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

  Any circumstance might trigger Churchill’s humor reflex. Once, after delivering a speech in Parliament on American aid, he rode home to Downing Street in the back of a limousine, belting out “Old Man River.” When his doctor once recited lines from John Milton’s Lycidas—“While the still morn went out with sandals grey…”—Churchill countered, “He was on the wrong side on the Civil War.” During a visit to Rome, he was introduced to the leaders of various Italian political factions. Greeting one group, he asked, “What party are you?” “We are the Christian Communists,” came the reply. Churchill could not contain himself: “It must be very inspiring to your party, having the Catacombs so handy.” One day in the House, he was forced to sit through the delivery of a long and tedious report rife with statistics. He noticed an elderly MP leaning forward with an antique ear trumpet pressed to his ear, struggling to hear the report. Churchill turned to a colleague and asked, “Who is that idiot denying himself his natural advantages?”52

  Chequers—the ancient Buckinghamshire country house that had been the country retreat of prime ministers since 1917—was guarded by vigilant sentries and could be approached only by those who knew that day’s password. One night during that first week of summer it was “Tofrek,” site of an 1855 battle in the Sudan. That evening, excited by the sound of a plane overhead, Churchill ran out, shouting, “Friend! Tofrek! Prime minister!” There, late at night, he would recite lines from Hamlet, or Byron, or sing music hall ballads he had not heard since the 1890s. Sometimes, when a recording of The Blue Danube was playing, he would waltz around the room alone, his right hand flat against his shirt and his left arm extended as though he were supporting the hand of a partner. Clementine, if present, would likely not join her husband. She understood that he often played and worked simultaneously. While gliding around the room, he very often crafted phrases to deploy in upcoming speeches, and to interrupt him was out of the question. However, on one occasion (years later), two cabinet ministers considered their business more important than Churchill’s speech preparation. They bounded up the stairs, headed for his bedroom, where he was dictating his notes. As they waited outside, a secretary announced their presence to the Old Man. “Tell them to go and bugger themselves,” came the volcanic response. Then a pause, and, “Tell them there is no need for them to carry out that instruction literally.”53

  The prelude to a speech in the House of Commons was opéra bouffe. He would craft it, not in the calm of a study surrounded by reference books but while on the telephone, or prancing around the Great Hall at Chequers, or propped up in bed, or bowed over a map, waging war. He composed every word of every speech; no committee of speechwriters toiled at No. 10. His bath was a favorite venue for speech preparation (he was proud of being able to control the taps with his toes while he dictated). In the midst of other tasks, he would start muttering phrases to himself: “To the gates of India”; “this bloodthirsty guttersnipe”; “this star of England.” When a cabinet minister called Germans “sheep,” Churchill snarled, “Carnivorous sheep.” In two words he captured the essence of his foes better than Baldwin or Chamberlain could in two hours of speechifying. When Hitler was the subject, Churchill struck and struck again, each cut more ferocious than the one before: “This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.” He fertilized every phrase with imagery, and weeded them of any word that could choke his message. He tried them out over dinner with colleagues, with different adjectives, different emphasis, to measure their rhythms and to hear how they sounded. He might pause to pluck a pinch of snuff from his gold snuffbox (it had once belonged to Admiral Nelson), pop it into a nostril, and emit a sneeze with robust delight. He sometimes offered a pinch to his young, female typists, who politely declined. The creative process so absorbed him that he often became oblivious to events unfolding in the room, as on the day his cigar ash ignited his bed jacket. One of his private secretaries, noting the rising smoke, offered, “You’re on fire, sir. May I put you out?” The P.M., not looking up, responded with nonchalance, “Yes, please do.” And kept right at his work.54

  The climax of his ruminations would come on the day of delivery. Always at least fifteen minutes late, he might still be in bed, dictating the final draft to a typist, or inking in changes, when he should have been on his way to Parliament. Anxious whips would be telephoning from the House, his staff would be begging him to hurry, his valet would be dressing him and flicking cigar ash from his shirt (always a delicate task, for Churchill did not like to be touched). Meanwhile, messengers held the elevator, and his chauffeur, outside, gunned the engine. Finally he would totter out, still dressing, tucking his spectacles and cigar case and loose cigars and his little snuffbox into sundry jacket pockets, checking the numbered pages to be sure they were in the right order.55

  Moments later, when he rose from the front bench to address the House, he would be greeted by a respectful hush from members and from the galleries, where journalists and foreign ambassadors leaned forward in anticipation. If his words were to be given in secret session, the cue to clear visitors from the Strangers’ Gallery would come when he gazed upward and declared, “I espy strangers.” Secret sessions of the House therefore posed a small problem for Churchill; his most delightful phrases would be lost to the press and diplomatic pouches, and therefore lost to the outside world. Churchill’s solution was simplicity itself; he simply repeated the favored phrases over dinner or in the House smoking room, thus assuring that they would appear in Max Beaverbrook’s newspapers the Daily Express and the Evening Standard. Or, if Churchill wanted the Duke of Alba’s daily secret report to Franco to contain a nugget of misinformation from the Old Man himself, he might repeat a phrase to some Foreign Office minion who was known to dine with the Spaniard. Thus, secret session or no, if Churchill wanted to say something, he said it. Only words can live forever, he liked to say; it would simply not do for his words to die on the floor of the House.

  Churchill, like Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare, could string together phrases that resonated with Glasgow pub patrons, Welsh coal miners, and Cockney laundresses, as well as with the Harold Nicolsons and Lady Astors. At his dinner table or in the Commons during Questions, he sprayed the room with fusillades of bons mots. But his broadcasts and speeches were strategic assaults, not tactical, and were crafted with infinite care. His broadcasts sound so English, but in fact their structural foundations date to Cicero. Gibbon and Shakespeare, and Churchill’s reading of them, had a hand in that. Gibbon, when read aloud, is a slow burn, more fuse than fireworks, yet the prose is perfectly balanced and perfectly ordered; each point meticulously advanced until in the climactic resolution only one inescapable conclusion can be reached. Gibbon’s cadence permeates Churchill’s speeches, which in structure and delivery were like a trebuchet, its mechanism slowly and steadily wound by Churchill until the maximum tension was reached, at which point he launched his verbal missile. Then, beginning with his next breath, he re-armed his siege engine and prepared for the next shot.

  Although Shakespeare’s name does not appear in the index of his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill read and memorized Shakespeare his whole life, and imbued his speeches with metrical tributes to the Bard. He embodied the Shakespearean notion that a man’s essence is to be found in his actions, and his words, the authenticity and value of which would be confirmed or debunked by the actions that followed. He did not so much speak to Englishmen (as Franklin Roosevelt did to Americans in his homespun fireside chats), as for them. In doing so he represented their destiny and their role in the current struggle, which could only end in either national survival or national annihilation. Hitler, an opportunist and nihilist romantic, told his people much the same.

  Churchill dictated all speeches, memos, and letters to his typists, usually young and fema
le, who typed away while he paced about the room, fetched his thoughts, and put them into words. When he dictated directly to the typewriter, the typists found themselves in peril, for to change flimsies in the middle of a long dictation would produce a “primitive wrath.” “Come on, come on!” he’d growl. “What are you waiting for!” “Don’t fidget so with that paper! Stop it!” He was personally insulted by any pause necessitated by the mechanics of the infernal machine. He displayed, wrote his bodyguard, an “appalling, almost childish” unwillingness to learn the mechanics of typing or of typewriters. None of his staff recollect ever seeing Churchill put a finger to a typewriter keyboard. Nor did he ever write his own memos. Other than signing them, recalled William Deakin, Churchill “never wrote a line in his life. I have never seen him put pen to paper.” Actually, Churchill had written his early books in longhand, and of course his dispatches from Cuba and the veldt. But once elected to the Commons, and forever after, he indulged his love of dictation.56

  He disliked the taking of dictation by shorthand, which would have kept the stenographers in the chase and allowed them to type in peace outside his presence. He believed shorthand only added one more step to the process of setting his thoughts down on paper. He allowed an exception to the ban when he was on the move—in a car, onboard a rolling ship, or strutting through the halls of Chequers or Parliament, conditions which even he understood were not conducive to wielding a typewriter. Not a moment was to be wasted by the typists, as young Patrick Kinna, a lance corporal and trained stenographer who had worked for the Duke of Windsor, learned the first time he entered the prime minister’s room to take a letter. Without looking up or acknowledging Kinna, Churchill, pacing, intoned, “This is a melancholy story….” Kinna, thinking Churchill was about to tell a tale, set down his pencil and notepad, and said, “Oh dear! How unfortunate.” “Well,” Churchill grumbled, “take it down.” It was a memo to the Admiralty, ruing the paucity of aircraft carriers. Kinna survived the day and served Churchill for the rest of the war as a member of the team.57

  Woe unto the typist who had to ask the Great Man to repeat a phrase. His staff knew that to guess at what he said was far preferable to asking him to repeat it. The typists had to engage in a fair amount of guessing (as Elizabeth Layton had learned) because Churchill often mumbled and, to make matters worse, often while pacing about far across the room, his back to the typist. When he didn’t mumble, he rumbled, strings of phrases all but indecipherable to the struggling scribes. When he dictated while in bed, propped up on his pillows, words were lost as newspapers fluttered to the floor, or the telephone rang, or he summoned his valet to refresh his refreshment. As with the collecting of his thoughts in preparation for a speech, he liked to dictate letters and memos while a gramophone played his favorite recordings of old music hall standbys—“After the Ball,” “Goodbye, My Love,” perhaps Harry Lauder belting out “Keep Right On Till the End of the Road.” The typists had to blot out the background noise in order to parse his phrases, a supremely difficult task when Churchill instructed his valet to turn the volume higher. Finally, when the typist finished, and before she could pull the paper from the typewriter, Churchill would thrust out a hand and utter a curt “Gimme.”58

  Typists earned about two pounds per week, about forty dollars a month, less than the wages of a corporal in the U.S. Army. As well, they were expected to remain at their post even as German bombs fell into nearby courtyards.59

  Churchill had been a professional writer before he became a statesman; he had supported his family with a tremendous stream of books and articles. His love of the language was deep and abiding, he had mastered it as few men have, and he was quick to correct anyone who abused it, especially those who tried to camouflage sloppy thinking with the flapdoodle of verbose military jargon or bureaucratese. He believed, with F. G. Fowler, that big words should not be used when small words will do, and that English words were always preferable to foreign words. He said: “Not compressing thought into a reasonable space is sheer laziness.” On his orders “Communal Feeding Centres” were renamed “British Restaurants,” as “Local Defense Volunteers” had become “Home Guard.” And why not “ready-made” rather than “prefabricated”? “Appreciate that” was a red flag for him; he always crossed it out and substituted “recognize that.” Another was “intensive” when “intense” was required. Once John Martin, driving along the Embankment with him, described the winding of the Thames as “extraordinary.” Churchill corrected him: “Not ‘extraordinary.’ All rivers wind. Rather, ‘remarkable.’ ” In the margins of official documents, he often quoted Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a copy of which he sent to Buckingham Palace on his first Christmas as prime minister.60

  John Martin believed that the P.M.’s “interest in basic English was inspired by politics rather than linguistics: it was a means of promoting ‘the English-speaking club.’ ” Certainly that was one reason. He believed that all countries where English was spoken, including America, should merge. Here lay a profound contrast with the foreign policies of his predecessors at Downing Street. They had focused upon the Continent and the various combinations of the great powers there. Neville Chamberlain had referred to the United States with amusement and contempt, and called Americans “creatures.” But Churchill, though a European patriot, looked westward, and not only because he knew Hitler could not be crushed without American troops. British to the bone, he was nevertheless the son of an American mother, and long before the war, he had envisaged a union of the world’s English-speaking peoples: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the far-flung colonies of the British Empire.61

  In his parliamentary speeches, and particularly in his broadcasts to his besieged island, his genius for the language fused with his idealized image of England and Englishmen, or the “British race,” formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—a people endowed with fearlessness, gallantry, nobility, a unique sense of honor, and invincibility. He still exulted in the memory of colonial conquests, when the Enfield rifles and Maxim guns of the Queen’s armies were challenged only by primitive weapons, imperial flags flew proudly, and British casualties, even in the Indian Mutiny, were always light. The slaughter of the 1914–1918 war had appalled Britons, including Churchill, and had exhausted and disillusioned many, but not Churchill. Now, drawing fire from the terrible red glow across the Channel, he was exhilarated. His first four hundred days in office—from early May 1940 to mid-June 1941, a ghastly time for millions of Europeans—were, for him, the supreme chapter in his life. Later he wrote that it was “the most splendid, as it was the most deadly year in our long British and English story.” He believed that 1940 was a time when “it was equally good to live or die.” Years after the war, John Martin remarked to him that life was not as exciting as it had been. Churchill replied jovially, “You can’t expect to have a war all the time.”62

  Based on his reading of Lord Moran’s memoirs, Anthony Storr, the eminent British psychiatrist, believed that the source of Churchill’s strength lay in his “inner world of make-believe,” the sort of fantasies imaginative men call up from time to time when bored or disappointed. For most of the 1930s, Churchill had been both. After June 1940, Storr believed, that world of imagination “coincided with the facts of external reality in a way that rarely happens to any man.” After the fall of France, Churchill became the hero he had always dreamed of being. Storr compares this to passionate love, “when, for a time, the object of a man’s desire seems to coincide exactly with the image of a woman he carries within him.” In that dark time, Storr argues, what England needed was not a shrewd, composed, balanced leader, but a prophet, a heroic visionary, a man who could dream dreams of victory when all seemed lost—a man who could inspire not only Britons but also Americans. “Had Churchill been a stable and equable man,” Storr writes, “he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have conclud
ed that we were finished.”63

  And yet, despite the fact that Churchill was prone to sentimentality, was mercurial, and at times lacked strategic military sense, he had, through intuitive leaps and careful analysis during the 1930s, arrived at an astonishingly accurate forecast of the calamity that had since befallen Europe and England. The events of September 1939 had proven him England’s most sober statesman, as well as its most prophetic. Other sober and equable men, who lacked his imagination and penetrating vision, had allowed Britain to stumble unprepared into this war.

  Storr’s Churchill is complex, which Churchill certainly was, and a lifelong depressive, which he likely was not. The widely held belief that Churchill fought depression throughout his adult life stems in large part from Storr’s musings and Lord Moran’s memoir, in which he recounts his service as Churchill’s personal physician. Moran probed Churchill during his last decade with leading questions about his “black dog” of depression and painted the octogenarian statesman in hues of decrepitude and despondency. Based on the writings of Moran and Storr, the idea that Churchill was a lifelong depressive and probably bipolar took hold in mental health circles, and it lingers still in the popular imagination (but not in the minds of Churchill’s family, friends, and his official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert). Yet Churchill likely did not suffer from mental illness. The story of the “black dog” begins in 1911, when, in a letter to Clementine, Winston enthused over a German doctor who was said to be able to cure depression: “I think this man might be useful to me—if my black dog returns.” (Samuel Johnson called his bouts with melancholia his “black dog.”) Churchill went on to tell Clementine that when the dog departed, “All the colors came back into the picture.” His letter describes what modern psychiatrists call a moderate adult depressive episode. The “light faded out of the picture,” Churchill wrote. When prompted by Moran in 1944, Churchill recounted the episode, as well as the sensations of vertigo that had long ago troubled him—feeling unease while standing at a ship’s railing or on a railroad platform, where he liked to put a pillar between himself and the approaching train. To this, Churchill added a vital conclusion: “And yet I don’t want to go out of the world at all in such moments.” Despondency or thoughts of self-obliteration never attached to Churchill’s low moods. After 1911 he never again wrote of the black dog.64