, but the latter might, depending upon the political, economic, and military authority vested in the central government by the constitution.108

  For two decades Churchill approached European union much as he had played polo—first, slash and dash and drive the ball up the field to get in range, then let the details take care of themselves. Likewise, although for two decades he had championed a union of some sorts with the United States, he had not offered details of just what form that union would take. Despite the linguistic and historical bonds between London and Washington, despite Churchill’s dream of a shared currency (the dollar-sterling), and his hopes for political and economic ties that were more than “agreements,” Churchill knew that Britain would never find itself “inside” the United States. But NATO brought the United States “inside” Europe and promised security, although in 1950 its command structure—both political and military—had yet to be determined. Strengthening Britain’s relationship with the United States and developing a closer relationship with continental Europe were Churchill’s paramount objectives. “The fact that there is a grave Soviet and Communist menace,” he told the House in 1950, “only adds to its [European unity’s] value and urgency. Here surely we can find agreement on all sides of the House. No one can say with justice that we are acting and feeling in this way in prejudice to the interests of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Everyone knows that that stands first in all our thoughts.”109

  To the security offered by his three interlocking rings could be added the security provided by the United Nations, but, although Churchill claimed for the United Nations a central role in world affairs, he harbored doubts about its efficacy. During a Brussels conference on European unity in 1949 he declared:

  But there are also fundamental defects in the structure of the United Nations Organization which must be corrected if any progress is to be made. I had always felt during the war that the structure of world security could only be founded on regional organizations…. In consequence, the supreme body has been cumbered and confused by a mass of questions, great and small, about which only a babel of harsh voices can be heard…. It is vain to build the dome of the temple of peace without the pillars on which alone it can stand.

  For Churchill, Europe—led by Britain, France, and someday Germany—would form the strongest pillar and the greatest regional organization on the planet. Pointing out that numerous Eastern European nations could not send representatives to the conference, Churchill added, “The yoke of the Kremlin oligarchy has descended upon them and they are the victims of a tyranny more subtle and merciless than any hitherto known to history.”110

  Churchill’s sole domestic political objective from 1946 well into 1951 was to push, prod, and excoriate the Attlee government on its economic performance. In 1948 he told the House, “We are oppressed by a deadly fallacy. Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Unless we free our country while time remains from the perverse doctrines of Socialism, there can be no hope for recovery.” He delivered a variation on that theme again and again, in the House, at constituent meetings, and at Conservative rallies. During one such rally at Blenheim Palace he summed up his position on Labour thus: “Since [1939] two disasters have come upon us: the Second World War and the first Socialist Government with a majority. By supreme exertions we surmounted the first disaster. The question which glares upon us today is: ‘How shall we free ourselves from the second?’ ” Labour had “squandered” first the American loan of almost four billion dollars and then the generous allotments of the Marshall Plan, with the result that “we are now dependent upon further American generosity and also eating up from hand to mouth the remaining overseas investments and assets accumulated under the capitalist system of former years.” Out of loyalty to King and country, he muted his criticism when he spoke abroad, but at home, he pressed the attack.111

  He reserved his most scathing and personal criticism for his old political nemesis, Aneurin Bevan. In July 1948, on the occasion of the launch of the National Health Service, Churchill told his Woodford constituents:

  One would have thought that a man who had been only a burden to our war effort in the years of storm and who had received high office in the days of victory would have tried to turn over a new leaf and redeem his past…. We speak of the Minister of Health, but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease, for is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, moral disease, and indeed a highly infectious form? Indeed, I can think of no better step to signalize the inauguration of the National Health Service than that a person who so obviously needs psychiatrical attention should be among the first of its patients. And I have no doubt that the highest exponents of the medical profession would concur that a period of prolonged seclusion and relief from any responsible duties would be an equal benefit to Mr. Bevan and to the National Health Service.112

  Here was Churchill in top form, and whether he was in gentlemanly form was not of any concern to him. That sort of harangue sold newspapers and would be quoted in pubs throughout the land. In times of austerity, comic relief is a balm. Churchill delivered regular doses of that relief. Attlee’s Labour colleagues spoke in bureaucratese. Churchill did not. He spoke to the common man and, more important, could speak like the common man when the situation demanded.

  Between mid-1945 and early 1950 Churchill delivered more than two hundred speeches, many quite lengthy. He dictated, polished, and delivered every one of the four hundred thousand words of his addresses—enough to fill a thousand-page volume—that he sent into battle against sociali
sm, in defense of the Empire, and for European unity. It is an extraordinary achievement given that during these years, he was also writing his memoirs and fulfilling his duties as the leader of the Shadow Cabinet.

  That he could produce so much was due to the remarkable way he structured his waking hours, which allowed him to squeeze almost two days of work into each day. He spent his weekends at Chartwell, arriving on Thursday night and leaving for London Tuesday morning. At Chartwell, if breakfast was the start of his day, it began sometime after nine in the morning, later if he had dictated into the early morning hours, which he regularly did. Then, as he bid them good night—or good morning—the typists collected the day’s work and sent it off by taxi to the printers in London in order that galleys could be delivered to the Great Man by midday. He breakfasted alone, in bed. He once told a Chartwell visitor that he and Clementine had “tried two or three times in the last forty years to have breakfast together, but it didn’t work.” His bath and a tour of Chartwell’s grounds followed breakfast. Early afternoon found the typists on the day shift drifting into the library from their rooms in the village and Chartwell’s orchard cottage. There they waited while Churchill, attired now in a dark blue suit, waistcoat, and gold watch and chain, perused galleys and ordered his thoughts in his second-floor study. When he was ready to dictate, he depressed a switch on an intercom connected to the library, and announced, “Come.”113

  For the typists, the terror began as soon as they sat down at the—not so silent—silent typewriters. This was the routine of a quarter century, during which the lion had not lost his roar. He dictated three, four, sometimes five drafts of his addresses. Bill Deakin and Denis Kelly fed him statistics, and transcripts of Labour speeches, and budget and banking data, and military dispositions. All was bustle. Misspellings on the part of typists were met with sighs and sharp rebukes. The omnipresent intrusion of the gramophone did not help matters. “You just typed away and handed it in and sometimes it was dreadful and he’d just scowl,” recalled Chips Gemmell. Foreign names especially tripped up the typists. Once, upon glancing at Miss Gemmell’s handiwork, the Old Man barked: “You have not got one word in fifty right.” He used a special code, known only to himself, to delineate sections of a speech—P-1 for housing, or H-3 for foreign affairs, for example. At his command, the typists scribbled the codes in at the appropriate places. At the end came “the great moment” when Churchill announced, “Now I am going to clop.” The “clop” was his paper punch; he had no use for paper clips. The pages were arranged, numbered, punched, and finally bound by a thin strip of cloth. Jane Portal*—whom Churchill always called “the Portal”—committed a mortal sin one day when she assembled the pages in the wrong order, which Churchill only discovered while delivering the speech. She was sure she would never again be entrusted with that duty. When a few days later another speech reached the binding-together moment, Miss Portal was duly surprised—and moved almost to tears—when Churchill said, “Let the Portal do it.” “You see,” she recalled years later, “he was saying ‘I’ve forgiven you, I trust you.’ It was a small, personal instant, but it meant a great deal to me. He would do that often with people.”114

  His humor, as with his impatience, was never far beneath the surface. George Christ (rhymes with “whist”) joined the team in 1949 and was assigned the duty of procuring official government documents from which Churchill culled salient points for inclusion in his addresses and memoirs. Churchill pronounced Christ’s name as one would the Savior’s, and delighted in ordering his typists to “get me Christ on the phone” or “get Christ down here at once.” Upon such occasions of levity, a pause and a raised eyebrow were Churchill’s signals to the typists that they were free to laugh. They were just as free to weep, as he often did while dictating passages that moved him: “I mean I would be weeping and he would be weeping,” Jane Portal recalled, “and all the while he was dictating in his marvelous voice and I’d be tap-tapping away, the both of us weeping.”115

  His generosity was as much in evidence as his temper, his humor, and his tears. He ordered that the Chartwell gates remain open as a sign of welcome to any neighbors who might be inclined to stop by. Many did. A supply of old jackets, heavy coats, gloves, and old boots was kept near the front hall during the first bitter winters of victory, to be given to those in need. There were many. He was always willing to pay Randolph’s debts, although he would not disclose to his son the exact terms of the Chartwell Trust. He provided for Pamela after her divorce. Lord Moran had never been well off. Churchill insisted on helping him out and executed a seven-year deed of covenant for Moran’s wife, which brought her the modern equivalent of $20,000 a year tax free. Chips Gemmell recalled a trip to the races (a typist always accompanied Churchill wherever he went) during which Churchill told her he would not need her services for several hours. He sent her and the driver off with orders to enjoy themselves however they pleased and to meet him at the car after the day’s events. When Miss Gemmell climbed into the car late in the day, the Old Man passed her a racing form, on which he had circled various horses. He announced they were winners and that he had wagered one pound on each of them for her. “Well, count up what you won,” he ordered. But Chips, confused by the mathematics of odds and payouts, could not. “He was very mad that I couldn’t read the numbers,” she recalled, “and told me I had won twenty pounds, which was a great deal.” It dawned on Miss Gemmell that the Old Man hadn’t really placed any bets but had “suddenly thought in the car, poor girl, I’ll say I put money on the horses and I’ll say to her, work out how much and collect your money; it was a lovely gesture.” When his scheme derailed, Churchill pressed a twenty-pound note into her hand.116

  One Churchillian gesture stood out above all others for Miss Gemmell. “I was the paint lady,” she recalled. “On Tuesdays, before returning to London he’d call me upstairs. ‘Miss, you’ll clean the palettes up and the paintbrushes, and see if I need paints.’ And I’d say ‘Yes sir.’ ” She found cleaning the brushes in turpentine a “ghastly business” but attended to her duties, ordered new paints, and tidied up Churchill’s studio in preparation for his return. She was thus much moved when one day he called her into the studio and presented her with one of his paintings, “a very flattering portrait.” It was a portrait of her.117

  As he waded ahead on his memoirs and speeches, he faced a daily mountain of letters from persons great and small throughout the world. Replies to such missives did not always flow directly from the Old Man, although his tears often flowed upon reading them. Chips Gemmell was assigned the duty of composing responses on her own, for his signature. One such letter she wrote was to go off to the Massey Ferguson Company, which had sent Churchill an automated bread-making machine. Miss Gemmell composed a long and flowery thank-you note that moved Churchill to observe, “Jesus Christ, Miss, you’ve really over-egged the omelet this time. It was only a piece of farm machinery.” Such moments of silliness were inevitably followed, usually sooner rather than later, by sinister eruptions due to secretarial misfeasance of one sort or another. And so it went each day until early evening, when the staff wandered into the village for dinner and Churchill took his evening meal in the company of any family or friends who happened to be present in the house. Lord Moran was a regular guest. Jane Portal noticed that he used a pencil to scribble notes on his pure-white shirt cuffs, the better to capture the Old Man’s wisdom in the book Moran intended to write. Then, sometime after nine or ten, having returned from their meal in the village, the typists reassembled in the library and, as in the morning, awaited the summons from the Great Man: “Come.” After he took himself off to bed near midnight, with brandy and a cigar in hand, yet another summons was issued, and the early morning dictation began. Thus, he effectively squeezed almost two working days into each twenty-four hours and left himself time to feed his goldfish and provoke battles between the swans and the geese on the lower lakes.118

  Churchill turned seventy-five on November 30, 1949. “I a
m ready to meet my Maker,” he told friends that day. “Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Actually, neither was ready to meet the other. In 1874, the year of Churchill’s birth, the great Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli anointed the great Liberal leader William Gladstone—whom Disraeli had just replaced as prime minister—an “exhausted volcano.” But Gladstone, sixty-four at the time, was not exhausted and returned to that high office three more times before resigning at age eighty-four in 1894. Lord Randolph Churchill had derided Gladstone as “an old man in a hurry.” But Randolph died young, at forty-five, and therefore did not live long enough to grasp a truism known to old men. As the new decade came in—and with it the second half of the twentieth century—Winston Churchill understood that an old man had best hurry if he is to get someplace in the time remaining to him. Time, in early January, named him the Man of the Half-Century. The first half of the century had brought Europe and the world a succession of shocks and calamities, the editors wrote, with Churchill offering solutions—and suffering defeats—from within and without the British government. “That a free world survived in 1950, with a hope of more progress and less calamity, was due in large measure to his [Churchill’s] exertions.” Knowing that a British general election might soon be called, Time predicted that “[Churchill] would fight it—as he had fought all his other great battles—on the issue of freedom. Churchill likes freedom.”119

  Not all on the western shores of the Atlantic shared Luce’s sentiments. James Reston, one of the premier political reporters at the New York Times, later wrote of a dinner party Churchill attended at the Times during his 1949 trip to America. “He [Churchill] looked considerably more rounded fore and aft…. There was a curious sort of grayness to his flesh…. He asked for a glass of tomato juice, which I thought was newsworthy, but corrected this impression when the brandy was passed around, and he complained that everybody kept him talking so much that he didn’t have time to drink.” Reston thought that Churchill “snorted and lisped more than usual, but this may have been induced by sobriety.” As Churchill left, “a little shuffly and a little bent, Dr. Howard Rush, the Times’s favorite doctor, remarked, ‘Jesus, prop him up.’ I thought his [Churchill’s] political days were over.” Reston—Scotty to his friends—had been born in Scotland and grew up with a Scots Presbyterian’s natural and ancient distrust of Englishmen. As for Churchill’s political days being over, the often-prescient Reston got it wrong this time.120