There were problems, too, between American and British troops where she thought she might be helpful, problems arising from the better food served American troops, their higher pay, and the posting of Negro GIs to England, although the latter vexed white Americans more than it did Englishmen. She had heard from several people, she wrote Stimson, that young southerners in England “were very indignant to find that Negro soldiers were not looked upon with terror by the girls in England and Ireland and Scotland. I think we will have to do a little educating among our Southern white men and officers.” When Stimson learned that Eleanor was going to Britain he asked Roosevelt confidentially to caution his wife not to raise the issue during her visit. Roosevelt, Stimson noted in his diary, was sympathetic “to our attitude” and said he would pass the word on to Mrs. Roosevelt.9
By mid-September the visit had been arranged. The invitation from Queen Elizabeth expressed her and the king’s pleasure if Eleanor would care to pay a visit to England and see something of the women’s war activities, and hoped she would stay a few days with them at Buckingham Palace.
HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN:
I am deeply appreciative of your very kind invitation to visit you in England. I shall try to come somewhere around the middle of October. I shall be very happy if I might spend two nights with you and His Majesty, the King, and after that I think I should devote my entire time to seeing all that I can of the British women’s war effort, and our own groups over there. It will be a great pleasure to see you again.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
“I think it will be of immense value your going over,” Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, assured her, “and you will have no difficulty in getting the kind of direct impression of typical people in their homes of which you spoke yesterday.” Her English schedule was placed in the highly competent hands of Lady Reading. Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby, who was in charge of the women’s auxiliary of the Army, was accompanying her to England. She was not part of the official party, which was to consist only of Tommy and Eleanor, but Eleanor wanted to tour the women’s military establishments with Mrs. Hobby. She also asked Ambassador John Gilbert Winant to find her “a simple, inexpensive hotel” in which to stay after she left Buckingham Palace—“I am afraid Claridge’s is too expensive.” Franklin instructed her to see “the Duchess of Kent and my godson, and Queen Mary and Queen Wilhelmina.” She should also see, if they called on her, “King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, King George of Greece, King Peter of Yugoslavia, The President of Poland, Beneěs of Czechoslovakia, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Margaret and Tony Biddle.”10
The trip began under condition of secrecy so that the time of her departure should not be known to the enemy. She and Tommy were driven in a Secret Service car to a back entrance at the airport. The curtains were drawn in the flying boat in which they made the journey, and they were permitted to open them only after the autumn-hued coast line of Cape Cod was receding in a reddish-brown haze. It was a smooth twenty-hour journey, but transatlantic travel was still a novelty with some element of danger, and the sense of coming closer to the war was heightened when all on board were sworn to secrecy after they had sighted a convoy with its escorting destroyers zigzagging about like skittering insects. They landed at Foynes. There were many Nazi agents in Dublin, and it was thought prudent to keep the First Lady’s arrival secret. Though no one was supposed to know of her presence, as Eleanor came up the gangplank and embraced Maude Gray, an onlooker said, “Why there’s Mrs. Roosevelt.” The weather made it impossible to proceed to London, so they spent the night at Kilgobbin, Lord and Lady Adare’s great landed estate in County Limerick. The family felt extremely poor, Eleanor learned that night, but in the diary of the trip, she had begun to keep, she observed that “it is one of those cases of comparative poverty.”11
The next day she, Tommy, Colonel Hobby, and the colonel’s aide flew to Bristol in a plane that the prime minister sent. Ambassador Winant was there to meet her and to accompany her in the prime minister’s special train to London. Eleanor liked Winant very much and had always found him helpful. When Harry Hopkins had told her that in London she did not have to bother with Winant but should deal with Averell Harriman, who was in charge of the Lend Lease operations in the British capital, she became quite angry and during her whole stay in England would have nothing to do with Averell, whom she had known since he was a small boy. As the train approached the end of its two-hour journey, she asked Winant why they had not flown to London. The ambassador was not sure; he had only been told that the king and queen never met anyone at the airport.
The prime minister’s special train, the knowledge that she was to be met by the king and queen and spend two nights at Buckingham Palace, the appearance, as the train drew to a halt in Paddington Station, of the station master, as formally dressed and dignified as a lord of the realm, suddenly roused the insecurity she had suffered when as a bride of Franklin’s they had stayed at some of the great houses in England. Why, she asked herself, had she ever let herself in for this? But outwardly she was serene and poised, and from the moment “she jumped from the train to grip the Queen’s hand to a final informal chat sitting on the edge of a chair in the American Service Club in Edinburgh, 21 days later,” noted the London Daily Mail after her departure, she created the image “of a personality as symbolically American as the Statue of Liberty itself.”12 The king was in a powder-blue uniform of an air marshal, the queen in a coat of black velvet, and Eleanor in a long, back-flared coat with a blue-fox scarf and a feathered hat of red, green, and white. “I hope you left the President in good health,” the king, who seemed less at ease than the two women, said. “Yes, he is in very good health and wished that he could have come himself.” “We welcome you with all our hearts,” the queen added. Eleanor then presented Tommy, Colonel Hobby, and the aide, and proceeded to say a few words to the rest of the group who were assembled on the red carpet to greet her—Lady Reading, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral Harold R. Stark.
As the royal limousine, a big Daimler, drove out of the station, a loud cheer went up. An alert reporter noted that through the whole welcoming ceremony the First Lady was carrying a large book, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column. At Buckingham Palace, which, like Paddington Station, had its quota of bomb scars, the king and queen showed her to her rooms, apologizing for the windows, which had been blown out and replaced either by wooden or isinglass panels. Eleanor had an enormous suite and a bedroom which Elliott, when he saw it, compared to the long corridor in the White House.
She had tea with the king and queen around a set table, “as I used to have in my childhood,” and met Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She found Elizabeth to be “quite serious and a child with a great deal of character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions.” Tommy, in the meantime, had had tea with the ladies-in-waiting in their sitting room. Afterward she and Tommy did a little work—diary, column, and correspondence—before dinner at 8:30. Although the guests included some of the highest dignitaries in the realm—Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, General Smuts, Winant, the Mountbattens, and Elliott, whose reconnaissance squadron was based seventy miles outside of London—dinner was a three-course wartime meal. Eleanor sat between the king and Churchill. “I found the P.M. not easy to talk to, which was my experience in Washington,” she noted. She got along well with the king, as she did with the queen. They still seemed to her, as they had in Washington, to be a young and charming couple who were doing a remarkable job of setting their people an example of character and devotion to duty. After dinner the company saw Noel Coward’s film In Which We Serve and then Eleanor had a long talk with Elliott, until about two in the morning, and was pleased to note that his hostility toward the English was changing to admiration. “It is very good for the young to learn that their rather harsh, snap judgments are not always correct.”13
The next morning there
was a press conference at the embassy. Eleanor was visibly startled by the turnout, “a very formidable group but it went well, I was told.” At lunch the queen brought together the heads of the women’s organizations. Colonel Hobby was there, and, noted Eleanor, she “curtsied to the King and Queen.” Altogether there were fourteen women alone with the king, he “seemed to take it with great calm.”
That afternoon she began her round of inspections, tours, speeches, and receptions. “Hustle, did you say?” a British reporter wrote later; “she walked me off my feet!” She walked “fifty miles through factories, clubs and hospitals,” reporters estimated later when, “glassy-eyed and sagged at the knees,” they returned from a seven-day tour of the Midlands, Ulster, and Scotland.14
That first afternoon she went with the king and queen to view the destruction. The “City” was gutted. St. Paul’s gaped open to the skies, and the dean told her that he and other church officials slept in the crypt during the bad blitzes in order to put out the fires more quickly. They toured London’s East End and the queen remarked that the only solace in the destruction was that new housing would replace the slums that had been leveled. Eleanor stood aghast before the Guildhall ruins, and as she spoke with the different types of civilian-defense personnel who were gathered there—decontamination squads, fire-fighters, policewomen, many of whom were decorated for bravery—it was again borne in on her how England’s home front was literally part of the battlefront.
That evening was Labor’s night at the Palace. Ernest Bevin, the bluff and well-muscled minister of labor, was a guest, as was Lord Woolton. “He’s your only Socialist peer, Sir,” Bevin remarked to the king. Conversation with the Labor men was easier than with Churchill. Bevin told her about “Bevin’s boys”—the three hundred Indian workers whom he had brought to England to teach skills and trade unionism. Woolton interested her because as a young man he had gone into the slums to experience conditions there and then had gone into business to prove that one could provide decent wages and good working conditions and still make money.
On Sunday the king, queen, and princess saw her off at the door after breakfast, more like friends saying good-by than any formal leave-taking, and she moved into the apartment the Winants had made available to her. She then went to visit the Washington Club, the American Red Cross Club in Mayfair. It was crowded, and the soldiers and sailors “mobbed” her. “Hi, Eleanor,” some called out, and soon she was involved in a question-and-answer session. There were complaints about the slowness of the mail and the lack of American-style food in the messes, and the Red Cross ladies were concerned about the lack of woolen socks; the boys wore “cotton ones and their feet were blistered.” She took that up with General Eisenhower the next evening. He had had his supply people check, he wrote her later:
I find that we have not only made all normal issues, but we have at the minute two and one-half million pairs of light woolen sox in warehouses. Naturally, I cannot guarantee that every individual soldier has his full allotment, since it is entirely possible that some have been lost and replacement not yet made. However, I have already started the various commanders on a check-up to see that no man needs to march without proper footgear.
She journeyed to Chequers, the prime minister’s country house. “After lunch we saw Randolph Churchill’s little boy, Winston, who is a sweet baby and exactly like the Prime Minister. They sat on the floor and played a game and the resemblance was ridiculous.” At Chequers she finished a letter to the president that she had begun at Buckingham Palace:
Dearest Franklin,
The Prime Minister is pleased with the ham & honey.
Our stay at the Palace is over but I am to see them again before leaving.
Saw a lot of boys at the Red + Washington Club this a.m. The woman in the dispensary even said they came in with terrible blisters because their socks are too tight. All coming here should be issued wool socks. No heat is allowed till Nov. & most of them have colds. The boys are very upset over the mail situation, some have been here two months & not a line from home. Also their pay in many cases is very late—& they buy bonds & don’t get them. Someone ought to get on top of this situation & while they are about it they might look into the question of how promptly the families are getting allotments.
The spirit seems good but of course I’ve only seen a few.
The spirit of the English people is something to bow down to. Bevin & Woolton? dined with us at the Palace last night.
We came to Chequers to-day. Gen. & Mrs. Portal are here & Sir Anthony Eden & his wife. Tell Harry Robert was here looking well. Elliott too came to lunch & he spends tomorrow night in London with me. Winant insists on giving me his flat & moving upstairs, which is hard on him but grand for us. To-morrow will be a long day, so good night.
Tommy bears up well & now finds staying with Kings quite ordinary!
Love
ER15
The next day, accompanied by Mrs. Churchill, she inspected units of the Auxiliary Territorial Airforce. Chalmers Roberts of the London Office of War Information reported to his chief, Wallace Carroll:
In a pouring rain she walked the length of the parade ground between two rows of girls who had been standing at attention for some time, water trickling down their necks. Mrs. Roosevelt could have driven past but she told the commanding officer, “I would much rather walk, if that’s all right.” It was.16
It was “stupid” of her, she commented in her diary, to have sent her raincoat and rubbers back to London with her big bag. She spoke to the girls, who were gathered together in one of the hangars. There were cheers for her and Mrs. Churchill. They had tea, and then proceeded to the Auxiliary Territorial Service induction and training center at Guildford. She was especially interested in the cooking classes:
The women are trained for two weeks at cooking small meals which they are obliged to eat themselves, then two weeks in making things out of left-overs and two weeks cooking out of doors on stoves which they built themselves out of old used tin cans, rubble like broken brick or stone, all held together by mud.
At a third camp, she slogged through the mud, fascinated by the way the girls were being trained to make repairs on heavy trucks.
Although there was every sign that she was doing very well indeed as unofficial ambassadress, she was still worried. On Tuesday Mrs. Churchill again accompanied her on an inspection of clothing-distribution centers of the Women’s Voluntary Services. Halfway through Mrs. Churchill sat down on a marble staircase—Mrs. Roosevelt’s pace was too much for her, she said; she would wait there. From this strenuous tour Eleanor proceeded to a luncheon given in her honor by the London County Council. It was an occasion saturated with centuries-old ceremonials, attendants in red coats, and a toastmaster who in measured voice called for order before each speaker in time-hallowed phrases: “I pray you silence, My Lords, Your Worships, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Honorable Mr. Chairman. The health of the king was proposed and that of the president. Eden offered the toast to her, saying that she was welcomed “first, as the first lady of the United States; second, as the wife of a great President of a mighty nation; and, third, and above all, for herself.”17
“The horrible moment came for me to respond,” she wrote later. She thought of Elliott’s change of attitude toward the British, and that gave her a theme. She predicted that as the months went by many of America’s young people
will know more about Great Britain than they have ever known before. The growing understanding between us will perhaps mean more in the future not only to us but to the world than we can know. . . .
I look to your young people and to our young people to be the kind of people most of us would like to be and really achieve some of the things we hoped to achieve—at the end of the war. And then I hope we will win the peace.
It seemed to go pretty well, she thought. That was an underestimation; that afternoon Admiral Stark sent her a note in his own hand: “We were all proud of you today.”18
After l
uncheon she went to Fighter Command, where the WAAFs filled every job from cook and waitress to control of the planes in the air. She went to dinner that night at the Winston Churchill’s, escorted by Henry Morgenthau, who was in London. She and the prime minister had, as she put it in her diary, “a slight difference of opinion” over Loyalist Spain. She had had a few talks with Churchill when he had flown to Washington immediately after Pearl Harbor and stayed at the White House. “He’s very human & I like him the’ I don’t want him to control the peace!” she had written then.*19
The subject of Spain came up when Churchill asked Morgenthau whether the United States was sending food to Spain in sufficient quantities. The secretary said yes, but Eleanor impulsively exclaimed that it was a little too late, that the Loyalists should have been helped. Churchill said he had been for Franco until Germany and Italy came to his aid. Why couldn’t the existing government have been helped, Eleanor asked, reviving an argument she had so often had with her husband. Churchill gave a reason Franklin had never suggested: if the Loyalists had won the two of them would have been the first to lose their heads. That argument did not impress Eleanor—it was of no importance whether she lost her head. “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine,” Churchill growled. Here Mrs. Churchill intervened: “I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.” That did not help matters, and Churchill’s annoyance was obvious. “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I am not going to change now,” he replied, almost angrily. At this point Mrs. Churchill got up and walked away from the table as a signal that dinner was over.20
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