Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “So you walked out on us.”

  “What I've come to say, Carol, is that I care about you—and the kids—very much. I'm sorry for getting angry. About the Market.”

  “Don't do the Market any more. Not cleaning, nor the punters. There's plenty of jobs now. There's a war on.” His face lit up. “That's wonderful, Carol. I'm so happy for you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How are the children?”

  “In bed.”

  “And…you?”

  “Bit like Mr. Burgess. Done a lot of thinking. And crying. About the things I care for.”

  “I'm sorry if I—”

  “You? Well, I must admit I had a little sniffle at the time. But that was four months ago, Mac.”

  “I'd like to try to make up for it. If you'll let me.” He moved forward, to the very threshold, holding out the flowers. Burgess had said he should take flowers, had insisted. Nothing elaborate, just a few stems and a lot of sincerity. He'd even left a particularly large tip to cover the cost.

  “We're moving, Mac. Going away.”

  “But why?”

  “Because like you and Mr. Burgess I care more than my life about something. The kids. Too much to keep them in London, not now there's a proper war.”

  “Not too far—”

  “Somerset. Nothing there but cows. Nothing that Mr. Hitler wants to bomb.”

  He was silent for a moment, nodding his head in understanding, and offering a prayer—the first time he had prayed, sincerely prayed, in more than twenty years, since the day he had watched little Moniek floating away. “That is such a pity. I was hoping…”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “A second chance?”

  “No second chances in a war, Mac. Sorry.”

  Burgess had told him she wouldn't have him back, not after four months, but he'd had to try.

  Then she closed the door, crushing the flowers.

  Mac turned up his collar and hobbled off into the rain.

  In extraordinary circumstances and against the odds, Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Halifax, and that one decision changed the course of history. If Halifax had succeeded Chamberlain, he would not have fought, and Britain would not have won.

  Yet even after May 10 it was still a damned close-run thing. The following day Jock Colville, a memorable diarist who served as private secretary to both Chamberlain and Churchill, wrote that “there seems to be some inclination in Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville will return…Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice.”

  Colville's view was, to Chamberlain, great hope. Only at the very end of his life did the former Prime Minister finally release his hold on the belief that, one day, he might return to Downing Street. The cold gray hand he had felt inside him was not an ulcer but gnawing, inconsolable illness. Within weeks of leaving Downing Street he underwent exploratory surgery followed by a major abdominal operation. It was cancer, from which there would be no recovery. In his diary of September 9, 1940, he recorded: “I have still to adjust myself to the new life of a partially crippled man, which is what I am. Any ideas which may have been in my mind about possibilities of further political activity, and even a possibility of another Premiership after the war, have gone.”

  In October he was told he had not long to live, and wrote: “this is very helpful and encouraging, for it would be a terrible prospect if I had to wait indefinitely for the end, while going through such daily miseries as I am enduring now. As it is, I know what to do, and shall no longer be harassed by doubts and questions.” He died on November 9, less than six months after leaving office.

  Halifax continued as Foreign Secretary, but his time at the heart of things was rapidly drawing to a close. He opposed Churchill's insistence that Britain would fight on no matter what—Halifax, true to his appeasement roots, preferred a negotiated peace to the “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” which was offered by Churchill, and before the end of May he came to the point of threatening resignation. But Churchill would accept neither negotiation with Germany nor the splitting of his Cabinet. He took Halifax for a private walk in the garden of Number Ten. They talked man to man, and Halifax behaved like the true English gentleman that he was. The crisis passed, and so did the Foreign Secretary. At the end of 1940, Churchill dispatched Halifax across the Atlantic as Ambassador to the United States.

  Sir Horace Wilson met a more brutal fate. When he arrived in his office on May 11, he found Brendan Bracken and Winston's son Randolph sitting on his sofa. They stared at him but not a word was spoken or a smile exchanged. He left, never to return—and never to be forgiven. His belongings were thrown into the corridor after him. He was retired from Government service completely in 1942.

  His fellow elf, Joseph Ball, resumed a business career. He ended up controlling the industrial concern Lonrho, which he later sold to the controversial tycoon, Tiny Rowland, who had once been a member of the Hitler Youth.

  Fortune smiled on others. Max Beaverbrook did not have long to wait before realizing his dream of being invited once more back into Government. Despite the press baron's vigorous and at times vicious anti-war campaigns, Churchill invited him to become Minister for Aircraft Production. Casting aside his former views without so much as a blush, the newspaper peer made an outstanding success of the task.

  His employee on the Express, Tom Driberg, soon gave up his role as “William Hickey” in order to become a Member of Parliament and eventually Chairman of the Labour Party. He also became an agent for the KGB and was one of the most notorious homosexual pick-up specialists of his age—and that in an age when homosexuality was usually punished with the full might of the law. His biographer wrote that “anyone with less influence would have ended up in jail, Driberg went to the House of Lords.” He lived much of his life in a lavatory and died in the back of a taxi on his way to Parliament.

  Bracken remained a figure who somehow always lived on the edges of reality, even though he served loyally throughout the war as Minister of Information and eventually First Lord of the Admiralty. But he knew that with Burgess he had made a deal with the Devil which would make it impossible for him to continue once the war finished and the alliance with the Soviets had crumbled. He could have been blackmailed at any point. After 1945 he never again held office and eventually he retired as an MP, becoming the First (and last) Viscount Bracken. He never married and in later life became something of a recluse, spending his last years giving away to good causes the large amounts of money he had accumulated from his ownership of the Financial Times. He died in 1958, leaving instructions that all of his papers should be burnt.

  Bob Boothby remained Dorothy Macmillan's lover, and was believed to have been the father of her youngest child. Harold Macmillan knew of this. In 1957 Macmillan, who proved to be a far more ruthless operator than many had expected, became Prime Minister. The following year he elevated Boothby to the House of Lords. After Lady Dorothy died, Macmillan, by then frail, in his eighties and almost blind, tried to burn a large number of letters in his garden incinerator. He made a mess of it and was discovered stumbling around the garden chasing after half-burnt pieces of paper. They turned out to be Boothby's love letters to Dorothy.

  Leo Amery, one of the undoubted authors of Churchill's succession, suffered perhaps the most cruel blow of all. His son John was a vigorous anti-Communist and was in France when it fell to the Nazis. Thereafter John spent much of his war in an anti-Communist crusade, which included trying to organize a British unit to fight the Russians. He also made several broadcasts from Berlin urging the British to make peace with Germany. After the war he was arrested and charged with treason. He pleaded guilty and was executed in Wandsworth prison six days before Christmas 1945. His brother, Julian, became a senior and much respected Tory MP.

  Mac's fate was the most ironic. In the tense and occasionally hysterical atmosphere of the times, many fears were expressed about th
e possible existence of a Fifth Column in Britain waiting to assist with the expected Nazi invasion. Within days of becoming Prime Minister, Churchill ordered a massive round-up of foreign aliens and those regarded as politically unsound. Mac was one of many thousands interned under Regulation 18B of the Emergency Powers Act. He spent three weeks in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, into which were thrown many Jewish refugees alongside genuine Nazis, until Halifax intervened to establish his bona fides. He was released and returned to London, where he was knocked down by a newspaper delivery van in the middle of the blackout and killed.

  Towards the end of the war Carol met a GI and went to live in Idaho.

  Joseph Kennedy became a pariah and was eventually recalled from his role as Ambassador in November 1940, soon after the Blitz began. By that time he had become widely disparaged as a defeatist—and also a coward for his propensity to endure every air raid on London from a “funk hole” near Windsor, usually in the company of a French model. He became known as “Jittery Joe.” When finally he left England, he took with him an air-raid siren which he said he intended to install at Hyannis to summon his children from their sailing.

  Kennedy's reputation was further tarnished by the discovery in August 1940 that all manner of anti-British information had been leaking from within his own embassy and finding its way to Germany. A senior American diplomat was charged with espionage and imprisoned. No mention was made of Anna, who was allowed to disappear quietly from Britain.

  Then there was Guy Burgess. He was one who would not disappear quietly. His career led him from the BBC to the Secret Intelligence Service and later still to the Foreign Office, where he was posted to the United States—all the time in the service of Russia's KGB. Yet no man can live forever on the edge. He became increasingly notorious for his drunkenness and flamboyant homosexuality, and was ordered back from the United States in disgrace and under suspicion. On May 25, 1951, he suddenly vanished in the company of another senior diplomat and Cambridge friend, Donald Maclean. They turned up several years later in Moscow. Their defection caused a worldwide sensation and started a hunt for other Soviet spies within the British Establishment which lasted for many years.

  Clearly Burgess had been warned of the authorities' interest in him, and there was much speculation about who tipped him off. Such information could only have come from the very highest level yet neither Churchill nor particularly Bracken, who had much to lose from his exposure, ever fell under suspicion. Indeed Churchill, who became Prime Minister for the second time only weeks after the defection, did his best to ignore the whole episode. As Jock Colville wrote in his diary: “I don't think he (Churchill) was much interested. In fact I had to press him to ask the Cabinet Office to provide a Note on the incident. I think he merely wrote them off as being decadent young men, corrupted by drink and homosexuality.” Churchill was happy for the passage of time to fade the traces of the many friendships and liaisons that Burgess had formed with so many powerful people—including, of course, Churchill himself.

  Burgess died in Moscow in 1963, still wearing his Old Etonian tie. As he had requested, his ashes were returned to Britain and buried in a Sussex churchyard.

  Many other things passed. Czechoslovakia, the country whose fate had been one of the prime causes of a war that was to spread around the world, was never to recover. After the German surrender it fell under the tyranny of Communism and didn't become an independent state again until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Then, at the first opportunity, it voted to pull itself apart. Today the state of Czechoslovakia no longer exists.

  Neither does the British Empire for which Churchill fought with all his heart.

  And no one believes what they read in the newspapers any more.

  As I emphasized at the beginning of this book, Winston's War is not a history. It is a novel that takes all the dramatic liberties required of a work of fiction. However, reality can be every bit as appetizing as fiction and I have attempted to stick as closely as I could to the events of the twenty-month period covered by the book.

  Some of those events are well known, others less so—the meeting between Churchill and Burgess at Chartwell that forms the basis for so much of what follows in the novel did take place and is described at length in a book written by Tom Driberg. Yet most of the histories of the period don't mention this meeting and therefore draw no significance from it. It's not difficult to understand why. Many diaries and personal memoirs of the appeasement period were thoroughly gutted after the War, and by the time Burgess was exposed as a Soviet spy, those wishing to recall any kind of connection with him were as difficult to find as orchids in Hyde Park. Churchill was just one amongst many with good reason to forget his relationship with the young BBC radio producer.

  So there are gaps in the historical record, and I have tried to fill them. Perhaps even the slightest meddling with the facts will upset those who regard themselves as serious historians, but on the other hand I hope that many readers will have their appetites whetted and their imaginations fired by the deliberate intertwining of fact and fiction to the point where they will want to dig deeper and find out for themselves what really happened.

  They might also be struck, as I have been, by the coincidence between the issues that Churchill faced at the time and those that continue to baffle us more than seventy years later—such as whether we should appease or confront the forces of terror, and whether a politician owes his prime loyalty to his party or his conscience. We tend to think of spin doctors as being a very recent invention but they were as mischievous and as amoral in the service of Neville Chamberlain as they have been for any modern prime minister, while the English still seem to be struggling to sort out their relationship with Europe and “Johnny Foreigner.”

  And how many of today's leaders in Europe and the United States can be found echoing Chamberlain's plaintive words that their world had been turned upside down by “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing"?

  Researching and writing this book has given me as much fulfillment and personal pleasure as any I have written, and the debts I owe to those who have guided me and inspired me are as deep as ever. The entire project was set on its road by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who treated me to an excellent lunch and finished it with some half-remembered and irresistible thought about a missing telegram. Rob Shepherd, a colleague of many years, allowed me to plunder his own great knowledge of this period and I have relied heavily on his splendid book, A Class Divided. Joe Shattan is another great friend who, in a different life, might have been Mac and is the main reason why the character was able to come to life, and I am also most grateful to Monty Park and to Trumper's, that exceptional gentlemen's barbers that has changed so little since Mac's day and where Monty maintained the highest of standards for many years.

  Sue Graham, Carol Bell, and Jeremy White gave a very special kind of support. With their backing I have been able to raise many thousands of pounds for the Spinal Injuries Association, even before the book was published.

  So many others have helped, particularly my beautiful goddaughter Eugenia Vandoros, and others who deserve a big hug of thanks are Tîm Hadcock-Mackay, Ian Patterson, Christopher Burr, Anthony Browne, Sherard Cowper-Coles, Kate Crowe, and Glenmore Trenear-Harvey. Angela Neuberger found for me a press cutting that was especially inspirational.

  I am also grateful to the following for permission to reproduce extracts from their publications and material: Miss Christine Penney at the Library of Birmingham University for permission to quote from Neville Chamberlain's letters; Hodder and Stoughton Limited for permission to quote from The Fringes of Power by John Colville; WH Allen Ltd. for permission to quote from Abuse of Power by James Margach; HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. for permission to quote from Harold Nicolson's

  Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939, edited by Nigel Nicolson.

  There is little need to offer an extensive bibliography for those wishing to read further about this period since the
sources are generally extremely well known, but I don't want to miss the opportunity to express my thanks to the staff at the London Library and to Phil Reed at the Cabinet War Rooms. The International Churchill Society and its magazine, Finest Hour, never cease to provide insights, and I am also grateful for the cheerful help provided by the archivists at Churchill College, Cambridge.

  So I hope you will read and enjoy—and, while doing so, will remember that had the story of Winston Churchill found another ending, as it so easily might have done, our world today would have been a place of shadows and dark despair, stripped of the freedoms and decencies we too frequently take for granted. The debt we owe to Winston Churchill, and to those who helped him, is beyond measure.

  Churchill is a character who never capitulates, especially when the values he holds most dear are in the gravest danger, and especially when those he counts on most abandon him. Have you ever been in a situation where you were forced to uphold a belief or moral standpoint when almost everyone you knew walked out on you?

  Burgess is a slave to the bottle; Churchill, in a similar manner, can only function with a cigar handy and a brandy within arm's reach. Do you think it's at all apparent how their fondness for booze and smoking affects their decisions and their lives? Do you think there is any way in which these vices actually help them?

  There are many love stories in Winston's War, but none end happily. Why do you think the author chose to focus on unhappy love, and how does this choice reflect the era in which the book takes place?

  The role of Kings in politics is not often one we consider today. But the King of England is a character in this story, and one that takes the occasional dip into politics. Do you think he is able to influence the course of political events at all, or influence the minds of politicians, or is his role simply that of a passive commentator?