The box, which he had organized, was the absolute center of Britain’s war against the Third Reich. Inside were numbered folders containing papers approximately 16″ x 13.″ The first one, the “top of the box,” as it was called, dealt with matters considered “really urgent” by his secretaries, according to one of them, John Peck, “not only by objective standards of importance, deadlines, and so on, but in part subjectively by the degree of the Prime Minister’s personal interest at the time. So we had to see and understand what was in his mind, and he relied on us to do this.” Below the top were folders containing military and foreign office telegrams, reports from the Chiefs of Staff (after screening by Churchill’s military liaison Pug Ismay), answers to questions he had raised concerning every aspect of British life—food supplies, crop yields, railroad capacity, coal production. Nothing escaped his attention.24
Churchill’s private secretaries, John Peck, Eric Seal, John Colville, and John Martin, carried keys to this box. There was another, buff-colored box. Only Churchill had the key to that one. Inside were German military orders—at first from the Luftwaffe, later from the Wehrmacht and the SS, and much later from Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats—all decoded and translated for him. In the first days of the war, Polish intelligence officers had captured a German electromagnetic cipher machine; Polish mathematicians subsequently examined the machine and smuggled a replica to the British. The British cryptographers, stationed at Bletchley Park, a Victorian redbrick, white-trimmed, and copper-roofed complex north of London, called the machine “Enigma.” Each day the enemy reset the code and each day the men at Bletchley tried to break it, often without complete success. But the Bletchley crowd decrypted enough messages often enough to give Churchill an over-the-shoulder look at German plans (except U-boat plans, for which a slightly different and more complex encoding machine was used). The Bletchley wizards tended to be young and bearded, with long hair, dirty fingernails, and disheveled clothing. When the prime minister first saw them, he remarked to their chief, “Menzies, when I told you to leave no stone unturned, I didn’t mean you to take me quite so literally.”25
At the outset, he told the War Cabinet secretary that “all directions emanating from me are made in writing, or should be immediately afterwards confirmed in writing.” Any instruction not in writing was invalid. The edict seems petty at first glance, but it precluded any subordinate from mucking up the works by misinterpreting and passing on down the line a prime ministerial command. The sheer volume of paperwork confirmed the wisdom of Churchill’s edict that nothing submitted to him, not even a technical account of changes in the manufacture of tanks, could be longer than a single sheet of paper. During a meeting at Admiralty House, he lifted one that wasn’t, and said: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against scrutiny.” But Churchill, in turn, contributed to the lengthening paper trail with his river of memos marked “Action This Day” and “Report in 3 Days.” Many began, “Pray tell me…,” or “Pray explain…,” which earned his memos the moniker “Winston’s prayers.”26
When reading and signing his missives at his desk, he often wore special sleeves over the cuffs of his jacket in order to protect them from any graphite or ink that might conspire to besmirch his outerwear. The sleeves, together with the occasional green eyeshade, lent to him the air of a plump typesetter. A perusal of the objects on his desk and side table, however—paperweights fashioned from gold medals, crystal inkstands with sterling lids, numerous bottles of pills and powders, and cut-crystal decanters of whisky—identified the owner as a Victorian gentleman of no small means.27
There were snarls, and he was responsible for some of them. Churchill’s many gifts did not include the administrative. He had little understanding of organization. When a major issue arose, he gave it his full attention, ignoring his other responsibilities, which, because he had taken personal charge of everything affecting the strategic direction of the war, were many. He procrastinated. In his autobiography, My Early Life, he wrote: “I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.” He never succeeded. He was always late for trains, although as P.M. he could demand that the trains wait for him. “Winston is a sporting man,” Clementine once told his bodyguard. “He likes to give the train a chance to get away.” In crises, he fell hopelessly behind on the box. He avoided dull topics, and boring papers lay unread weekend after weekend, until, gritting his teeth, he waded through them. He would make plans, Jock Colville recalled, but was “inclined to forget to tell any of us and then to forget himself.” He once called his military chiefs to No. 10 for a 4:00 P.M. meeting. They arrived at the appointed hour; Churchill did not. Aides were sent off to locate the prime minister. They found him “enjoying a whisky and soda in the smoking room at the House.”28
Some of his problems emanated from men he himself had selected. His staff believed that he was a poor judge of character and that he sometimes insisted upon unsuitable appointments. Men who had fought valiantly won his uncritical admiration. He wanted to give high office to Admiral Sir Roger Keyes of Zeebrugge, a hero of the First World War, though the admiral’s mental powers were clearly failing. Orde Wingate, who would win fame as a daring commander of Burmese guerrillas, also caught his eye, though Wingate, who Churchill’s doctor, Charles Wilson (made Lord Moran in 1943), thought was quite possibly insane, proved hopeless when given other responsibilities. Of course, those who had stood with Churchill against Munich always found favor with him. In his eyes Anthony Eden, who had quit the Chamberlain government in protest, could do no wrong. That was not a unanimous feeling; P. J. Grigg, permanent under secretary at the War Office, said of Eden, “The man is complete junk.”29
Only up to a point did Churchill accept Ben Franklin’s maxim that well done is better than well said. He liked things well done and well said. Perhaps because Churchill himself was so articulate, he sometimes misjudged those who were not. The Middle East commander Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Wavell, though a published poet and fluent in Russian, was shy and unforthcoming—attributes that to Churchill implied Wavell was almost dumb—and he remained tongue-tied when the P.M. tried to elicit his views about the war. His fellow generals thought Wavell a magnificent commander. Thus, the prime minister withdrew his objections to him with great reluctance and later wished he hadn’t. He never appreciated the gifts of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the greatest RAF hero of the war, because of Dowding’s reticence. Ironically, the Old Man’s extraordinary fluency in discussion was sometimes a handicap. He could out-argue anyone, even when he was wrong. All who were close to him remember what Sir Ian Jacob (then a colonel, later promoted to lieutenant general)calls his “most devastating method of argument.” Jacob recalled how he would “debate, browbeat, badger, and cajole those who were opposed to him, or whose work was under discussion.” Churchill did not thrust and parry in such duels; he knew only how to thrust. Only later did it become clear that those who vehemently disagreed with him, and stated their case clearly, were those who won his respect. They survived to fight another day, which given Churchill’s temperament was likely the next day. He was hard on those he called on the carpet, but he was harder on himself. “Every night,” he told Colville, “I try myself by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground—anyone can go through the motions—but something really effective.”30
“Idleness was a concept unknown to him,” recalled his daughter Mary. Idleness was the handmaiden to boredom, and boredom was an enemy to be vanquished. When Churchill found himself bored, recalled Scotland Yard’s Inspector Thompson, he became “a kicker of waste baskets, with an unbelievably ungoverned bundle of bad temper.” At such times, Thompson wrote, it is best to stay away from him “and this his family seeks to do.” The Old Man’s foul mood persisted until—the sooner the better for all concerned—he distanced himself from the agent of boredom. Such was the case one evening later in the war when Churchill, Co
lville, and several American guests viewed Citizen Kane. Colville termed it “a deplorable American film…. The P.M. was so bored that he walked out before the end.” He did so again during a White House viewing of Oliver Twist, leaving the president and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting alone. Boredom, for the Old Man, was an assault on his equilibrium, inflicted in these cases by movies that failed to engage him but usually by a droning bureaucrat or a dinner guest in whom he had scant interest. He would at first put on an air of civility in such circumstances, his doctor recalled. “Then, as if exhausted by his act of civility, he would make no further attempt at conversation, sitting all hunched up and scowling at his plate.” Finally, he would harrumph and walk off. Churchill “found it difficult to put on an act of affability even when circumstances positively demanded it,” Colville wrote. “He drew a conscious distinction between those with whom it was agreeable to have dinner and those who… were part of the scene.”31
When boredom struck, he could be depended upon to make a “ruthless break” in pursuit of a more enjoyable source of entertainment. The balm might take the form of dictating a letter, singing off-key renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan, perhaps wielding his trowel to lay bricks in the gardens at Chartwell. (Chartwell was soon closed for the duration of the war, the furniture draped in sheets. Most of the staff of gardeners, kitchen maids, the chauffeur, and housemaids were furloughed. Only a caretaker remained.) He always kept his quiver full of possible activities: read a novel, feed his goldfish, address his black swans, parse the newspapers, declaim on England’s glorious past. Painting had long afforded Churchill the happy combination of quietude and a focus for his restless mental energy, but during the war, he would unpack his easel, brushes, and oils only once: at Marrakech after the Casablanca Conference. Gambling had always been another option, but the war had put an end to those pleasures, at least in casinos. He soon was gambling with his armies, tanks, and ships. Whether aboard a train, tucked under his bedclothes with his newspapers strewn about, or presiding at the dinner table, he was “absolutely incapable” of doing nothing, recalled his literary assistant Sir William Deakin: “He could switch off in a marvelously tidy way.”
Once years before, recalled Inspector Thompson, during a train journey in North Africa, Churchill (then a cabinet member) decided he wanted a bath. He ordered the train stopped. Then he ordered a tub he had spotted in the baggage car removed and set out in the sands. It was filled to brimming with hot water siphoned from the locomotive’s boiler. And there, as the train let off steam, Churchill “bathed with half of Africa agape.” It fell to Thompson to shadow Churchill when he made his ruthless breaks. “He will move at a moment’s notice. He will move without notice. He is an animal. In war he is particularly feral.”32
In relief of boredom, almost any action—short of the wicked—would do, with one prerequisite: it had to possess value, and Churchill was the arbiter of the value. There simply was none to be had by sitting through Citizen Kane or lingering in reception lines where strangers grabbed for his hand as if they owned it. No value accrued from entertaining humorless dinner guests. In the end, when boredom struck, his most reliable source of relief—the only source of relief he never tired of—was himself. He once told a friend that his idea of a delightful evening was to enjoy fine food in the company of friends, to then discuss the fine food, and then to move on to a good discussion “with myself as chief conversationalist.” What could be more stimulating than to listen to the sound of his own voice while declaiming on some topic of abiding interest, such as the Boer War or, in 1940, the need to kill Huns?33
He was his own favorite audience. He regularly quoted at great length from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and Walter Scott’s “Marmion,” feats of memory Colville found to be “remarkable” yet sometimes “rather boring.” Boring for Colville perhaps, but not for Churchill. His old friend Violet Bonham Carter recalled that if a long recitation of Macaulay’s verse did not suffice to keep his gears meshed, he would revert to another favorite subject: himself. Lord Moran wrote, “Winston is so taken up with his own ideas he is not interested in what other people think.” That was partially true; he was more interested in what other people did. Herbert Samuel, Lloyd George’s successor as head of the old Liberal Party, believed Churchill was not interested in reasoned arguments, but rather, asked, “Will it work in practice?” One of Moran’s observations, however, doesn’t pass muster: “He [Churchill] must lose a chunk of his life this way, and must often be lonely, cut off from people.” In fact, Churchill found real joy in the company of his friends and family. He loved being with small children; “wollygogs” he called them, and wollygogs were always granted immunity from his growls and snarls. He surrounded himself with people who cared for him, people who hung on his every word. And why should they not; he was Winston Churchill. If he chose not to take an interest in someone, that person remained invisible. Years later, Frank Sinatra, by then the most famous crooner on the planet, rushed up to Churchill, grabbed his hand, and exclaimed, “I’ve wanted to do that for twenty years.” Churchill, not at all happy with being touched by a stranger, turned to a private secretary and demanded, “Who the hell was that?”34
He once complained to Lord Moran of a loss of feeling in his shoulder, apparently caused by a pinched nerve. Should he be concerned about this? Churchill asked. “Sensation doesn’t matter,” replied the doctor. “No,” Churchill shot back, “life is sensation; sensation is life.” In this need for stimulation he was one with fellow wit and fellow Tory Dr. Samuel Johnson, who considered action the necessary prerequisite for a well-lived life. Churchill needed to complete the circuit between the goings-on in his mind and the external world. Once he generated an idea, he felt compelled to actualize it. When he pledged that RAF bombs would consume Nazi Germany, he did so not simply to hear himself speak—that was a delightful collateral benefit—but because he intended to deliver on his promise. “The only guide to a man is his conscience,” he once told the Commons, “the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.”35
Descartes believed the wellspring of human essence could be expressed thus: Cogito, ergo sum. But Churchill was not a man of philosophical bent, and, like most Englishmen, he held continental rationalism in low regard. Empiricism—Locke and Hume—was the English way. Churchill saw things more along the lines of I act, therefore I am. Lord Samuel once offered to Lord Moran that Churchill “has never ever taken any interest in speculative thought, in philosophy and religion.” That was only partially true. He loved to engage in scientific and technological speculation, intellectual realms where the imagination could soar and where ideas were tested, results obtained, and improvements made in the lives of people. In 1932 he published Thoughts and Adventures, a collection of essays in which he predicted the atomic bomb and atomic-powered electrification (and the risks to humanity); bioengineering of crops and animals (and perhaps people); and television (which, when it became a reality, he detested). “Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants,” he wrote, “comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.”36
On the day France fell, Churchill summoned Dr. R. V. Jones, just twenty-eight and a junior scientist working in RAF Intelligence, to No. 10 to argue his hypothesis (heretical to more senior scientists) that the Germans were using radio beams to target Britain. The raids, infrequent and usually directed at northern ports, had begun the previous October. Churchill expected them to increase in frequency and deadliness now that Hitler had control of the airfields of the Low Countries and France. Backed by Churchill, Jones in the coming months figured out how to jam the German beams and delivered one of the most important victories of the war. Jones later wrote of Churchill: “He understood the essence of supreme decisions: yea or nay, right or left, advance or retreat…. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of experts…. He knew how eas
y it is for the man at the summit to receive too rosy a picture from his Intelligence advisors…. Alone among politicians he valued science and technology at something approaching their true worth, at least in the military application.”37
Churchill’s embrace of the new did not extend to the art and science of governing. The Oxford philosopher and Latvian Jewish émigré Sir Isaiah Berlin later proposed in his essay Churchill and Roosevelt that Churchill remained politically a European man of the nineteenth century, despite his embrace of modern technologies and his belief in their promise, despite his insatiable curiosity and his appetite for new knowledge. Britain’s glorious imperial past informed Churchill, who presumed it would likewise inform the future. But Franklin Roosevelt, Berlin argues, saw—and Churchill did not—that the past and all of its traditions could be jettisoned in order to produce a new political order from whole cloth. Where Roosevelt was an imaginative though cautious political visionary, Churchill was an imaginative and incautious preservationist. “Churchill… looks within,” Berlin wrote, “and his strongest sense is the sense of the past.”
After reading Plato and Aristotle as a young man, Churchill declared for agnosticism. Although he embraced the Greek philosophical antecedents of Christianity, he found no intellectual reward in theological exercises. He subscribed to the Christian values of mercy and forgiveness, but his beliefs were not dictated by doctrine, and certainly not by clerics. He had been informed by his experiences as a soldier and journalist, and he rejected the carrot and stick of heaven and hell. The idea of an afterlife was not much more than an afterthought for Churchill, and one he considered equivalent to a belief in ghosts and goblins. He claimed he “did not much believe in personal survival after death, at least not of the memory.” The thought of oblivion did not vex him. Where others found only terror in the prospect of the negation of self, Churchill found sanguineness, and fodder for irreverent asides. He did not believe in another world after death, he told his doctor, but “only in ‘black velvet’—eternal sleep,” which did not stop him from playing whimsically with other possibilities in painterly terms: “When I get to Heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my five million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here. There will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.” Churchill’s fanciful heaven was also a distinctly pluralistic place where the full spectrum of humanity would mingle forever (although the membership list would never do for Churchill’s earthly private dining society, the Other Club): “Indians and Chinese and people like that. Everyone will have equal rights in Heaven… that will be the real welfare state…. Of course, I admit I may be wrong. It is conceivable that I might well be reborn as a Chinese coolie. In such case I should lodge a protest.” In a similar impish vein, he once proclaimed a proof for God’s existence “is the existence of Lenin and Trotsky, for whom a hell is needed.”38
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