Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  On 5 May, General Pownall wrote in his diary that Churchill ‘is probably more to blame than anyone for the various muddles which have taken place (and certainly for the general mix up in affairs generally)’.16 His assessment was shared by the military expert Basil Liddell Hart. ‘The prime responsibility for this fiasco rested on Churchill, who from September on had pressed for drastic action to cut off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore.’17 Beaverbrook was so disturbed by Churchill’s ‘harebrained’ operation, which had resulted in the arrest of the Express’s ‘star war correspondent’ – Giles Romilly’s name had ‘figured enormous at the top of his brilliant despatches’, wrote Nellie – that the newspaper owner allegedly said to one of his associates: ‘Churchill? He’s the man who let the Germans into Norway.’18, 19

  Churchill’s conduct over the previous three weeks had strengthened opinions in Westminster that not only was he not to be trusted at the helm, but that to hand him command risked inviting the same fate as had befallen HMS Afridi, which had sunk in twenty minutes. Colville famously summed it up: ‘The mere thought of Churchill as Prime Minister sent a cold shiver down the spines of staff at 10 Downing Street … Our feelings … were widely shared in the Cabinet Offices, the Treasury, and throughout Whitehall.’20 The same trembling affected Admiral Godfrey in the Admiralty Intelligence Room. ‘We all felt very uneasy that Mr Churchill … was leading us into a strategical adventure that might culminate in the defeat of the Allies.’21

  To many well-intentioned people who had worked with Churchill since the first mines were dropped into the Norwegian Sea on 8 April, his repeated interferences and changes of mind, his idiosyncratic and exhausting working methods, his failure to foresee or to parry the supremacy of the Luftwaffe, made him more culpable, operationally, than at Gallipoli. The War Minister Oliver Stanley told Halifax that, after the experience of sitting with Churchill in Cabinet, ‘he could not serve Winston loyally having seen so much of him in the last two months’.22 Concerned, Clementine would be driven by her husband’s behaviour to write him a letter shortly afterwards, then tear it up and write it out again, in which she referred to ‘your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner’.23

  Despite Chamberlain’s agreement to cede him more responsibility, which would be confirmed on Monday 6 May, there were signs that Churchill suddenly felt beleaguered – and not empowered, as he had earlier claimed to the Manchester Guardian’s editor, William Crozier. Lord Camrose saw Churchill on 3 May and felt that ‘he was not quite the master of himself or cool politician that the P.M. is’.24

  For one thing, he was drinking too much.

  The bottle of whisky fetched by Geoffrey Shakespeare on Churchill’s first night back at the Admiralty had been followed by crates. After Operation ‘Hammer’ was called off, a disappointed President Roosevelt confided to the Canadian Prime Minister that Churchill ‘was tight most of the time’.25 Hitler’s view of Churchill as a ‘superannuated drunkard’ was supported by the journalist Cecil King who in April had watched Churchill having difficulty finishing a speech in the Commons and needing to be led away.26 ‘It is at times like these that age and excessive brandy drinking tell.’27

  Churchill’s scientific adviser Professor Lindemann calculated that if all the brandy Churchill had drunk was poured into the very large dining room at Chartwell, the level would rise 5/8th of an inch up the wall. But brandy was merely one of his tipples. Churchill’s intake of other alcoholic beverages intensified during this period.

  Since September, Churchill’s personal consumption of wine had been costing him £30 a month (£1,800 in today’s prices). General Jacob observed that Churchill began the day by drinking ‘white wine on occasion’ at breakfast.28 He proceeded to take a glass of dry sherry at mid-morning, and a small bottle of claret or burgundy at lunch. Churchill’s secretary Phyllis Moir told readers of Life Magazine: ‘To Mr Churchill a meal without wine is not a meal at all.29 When he is in England he sometimes takes port after lunch, and always after dinner.’ She continued in her merry vein: ‘In the late afternoon he calls for his first whisky and soda of the day … He likes a bottle of champagne at dinner. After the ritual of port he sips the very finest Napoleon brandy. He may have a highball in the course of the evening.’

  Churchill’s excessive drinking had become damaging to his constitution as well as to his judgement. Cranborne was so concerned that he wrote to his father on 18 April about ‘a real risk of his cracking up altogether’.30 When Lord Salisbury visited Churchill two nights later, their hour’s conversation was taken up with an elaborate discussion of the statistics which covered the walls. ‘Frankly, I was disappointed … he seemed to me rather to have lost his grip on the broad aspects of the War.’31

  Plagued by ‘very deadly’ thoughts, Churchill’s conversation was no longer so brilliant.32 A dull look had entered his once prominent aquamarine eyes as he rushed from meeting to meeting. His bodyguard Walter Thompson noticed Churchill’s ‘rumpled slump’, which made Thompson feel a foot taller than he really was.33 His deportment alarmed Admiral Keyes, who had known him for longer than Thompson. Keyes reported to his wife that he found Churchill incredibly ‘jumpy’ at their curtailed meeting to discuss Trondheim: ‘He was very tired he said 2 or 3 times, so I said too tired to listen to me.’34, 35

  As ever when he was exhausted, Churchill’s lisp became more pronounced. In 1899, the Pretoria police had circulated a description after his escape: ‘pale features, reddish brown hair, speaks through his nose and cannot pronounce letter S’.36 Forty-one years on, his Principal Private Secretary reported that ‘the chief difficulty is understanding what he says, and great skill is required in interpreting inarticulate grunts or single words thrown out without explanation’.37 He misplaced more than words. Jaspar Rootham recalled having to take Churchill’s dentures into a Cabinet meeting in order for him to carry on talking.38

  By early May, even parliamentary reporters had started to comment on how tired Churchill looked – and when Churchill was tired, said Lord Woolton, he ‘never bothered about being polite to anyone’.39 The French Prime Minister was on the receiving end of barks which ‘made the telephone vibrate’.40 Clementine wrote in her letter admonishing him: ‘I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner.’41

  How jittery Churchill had become towards the end of the Norwegian Campaign can be seen in an extraordinary incident that occurred during the morning Cabinet meeting on 6 May, when his ‘slightly bloodshot and watery eye’ rotated in a rage on the Foreign Secretary – and accused him of treason.42 Churchill turned a deep shade of red, ‘as always happens to him when he is very angry’, after the latter’s suggestion that they try and gain time by deluding the Germans with peace talks.43 Halifax replied that his irresponsible ideas ‘may be silly, are certainly dangerous, but are not high treason’.44

  Churchill afterwards apologised. ‘I had a spasm of fear,’ he confessed, placing the blame for his rudeness on ‘the present atmosphere of frustration’.45

  Alarmed by Churchill’s erratic behaviour, Times journalist Leo Kennedy wrote in his diary that what was really needed was for Churchill to be ordered to rest. ‘He is overdoing himself and taking the strain by stoking himself unduly with champagne, liqueurs etc. Dines out & dines well almost every night.46 Sleeps after luncheon then to the House of Commons, then a good & long dinner, & doesn’t resume work at the Admiralty till after 10 p.m., & goes on till 1 or 2 a.m. He has got into the habit of calling conferences & subordinates after 1 a.m., which naturally upsets some of the Admirals, who are men of sound habits. So there is a general atmosphere of strain at the Admiralty which is all wrong. Yet Winston is such a popular hero & so much the war leader that he cannot be dropped. But he ought somehow to be rested.’

  On the same day, 4 May, General Ironside registered concern at Churchill’s lack of sleep and concentration at what should have been a triumphant moment for the First Lord in hi
s expanded new role. ‘We had yesterday for two hours our first meeting with Winston as Chairman of the Co-ordination Committee and found him very tired and sleepy and we hardly did anything at all.47 He took quietly what we said without demur. The lull after the storm.’

  An official Humber conveyed Churchill the short distance from the Cabinet Room back to his official residence. He eschewed buses and public transport, and had ventured only once onto the London Underground. On that occasion, he needed to be retrieved after making several circuits without knowing how or where to get off.

  On his arrival at the Admiralty, the car door was opened by his bodyguard, who sat in the front seat next to the chauffeur. It was noticeable to Walter Thompson that Churchill moved with less vitality than in February, when the journalist Charles Eade had accompanied him into Admiralty House. Eade had been ‘amazed at the speed with which this man of 65 walked along passages and up steep staircases’.48

  Three weeks after Operation ‘Wilfred’, Churchill looked all of his years. He had lost most of the hair which had caused him to be known as the Red Terror. His cheeks were pouchy, and he walked with a stoop, his right shoulder lower than the left after he injured it falling onto the Bombay dockside more than forty years before. Mildly deaf when he wanted to be, he carried his seventeen stone with his large head thrust forward, scowling at the ground, in his doctor’s description, with ‘the sombre countenance clouded, the features set and resolute, the jowl clamped down as if he had something between his teeth and did not mean to let go’.49

  Unlike Chamberlain and Halifax, Churchill had chosen to remain in London for the weekend. His address was a Palladian-style building once occupied by Leo Amery, Samuel Hoare and Duff Cooper, and entered by a door in the Mall behind the statue of Captain Cook. Here Churchill had lived since September with his wife, their youngest daughter Mary, whose oldest sister had been born here, and a black cat called Nelson that slept at the foot of his narrow bed. His pregnant daughter-in-law Pamela, married to his son Randolph since October, also had rooms here while Randolph was stationed with the Fourth Hussars at a training camp in Kettering.

  A ‘fairy-tale fortress’ was how the First Lord’s residence struck the Soviet Ambassador.50 Churchill acknowledged that the Admiralty ‘leaves its mark on everyone who has been in it’.51 It never bored him to show off the cast-iron stove commemorating a naval victory in the Punic War; or John Webber’s paintings of Cook’s voyages; or the Board Room into which Lieutenant Lapenotière had staggered in the early hours of a November morning, his uniform splashed with mud, crying: ‘Sir, we have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson!’52

  For Duff Cooper, who had lived here until his resignation in 1938, Admiralty House, with its views through tall windows over Horse Guards Parade, 10 Downing Street and St James’s Park, was the most romantic address in Whitehall – an image sustained by Cooper’s wife who commissioned Rex Whistler to install a bed that rose sixteen feet high ‘from a shoal of gold dolphins and tridents’.53

  In March, Diana Cooper revisited the Churchills’ top-floor apartment, which back in September had been converted from her former nurseries and attics. She reported on the sea change. Clementine had retained Diana’s chintz curtains, but the dolphins were stored away, ‘and on a narrow curtainless pallet-bed sleeps the exhausted First Lord. My gigantic gold-and-white armoire holds his uniform. The walls are charts.’

  The library, state bedroom and boudoir had been turned into secret map rooms. On the walls hung duplicates of maps in the basement War Room. These were covered with black cloth to hide from unauthorised personnel the day-to-day progress of hostilities.

  At their dinner in October, the Chamberlains had eaten in what had been the Coopers’ nursery, where their son John Julius had kept a large fish tank full of sea horses that he fed on fleas. After the meal, Churchill had escorted the Prime Minister and his wife down in a lift to see the staff at work on two floors, in rooms strengthened by iron girders against air raids. Anne Chamberlain toured, in turn, the Result Room, ‘where all the results came through to a Staff News Commander’; the Code Room; and the Typists’ Room, in which secretaries typed out codes.54 ‘Everyone appears to do 12 hrs on, then 24 or 36 hrs off. There is of course no fresh air, but simply air pumped in and out, and all the work has to be done by artificial light.’

  On a visit down stuffy half-lit passages to Churchill’s office, Maisky observed a lamp with a broad dark shade hanging from the ceiling. Churchill nodded to it, and pouring whisky said with satisfaction: ‘The lamp was here 25 years ago, when I was naval minister for the first time.55 Then it was removed. Now they’ve put it up again.’ Churchill led Maisky to a folding door in the wall, where in a deep niche the Soviet Ambassador saw a map of Europe with faded small flags pinned onto it in various places, including the Dardanelles. Churchill said: ‘It’s a map of the movements of the German navy in the last war … Now we will need it again.’

  Anne Chamberlain had recently refurbished No. 10 with her niece. She approved of Churchill’s cosy-looking office, with its red leather chairs and sofa, ‘and a very tidy pair of brown leather slippers which Mrs Churchill pointed out to me with some relish, showing how comfortably the first Lord tucks himself in when he gets back there to work in the evening’.56

  Churchill had a large desk in the corner, where he sat with his back to the room, with the light on his left side. His chair, made out of fragile wood, was an old chair which had belonged to his father. His spotted blue-and-white bow-tie was another homage to his father, who had worn one. Immaculate in his dress, Churchill normally wore striped trousers, pearl-buttoned boots which he would kick off, and a white shirt under a loose-fitting black jacket.

  His shirts were silk, as were his socks and his pale pink underwear which he ordered from the Army & Navy store at an annual cost of £80 (£4,700 in today’s prices). ‘I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle.’57 Of special sensitivity was the patch on his right forearm where he had sacrificed a ‘bit of pelt’ to help out a fellow officer wounded in the Sudan Campaign.58 Churchill liked to show off the scar left by the Irish doctor who had scalpelled out a piece of flesh ‘about the size of a shilling’ to graft onto the arm of Lieutenant Richard Molyneaux. It tickled Churchill to think that someone else might be walking around in his skin.

  Aside from a patch of eczema on his jaw, Churchill’s skin was remarkably smooth. Journalists who came to interview him at this time were struck by the pallor of his face, which seemed bloodless and clean (owing to Churchill’s use of a Beecham’s skin cream, Lait Larola). To one visitor, he gave the impression that ‘he had just dressed after a bath and had used talcum powder with liberality’.59

  His unconventional working habits are well known:

  The fifteen Havana cigars he smoked a day – sometimes throwing the lit end into his waste-paper basket, which moments later needed to be doused with a soda-syphon.

  His afternoon siesta – a custom adopted, like the cigars, following his 1895 visit to Cuba, where he was impressed by the practice of government troops and rebels of suspending their war for an hour during the heat of the day. ‘That,’ wrote Geoffrey Shakespeare, ‘is why he could start again at nine p.m. looking as rosy as a baby back from a pram ride in park.’60

  His elaborate bathing rituals – with the water at exactly the right temperature. ‘I had to test it carefully with my elbow,’ said his valet Norman McGowen, who once overheard Churchill muttering, and asked: ‘Do you want me?’ The reply: ‘I wasn’t talking to you, Norman, I was addressing the House of Commons.’61

  His dictation – while parading up and down in a dressing gown embroidered with green and gold dragons, and underneath, a long silk nightshirt restrained by a woolly tummy-band. Geoffrey Shakespeare was frequently summoned to be in attendance to answer questions about the navy. ‘He wanted me there as I was versed in current Naval practice whereas he had been the First Lord twenty-five years ago.’62

  Uncle Geoffrey’s descriptio
n still holds good for the statement which Chamberlain had asked Churchill to prepare in order to wind up the Norway Debate. ‘Usually after dinner he held a Naval conference from 9 to 11 p.m.’ There is, among Uncle Geoffrey’s papers, a prized photograph of one such meeting in the Admiralty Board Room, and beneath it he has written ‘the only photograph of the Board of Admiralty ever taken’: it shows my great-uncle seated at the end of a long table, eyes closed, possibly with exhaustion, or else conserving his energies for the night ahead; and Churchill at the other end, hands on the table as if poised to spring up. Uncle Geoffrey continued: ‘But after 11 p.m.63 he devoted himself to speech making. Having been closely associated with Lloyd George in the preparation of his speeches, I was interested to observe Churchill’s technique. He used no notes or headlines giving the sequence of his points. He dictated directly and firmly to an expert typist who used a silent machine. One night he remarked: “Are you all ready? I’m feeling very fertile tonight.” … As he dictated he padded up and down in soft bedroom slippers, arms behind his back, head thrust forward, a cigar protruding from his mouth. The argument flowed in smooth logical sequence. Now and again he paused to ask me a question or I made a suggestion and he replenished his glass from a whisky decanter on the table. On he went …’

  Once Churchill had corrected and polished what he had to say, he asked Clementine to sit in a chair and he practised aloud in front of her. His valet revealed: ‘His speeches must first be tried out in her presence.’64 Churchill’s speech to wind up the Norway Debate on Wednesday was one of the most difficult that he had been called upon to make since his arrival in the Commons forty years before. Clementine’s input was vital. ‘I tell her everything,’ Churchill confided to Maisky.65 ‘But she knows how to keep mum. She won’t spill a secret.’ The historian David Cannadine says that there was no one he trusted more to give him hard truths and offer political judgement. ‘He always needed to be managed, and she was his great manager.’66 The extent of Churchill’s dependence on his wife may even have reached Narvik, where Giles Romilly’s Austrian guard told him: ‘England – old statesmen! Young Führer is good! And not married! Also good! A wife plays too big a role!’